Young children enforce self-created norms promiscuously.

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Social Cognition
• Moral Development

Background:

• Children's understanding and enforcement of rules are central to social development.
• Previous research indicates children protest adult-created rules and collaboratively created peer rules.
• The enforcement of individually self-created rules by young children remains less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether three- and five-year-old children protest transgressions of rules they individually create.
• To examine if the collaborative nature of rule creation influences children's norm enforcement.
• To determine the developmental emergence of normativity towards self-created rules.

Main Methods:

• Two studies involving three- and five-year-old children were conducted.
• Children were prompted to devise individual or collaborative ways to play with a toy.
• A puppet transgressed the self-created rules, and children's protests were recorded.

Main Results:

• Five-year-olds protested self-created rule transgressions similarly across collaborative, individual, and mixed conditions.
• Three-year-olds also protested self-created rules, but at lower rates than five-year-olds.
• Protest rates were not influenced by explicit cues of normativity or conventionality.

Conclusions:

• Children's willingness to protest self-created rules is not dependent on the degree of collaboration in their creation.
• The tendency to uphold self-created norms emerges early in development, around the same time children accept adult-created norms.
• These findings suggest a promiscuous normativity develops earlier than previously thought.