The Domain Frequency Association: A mental shortcut to guide children’s generalization of norms and preferences

Happy Normativists: Do Children Express Happiness When Following Conventional Norms?

Young children rapidly acquire and rigidly adhere to conventional norms. Prior accounts of this early-emerging norm behavior propose that children perceive conventional norms as obligations to their cultural groups and, in conforming to the norms, sacrifice their individual desires for the welfare of the group. In the current research, we investigate the hypothesis that children may actually derive happiness from adhering to conventional norms, thus aligning rather than diverging from their individual desires. To test this hypothesis, we presented 4-5-year-old children (N = 120) with a novel apparatus in which they were either be taught a set of actions that constituted the norm for operating the apparatus (Norm condition) or a set of actions that they chose from to use the apparatus (Control condition). While performing these actions, we videorecorded and coded children's facial expressions to measure the happiness they derived from performing the actions in the norm versus control conditions and asked them to retrospectively report on their happiness while using the apparatus. Facial expressions and self-reports of happiness did not differ across conditions; however, they were significantly higher than neutral.

Rational learners and parochial norms

Parochial norms are narrow in social scope, meaning they apply to certain groups but not to others. Accounts of norm acquisition typically invoke tribal biases: from an early age, people assume a group's behavioral regularities are prescribed and bounded by mere group membership. However, another possibility is rational learning: given the available evidence, people infer the social scope of norms in statistically appropriate ways. With this paper, we introduce a rational learning account of parochial norm acquisition and test a unique prediction that it makes. In one study with adults (N = 480) and one study with children ages 5- to 8-years-old (N = 120), participants viewed violations of a novel rule sampled from one of two unfamiliar social groups. We found that adults judgments of social scope - whether the rule applied only to the sampled group (parochial scope), or other groups (inclusive scope) - were appropriately sensitive to the relevant features of their statistical evidence (Study 1). In children (Study 2) we found an age difference: 7- to 8-year-olds used statistical evidence to infer that norms were parochial or inclusive, whereas 5- to 6-year olds were overall inclusive regardless of statistical evidence. A Bayesian analysis shows a possible inclusivity bias: adults and children inferred inclusive rules more frequently than predicted by a naïve Bayesian model with unbiased priors. This work highlights that tribalist biases in social cognition are not necessary to explain the acquisition of parochial norms.

How cues to social categorization impact children's inferences about social categories

Social categorization involves two crucial processes: First, children seek properties on which they can categorize individuals, i.e., they learn to form social categories; then children make inferences based on social category membership and might develop affective responses toward social categories. Over the last decade, a growing number of research in developmental psychology started to use novel social categories to investigate how children learn and reason about social categories. To date, three types of cues have been put forward as means to form social categories, namely linguistic, visual, and behavioral cues. Based on social category membership, children draw inferences about the shared properties of social category members and about how social category members ought to behave and interact with each other. With additional input, children might apply essentialist beliefs to social categories and develop affective responses toward social categories. This article aims to provide key insights on the development of stereotypes and intergroup biases by reviewing recent works that investigated how children learn to form novel social categories and the kind of inferences they make about these novel social categories.