Social Cognitive Skills and Delinquent Behavior Modification among Students in Secondary Schools in Kenya

Abstract

Social cognition is being researched in many fields, including psychology, medicine, business, and education. Social cognition refers to the mental operations that underlie social interactions including the perception and interpretation of the intentions, dispositions, and behaviors of others, and the generation of a response to these behaviors (Green, Penn, Bentall, Carpenter, Gaebel, Gur & Heinssen, 2008). Social cognition refers to a set of neurocognitive processes underlying an individual's ability to “make sense of others’ behavior” as a crucial prerequisite of social interaction (Frith & Frith, 2007). Green et al. (2008) reiterate that social cognitive processes in humans describe the ways individuals draw inferences about other people's beliefs and the ways they weigh social situational factors in making these inferences. Social cognitive skills are necessary skills for the successful social functioning of any given individual. Components of social cognitive skills include self-control, vicarious experience, attributions, and inhibition. Self-control is defined as the ability to delay immediate gratification of a smaller reward for a larger reward later in time (Kirby & Herrnstein, 1995). Self-control is also defined as the mechanism that allows for inhibiting or over riding impulses coming from the hot system, allowing precedence of the cold system (Gillebaart & De Ridder, 2017). Bandura in Otengei, Kasekende, and Ntayi (2017) define vicarious experience as what takes place when people observe the actions of others and then evaluate themselves. Bartsch et al. (2012) also define vicarious experience as the observation of others (models) succeeding or failing. Rosenbaum, Schuck, Costello, Hawkins, and Ring (2005) classify vicarious experience as either negative or positive. Attribution deals with how the social perceiver uses information to arrive at causal explanations for events, and it examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgment (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Attribution can be dispositional attribution, which assigns the cause of behavior to some internal characteristic of a person rather than to outside forces or something situational in nature. which assigns the cause of behavior to some situation or event outside a person's control rather than to some internal characteristic (Heider, 1958). Finally, inhibitory control involves the ability to inhibit automatic but incorrect responses or to resist interference from distracting stimuli in order to reduce a non-target’s impact on ongoing information processing (Diamond, 2013).