Current Directions in Psychological

Young Children Enforce Social Norms Science

21(4) 232–236
© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0963721412448659
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Marco F. H. Schmidt and Michael Tomasello
Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology,
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Abstract
Social norms have played a key role in the evolution of human cooperation, serving to stabilize prosocial and egalitarian
behavior despite the self-serving motives of individuals. Young children’s behavior mostly conforms to social norms, as they
follow adult behavioral directives and instructions. But it turns out that even preschool children also actively enforce social
norms on others, often using generic normative language to do so. This behavior is not easily explained by individualistic
motives; it is more likely a result of children’s growing identification with their cultural group, which leads to prosocial
motives for preserving its ways of doing things.

Keywords
young children, social norms, norm enforcement, social cognition, normativity, cooperation, conventionality

Human societies are organized very differently from those of That norms do indeed supply additional force is clear from
other primates. Most prominently, human societies structure the fact that people follow not only moral norms but also
many of their activities via cooperative institutional arrange- “arbitrary” conventional norms whose violation would involve
ments, which are created by “agreement” for a common pur- no direct harm or victimization (Turiel, 1983)—norms con-
pose and in which individuals play well-defined roles with cerning such things as the appropriate clothing for a funeral
prespecified rights and obligations. These range from rela- (but see Kelly, Stich, Haley, Eng, & Fessler, 2007, for a cri-
tively simple institutions, such as marriage, to highly complex tique of the moral/conventional distinction). Our motivation to
institutions, such as the governments of modern industrialized conform to conventional norms stems at least partly from not
nations. wanting to be disapproved of, or punished, by others. But it
The glue of human societies and their institutions is social also stems partly from our desire to belong (to the group), and
norms, which seem to be unique to humans. That is to say, to conform and do things the “right” way. Preschool children
what holds these cooperative social arrangements together is already know the difference between a statistical norm (e.g.,
individual humans’ tendency to do things the way that others people don’t wear blue jeans to bed) and a true social norm
in the group do them—indeed, in the way they are expected by (e.g., people don’t wear blue jeans to funerals), and in new
others in the group to do them (Chudek & Henrich, 2011). situations they want to know such things as “Where do we
Social norms do not derive their binding power from brute hang our coats?” and “Where should I sit?” (Kalish, 1998;
physical force but rather from the mutual expectations within Kalish & Cornelius, 2007).
the social group to which each individual, at least implicitly, There is a less-noted, specific type of conventional norm
agrees to bind himself or herself—so that they apply generally that works somewhat differently. Whereas moral norms and
to all who so agree. many conventional norms regulate already existing activities
(typically in cooperative ways), constitutive norms to some
degree actually create new social realities, typically in the
Types of Social Norms form of “X counts as Y in context C” (Searle, 1995). For
The prototypes of social norms are moral norms. As Nichols example, although individuals mate and have children in any
(2004) has argued, moral norms derive much of their normative case, the institution of marriage creates institutional roles with
influence on human behavior from the fact that, to some degree, deontic powers. Thus, a father legitimated by the institution of
they are in line with humans’ natural aversion to harming oth-
ers and natural attraction to helping others (see Warneken &
Corresponding Author:
Tomasello, 2009, for a review). Thus, with no other motiva-
Marco F. H. Schmidt, Department of Developmental and Comparative
tions in play, moral norms for helping others and against inflict- Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
ing harm on others serve to reinforce already existing values. Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
But what additional force is added by the norms? E-mail: [email protected]

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Young Children Enforce Social Norms 233

marriage is empowered by society to make life-and-death

decisions for his children. Police legitimated by the “consent
of the governed”—a political notion advocated by the philoso-
phers John Locke (1690/1988) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1762/1997)—are entitled to do all kinds of things that would
not be tolerated if they were done by private individuals.
Particularly clear cases of constitutive norms are provided
by rule games, in which violating a norm—for example, mov-
ing a pawn backward in a game of chess—is not just failing to
follow a convention (though it is that) but is not playing the
game “we” agreed upon at all. Wearing a tattered T-shirt to a
funeral is reprehensible, but moving a pawn backward in the
game of chess is simply not playing chess.

