Eighteen‐Month‐Old Infants Correct Non‐Conforming Actions by Others

Deviancy Aversion and Social Norms

We propose that deviancy aversion-people's domain-general discomfort toward the distortion of patterns (repeated forms or models)-contributes to the strength and prevalence of social norms in society. Five studies (N = 2,390) supported this hypothesis. In Study 1, individuals' deviancy aversion, for instance, their aversion toward broken patterns of simple geometric shapes, predicted negative affect toward norm violations (affect), greater self-reported norm following (behavior), and judging norms as more valuable (belief). Supporting generalizability, deviancy aversion additionally predicted greater conformity on accuracy-orientated estimation tasks (Study 2), adherence to physical distancing norms during COVID-19 (Study 3), and increased following of fairness norms (Study 4). Finally, experimentally heightening deviancy aversion increased participants' negative affect toward norm violations and self-reported norm behavior, but did not convincingly heighten belief-based norm judgments (Study 5). We conclude that a human sensitivity to pattern distortion functions as a low-level affective process that promotes and maintains social norms in society.

Preverbal infants' understanding of social norms

Social norms are foundational to human cooperation and co-existence in social groups. A crucial marker of social norms is that a behavior is not only shared, but that the conformity to the behavior of others is a basis for social evaluation (i.e., reinforcement and sanctioning), taking the is, how individuals usually behave, to an ought, how individuals should behave to be socially approved by others. In this preregistered study, we show that 11-month-old infants grasp this fundamental aspect about social norms already in their first year. They showed a pupillary surprise response for unexpected social responses, namely the disapproval and exclusion of an individual who showed the same behavior like others or the approval and inclusion of an individual who behaved differently. That preverbal infants link the conformity with others' behavior to social evaluations, before they respond to norm violations themselves, indicates that the foundations of social norm understanding lie in early infancy.

Rethinking Norm Psychology

Norms permeate human life. Most of people's activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden-rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of "norm psychology" and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior-compliance, enforcement, and commentary-and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or "cognitive gadget," perspective suggests that people alive today-parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers-have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People's actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.

Interactive repair and the foundations of language

The robustness and flexibility of human language is underpinned by a machinery of interactive repair. Repair is deeply intertwined with two core properties of human language: reflexivity (it can communicate about itself) and accountability (it is used to publicly enforce social norms). We review empirical and theoretical advances from across the cognitive sciences that mark interactive repair as a domain of pragmatic universals, a key place to study metacognition in interaction, and a system that enables collective computation. This provides novel insights into the role of repair in comparative cognition, language development, and human-computer interaction. As an always-available fallback option and an infrastructure for negotiating social commitments, interactive repair is foundational to the resilience, complexity, and flexibility of human language.

Children are eager to take credit for prosocial acts, and cost affects this tendency

We report two experiments on children's tendency to enhance their reputations through communicative acts. In the experiments, 4-year-olds (N = 120) had the opportunity to inform a social partner that they had helped him in his absence. In a first experiment, we pitted a prosocial act ("Let's help clean up for Doggie!") against an instrumental act ("Let's move these out of our way"). Children in the prosocial condition were quicker to inform their partner of the act and more likely to protest when another individual was given credit for it. In a second experiment, we replicated the prosocial condition but with a new manipulation: high-cost versus low-cost helping. We manipulated both the language surrounding cost (i.e., "This will be pretty tough to clean up" vs. "It will be really easy to clean this up") and how difficult the task itself was. As predicted, children in the high-cost condition were quicker to inform their partner of the act and more likely to take back credit for it. These results suggest that even 4-year-old children make active attempts to elicit positive reputational judgments for their prosocial acts, with cost as a moderating factor.

