Children's Norm Enforcement in Their Interactions With Peers

What We Do When We Define Morality (And Why We Need to Do It)

All psychological research on morality relies on definitions of morality. Yet the various definitions often go unstated. When unstated definitions diverge, theoretical disagreements become intractable, as theories that purport to explain "morality" actually talk about very different things. This article argues for the importance of defining morality and considers four common ways of doing so: The linguistic, the functionalist, the evaluating, and the normative. Each has encountered difficulties. To surmount those difficulties, I propose a technical, psychological, empirical, and distinctive definition of morality: obligatory concerns with others' welfare, rights, fairness, and justice, as well as the reasoning, judgment, emotions, and actions that spring from those concerns. By articulating workable definitions of morality, psychologists can communicate more clearly across paradigms, separate definitional from empirical disagreements, and jointly advance the field of moral psychology.

Simulating peers: Can puppets simulate peer interactions in studies on children's socio-cognitive development?

Interactions with peers are fundamental to socio-cognitive development, but assessing peer interactions in standardized experiments is challenging. Therefore, researchers commonly utilize puppetry to simulate peers. This Registered Report investigated urban German children's (AgeRange  = 3.5-4.5 years; N = 144; 76♀) mind ascriptions and social cognition to test whether they treat puppets like peers, adults, or neither. Children attributed less mind properties to puppets than peers or adults. However, children's social cognition (i.e., normativity, prosociality, and theory of mind) varied little across partners. Puppetry relies on children's ability for pretense, but can provide valid insights into socio-cognitive development. Implications for using puppets as stand-ins for peers in developmental research are discussed.

Everyone’s a Critic (Sometimes): Young Children Show High Awareness of, But Lower Adherence to, Prosocial Lying Norms

From an early age, children are taught norms about socially-acceptable behaviors; however, children's ability to recognize these norms often predates their tendency to follow them. This conflict between understanding and action has been predominantly studied in cases when enacting the norm would be costly for the child (i.e. when sharing would result in forgoing resources), but is underexplored in more low-cost scenarios. The current study examined the gap between children's knowledge and behavior in a context with a low personal cost: telling a prosocial, or white, lie. Children (N = 46) evaluated objectively poor drawings in three contexts: in one context, children were asked how a third-party character should act in a story (to assess knowledge) and in the other two contexts, children were asked to provide real-time feedback to another person and to a puppet (to assess behavior). Results indicated that children endorsed prosocial lying norms (i.e. said the story character should give the drawing a good rating) at a significantly higher rate than they demonstrated through their own lie-telling behaviors (i.e. their willingness to give social partners good ratings). These data indicate that the discrepancy between children's knowledge of social norms and their actual behaviors cannot simply be attributed to the personal costs of enacting social norms. Instead, this competence-performance gap may be due to the fact that children are often taught social rules via hypothetical situations but enacting behaviors in real-world situations may require additional skills, such as inhibition and the processing of complex, multimodal social cues.

Children across societies enforce conventional norms but in culturally variable ways

Individuals in all societies conform to their cultural group's conventional norms, from how to dress on certain occasions to how to play certain games. It is an open question, however, whether individuals in all societies actively enforce the group's conventional norms when others break them. We investigated third-party enforcement of conventional norms in 5- to 8-y-old children (n = 376) from eight diverse small-scale and large-scale societies. Children learned the rules for playing a new sorting game and then, observed a peer who was apparently breaking them. Across societies, observer children intervened frequently to correct their misguided peer (i.e., more frequently than when the peer was following the rules). However, both the magnitude and the style of interventions varied across societies. Detailed analyses of children's interactions revealed societal differences in children's verbal protest styles as well as in their use of actions, gestures, and nonverbal expressions to intervene. Observers' interventions predicted whether their peer adopted the observer's sorting rule. Enforcement of conventional norms appears to be an early emerging human universal that comes to be expressed in culturally variable ways.

Developing Health Lifestyle Pathways and Social Inequalities across Early Childhood

Lifestyles are a long-theorized aspect of social inequalities that root individual behaviors in social group differences. Although the health lifestyle construct is an important advance for understanding social inequalities and health behaviors, research has not theorized or investigated the longitudinal development of health lifestyles from infancy through the transition to school. This study documented children's longitudinal health lifestyle pathways, articulated and tested a theoretical framework of health lifestyle development in early life, and assessed associations with kindergarten cognition, socioemotional behavior, and health. Latent class analyses identified health lifestyle pathways using the US Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; N≈6,550). Children's health lifestyle pathways were complex, combining healthier and unhealthier behaviors and changing with age. Social background prior to birth was associated with health lifestyle pathways, as were parents' resources, health behaviors, and non-health-focused parenting. Developing health lifestyle pathways were related to kindergarten cognition, behavior, and health net of social background and other parent influences. Thus, family context is important for the development of complex health lifestyle pathways across early childhood, which have implications for school preparedness and thus for social inequalities and well-being throughout life. Developing health lifestyles both reflect and reproduce social inequalities across generations.

