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

during a child’s early years and follow different developmental trajectories (Tremblay, 1999;
Troup-Gordon & Ladd, 2005). Thus, children’s social knowledge reflects children’s social
experiences that may lead to consistencies and variations in social judgments.
Social knowledge can be further defined as memory structures characterized by social
orientations, motivations, and goals (Smetana, 2006). Social information processing research
defines personal knowledge constructs as memories of past experiences, which influence mental
processing (Crick & Dodge, 1994). These definitions embrace the notion that experiential
knowledge is a well-organized body of information stored within our memory systems and that
influences social thought, reasoning, motivation, and behavior.
Behavior and Reasoning
For some time, developmental psychologists have sought to understand the link between
children’s reasoning and their behavior with respect to acts of overt aggression and victimization
(Arsenio & Lemerise, 2004). Arsenio and Lemerise (2004) assert that many aggressive acts are
both social and moral transgressions. Social aggression is defined as behavior that violates social
conventions, while Moral aggression is defined as social behavior that violates the moral “ideal”
of respect for the positive well-being of another (Coie & Dodge, 1998; Turiel, 1998, 2002,
2006).
Tisak, Tisak, and Goldstein (2006) linked prosocial behavior with reasoning that benefits
others (e.g., sharing, helping, comforting), and aggressive behavior with reasoning that causes
harm to others or that violate the rights and welfare of others (Turiel, 1978, 1983). Tisak and
colleagues (2006) suggest that aggressive behavior is a manifestation of aggressive social and
negative moral reasoning and that prosocial behavior is a manifestation of prosocial and positive
moral reasoning.
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