Teaching versus enforcing game rules in preschoolers’ peer interactions

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.

An investigation of children's strategies for overcoming the tragedy of the commons

Common-pool resource (CPR) dilemmas are pervasive challenges to overcome. We presented six-year-old children with an experimental CPR paradigm involving a renewable water resource, which children could collect to win individual rewards. To maximize water collection, children had to wait for water to accumulate, without collapsing the resource. We explore the social strategies children used to overcome the dilemma together. Like adults, six-year-old children were challenged by the dilemma: resource sustaining was more successful in a parallel condition in which children worked independently compared with the collective CPR condition. However, children were capable of collectively preventing resource collapse by spontaneously generating inclusive rules, equally distributing the rewards and distracting one another from the delay-of-gratification task. Children also learned to sustain the resource longer in repeated interactions with the same partner. Already by the age of six, children are capable of CPR social strategies resembling those of adults.

Three-Year-Olds' Reactions to a Partner's Failure to Perform Her Role in a Joint Commitment

When children make a joint commitment to collaborate, obligations are created. Pairs of 3-year-old children (N = 144) made a joint commitment to play a game. In three different conditions the game was interrupted in the middle either because: (a) the partner child intentionally defected, (b) the partner child was ignorant about how to play, or (c) the apparatus broke. The subject child reacted differently in the three cases, protesting normatively against defection (with emotional arousal and later tattling), teaching when the partner seemed to be ignorant, or simply blaming the apparatus when it broke. These results suggest that 3-year-old children are competent in making appropriate normative evaluations of intentions and obligations of collaborative partners.