Viewing Development Through the Lens of Culture: Integrating Developmental and Cultural Psychology to Better Understand Cognition and Behavior

Although many definitions of culture exist, studies in psychology typically conceptualize different cultures as different countries. In this article, we argue that cultural psychology also provides a useful lens through which to view developmental milestones. Like other forms of culture, different developmental milestones are demarcated by shared values and language as well as transmission of particular social norms. Viewing development through the lens of cultural psychology sheds light on questions of particular interest to cultural psychologists, such as those concerning the emergence of new cultures and the role of culture in shaping psychological processes. This novel framework also clarifies topics of particular interest to developmental psychology, such as conflict between individuals at different milestones (e.g., arguments between older and younger siblings) and age-related changes in cognition and behavior.

Preschoolers refer to direct and indirect evidence in their collaborative reasoning

Collaborative reasoning requires partners to evaluate options and the evidence for or against each option. We investigated whether preschoolers can explain why one option is best (direct reasons) and why the other option is not (indirect reasons), looking at both problems that have a correct answer and those that require choosing the better option. In Study 1, both age groups produced direct reasons equally frequently in both problems. However, 5-year-olds produced indirect reasons more often than 3-year-olds, especially when there was a correct answer. In Study 2 with a nonverbal task with a correct answer, 3-year-olds produced indirect reasons more often than in Study 1, although 5-year-olds' indirect reasons were more efficiently stated. These results demonstrate that even 3-year-olds, and even nonverbally, can point out to a partner a fact that constitutes a reason for them to arrive at a correct joint decision.

Constraints on conventions: Resolving two puzzles of conventionality

Conventions play a fundamental, yet contested, role in social reasoning from childhood to adulthood. Conventions about how to eat, dress, speak, or play are often said to be alterable, contingent on authorities or consensus, specific to contexts, and-thereby-distinct from moral concerns. This view of conventional norms has faced two puzzles. Children and adults judge that (a) some conventions should not be adopted and (b) some violations of conventions would be wrong even if the conventions were removed. The puzzles derive, in part, from the notion of "pure" conventions: conventions detached from non-conventional concerns. This paper proposes and examines a novel solution to the two puzzles, termed the constraint view. According to the constraint view, children and adults deem conventions as alterable within constraints imposed by non-conventional concerns. The present research focused on constraints imposed by concerns with agents to whom the norms apply and concerns with others affected by the norms. Findings from four studies with preschoolers and adults supported the constraint view. Participants evaluated actions and norms based on concerns with effects on agents and others, deeming conventions to be alterable insofar as the altered norms did not negatively impact agents or others. The constraint view offers a new framework for research on how children and adults integrate conventional and non-conventional concerns when they evaluate norms and acts.

The Development of Cumulative Cultural Learning

Human culture is unique among animals in its complexity, variability, and cumulative quality. This article describes the development and diversity of cumulative cultural learning. Children inhabit cultural ecologies that consist of group-specific knowledge, practices, and technologies that are inherited and modified over generations. The learning processes that enable cultural acquisition and transmission are universal but are sufficiently flexible to accommodate the highly diverse cultural repertoires of human populations. Children learn culture in several complementary ways, including through exploration, observation, participation, imitation, and instruction. These methods of learning vary in frequency and kind within and between populations due to variation in socialization values and practices associated with specific educational institutions, skill sets, and knowledge systems. The processes by which children acquire and transmit the cumulative culture of their communities provide unique insight into the evolution and ontogeny of human cognition and culture.

Using naturalistic recordings to study children's social perceptions and evaluations

Children often encounter events that bear on their moral and other evaluations, such as physical aggression and material disorder. Children's perceptions and evaluations are decisive for how they respond to and learn from these everyday events. Using a new method for investigating the development of social perceptions and evaluations, researchers interviewed 3- to 6-year-olds about naturalistic video recordings of harm, disorder, and joint play events. Children distinguished between the situations in the perceived intent of the protagonists, evaluations, justifications, and what they thought the protagonist should do after. Age differences suggested that perceiving and evaluating simple everyday situations was challenging for younger children. This research highlights the importance of studying children's everyday social perceptions and evaluations and validates a new paradigm for doing so. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

A content analysis of hand hygiene materials targeting elementary-age children

Millions of dollars have been spent on the design and dissemination of educational materials to improve handwashing to prevent infectious diseases. School-age children have been the focus of many of these efforts; yet little is known about the content of these materials. This study uses content analysis to examine the theoretical and motivational trends as well as the communication approach used in a sample of hand hygiene intervention materials targeting elementary-age children. Two trained coders analyzed 144 communication materials. Study results indicate that educational materials infrequently exhibit information consistent with theories of communication for behavior change, commonly use fear-based messaging, and rarely recommend using technology in the design of the interventions. Implications for future research and the design of more strategic, child-focused hand hygiene interventions are discussed.

