Poster #71 - Children’s evaluation of norm violations in pretend play

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Pretend play is a particularly relevant context for studying children’s social reasoning and evaluation, as they spend much of their time engaging in pretense, often with peers. Children transfer their real-world representations and reasoning into their pretend worlds, such as their general knowledge (e.g., facts, words) or understanding of physical rules (e.g., cups with liquid spill when tipped) (Lillard & Woolley, 2015; Van de Vondervoort & Friedman, 2017). Although pretending is often a social activity, few studies have examined children’s transfer of social knowledge into pretense. Fast & Van Reet (2018) found that preschool-aged children overwhelmingly negatively evaluate pretend harmful actions and positively evaluate pretend helpful actions, suggesting that children maintain their reasoning about moral norms (those concerning justice, cooperation, and altruism) during pretend play.
While children maintain their reasoning about moral norms in pretend play, it is unknown how they will treat conventional norms. Conventional norms refer to behaviors that are generally agreed upon, accepted, and followed within a social group, whereas moral norms are immutable and relevant across social and cultural groups (Turiel, 1983). One of the major tasks for young children is to learn the conventional norms within their culture. Pretend play may be one way in which they practice adhering to these norms. However, given the sometimes highly fantastical (i.e., unrealistic) nature of pretend, it is also possible that conventional norms may be more freely violated compared to moral norms.
To better understand children’s evaluation of conventional norms in pretense, we introduced 3- to 5-year-old children (N=196) to a series of pretend play scenarios (e.g., pretending to eat breakfast). In two scenarios the puppet followed a norm (e.g., ate cereal for breakfast) and in two scenarios the puppet violated a norm (e.g., ate a hamburger for breakfast). Children were asked to evaluate the puppet’s actions in each scenario. We hypothesized that children would judge pretend behaviors that violate norms to be less acceptable than pretend behaviors that follow norms. Indeed, we found pretend norm violation was deemed less acceptable than pretend norm adherence,  = .57, SE = .02, t = 6.92, p < .0001.
Further, we manipulated (between-subjects) the pretend play context, such that the scenarios were either realistic or fantastical (e.g., eating breakfast on a cloud). We predicted that children’s evaluation of norm violations would be judged less negative relative to norm adherence when the pretend play context was more abstract (i.e., fantastical), thus more removed from the real world. Contrary to our hypothesis, we did not find that an interaction between scenario context and norm violation,  = .013, SE = .16, t = -1.12, p = .600, suggesting that the effect of norm violation did not differ depending on whether pretend play was realistic or fantastical. Overall, these findings provide further evidence that children’s pretend play is deeply rooted in their real-world understanding (Lillard & Wooley, 2015) – as with moral norms (Fast & Van Reet, 2018), preschool-age children use their real-world understanding of conventional norms to evaluate others’ actions in pretense.

Authors

• Anne Fast, Western Washington University
  Presenting Author

• Annie Riggs