Human social life depends heavily on social norms that prescribe and proscribe specific actions. Typically, young children learn social norms from adult instruction. In the work reported here, we showed that this is not the whole story: Three-year-old children are promiscuous normativists. In other words, they spontaneously inferred the presence of social norms even when an adult had done nothing to indicate such a norm in either language or behavior. And children of this age even went so far as to enforce these self-inferred norms when third parties “broke” them. These results suggest that children do not just passively acquire social norms from adult behavior and instruction; rather, they have a natural and proactive tendency to go from “is” to “ought.” That is, children go from observed actions to prescribed actions and do not perceive them simply as guidelines for their own behavior but rather as objective normative rules applying to everyone equally.
BaayenR. H. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
2.
BonawitzE.ShaftoP.GweonH.GoodmanN. D.SpelkeE.SchulzL. (2011). The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery. Cognition, 120, 322–330. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.001
3.
BoydR.RichersonP. J. (2009). Culture and the evolution of human cooperation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364, 3281–3288.
4.
BurnhamK. P.AndersonD. R. (2002). Model selection and multi-model inference: A practical information-theoretic approach (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Springer.
5.
ButlerL. P.MarkmanE. M. (2012). Preschoolers use intentional and pedagogical cues to guide inductive inferences and exploration. Child Development, 83, 1416–1428. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01775.x
6.
ButlerL. P.MarkmanE. M. (2014). Preschoolers use pedagogical cues to guide radical reorganization of category knowledge. Cognition, 130, 116–127. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.10.002
7.
ButlerL. P.MarkmanE. M. (2016). Navigating pedagogy: Children’s developing capacities for learning from pedagogical interactions. Cognitive Development, 38, 27–35. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2016.01.001
8.
ButlerL. P.SchmidtM. F. H.BürgelJ.TomaselloM. (2015). Young children use pedagogical cues to modulate the strength of normative inferences. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 33, 476–488. doi:10.1111/bjdp.12108
9.
ButlerL. P.TomaselloM. (2016). Two- and 3-year-old children integrate linguistic and pedagogical cues in guiding inductive generalizations and exploration. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 145, 64–78. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2015.12.001
ChudekM.HenrichJ. (2011). Culture–gene coevolution, norm-psychology and the emergence of human prosociality. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15, 218–226. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2011.03.003
12.
CimpianA.SalomonE. (2014). The inherence heuristic: An intuitive means of making sense of the world, and a potential precursor to psychological essentialism. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 37, 461–480. doi:10.1017/S0140525X13002197
CsibraG.GergelyG. (2011). Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 366, 1149–1157. doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0319
15.
DobsonA. J. (2002). An introduction to generalized linear models (2nd ed.). Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC.
16.
GabenneschH. (1990). The perception of social conventionality by children and adults. Child Development, 61, 2047–2059. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1990.tb03586.x
17.
HoggM. A.ReidS. A. (2006). Social identity, self-categorization, and the communication of group norms. Communication Theory, 16, 7–30. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00003.x
18.
HumeD. (2000). A treatise of human nature (NortonD. F.NortonM. J., Eds.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1739)
19.
KelemenD. (1999). The scope of teleological thinking in preschool children. Cognition, 70, 241–272.
20.
KelemenD. (2004). Are children “intuitive theists”? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature. Psychological Science, 15, 295–301. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00672.x
21.
LegareC. H.NielsenM. (2015). Imitation and innovation: The dual engines of cultural learning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19, 688–699. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2015.08.005
22.
LewisD. K. (1969). Convention: A philosophical study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
23.
LyonsD. E.YoungA. G.KeilF. C. (2007). The hidden structure of overimitation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 104, 19751–19756. doi:10.1073/pnas.0704452104
24.
McGuiganN.WhitenA.FlynnE.HornerV. (2007). Imitation of causally opaque versus causally transparent tool use by 3- and 5-year-old children. Cognitive Development, 22, 353–364. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2007.01.001
25.
NagelT. (1986). The view from nowhere. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
26.
NielsenM.TomaselliK. (2010). Overimitation in Kalahari Bushman children and the origins of human cultural cognition. Psychological Science, 5, 729–736. doi:10.1177/0956797610368808
27.
ParsonsT. (1951). The social system. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
28.
RakoczyH.BroscheN.WarnekenF.TomaselloM. (2009). Young children’s understanding of the context relativity of normative rules in conventional games. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27, 445–456. doi:10.1348/026151008X337752
29.
RakoczyH.SchmidtM. F. H. (2013). The early ontogeny of social norms. Child Development Perspectives, 7, 17–21. doi:10.1111/cdep.12010
30.
RakoczyH.WarnekenF.TomaselloM. (2008). The sources of normativity: Young children’s awareness of the normative structure of games. Developmental Psychology, 44, 875–881. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.44.3.875
31.
R Development Core Team. (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
32.
RosnowR. L.RosenthalR. (2003). Effect sizes for experimenting psychologists. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57, 221–237.
33.
RossanoM. J. (2012). The essential role of ritual in the transmission and reinforcement of social norms. Psychological Bulletin, 138, 529–549. doi:10.1037/a0027038
34.
SchmidtM. F. H.RakoczyH.MietzschT.TomaselloM. (2016). Young children understand the role of agreement in establishing arbitrary norms—but unanimity is key. Child Development, 87, 612–626. doi:10.1111/cdev.12510
35.
SchmidtM. F. H.RakoczyH.TomaselloM. (2011). Young children attribute normativity to novel actions without pedagogy or normative language. Developmental Science, 14, 530–539. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.01000.x
36.
SchmidtM. F. H.RakoczyH.TomaselloM. (2012). Young children enforce social norms selectively depending on the violator’s group affiliation. Cognition, 124, 325–333. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.06.004
37.
SchmidtM. F. H.TomaselloM. (2012). Young children enforce social norms. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21, 232–236. doi:10.1177/0963721412448659
38.
SearleJ. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York, NY: Free Press.
39.
SmetanaJ. G.BraegesJ. L. (1990). The development of toddler’s moral and conventional judgments. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 36, 329–346.
40.
TomaselloM. (2014). A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
41.
TurielE. (1983). The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
42.
TurnerJ. C.HoggM. A.OakesP. J.ReicherS. D.WetherellM. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
43.
VredenburghC.KushnirT.CasasolaM. (2015). Pedagogical cues encourage toddlers’ transmission of recently demonstrated functions to unfamiliar adults. Developmental Science, 18, 645–654. doi:10.1111/desc.12233
44.
WellmanH. M. (2011). Developing a theory of mind. In GoswamiU. (Ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development (2nd ed., pp. 258–284). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
