Navigating the social world requires sophisticated cognitive machinery that, although present quite early in crude forms, undergoes significant change across the lifespan. This book will be the first to report on evidence that has accumulated on an unprecedented scale, showing us what capacities for social cognition are present at birth and early in life, and how these capacities develop through learning in the first years of life. The volume will highlight what is known about the discoveries themselves but also what these discoveries imply about the nature of early social cognition and the methods that have allowed these discoveries -- what is known concerning the phylogeny and ontogeny of social cognition. To capture the full depth and breadth of the exciting work that is blossoming on this topic in a manner that is accessible and engaging, the editors invited 70 leading researchers to develop a short report of their work that would be written for a broad audience. The purpose of this format was for each piece to focus on a single core message: are babies aware of what is right and wrong, why do children have the same implicit intergroup preferences that adults do, what does language do to the building of category knowledge, and so on. The unique format and accessible writing style will be appealing to graduate students and researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology.

Table of Contents:
Section 1 Framing the Issues ; 1.1 Social-Cognitive Development: A Renaissance ; 1.2 The Paradox of the Emerging Social Brain ; 1.3 Core Social Cognition ; 1.4 Core Cognition of Relational Models ; 1.5 Infant Cartographers: Mapping the Social Terrain ; 1.6 The Evolution of Concepts About Agents ; 1.7 The Evolution of Human Sociocognitive Development ; 1.8 Teleological Understanding of Actions ; 1.9 How Universals and Individual Differences Can Inform Each Other: The Case of Social Expectations in Infancy ; 1.10 The Contribution of Temperament to the Study of Social Cognition: Learning Whether the Glass Is Half Empty or Half Full ; 1.11 Emotion and Learning: New Approaches to the Old Nature-Nurture Debate ; 1.12 Early Childhood Is where Many Adult Automatic Processes are Born ; 1.13 Social Evolution ; Section 2 Mentalizing ; 2.1 Universal Social Cognition: Childhood Theory of Mind ; 2.2 Infant Foundations of Intentional Understanding ; 2.3 Why Don't Apes Understand False Beleifs? ; 2.4 False-Belief Understanding and Why it Matters: The Social-Acting Hypothesis ; 2.5 Language and Reasoning About Beliefs ; 2.6 The Myth of Mentalizing and the Primacy of Folk Sociology ; 2.7 The New Puzzle of Theory of Mind Development ; 2.8 How Real Is the Imaginary? The Capacity for High-Risk Children to Gain Comfort From Imaginary Relationships ; 2.9 Social Engagement Does Not Lead to Social Cognition: Evidence From Williams Syndrome ; Section 3 Imitation, Modeling, and Learning From and About Others ; 3.1 Natural Pedagogy ; 3.2 A Comparison of Neonatal Imitation Abilities in Humans and Macaque Infants ; 3.3 Origins of Social Cognition: Bidirectional Self-Other Mapping and the "Like-Me" Hypothesis ; 3.4 Overimitation and the Development of Casual Understanding ; 3.5 Social Cognition: Making Us Smart, or Sometimes Making Us Dumb? Overimitation, Conformity, Nonconformity, and the Transmission of Culture in Ape and Child ; 3.6 Early Social Deprivation and the Neurobiology of Interpreting Facial Expressions ; 3.7 The Emergence of Perceptual Preferences for Social Signals of Emotion ; 3.8 Some Thoughts on the Development and Neural Bases of Face Processing ; 3.9 Redescribing Action ; 3.10 Preschoolers Are Selective Word Learners ; 3.11 Culture-Gene Coevolutionary Theory and Children's Selective Social Learning ; 3.12 How Casual Learning Helps Us to Understand Other People, and How Other People Help Us to Learn About Causes: Probabilistic Models and the Development of Social Cognition ; 3.13 How Children Learn From and About People: The Fundamental Link Between Social Cognition and Statistical Evidence ; 3.14 Children Learn From and About Variability Between People ; Section IV Trust and Skepticism ; 4.1 The Gaze of Others ; 4.2 Empathy Deficits in Autism and Psychopaths: Mirror Opposites? ; 4.3 Status Seeking: The Importance of Roles in Early Social Cognition ; 4.4 Reputation Is Everything ; 4.5 Understanding Expertise: The Contribution of Social and Nonsocial Cognitive Processes to Social Judgements ; 4.6 Respectful Deference: Conformity Revisited ; 4.7 Children's Understanding of Unreliability: Evidence for a Negativity Bias ; 4.8 Biased to Believe ; 4.9 Food as a Unique Domain in Social Cognition ; Section 5 Us and Them ; 5.1 What is Group Psychology? Adaptations for Mapping Shared Unintentional Stances ; 5.2 The Conceptual Structure of Social Categories: The Social Allegiance Hypothesis ; 5.3 Essentialism: The Development of a Simple, But Potentially Dangerous, Idea ; 5.4 Generic Statements, Casual Attributions, and Children's Naive Theories ; 5.5 From Categories to Exemplars (and Back Again) ; 5.6 Bridging the Gap Between Preference and Evaluation During the First Few Years of Life ; 5.7 On the Developmental Origins of Differential Responding to Social Category Information ; 5.8 Building a Better Bridge ; 5.9 Is Gender Special? ; 5.10 Does Your Infant Say the Words "Girl" and "Boy"? How Gender Labels Matter in Early Gender Development ; 5.11 Bringing the Cognitive and Social Together: How Gender Detectives and Gender Enforcers Shape Children's Gender Development ; 5.12 The Development of Language as a Social Category ; 5.13 The Study of Lay Theories: A Piece of the Puzzle for Understanding Prejudice ; 5.14 Social Acumen: Its Role in Constructing Group Identity and Attitudes ; 5.15 Understanding and Reducing Social Stereotyping and Prejudice Among Children ; 5.16 What Are They Thinking? The Mystery of Young Children's Thoughts on Race ; 5.17 How Do Children Learn to Actively Control Their Explicit Prejudice? ; Section 6 Good and Evil ; 6.1 What Primates Can Tell Us About The Surprising Nature of Human Choice ; 6.2 Horrible Children: The Limits of Natural Morality ; 6.3 Young Children's Moral and Social-Conventional Understanding ; 6.4 The Origin of Children's Appreciation of Ownership Rights ; 6.5 Becoming a Moral Relativist: Children's Moral Conceptions of Honesty and Dishonesty in Different Sociocultural Contexts ; 6.6 The Origins of The Prosocial Ape: Insights From Comparative Studies of Social Preferences ; 6.7 Cooperation, Behavioral Diversity, and Inequity Responses ; 6.8 Morality, Intentionality, and Exclusion: How Children Navigate the Social World ; 6.9 Converging Developments in Prosocial Behavior and Self-Other Understanding in the Second Year of Life: The Second Socio-Cognitive Revolution ; 6.10 Disposition Attribution in Infancy: The Foundations of Understanding Helping and Hidering Interactions ; 6.11 What Do Children and Chimpanzees Reveal About Human Altruism?