Children's suggestibility for neutral arbitrary actions in the context of norm violations

This study investigated children's false memories for neutral arbitrary actions. Five- to six-year-olds (N = 32) were taught four arbitrary actions, each following specific rules. The children then watched a televised adult performing eight actions: the four familiar actions while violating one aspect of each rule script and four unfamiliar actions. Suggestive and non-suggestive questions about all witnessed actions were asked, followed by forced-choice test questions to measure the false memory effect. The likelihood of forming false memories was higher in the suggestive condition than in the non-suggestive condition. There was no effect of previously acquired knowledge about the rules of the actions and no interaction between rule knowledge and suggestion. The results are discussed in light of previous findings in related fields of false memory research.

The ontogenetic emergence of normativity: How action imitation relates to infants' norm enforcement

Major developmental theories allot imitation a pivotal role in the cultural acquisition of social norms. Although there exists considerable evidence of young children's norm enforcement behavior, the ontogenetic emergence of normativity and the role of imitation is debated. Here, we assessed two pathways of how general imitation tendencies might relate to norm enforcement: The compliance path holds that young children's general imitation tendencies lead to displaying compliant behavior, which in turn predicts norm enforcement toward third parties. The internalization path suggests that young children's general imitation tendencies lead to an internal representation of normative rules. As children observe third parties' normative transgressions, a perceived discrepancy between internalized representation of the rule and observed behavior arises, which in turn triggers corrective action, that is, norm enforcement behavior. We assessed 18-month-olds' (N = 97) general imitation tendencies across four tasks, their compliance with maternal directives across two tasks, and their self-distress as well as protest behavior following normative transgressions. Results showed that (a) whereas imitation significantly predicted compliance behavior, compliance did not predict norm enforcement behavior, and that (b) imitation predicted self-distress, which in turn predicted norm enforcement. These findings speak to internalization as one psychological basis of norm enforcement behavior and highlight the importance of imitation in the ontogenetic emergence of normativity.

Cascades in language acquisition: Re-thinking the linear model of development

The first 5 years of life are characterized by incredible growth across domains of child development. Drawing from over 50 years of seminal research, this chapter contextualizes recent advances in language sciences through the lens of developmental cascades to explore complexities and connections in acquisition. Converging evidence-both classic and contemporary-points to the many ways in which advances in one learning system can pose significant and lasting impacts on the advances in other learning systems. This chapter reviews evidence in developmental literature from multiple domains and disciplines (i.e., cognitive, social, motor, bilingual language learning, and communication sciences and disorders) to examine the phenomenon of developmental cascades in language acquisition.

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.

Evolutionary origin and the development of consciousness

This review seeks to combine advances in anthropology and neuroscience to investigate the adaptive value of human consciousness. It uses an interdisciplinary perspective on the origin of consciousness to refute the most common fallacies in considering consciousness, particularly, disregarding the evolutionary origin of the subjective reality in looking for the neural correlates of consciousness and divorcing studies in neuroscience and behavioural sciences. Various explanations linked to consciousness in the field of neuroscience, supplemented with the theoretical explanation of an experience as an ongoing process of overlap between intrinsic neural dynamics and stimulation can be summarised as the stochastic dynamics of one's control system experienced by the individual in the form of subjective reality. This framework elaborates on the world-brain research program and lays foundation for the quantitative description of one's qualitative feelings and naturalistic science of consciousness. Furthermore, this study highlights the philosophical perspective of the inseparability between the physical correlates and the subjective reality contributing to the realistic ontology of conscious processes.

Toddlers' interventions toward fair and unfair individuals

Cooperative societies rely on reward and punishment for norm enforcement. We examined the developmental origin of these interventions in the context of distributive fairness: past research has shown that infants expect resources to be distributed fairly, prefer to interact with fair distributors, and evaluate others based on their fair and unfair resource allocations. In order to determine whether infants would intervene in third-party resource distributions by use of reward and punishment we developed a novel task. Sixteen-month-old infants were taught that one side of a touch screen produces reward (vocal statements expressing praise; giving a cookie), whereas the other side produces punishment when touched (vocal statements expressing admonishment; taking away a cookie). After watching videos in which one actor distributed resources fairly and another actor distributed resources unfairly, participants' screen touches on the reward and punishment panels while the fair and unfair distributors appeared on screen were recorded. Infants touched the reward side significantly more than the punishment side when presented with the fair distributor but touched the screen sides equally when the unfair distributor was shown. Control experiments revealed no evidence of reward or punishment when infants saw food items they liked and disliked, or individuals uninvolved in the resource distribution events. These results provide the earliest evidence that infants are able to spontaneously intervene in socio-moral situations by rewarding positive actions.

