Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm: Promiscuous Normativity in 3-Year-Olds

Schmidt, Marco F. H.; Butler, Lucas P.; Heinz, Julia and Tomasello, Michael (2016): Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm: Promiscuous Normativity in 3-Year-Olds. In: Psychological Science, Vol. 27, No. 10: pp. 1360-1370

Abstract

Human social life depends heavily on social norms that prescribe and proscribe specific actions. Typically, young children learn social norms from adult instruction. In the work reported here, we showed that this is not the whole story: Three-year-old children are promiscuous normativists. In other words, they spontaneously inferred the presence of social norms even when an adult had done nothing to indicate such a norm in either language or behavior. And children of this age even went so far as to enforce these self-inferred norms when third parties broke them. These results suggest that children do not just passively acquire social norms from adult behavior and instruction;rather, they have a natural and proactive tendency to go from is to ought. That is, children go from observed actions to prescribed actions and do not perceive them simply as guidelines for their own behavior but rather as objective normative rules applying to everyone equally.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Form of publication: Publisher's Version
• Faculties: Psychology and Education Science > Department Psychology
• Subjects: 100 Philosophy and Psychology > 150 Psychology
• ISSN: 0956-7976
• Alliance/National Licence: This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.
• Language: English