Abstract
Heyes has offered a thought-provoking cultural evolutionary alternative to the nativist norm-psychology account. I am largely sympathetic to this view, but I would like to highlight certain aspects of the proposal that could benefit from more detailed treatment. There are informative parallels in the structure of Heyes’s proposal to ongoing debates concerning the development of children’s social cognition (social understanding). I draw on these parallels to suggest ways in which this proposal might direct a program of work.
1. Parallels to other social processes.
Linking implicit and explicit processing, Heyes proposes that normative understanding initially develops through implicit processing using domain-general mechanisms that allow children to figure out patterns and regularities in compliance and enforcement of behavior before they begin to explicitly reason about others’ behaviors through an expression of the rules that apply to specific norms. Central to the gadget account is the idea that these particular mental processes are inherited through sociocultural contexts and cultural transmission rather than innately specified as “rules.” Heyes explains that implicit-level compliance and enforcement behaviors are expected of children across a range of situations, but questions remain as to the limits of what children can learn about norms through these implicit processes. Early cooperation and instrumental helping might be examples of early behaviors that could be learned first through implicit processes and which provide a springboard for more involved or complex normative understanding. For instance, fluid collaboration is a sophisticated form of collaboration evidenced in indigenous contexts in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States that is enacted through a form of “thinking together” without apparent disagreements or negotiation (Alcalá et al., 2018). This type of collaboration is distinctly different from negotiating an agreement between participants, which is more evident in non-Indigenous U.S. contexts. If there are limits to children’s normative understanding acquired through implicit processes, to what extent is the development of explicit processes driven by paradigmatic changes in the child’s reasoning capacity or through external pressures from sociocultural processes?
In moving this proposal forward, one could consider in more detail Heyes’s poverty-wealth scheme—that is, the inheritance of normative thinking is constructed throughout childhood through rich social interactions. An approach would be to formulate hypotheses concerning the features of the cultural context that are likely to influence variation in normative development via explicit processes. In Heyes’s account, explicit processes develop gradually through to adulthood; however, a clear developmental profile is needed first of the transition from implicit to explicit processing in early childhood. If children develop and acquire explicit processing of normativity through culturally determined mechanisms, we should expect variation both in ontogeny and between cultural contexts. In ontogeny, as we have seen in the development of social understanding, children’s mentalizing abilities evolve according to a particular developmental sequence as children become progressively able to represent the mental states of others. Importantly, this sequence varies cross-culturally, with children from interdependent contexts placing greater emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge and finding this form of reasoning easier than reasoning that involves understanding the diversity of belief or false belief, something that is easier for children from more individualistic contexts (e.g., Dixson et al., 2018; Shahaeian et al., 2011; Wellman et al., 2006). Evidence for these culture-dependent sequences have been immensely helpful for building a stronger case for the social construction of mental-state reasoning. These longitudinal and cross-cultural designs could be recruited to examine whether early normative development follows similar sequential patterning that reflects a hierarchy of increasing skill in reasoning about normativity.
2. Keeping the “cultural” in cultural-evolutionary.
Keeping our gaze firmly on the “cultural” in the model compels us to think broadly about features of children’s social experiences that help them move from implicit to explicit processing. Using a classic constructivist framework, norms are represented in everyday activities between children and their peers and adults before they are internalized. What then are the conditions that lead children to develop explicit reasoning about people’s normative behaviors that conform to and/or violate norms, and how might explicit processing allow one to be more effective in the understanding of norms? In the social-cognition domain, there are a myriad of proximal and distal social experiences that come to bear on children’s capacity to mentalize about the actions of others (for a review, see Devine & Hughes, 2018). As is well documented, cultural mandates vary in the extent to which they endorse individuated versus relational selves, and the socialization of children to these particular conceptions of self are reflected in caregiving styles. For instance, variation in children’s mentalizing profiles can be linked to cultural mandates that place greater or less emphasis on individuals with minds. Predictors of this cross-cultural variation can be found in proximal features of children’s environments, such as the propensity for caregivers to talk about their child’s and others’ mental states.
Specific forms of language commentary in children’s lives could be hypothesized to directly influence their capacity to process normative behavior. A natural place to start would be to examine parents’ conversational scaffolding of children’s knowledge of norms across early childhood. Here, Heyes singles out the capacity to mentalize as being in service of the explicit processes involved in reasoning about norms. I think the extent to which reasoning about normative behavior requires recourse to thinking about others’ mental states is an open question, however. We know that conversations that focus on the mind and direct children’s attention to the mind as well as language that focuses on mental states help consolidate children’s experience of their physical worlds as being mediated by the mind. However, for children in contexts in which the mind is not considered a direct mediator of behavior, the consequences and outcomes of behavior rather than the intentions underlying an individual’s behavior are more important for helping children interpret and understand their social worlds. Over and above identifying differences in parents’ explicit references to norms, there are important preliminary observations to be made about the types of conversations that might take place when children are transitioning from implicit to explicit processing of normative behavior. One candidate in early-childhood interactions may be the use of directive language—parental language that directs children’s attention away from what the child is focused on. Directives have usually been analyzed for their effects on children’s language development, but these types of utterances may help children attend to behavioral regularities and to what caregivers may consider important social and contextual features of normative interaction. This is but one example of the type of caregiver interactions that may scaffold children’s participation into early normative behavior and reinforce the value of observing caregiver interactions that serve as foundations for the development of explicit reasoning about norms.
