Dodge’s first empirical study of children’s hostile attributional biases (1980) and theoretical synthesis of a processing model (1986) followed explicitly from the structural cognitive development literature. It may surprise some that processing theory has its roots (partially) in Piagetian moral judgment theory. Given the different scope of these two traditions, more narrow moral domain models might well be an essential component of broader processing models, rather than a competitor in the marketplace of theories. These operations include selective attention to social cues, attribution of intent, generation of goals, accessing of behavioral scripts from memory, decision making, and behavioral enactment. The mental operations that are considered include, but go well beyond, the social understanding that is the topic of moral domain inquiry. In contrast, social information processing theory ( Crick & Dodge, 1994 Dodge, 1986 Dodge & Pettit, 2003 Gifford-Smith & Rabiner, 2004) is more broadly concerned with all of the mental operations that are deployed to generate a behavioral response during one’s own social interaction. The mental operations that are assessed and considered in this tradition are thinking and reasoning and the outputs are knowledge and understanding, rather than overt social behavior. It has rarely been concerned with a child’s social behavior and should not be criticized for failing to address behavioral responses such as aggression adequately. It is a theory of social cognitive development in the tradition of Piaget (1965). The goal of moral domain models has been to describe how children develop knowledge and understanding about social events. Most important, the goals of each theory differ in ways that render them asymmetric. However, we believe that their reach at integration exceeds their grasp in several crucial ways. Furthermore, they have contributed to the moral domain tradition by pushing scholars to use processing theory to consider more seriously how moral understanding leads to behavioral responses in actual social interactions. In so doing, they have made an important contribution by highlighting how the methods of data interpretation developed within the moral domain tradition and the consideration of mixed-domain situations could help clarify several aspects of processing theory that have remained elusive. With these challenges facing them, Arsenio and Lemise (this issue) are to be commended for attempting to bring together two perspectives on children’s aggressive behavior: what they termed social information processing and moral domain models. Traditions operate with different assumptions, methods of data collection and analysis, publishing outlets, and even rules of evidence. Integration across theoretical traditions is a daunting but important task for scholars who wish to understand human development.
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