Is or ought? Reactions to violations help children to distinguish norms and regularities

Humans have a natural tendency to treat regularities (what people often do) as norms (what people ought to do). This tendency to move from is to ought introduces bias into our social reasoning because nonconformity to regularities is treated as wrong rather than uncommon. How then can children distinguish norms and regularities? This study investigated whether children use others' distinct reactions to violations of norms and regularities to distinguish the two. Children (103 4- to 8-year-olds) observed a group of demonstrators consistently use one pathway of a novel apparatus, establishing it as the conforming pathway. Then, an additional demonstrator used an alternative (i.e., violating) pathway while bystanders reacted to the violation. In the Norm condition (n = 48) bystanders were visibly irritated and disapproving of the violation, whereas in the Regularity condition (n = 55) bystanders were surprised or confused but ultimately accepting of the violation. Children then completed three tasks in which they used the apparatus themselves, observed a puppet using the violating pathway, and evaluated the wrongness of using the violating pathway on a Likert scale. Children used the conforming pathway more often in the Norm condition than in the Regularity condition, disapproved of violations more in the Norm condition than in the Regularity condition, and rated violations as more impermissible in the Norm condition than in the Regularity condition. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that children use others' reactions when distinguishing norms and regularities.