Social cognition as a mediator of adolescent development: A coactive systems approach

Abstract

The study of social cognition often follows as an attempt to represent the structure and content of social knowledge assumed to be located within individual social actors. While we have learned much from the study of social cognition, traditional approaches maintain a sharp distinction between cognition and action. As such, they raise the question of how inner knowledge becomes translated into social action. An alternative approach proceeds by studying social cognition in medias res—in the middle of everything (Fischer & Bidell, 1998). From this view, social cognition functions as a form of acting and as a mediator of action and development. In what follows, we elaborate a coactive systems framework for understanding how social meanings develop as mediators of social action in adolescence.