The development of third party norm enforcement in eight diverse societies

• In Event: 2-032 - The foundations of social norm psychology

Integrative Statement

Third party punishment and norm enforcement sustain social norms in societies and stabilize cooperation. Western middle-class children already enforce norms as third parties from a young age (e.g., Rakoczy et al., 2008). Yet, cross-cultural evidence from adults shows substantial variation in norm enforcement, both in frequency and in cultural enforcement styles (e.g., Heinrich et al., 2006; Wiessner, 2005). We investigated the development of norm enforcement in five- to eight-year-olds from eight diverse populations worldwide (N = 390 children; 3 urban and 5 rural populations). We focused on two questions: (1) Do children across societies enforce norms? (2) Are there differences in norm enforcement styles? Children participated in the study with same-gender, similar-aged peers. We taught them a novel sorting game: one group of children learnt to sort by colour, another group learnt to sort by shape. Next, children observed (i) another child who had learnt the same rule (control condition) and (ii) a different child who had learnt an incompatible rule (test condition). We video-recorded children’s interactions, transcribed and translated their utterances from video, and developed a comprehensive coding scheme for their verbal and non-verbal behaviours. We found that across all eight populations observers intervened more frequently in the test condition than in the control condition – this was true for both non-verbal and verbal behaviour. There were difference in how observers intervened non-verbally: in three populations, observers preferred physical interventions (e.g., sorting items themselves); in three populations, they preferred gestures (e.g., pointing to the correct items); and in two populations, they used both equally. Looking at observers’ verbal interventions, we found explicit references to the sorting rules in all populations. Yet, in the five rural populations observers predominantly used non-rule based verbal interventions (e.g., “no!”, “don’t do it!”), whereas observers in the three urban populations used rule and non-rule based interventions equally. Our findings show that children across diverse societies enforce and teach norms to their peers, but that enforcement styles vary across populations. We will discuss these findings in the light of recent work on children’s norm enforcement and third party punishment and offer suggestions to explain the observed societal variation.

Authors

• Patricia Kanngiesser, Freie Universität Berlin
  Presenting Author

• Marie Schäfer, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
  Non-Presenting Author

• Esther Herrmann, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
  Non-Presenting Author

• Henriette Zeidler, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
  Non-Presenting Author

• Daniel Haun, Leipzig University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael Tomasello, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author