Copyright Malvin Porter, Jr. 2010 - acumen - The University of ...

Social Information Processing Theory
Social information processing theory asserts that children’s understanding of social
situations influences their subsequent behavior. Social information processing theory emphasizes
decision-making in the context of differing social situations (Arsenio & Lemerise, 2004).
Children enter into social situations with different social and biological abilities and diverse past
experiences. Social information processing theory posits that past experiences and knowledge
make up latent mental structures that represent past events which are stored in long-term
memory. These latent mental structures interact with and influence mental processing (Crick &
Dodge, 1994) and are incorporated, in turn, with other memories into a general mental or
knowledge structure that directs the processing of future social cues.
Crick and Dodge (1994) theorized that children’s cognitive information processing
occurs in distinct sequential steps. Children receive an assortment of social cues as input.
Resulting behavioral responses are a function of how children process social cues. Social
information processing steps include (1) encoding of social cues, (2) interpretation and mental
representation of those cues, (3) clarification or selection of a goal, (4) response access or
construction, (5) response decision, and (6) behavioral enactment.
Crick and Dodge (1994) argued that children encode and interpret social cues by
selectively attending to a contextualized external situation and to perceived internal cues.
Children must attempt to understand the objective nature of what happened in a specific situation
and attempt to understand why the event occurred. For example, a child who trips on a
classmate’s foot must first figure out what happened (“I tripped on his feet”) and why it might
have happened (“he tripped me” or “. It was an accident”). The interpretation of events is
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