The Social Function of Imitation in Development

Imitation is a deeply social process. Here, I review evidence that children use imitation as a means by which to affiliate with others. For example, children imitate the actions of others more closely when they seek a positive social relationship with them and respond positively to being imitated. Furthermore, children infer something of the relationships between third parties by observing their imitative exchanges. Understanding the social nature of imitation requires exploring the nature of the social relationships between children and the individuals they imitate. Thus, in addition to discussing children's own goals in imitative situations, I review the social pressures children experience to imitate in particular ways, learning to conform to the conventions and rituals of their group. In the latter part of this article, I discuss the extent to which this perspective on imitation can help us to understand broader topics within social development, including the origins of human cultural differences.

Why do children essentialize social groups?

The tendency to essentialize social groups is universal, and arises early in development. This tendency is associated with negative intergroup attitudes and behaviors, and has thus encouraged the search for remedies for the emergence of essentialism. In this vein, great attention has been devoted to uncovering the cognitive foundations of essentialism. In this chapter, I suggest that attention should also be turned toward the motivational foundations of essentialism. I propose that considerations of power and group identity, but especially a "need to belong," may encourage children's essentialization of social groups. Namely, from a young age, children are keen to feel members of a group, and that their membership is secure and exclusive. Essentialism is the conceptual gadget that satisfies these feelings. And to the extent that groups are defined by what they do, this motivated essentialism also impels children to be adamant about the maintenance of unique group behaviors.

Social norms and cultural diversity in the development of third-party punishment

Human cooperation is probably supported by our tendency to punish selfishness in others. Social norms play an important role in motivating third-party punishment (TPP), and also in explaining societal differences in prosocial behaviour. However, there has been little work directly linking social norms to the development of TPP across societies. In this study, we explored the impact of normative information on the development of TPP in 603 children aged 4-14, across six diverse societies. Children began to perform TPP during middle childhood, and the developmental trajectories of this behaviour were similar across societies. We also found that social norms began to influence the likelihood of performing TPP during middle childhood in some of these societies. Norms specifying the punishment of selfishness were generally more influential than norms specifying the punishment of prosocial behaviour. These findings support the view that TPP of selfishness is important in all societies, and its development is shaped by a shared psychology for responding to normative information. Yet, the results also highlight the important role that children's prior knowledge of local norms may play in explaining societal variation in the development of both TPP and prosociality.

A lifelong preoccupation with the sociality of moral obligation

Tomasello provides compelling evidence that children understand that people are morally obligated toward members of their social group. We call for expanding the scope of inquiry to encompass the full developmental trajectory of humans’ understanding of the relation between moral obligation, sociality, and stancetaking in interaction. We suggest that humans display a lifelong preoccupation with the sociality of moral obligation.

The Development of Prosocial Emotions

Humans rely heavily on their prosocial relationships. We propose that the experience and display of prosocial emotions evolved to regulate such relationships through inhibiting individual selfishness in service of others. Two emotions in particular serve to meet two central requirements for upholding prosociality: gratitude motivates maintenance of ongoing prosocial interactions, and guilt motivates repair of ruptured prosocial interactions. We further propose, and review developmental evidence, that nascent forms of these two emotions serve their respective functions from early in ontogeny. The remarkably early emergence of these prosocial emotions allows even very young children to participate in and benefit from prosociality. We discuss the implications of and challenges to this conclusion and identify pressing future directions for this work.