Social Cognition: What Underlies Social Skill Development

Social cognition is the knowledge that underlies effective social skills. If an individual is taught only a social skills rule then the skill will be a memorized response and will not generalize across settings. For example, if a child is taught to stand an arm's length away from someone else, what will the child do if he is on a crowded subway car? Most likely that child will have a melt down not only because of the closeness of so many people but also because he cannot enact his rote rule. On the other hand, if the child knows to assess the social situation and can determine that everyone is standing very close, he is less likely to have a melt down. To develop social cognition, the child must have basic relatedness skills across: attunement, visual referencing and coordination as precursors to developing skills related to social cognition. Social cognition emerges with the development of self awareness, social assessment, episodic memories, experience sharing, and dynamic analysis. Learning social skills based on social cognition is a marathon and not a sprint which affords the child the necessary underpinnings to learn to interact with others across settings.