Attention to Social Norms Predicts School Success in Early Childhood

• In Event: 3-182 - What are Norms Good For? Outcomes Related to Children’s Early Attention to Social Norms

Integrative Statement

Children use social norms to guide their own actions (Göckeritz et al., 2014; Kenward, 2012) and reason about the permissibility of others’ actions (Hardecker et al., 2016; Roberts et al., 2017). Although children as a group attend to social norms by toddlerhood, individual children vary in their attention to social norms. Further, the downstream consequences of children’s consideration of normativity are largely unknown. We investigated whether children who are more attentive to norms in an experimental context are also more successful in a highly-normative real-world context—in particular, at school.

Participants (N=85, 4–5 years) completed two tasks. Children tend to view adults’ actions in novel contexts as normative, which results in action imitation over innovation (Kenward et al., 2011; Keupp et al., 2013, Over & Carpenter, 2012). Thus, as one measure of children’s norm sensitivity, we tested children’s imitation of an adult. First, children watched the experimenter play a novel tablet game. Next, children played the game independently. We calculated the proportion of children’s actions that matched the experimenter’s demonstration. See Figure 1.

A second task examined children’s sensitivity to norms in a third-person context. In this task (adapted from Roberts et al., 2017), participants learned about two novel groups with conflicting norms. Participants were then introduced to individuals who either adhered to, or deviated from, their group’s norms. Participants rated how good or bad the individuals’ actions were. We averaged children’s ratings of adherences with their ratings of violations (reverse-scored). See Figure 2.

We tested the individual effects of children’s performance on the “imitation” and “evaluation” tasks on children’s school performance (i.e., grades), controlling for one another. Children’s performance on the “evaluation” measure predicted grades (t(84)=3.62, p=.001), even when additionally controlling for measures of executive function and theory of mind (t(78)=2.98, p=.004). Performance on the “imitation” measure also predicted grades (t(84)=2.21, p=.03), but this relation was only marginally significant when additionally controlling for executive function and theory of mind task scores (t(78)=1.65, p=.10).

In sum, children’s attention to social norms predicted their grades above and beyond measures of executive function and theory of mind—skills that are critical to early scholastic achievement (Best et al., 2011; Bull et al., 2008; Krajewski & Schneider, 2009). However, it remains unclear whether children’s normative reasoning is causally related to their school success. Discussion focuses on why this particular social skill may be critical to scholastic achievement. One possibility is that children who are attentive to norms are better poised to learn; for instance, children who listen when teachers talk (a common classroom norm) may have more time and attention to devote to learning. Alternatively, children who adhere to classroom norms may be perceived more positively by teachers irrespective of their learning, resulting in better grades. The latter is particularly plausible in early elementary school, when grades are often determined by teacher’s impressions rather than objective measures (e.g., exams). Plans for future work include disambiguating correlation and causation in the observed effects and determining whether attention to norms continues to predict scholastic achievement as children age.

Authors

• Rachel Ann King, Cornell University
  Presenting Author

• Katharine E Scott, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chuck Kalish, Society for Research in Child Development
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author