Journal
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 27, Issue 10, Pages 1360-1370Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0956797616661182
Keywords
children; cognitive development; cooperation; social cognition; social norms; open materials
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Funding
- Max Planck Society
- Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
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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.
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