The development and importance of shared reality in the domains of opinion, morality, and religion

The importance of shared reality emerges early in human development. Infants and young children notice when others share their beliefs, and information about shared beliefs influences their social judgments. This article reviews recent research on the importance of shared beliefs in three domains that have been widely investigated over the past several years-opinions, moral views, and religious beliefs. I argue that shared religious beliefs appear especially influential and suggest several reasons why this might be the case, including the perceived link between religion and morality as well as the strong role that religious beliefs play in personal identity. Future research can further test these possibilities.

Is Fromm Relevant for Relational Approaches in Psychoanalysis?

This paper provides an overview of how Erich Fromm's work influenced contemporary relational and intersubjective approaches. It stresses Fromm's humanistic and existential sensibility, his explanation of how different socioeconomic and cultural contexts mold different character types, and how his center-to-center relatedness in clinical work all contribute to psychic change. The author shows how these dimensions intersect and add to current interests in relational psychoanalysis.

Cumulative cultural learning: Development and diversity

The complexity and variability of human culture is unmatched by any other species. Humans live in culturally constructed niches filled with artifacts, skills, beliefs, and practices that have been inherited, accumulated, and modified over generations. A causal account of the complexity of human culture must explain its distinguishing characteristics: It is cumulative and highly variable within and across populations. I propose that the psychological adaptations supporting cumulative cultural transmission are universal but are sufficiently flexible to support the acquisition of highly variable behavioral repertoires. This paper describes variation in the transmission practices (teaching) and acquisition strategies (imitation) that support cumulative cultural learning in childhood. Examining flexibility and variation in caregiver socialization and children's learning extends our understanding of evolution in living systems by providing insight into the psychological foundations of cumulative cultural transmission-the cornerstone of human cultural diversity.

Young children consider individual authority and collective agreement when deciding who can change rules

Young children demonstrate awareness of normativity in various domains of social learning. It is unclear, however, whether children recognize that rules can be changed in certain contexts and by certain people or groups. Across three studies, we provided empirical evidence that children consider individual authority and collective agreement when reasoning about who can change rules. In Study 1, children aged 4-7years watched videos of children playing simply sorting and stacking games in groups or alone. Across conditions, the group game was initiated (a) by one child, (b) by collaborative agreement, or (c) by an adult authority figure. In the group games with a rule initiated by one child, children attributed ability to change rules only to that individual and not his or her friends, and they mentioned ownership and authority in their explanations. When the rule was initiated collaboratively, older children said that no individual could change the rule, whereas younger children said that either individual could do so. When an adult initiated the rule, children stated that only the adult could change it. In contrast, children always endorsed a child's decision to change his or her own solitary rule and never endorsed any child's ability to change moral and conventional rules in daily life. Age differences corresponded to beliefs about friendship and agreement in peer play (Study 2) and disappeared when the decision process behind and normative force of collaboratively initiated rules were clarified (Study 3). These results show important connections between normativity and considerations of authority and collaboration during early childhood.

Parents scaffold flexible imitation during early childhood

Children use imitation flexibly to acquire the instrumental skills and conventions of their social groups. This study (N=69 parent and 3- to 6-year-old child dyads) examined the impact of instrumental versus conventional language on (a) children's imitative flexibility in the context of parent-child interaction and (b) how parents scaffold children's imitation. Children in dyads presented with conventional language imitated with higher fidelity than children in dyads presented with instrumental language. Parents in dyads presented with conventional language also provided their children with more instruction to imitate and engaged in more encouragement, demonstration, and monitoring than parents in dyads presented with instrumental language. The relation between language cue and children's imitative fidelity was mediated by parent scaffolding behavior. The results provide evidence that caregivers support the development of flexible imitation during early childhood by adjusting their scaffolding according to the goal of the behavior.

Children spontaneously police adults' transgressions

Maintaining social order requires the policing of transgressions. Prior research suggests that policing emerges early in life, but little is known about children's engagement in such behavior in live interactions where there is uncertainty about the consequences. In this study, 4- to 11-year-old children (N=158) witnessed an unfamiliar adult confederate intentionally destroy another adult's property. Of interest was whether children would engage in policing behavior by protesting to the transgressor or by spontaneously reporting the transgression to a third party. Some children engaged in these behaviors spontaneously; nearly half (42%) protested the transgression, and 27% reported it without being prompted. Even when children did not spontaneously report the transgression, they almost always reported it when asked directly. The findings show that children commonly engage in policing even in the face of potentially negative consequences.