We acquire modes of behavior – social norms – as we grow up. We know we should be polite, we must not run around naked in public, and that we should not hurt people, animals, etc. We mimic behavior around us. Experts say these “social norms” form part of the framework of society. But, how do we acquire these norms?
Marco Schmidt and Michael Tomasello from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology decided to investigate by researching children’s enforcement of social norms to gain more insight into this important ‘social glue’. Their study is published in the August 2012 issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Schmidt explains:
“Social norms are crucial for understanding human social interactions, social arrangements, and human cooperation more generally. But we can only fully grasp the existence of social norms in humans if we look into the cradle.”
Schmidt and Tomasello had a particular interest in gaining more insight into the way children use constitutive norms, which in contrast to other norms, is a constitutive norm that can give rise to new social realities. For instance, the police force is empowered through ‘consent of the governed,’ meaning it gives them the right to do all kinds of things that society would never allow an average citizen to do.
Constitutive norms apply in many places, and are especially significant in rule games like chess; There are certain norms that define the game of chess and if someone moves a pawn backward in a game of chess, they are not just violating a norm by not following a certain rule, they are also not playing the game everyone agreed upon and therefore they are simply not playing chess.
In recent years, Schmidt and Tomasello, together with Hannes Rakoczy from Göttingen University, have performed numerous studies to examine the way in which children use constitutive norms and how to identify the point at which children stop thinking of game rules as rules handed down by powerful authorities, and start thinking of these rules as something like a mutual social agreement.
One of their studies involved 2- and 3-year-old children watching a puppet that said it would now ‘dax.’ The puppet then performed an action that was different to one, which adults previously referred to as ‘daxing’. The team noted that many children objected to this violation of the rule and particularly the 3-year-olds made norm-based objections, like saying: “It doesn’t work like that. You have to do it like this.”
Another study by the Schmidt, Rakoczy, and Tomasello team discovered that children make distinctions and only enforce game norms on members of their own cultural in-group, such as only to those who speak the same language.
These findings indicate that children understand the concept that belonging to a certain group falls within the scope of the norm and that expectations exist to respect these norms. The study also revealed that children do not need to be explicitly taught by adults to view an action as following a social norm; all they need to see is that adults expect things to work a certain way.
Overall, these studies indicate that children apply the norms in appropriate context and to the appropriate social group and that they are able to understand the concept of social norms at an early age.
Tomasello says:
“Every parent recognizes this kind of behavior – young children insisting that people follow the rules – but what is surprising is how sophisticated children are in calibrating their behavior to fit the circumstances.”
According to Schmidt’s and Tomasello’s belief, children enforce social norms as a way of identifying with the way a community operates and that enforcing social norms means that they are an integral part of becoming a member of a cultural group.
The team is planning more studies in the same field, concluding that understanding social norm “is essential to understanding the social and cooperative nature of the human species.”
Written by Petra Rattue