1-134 - Children’s understanding, acquisition, and challenges to normative expectations

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Norms govern most everyday social interactions, creating obligations and entitlements. Research has shown that the contexts and cues children use to infer agents’ obligations and entitlements varies widely. The factors that enable children to challenge unfair norms has also been demonstrated. In the current symposium, investigators from three countries present current research on children’s acquisition, evaluation, and resistance to different types of norms.
Presentation 1 investigates the functional integration of theory of mind and normative action evaluation. Two studies with 5- and 7-year-olds and adults show that in their normative evaluations of an action even preschoolers take into account information about the agent’s intentionality in adult-like ways, weighing intentionality more strongly in moral compared to conventional judgments.
Presentation 2 investigates children’s awareness of social inequalities in resource allocation contexts. Study 1 demonstrates that 5- and 10-year-olds rectify rather than perpetuate a normative tradition of unequal resource allocations; Study 2 reveals that group dynamics create a feeling of group loyalty that can make it difficult to challenge norms even when norms create unequal distributions between groups.
Presentation 3 investigates epistemic normativity and asks whether 3- and 5-year-olds use ownership to infer whether a speaker is entitled to claim knowledge about a fact (e.g., the proper name of an object). By age 5 children defend an owner against someone who prohibits the owner from claiming knowledge about her property.
The discussant will integrate these findings by reflecting on the broader context of the development of social cognition, morality, and social norms.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Hannes Rakoczy, University of Göttingen

Discussant

• Adam Rutland, Goldsmiths (University of London)

Individual Presentations

• Children’s reliance on the underlying intentional structure of an action in normative evaluations - Presenting Author: Marina Josephs, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; Hannes Rakoczy, University of Göttingen

• Obligations regarding resource allocations in contexts of social inequality - Presenting Author: Melanie Killen, University of Maryland, College Park; Laura Elenbaas, University of Maryland; Michael T Rizzo, University of Maryland

• Epistemic Normativity: Preschoolers Defend Others’ Entitlement to Claim Knowledge - Presenting Author: Emmily Fedra, LMU Munich; Marco F. H. Schmidt, LMU Munich