2-011 - Cultural Norm-Psychology: How toddlers and children use linguistic and behavioral cues to guide normative inferences and conduct

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

As a cultural species, our daily lives are deeply constrained by many rituals and social norms that are shared and enforced by our communities. A full account of human psychological and behavioral development will require understanding how children come to use information about normative and ritualistic behavior to (1) decide how they should behave, (2) enforce normative behavior in others, and (3) discriminate between individuals of different group identities. This international and interdisciplinary symposium moves towards such an account by using similar methods to study how these different aspects of normativity develop between infancy and late childhood.
The first paper explores how 18-month-old infants use normative information, provided by adult models, to form concrete normative expectations and attitudes about how someone else should act. The second paper explores how adult-modeled normative information about appropriate prosocial behavior begins to influence children’s own preferences for fair outcomes between 6 and 11 years of age. The third paper explores how observing an adult model a ritualistic activity shapes 6-10 year-old children’s preferences for fair outcomes for both in-group and out-group members. Together, these results suggest that children are adroit with social norms, but that different aspects of our sensitivity to norms and rituals may develop at different times.
The discussant will provide wider context by speaking about the nature and functions of social norms, and how we can integrate the present (and future) studies into a more comprehensive account of the ontogeny of normative and ritualistic behavior, and human psychological development more broadly.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Bailey R House, Institute of Human Origins Arizona State University

Discussant

• Charles Kalish, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Eighteen-Month-Old Infants Form Normative Expectations in Triadic Interactions - Presenting Author: Marco F. H. Schmidt, LMU Munich; Hannes Rakoczy, University of Göttingen; Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

• The development of normative influences on prosocial behavior in middle childhood - Presenting Author: Bailey R House, Institute of Human Origins Arizona State University; Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

• Ritual Cost and Group Belonging - Presenting Author: Rohan Kapitany, The University of Queensland; Rachel Watson-Jones, 3. The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Psychology; Mark Nielsen, University of Queensland; Cristine H Legare, University of Texas at Austin