Young Children Enforce Social Norms

Abstract

Social norms have played a key role in the evolution of human cooperation, serving to stabilize prosocial and egalitarian behavior despite the self-serving motives of individuals. Young children's behavior mostly conforms to social norms, as they follow adult behavioral directives and instructions. But it turns out that even preschool children also actively enforce social norms on others, often using generic normative language to do so. This behavior is not easily explained by individualistic motives; it is more likely a result of children's growing identification with their cultural group, which leads to prosocial motives for preserving its ways of doing things.

Over-imitating preschoolers believe unnecessary actions are normative and enforce their performance by a third party

“…The cognitive processes that produce such views are intuitive and not directly available to introspection, and norms can be acquired unconsciously as a result of observing others follow them (Cialdini, 2007;Haidt & Bjorklund, 2008;Sripada & Stich, 2007). Although from 2 or 3 years of age children can often distinguish between what is morally bad and what is bad according to convention (Nucci & Turiel, 1978;Schmidt, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2011b;Smetana & Braeges, 1990;Stern & Peterson, 1999), there is also evidence that their early conceptions of rightness and wrongness can be non-domain-specific (Kagan, 1981). This summed evidence lends plausibility to the hypothesis that children may be capable of encoding certain observed actions as normative without encoding reasons for the actions' normativity or even encoding the domain within which the actions' normativity is determined.…”

Young children mostly keep, and expect others to keep, their promises

“…In all three studies, children were engaged in prosocial interactions (helping)-either with a puppet partner (Study 1) or with adult experimenters (Studies 2 and 3). We conducted the studies with 3-year-olds, who have been shown to comprehend both joint commitments and the normative implications of social rules (Gräfenhain et al, 2009;Schmidt & Tomasello, 2012). We also included 5-year-olds in all studies to explore whether a more nuanced understanding of promises may emerge later during the preschool years (e.g., Heyman et al, 2015).…”

“…Second, one important characteristic of promises is that they are normatively binding (i.e., they entail an obligation that one should keep one's word), and research has shown that young children already comprehend the normativity of some social rules and will hold responsible others who do not abide to norms (Schmidt & Tomasello, 2012). For example, 3-year-olds will actively correct a puppet actor that fails to play a game correctly (Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2008) or will intervene if a puppet tries to take someone else's property (Rossano, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2011), often using norm-related language during their interventions (e.g., ''You did that wrong," ''You must not do this").…”

Validación factorial de la escala percepción del sistema normativo: una propuesta para analizar la transgresión social

“…Every society requires an institutional system with predictable rules that regulate social interaction (Schmidt & Tomasello, 2012). Institutional performance is expressed through various types of norms, which have differential statuses, coexist, and organize social interaction (Epstein, 1997).…”