Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm.
Published
Journal Article
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.
Full Text
Duke Authors
Cited Authors
- Schmidt, MFH; Butler, LP; Heinz, J; Tomasello, M
Published Date
- October 2016
Published In
Volume / Issue
- 27 / 10
Start / End Page
- 1360 - 1370
PubMed ID
- 27634004
Pubmed Central ID
- 27634004
Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)
- 1467-9280
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
- 0956-7976
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
- 10.1177/0956797616661182
Language
- eng