DOUBLE SOCIAL DYNAMICS IN COGNITIVE-DEVELOPMENT

From their very beginnings, developmental and social psychology had recourse to a two-fold mechanism for explaining cognitive development: conflict and imitation. Conflict accounted for innovation and imitation for appropriation of the cultural heritage. Contemporary research on social marking shows that this mechanism implements functions usually attributed to imitation. However, the reproductive role social marking assumes may necessitate intervention of conflict. An experiment illustrates that combining social marking and socio-cognitive conflict is a very efficient way of generating progress in performances on a conservation task for children from approximately 6 1/2 years (N = 160).