ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on aggression and delinquency in the context of relating social thinking with social behavior, specifically interrelations among aggression, delinquency, and morality. In the last 25 years, a tremendous amount of research via cognitivedevelopmental models has investigated the connection between social thinking and social behavior. However, with some exceptions (e.g., Harvey, Fletcher, & French, 2001), there has not been a discussion of the relationship among the different social-cognitive models as they relate to aggression, delinquency, and morality. Therefore, we describe the major theoretical social-cognitive paradigms that focus on these constructs including the social-domainmodel (Turiel, 1978, 1983), social-cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), social information-processing theory (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Dodge & Crick, 1990), and the social cognitive information-processingmodel (Huesmann, 1988, 1998).Within this context, we discuss themanner inwhich these theories, in parallel and collectively, contribute to our understanding of the association between social-cognitive development and aggression.
Various definitions have been utilized in studying morality (e.g., Kohlberg, 1969; Piaget, 1932/1965; Turiel, 1983), but generally morality consists of two dimensions. One dimension concerns positive actions and behaviors that benefit others, including sharing, helping,
and comforting, which are usually referred to as prosocial behaviors (see Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Sadovsky, chap. 19, this volume, and Carlo, chap. 20, this volume).
