The sources of normativity: Young children's awareness of the normative structure of games.

Abstract

In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old children's awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter had played for a while, a puppet came (controlled by a 2nd experimenter), asked to join in, and then performed an action that constituted a mistake in the game. In control conditions, the puppet performed the exact same action as in the experimental conditions, but the context was different such that this act did not constitute a mistake. Children's normative responses to the puppet's acts (e.g., protest, critique, or teaching) were scored. Both age groups performed more normative responses in the target than in the control conditions, but the 3-year-olds did so on a more explicit level. These studies demonstrate in a particularly strong way that even very young children have some grasp of the normative structure of conventional activities.

Preschoolers understand the normativity of cooperatively structured competition

“…For example, roughly one third of 3-year-olds performed goal protest against an irrational, rule-following opponent. However, uttering spontaneous protest and critique is demanding, and most studies using this measure find a considerable number of children who do not show any protest behavior, which could be due to shyness (e.g., Rakoczy et al, 2008;Schmidt, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2013;Wyman, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2009). Another possibility in our specific study is that some children refrained from protesting against irrational behavior (despite finding it objectionable) because of the costs involved given that the irrational opponent helped children to win the prize.…”

“…That is, children protest and criticize third parties who do not perform simple game acts in prescribed ways (e.g., Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2008). To our knowledge, however, there has been no investigation of young children's understanding of the second aspect, namely that all players in a competitive game follow a rational (competitive) game-playing strategy and try to win.…”

Moving together: toward understanding the mechanisms of joint action

“…It is beyond the scope of our special issue to cover all the exciting new findings in this field, which concern the development of shared attention (Carpenter and Liebal in press), the use of pointing gestures (Liszkowski et al 2008), the emergence of helping behavior (Warneken and Tomasello 2007), as well as the understanding of commitment (Gräfenhain et al 2009) and social norms (Rakoczy et al 2008). The studies in this special issue, however, provide a sample of some of the exciting research questions currently being addressed in this field, including questions about children's processing of interaction partners' actions, their understanding of others' action capabilities, and the development of social cognition in the adolescent brain.…”

Putting the social into social learning: Explaining both selectivity and fidelity in children's copying behavior.

“…Norms are behaviors which are accepted as appropriate ways of acting by members of a particular group (Kallgren, Reno, & Cialdini, 2000). They specify how individuals typically behave and, more strongly, how they ought to behave in particular circumstances (Kallgren et al, 2000;Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2008). Thus when children learn a norm, they learn how to be like other members of their group.…”

“…Rakoczy et al (2008), for example, demonstrated that 3-year-old children imitate and then enforce what they have learned as a social norm on those around them. Rakoczy et al presented children with demonstrations of how to play a novel game in which they were shown how to perform a particular action called 'daxing.'…”