Children’s Understanding and Enforcement

of Social Norms
The vast majority of work on social norms in children has
focused on moral and, to a lesser degree, conventional norms
and on the question of why young children respect and follow Fig. 1. Example of children’s enforcement of constitutive norms: A child
them. Piaget (1932) noted that children initially follow moral wags his finger and protests against a hand puppet who is violating the rules
norms out of respect for the authority of adults and older chil- of a simple game.
dren. However, in the same book, Piaget also reported studies
of Swiss children’s application and understanding of rules in
games of marbles, arguing that regardless of whether the rules cultural group, which leads to prosocial motives for preserving
of marbles strike adults as “moral,” they instantiate the funda- the group’s ways of doing things.
mental process of rule acquisition and following: “The rules of The first study was reported by Rakoczy, Warneken, and
the game of marbles are handed down, just like so-called Tomasello (2008). In this study, 2- and 3-year-old children
moral realities, from one generation to another, and are pre- watched as a puppet announced that she would now “dax.” But
served solely by the respect that is felt for them by individu- then she performed a different action than the one the children
als” (p. 2). However, as children become older (by about 7 to had previously seen an adult performing and calling “daxing.”
12 years of age), their respect for the rules of the game is Many children objected in some way (whereas they did not
derived less from authority and more from the fact that they object if the puppet performed the same action without calling
have autonomously agreed to abide by them; thus, there is a it “daxing”); importantly, in doing so, the 3-year-olds reliably
kind of reciprocity and mutual respect among players (this is used normative language such as “It doesn’t work like that.
what evolutionists often call contingent reciprocity: I agree to You have to do it like this.” These utterances demonstrated
cooperate if everyone else does also). that the children were not just objecting to the puppet’s actions
Recently, we have been engaged in a line of research because they personally did not like them or because they
focused on children’s understanding of the norms governing objected to the puppet as an individual, but rather because
simple rule games. Our question is at what point young chil- what the puppet was doing not the way the action should be
dren stop thinking of games’ rules as immutable dictates performed by anyone (a generic, normative assessment). And
handed down from powerful authorities and begin thinking of they were not just objecting to the fact that the puppet did not
them as something like agreements into which they have perform the action she said she would: Rakoczy, Brosche,
entered. To investigate this question, we have focused on a Warneken, and Tomasello (2009) obtained the same results
novel aspect of the ontogeny of social norms. Beginning at with a nonverbal indication of the game context (i.e., indica-
around 3 years of age, young children do not just follow social tion that an action X is appropriate when performed on this
norms but actively enforce them on others—even from a third- table, but not when performed on that table).
party stance, in situations in which they themselves are not It is worth noting that the rule games involved in these stud-
directly involved or affected (see Fig. 1 for an example). ies were solitary activities; playing them incorrectly did not
Although there are many prudential reasons for following disrupt the game for any other players. So why did children
social norms, it is not immediately clear why a 3-year-old object and correct the puppet? Why should children care about
child should feel compelled to actually enforce them on oth- deviations from norms if no one is harmed by them? We do not
ers. Such group-oriented behavior opens the possibility that know the answer to this question, but in two recent studies,
young children are not merely driven by individualistic children of about the same age behaved very similarly—they
motives but that, from early on, they start to identify with their objected, using normative language—when a puppet violated

