ABSTRACT
Consider a child on her first day at school: she enters a new, unpredictable social world. What sort of person is the teacher? What will her new fellow pupils be like? How can she make friends? What sorts of rules are there? What happens if someone breaks a rule? How are the other children feeling on their first day? What are they thinking about her? The way that children come to make sense of issues such as these is the main concern of research in social cognitive development. This is an area of research that has emerged as an important part of developmental psychology in the past 15 or 20 years. 1 It concerns the child’s developing ability to understand and explain properties of the social world: characteristics of individuals – their motives, dispositions, beliefs and feelings – of relationships between individuals – friendship and conflict – and of social systems – social norms, moral rules, and obedience to authority.
