Young children tattle to enforce moral norms

Abstract

By 3 years of age, children tattle about rule violations they observe, even as unaffected bystanders. It is argued that tattling is one way in which children enforce norms and that in the long term, it helps sustain co‐operation (e.g., Vaish, Missana, & Tomasello, 2011). However, an alternative explanation could be that children are worried that the victim might blame them and so feel the need to inform the victim about who caused the harm. The present study aimed to tease these possibilities apart. Children observed a puppet either causing harm to another puppet (e.g., destroying their artwork) or no harm (e.g., destroying a different object). Importantly, the situation was constructed such that children knew they could not be blamed for the transgressions. Nonetheless, 3‐year‐old children tattled on the transgressor more when the transgressor had caused harm than no harm. Thus, young children's tattling about third‐party moral transgressions seems to be aimed at enforcing norms. An additional, exploratory goal of this study was to examine the relation between children's temperament and norm enforcement. Temperamental shyness negatively correlated with children's protesting and tattling behavior, though more research is needed to better understand the role of temperament in early norm enforcement.

Young Children and Adults Show Differential Arousal to Moral and Conventional Transgressions

“…Norms are integral to human group living and cooperation, and are followed and enforced from early in human ontogeny (Rakoczy et al, 2008;Boyd and Richerson, 2009;Riedl et al, 2015;Yucel and Vaish, 2018). But not all norms are treated equally.…”

“…Ten additional children were tested but excluded due to parental interference (n = 3), because they did not provide sufficient pupil data for analyses (n = 3), because they wore glasses and could not be recorded by the eye tracker (n = 1), because they cried and did not complete the study (n = 2), or due to experimenter error (n = 1). The sample size was determined as 16 children per cell, based on previous behavioral research on the development of norm understanding (Vaish et al, 2011b;Schmidt et al, 2012;Yucel and Vaish, 2018). Because children were oversampled to account for possible exclusions, we ended up testing and retaining two more 4-year-olds than originally planned.…”

“…Human group living and cooperation rely heavily on social norms that regulate how one ought to behave (Boyd and Richerson, 2009;Killen and Smetana, 2015). These norms are often enforced by adults-and even young children-to ensure fair treatment of others and harmonious group living by protesting, punishing, or tattling on norm violators (Rakoczy et al, 2008;Balafoutas and Nikiforakis, 2012;Gummerum and Chu, 2014;Riedl et al, 2015;Yucel and Vaish, 2018).…”

Tattling with Chinese Characteristics: Norm Sensitivity, Moral Anxiety, and “The Genuine Child”

“…These recent inquiries into tattling motivations, in line with cutting-edge theoretical interest in early understanding of social norms and morality, are intertwined with debates on the developmental trajectory of tattling behavior (for a review, see Ingram 2019). Latest experiments have demonstrated that young children (three-to five-year-olds) do show the capacity to tattle in third-party situation, when the victims are present (Yucel and Vaish 2018) or absent (Hardecker et al 2016). But it remains controversial when exactly tattling in the sense of norm sensitivity emerges: although reporting another child's misbehavior was found as early as 18 months of age (Dunn and Munn 1985) and quite common among two-year-olds (den Bak and Ross 1996), it remains an open question whether twoyear-olds' tattling is truly oriented toward defending norms or they are simply protesting behavior that they don't like.…”

“…In addition to highlighting the importance of tattling in children's social life, recent studies, mostly with Western populations, have focused on the motivations underlying tattling behavior. A recent debate in psychology bears resemblance to the classic anthropological debate about adults' gossip, and it boils down to this key tension: do children tattle for other-oriented or group-oriented purposes, such as identifying rule-violators, defending sociomoral norms, and facilitating cooperation (Yucel and Vaish 2018), or is tattling driven by self-serving motivations, such as enhancing one's own status through indirect aggression (Ingram 2014)? These new studies are inspired by current theoretical interest in the emergence and development of sensitivity to, and enforcement of, sociomoral norms as an important psychological foundation for human cooperation (e.g., Tomasello and Vaish 2013).…”