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234 Schmidt, Tomasello

a moral norm against harm (i.e., by destroying another per- pretend soap (“No, you can’t eat that. It’s soap!”). When the
son’s picture; Vaish, Missana, & Tomasello, 2011) or a norm same block was later designated as a sandwich in a different
against infringements on property rights (Rossano, Rakoczy, game, children objected if it was used as soap.
& Tomasello, 2011). Children’s reactions to violations of rule These studies demonstrate with special clarity that young
games thus appear to be quite similar, both quantitatively and children can, at least in pretense, understand that the way a
qualitatively, to their reactions to violations of moral norms game is played is, in a sense, an “agreement” that can be
that cause actual harm—which is a bit puzzling. Critically, changed, not something written in stone. In addition, it is worth
however, children do differentiate these two types of norms: noting that this ability to socially designate a wooden block as a
Schmidt, Rakoczy, and Tomasello (in press) found that whereas sandwich—and then treat it as such in subsequent actions—may
young children enforce moral norms equally on all violators, be seen as a forerunner of humans’ astounding ability to accord
they enforce game norms only on members of their own cul- to otherwise unremarkable objects and people special cultural
tural in-group (e.g., people who speak the same language)— statuses (e.g., paper as money and persons as presidents) based
presumably because only “we” fall within the scope of the norm only on “agreement” (Searle, 1995). Pretend play of this type
and can be expected to respect it. may thus be seen as the cradle of humans’ understanding of
Another key question is where the generality of these norms institutional reality (Rakoczy & Tomasello, 2007).
comes from. Csibra and Gergely (2009) have hypothesized
that natural pedagogy is an evolved cognitive system whereby
children, when they recognize that they are being taught some- Social Norms as Shared Intentionality
thing, automatically jump to the conclusion that it is generic Everyone knows that children follow social norms, but they
information about the way things work (instead of nongeneral- also, from about 3 years of age, enforce them. One could
izable information about specific things, e.g., personal prefer- already argue from this basic fact that children do not view
ences). In the studies concerning children’s game rules, an social norms as part of the essential structure of external real-
adult always explicitly taught the children how the game was ity, in which case they would not need enforcing by mere mor-
played. However, in a recent study by Schmidt, Rakoczy, and tals. So it is possible that children are not really enforcing
Tomasello (2011), there was no pedagogy (or adult normative social norms after all but only mimicking their parents—but
language) involved. Nevertheless, when 3-year-old children that merely pushes the question back to why the parents are
saw a puppet interact with a novel artifact in a way that dif- enforcing them in the first place. Imitation has to stop some-
fered from the way they had just seen an adult interacting with where, so it does not help us with the question of origins.
it (she immediately recognized it and acted on it confidently), Moreover, in the modern understanding of social learning,
they again corrected the wayward puppet, again quite often children imitate only what they in some sense understand
using normative language, which they did not do if the adult (e.g., Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993). If children see a
had previously interacted with the artifact in only an explor- parent enforcing a norm, and if they then want to do the “same
atory way, as if it were novel for her. Young children thus do thing” in a novel context, they must understand what the adult
not need explicit instructions or communication from adults is objecting to—not a specific behavior but rather the violation
(which is indeed less common in traditional societies; Lancy, of a norm—which implies some understanding of norms.
1996), or any other kind of special marking from adults, to see Instead, we think that the experimental findings suggest
an action as socially normative; they just need to see that something like the following explanation. When children begin
adults apparently expect things to work a certain way (see to identify with their cultural group—which more and more
Casler, Terziyan, & Greene, 2009, for observations of children research is showing happens at a very young age, based on such
protesting against third parties for using artifacts in noncon- things as linguistic accent and common clothing (e.g., Kinzler,
ventional ways). Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007)—they understand that part of this
It is difficult to interpret these findings as being compatible group identification is that “we” do things in certain ways.
with the idea that children see game rules and other constitu- Gilbert (1989) argued that when someone wants to be a member
tive norms as somehow essentialistic (i.e., unalterable and of a group, they, in essence, jointly accept the social norms that
immutable) features of the external world. They apply them the members of the group commit themselves to, which natu-
only in appropriate contexts and only to the appropriate social rally includes upholding the norms when others in the group
group (and can apply them without adult teaching). Another violate them (see Gräfenhain, Behne, Carpenter, & Tomasello,
line of research has undermined the essentialistic interpreta- 2009). And so, our proposal is that enforcing norms is an inte-
tion even further. Rakoczy (2008) and Wyman, Rakoczy, and gral part of becoming a member of a cultural group, given indi-
Tomasello (2009) looked at children’s understanding of con- viduals’ evolved skills and motivations for shared intentionality
stitutive norms used in the special context of games of pre- and group identification (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, &
tense. Three-year-old children again objected—in much the Moll, 2005; Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman, & Herrmann, in
same way as in the other studies involving game rules—when press). Later in development, these same skills and motivations
a puppet used a wooden block as a pretend sandwich, because enable children to participate more fully in, and perhaps even
the child and an adult had previously designated this block as contribute to, the institutional reality of their culture.

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Young Children Enforce Social Norms 235

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Declaration of Conflicting Interests Germany: Springer-Verlag.
The authors declared no conflict of interest with respect to the Rakoczy, H., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2008). The sources of
authorship or the publication of this article. normativity: Young children’s awareness of the normative struc-
ture of games. Developmental Psychology, 44, 875–881.
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