Social Construct Availability and Accessibility as a Function of Social Life Phase: Emphasizing the “How” versus the “Can” of Social Cognition

Abstract

This paper presents a model relating characteristics of social life phases (e.g., socialization agents; activities and tasks; etc.) to specific features of change in social knowledge—social construct availability (including differentiation) and accessibilty—which, in turn, are hypothesized as relating to observed changes in developmental social cognition. The usefulness of this model is illustrated by (1) studies that find developmental differences in social judgments that cannot be accounted for by developmental differences in cognitive capacity or reasoning ability; (2) studies that find older children making less “sophisticated” judgments than younger children; and (3) studies that find important developmental similarities in judgments. Techniques for measuring children's social construct differentiation, social construct accessibility, beliefs concerning the frequency of trait-related behaviors, beliefs concerning the commonality of different traits, and preferred explanations of emotional events are described. Preliminary evidence of developmental similarities and differences on each of these measures is presented, and its relevance to the model is discussed. A general distinction is drawn between developmental and social-psychological studies of whether individuals “can” make prescribed and prespecified judgments, and studies of “how” individuals make the judgments they do make. The problems with the “can” approach and the need for the “how” approach, of which our model is one example, are discussed.