Act Environmentally When Peers Do So? The Effect of Friends' and Strangers' Resource Extraction on Preschool...

Throughout childhood development, children learn social norms by observing how others behave. The current study used an adapted simplified public forest task, in which groups of three children sharing 30 trees, to investigate whether observing peers-friends or strangers-who demonstrated a lower-resource-extraction norm (i.e., cutting 4/5 trees) or a higher-resource-extraction norm (i.e., cutting 15/16 trees) would influence children's pro-environmental behavior. Participants were 5-year-old and 6-year-old children from kindergarten. Information about peers' resource extraction was presented verbally by the experimenters, who informed children about the number of trees that friends or strangers had previously cut. The results showed that 5-year-olds exhibited greater pro-environmental behavior under the lower- than the higher-resource-extraction norm when the peer was a friend, but this difference was not observed when the peer was a stranger. In contrast, 6-year-olds' pro-environmental behavior did not differ between the lower- and higher-resource-extraction norms, regardless of whether the peer was a friend or a stranger. These results indicate that social distance moderates the influence of peer resource-extraction norms on 5-year-olds' pro-environmental behavior, but not on that of 6-year-olds. These findings provide preliminary evidence that environmental education for 5-year-olds may benefit from considering friends' resource-extraction norms.