3-045 - Following Authorities, Goals, or Groups? New Perspectives on Children’s Normative Reasoning and Behavior

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The preschool years are a critical period for children’s acquisition of normative knowledge and development of normative behaviors. This includes at least three principles that preschoolers need to understand: 1) norms, unlike personal preferences, regulate the actions of groups, 2) some norms apply broadly (e.g. moral norms) while others are specific to particular contexts (e.g. conventions) (Killen & Smetana, 2005), and 3) individuals share responsibility for knowing, following, and enforcing norms (Schmidt & Tomasello, 2012). An important thread that runs through these is the need to detect an 'appropriate' reason for compliance. Some examples include an authority figure, our social contracts with in-group members, or the goals our normative behaviors achieve.

This symposium brings together an international group of researchers investigating children’s normative reasoning in social games, goal-directed actions, and prosocial giving, which together offer new evidence about influences on preschoolers’ normative reasoning and behaviors. The first paper shows that children consider the issue of individual and collective authority over rules when deciding who can change them. The second paper investigates the role of agents’ goals and adult authority in judgments about instrumental, moral, and prudential norm violations. The third paper discusses group-biased motivations and the role of a legitimate authority in facilitating such biases in normative distributive contexts. Finally, a renown expert in social cognitive development will discuss the implications these studies have for future research on normative reasoning and social cognition in general.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Xin (Alice) Zhao, Cornell University

Discussant

• Charles Kalish, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Children’s Awareness of Their Own Individual and Collective Authority to Change The Rules of Social Games - Presenting Author: Xin (Alice) Zhao, Cornell University; Tamar Kushnir, Cornell University

• You Ought to (Want to) Be Rational: Preschoolers Judge Instrumental Ends as Obligatory and Authority-Dependent - Presenting Author: Marco F. H. Schmidt, LMU Munich; Audun Dahl, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Boys’ Robust Inter-group Bias - Presenting Author: Avi Benozio, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Gil Diesendruck, Bar Ilan University