ABSTRACT
Recently there has been growing discontent among many developmental psychologists who have studied social cognition using structural developmental models. These models, for the most part, have been derived from children's responses to hypothetical social situations in decontextualized settings that were relatively unencumbered by affective and motivational considerations. Empirical tests of these models rested on semistructured interviews with children in which the presentation of others as social agents was generally in the form of hypothetical individuals interacting in hypothetical social contexts that lacked compelling subjective meaning for the knower. Consequently, our knowledge of children's reflective social cognition did not correspond to how children socially interact in naturally occurring, spontaneous, real-life situations in which the struggle to achieve and maintain interpersonal relations entails considerably more than the cognitive mastery of concepts about the self and others. Those of us who work with children, as therapists or educators, have found that structural or formal models of cognitive competence have had limited practical application. There seems to be a growing theoretical gap between reflective social cognition and cognition in conduct (i.e., between form and experience).
