3-029 - Children’s reasoning about social norms

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Recent research demonstrates that from an early age, social norms are critical to children’s social cognitive development: they tell children what to expect from others and they guide children’s own behavior (e.g., Cooley & Killen, 2015; Göckeritz et al., 2014; Samland et al., 2016). Important data emerged from this work, yet questions concerning the breadth and depth of children’s norm-based reasoning remain unanswered. For example, we know that children successfully navigate a complex array of social behaviors and determine which are normative and which are not (Rakoczy & Schmidt, 2013), but we do not fully understand how this is learned. We know that children adhere rigidly to norms and that they prefer those who do so as well (Vaish et al., 2016), yet we are not clear on what motivates their reasoning. Moreover, we know that children show strong behavioral (e.g., protest) and emotional (e.g., anger) responses to norm violators (Hardecker et al., 2016), but we do not know which conditions are necessary to elicit such responses. This symposium begins to address these and other questions. The first presenter will demonstrate that children’s norm acquisition is grounded in statistical reasoning. The second presenter will demonstrate that children’s adherence to norms is motivated by concerns about their group’s reputation. The third presenter will demonstrate that children, across two societies, negatively critique norm violators even under minimal conditions. Finally, the discussant (an expert on children’s normative reasoning) will discuss the impact of this work on furthering our understanding of social cognitive development.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Steven Othello Roberts, University of Michigan

Discussant

• Hannes Rakoczy, University of Göttingen

Individual Presentations

• Children acquire knowledge of conventional norms through statistical reasoning - Presenting Author: Annie Riggs, Western Washington University

• Concern for group reputation increases prosociality in young children - Presenting Author: Jan Engelmann, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Esther Herrmann, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

• So it is, so it shall be: Group regularities license children’s prescriptive judgments. - Presenting Author: Steven Othello Roberts, University of Michigan; Susan A Gelman, University of Michigan; Arnold K Ho, University of Michigan; Cai Guo, Stanford University