Poster #193 - Emotional Reactions to Violations help Children Distinguish Norms and Regularities

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Young children must learn both descriptive regularities (i.e., the way things normally are) and prescriptive norms (i.e., what one ought to do) that govern others’ behavior. Norms are a type of regularity in that knowledge of their existence is common amongst group members and fidelity to the norms is both practiced and expected (Searle, 1995). However, while a violation of a regularity may elicit surprise or confusion, a violation of a norm incurs sanction or punishment (Levy, Taylor & Gelman, 1995; Rakoczy & Schmidt, 2012). In light of the conceptual differences between regularities and norms, one open question is how children infer whether an action is guided by a norm versus a regularity? In this study, we investigate whether statistical frequency and others’ reactions to violations of a behavior help children identify norms versus regularities. In theory, a violation of a regularity elicits surprise or confusion whereas a violation of a norm is cause for protest, or teaching (Bendor & Swistak, 2001). Children themselves tend to display strong reactive attitudes to norm violations (Rackozy, Warneken & Tomasello, 2008; Schmidt et al., 2016). However, no research to date has examined whether children utilize others’ reactions as a source of evidence for inferring whether a behavior is a norm.
This study used an apparatus consisting of two conjoined marble ramps, each of which led to the same destination. Children ages 4- to 8-years-old (N=100) watched three video demonstrations of people consistently using one of the ramps and then a “violator” using the other ramp. For each of these demonstrations, they also watched the emotional responses of a group of onlookers. Children were randomly assigned to either the Norm or Regularity condition. In the Norm condition, the onlookers displayed a strong negative response to the violator whereas in the regularity condition, the onlookers appeared surprised but accepting of the violation. Children were then prompted to play with the apparatus, once in the presence of an experimenter and three times in the absence of an experimenter. Experimenters coded which ramp the children used. Next, a puppet used the violating ramp and experimenters recorded children’s spontaneous protest. Finally, children observed a video of a person using the violating ramp and were asked on a scale from 1 to 4 (1= ok, 4 = very bad) about the wrongness of the violation.
The final phase of data collection is currently in progress for this study and thus formal analyses are not completed. Preliminary results demonstrate that older, but not younger children were more likely to use the alternative ramp in the Regularity than the Norm condition (Mregularity = 3.3, Mnorm =4.0). All ages of children were more likely to protest the puppet’s violation (Mregularity = .1, Mnorm =.6) and endorse the video of a violation (Mregularity = 1.9, Mnorm =2.7) as wrong in the Norm than in the Regularity condition. These results suggest that children use others’ reactions to violations as evidence to distinguish regularities and norms.

Author

• Annie Riggs, Western Washington University
  Presenting Author