The quiet revolution in the study of social behavior that began during the 1970s is in its second decade, and most of its tenets now seem less revolutionary than they once were. The revolt had both a positive and a negative message. On the negative side, it was a rejection of the then-dominant view that all features of personality development and social adaptation could be explained by social learning experiences of one sort or another. As useful as concepts of social reinforcement and modeling were in accounting for individual differences in social behaviors in the short run, they failed to explain continuity over the life-span. The general problem – as recognized by early critics such as John Bowlby (1969), Harry Harlow (1958), Lawrence Kohlberg (1969), T. C. Schneirla (1966), Z-Y. Kuo (1967), and K. Lorenz (1965) – was that social learning theories omitted too much information about the adaptive properties of the developing person. These properties included age-related changes in biological structure and function, in cognitive abilities, and in affective expression. Nor was there robust empirical support for the primary child-rearing propositions of social learning theory (e.g., Yarrow, Campbell, & Burton, 1968). Enthusiasm for the study of social processes in children temporarily lapsed.

By the mid-1970s, social developmental issues became once again the focus of vigorous and broad-based exploration, albeit from fresh methodological and theoretical perspectives. Of the new proposals that were offered, some of the more novel and influential ones concerned biological–evolutionary contributions to social development.