Work

Young children enforce self-created norms promiscuously

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: • Five-year-olds protested the transgression of norms they created themselves. • It did not matter whether they created and/or enacted the norm together or alone. • Three-year olds also protested the transgression of norms they created themselves. • Five-year-olds protested more often than three-year-olds. • The use of normative language did not influence protesting in either age group. Three-year-old children normatively protest the transgression of adult rules in a variety of contexts. Five-year-olds also normatively protest the transgression of rules they have themselves created collaboratively with peers. But do children of these ages protest rules that they have created for themselves as individuals? We prompted five-year-olds (Study 1: 128 participants, 69 females) and three-year-olds (Study 2: 64 participants, 32 females) to devise a way to play with a toy in the presence of some puppet peers, after which a new puppet engaged with the toy the ‘wrong’ way. Results showed that five-year-olds protested at similar rates regardless of whether they came up with a way to play collaboratively with others and then played together (collaborative condition), came up with a way to play individually but then played together (two trendsetter conditions), or came up with a way to play and played totally individually (solo condition). In Study 2, three-year-olds protested self-created rules as well, albeit at lower rates than five-year-olds. Finally, neither age group’s protest seemed to be influenced by instructions containing explicit cues of normativity or conventionality (e.g., creating a game with rules vs coming up with a way to play). As such, when children create norms themselves, their willingness to protest novice transgressors seems not to be impacted by the degree to which these norms were created through collaboration. Moreover, our results show that promiscuous normativity of self-created norms emerges earlier than previously thought, around the same time children become promiscuous normativists towards adult-created norms.

Source: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2025.106396

Authors: Wouter Wolf, Vivian Iva, Isabella Larsen, Michael Tomasello

Institutions: Duke University, Utrecht University, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Language: English

Topic: Child and Animal Learning Development

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,500