Learning the rules of the game: The role of generic "you" and "we" in shaping children's interpretations of norms

A critical skill of childhood is learning social norms. We examine whether the generic pronouns "you" and "we," which frame information as applying to people in general rather than to a specific individual, facilitate this process. In one pre-registered experiment conducted online between 2020 and 2021, children 4- to 9-year-old primarily living in the midwestern U.S. (N = 146, 75 girls, 71 boys, M_age  = 7.14, SD = 1.69, 82% White) interpreted actions described with generic pronouns (vs. "I") as normatively correct and selected the speaker who used generic pronouns as the rule-follower, particularly when generic pronouns were presented first. There were no significant effects of age. These results illustrate how generic pronouns influence how children discern unfamiliar norms and form interpersonal judgments.

Disagreement, justification, and equitable moral judgments: A brief training study

Although theorists agree that social interactions play a major role in moral development, previous research has not experimentally assessed how specific features of social interactions affect children's moral judgments and reasoning. The current study assessed two features: disagreement and justification. In a brief training phase, children aged 4-5.5 years (N = 129) discussed simple moral scenarios about issues of fairness (how to allocate things between individuals) with a puppet who, in a between-participants factorial design, either agreed or disagreed with the children's ideas and either asked or did not ask the children to justify their ideas. Children then responded to another set of moral scenarios in a test phase that was the same for all children. Children in the "agree and do not justify" baseline condition showed an inflexible equality bias (preferring only equal allocations regardless of context), but children who had experiences of disagreement or experiences of being asked to justify themselves shifted toward making equitable decisions based on common ground norms and values. Furthermore, false belief competence was related to children's decisions and justifications. These findings support the classic Piagetian hypothesis that social interactions are a catalyst of cognitive disequilibrium and moral development.

Young children conform more to norms than to preferences

As members of cultural groups, humans continually adhere to social norms and conventions. Researchers have hypothesized that even young children are motivated to act conventionally, but support for this hypothesis has been indirect and open to other interpretations. To further test this hypothesis, we invited 3.5-year-old children (N = 104) to help set up items for a tea party. Children first indicated which items they preferred but then heard an informant (either an adult or another child) endorse other items in terms of either conventional norms or personal preferences. Children conformed (i.e., overrode their own preference to follow the endorsement) more when the endorsements were framed as norms than when they were framed as preferences, and this was the case whether the informant was an adult or another child. The priority of norms even when stated by another child opposes the interpretation that children only conformed in deference to adult authority. These findings suggest that children are motivated to act conventionally, possibly as an adaptation for living in cultural groups.

Moral concerns are differentially observable in language

Language is a psychologically rich medium for human expression and communication. While language usage has been shown to be a window into various aspects of people's social worlds, including their personality traits and everyday environment, its correspondence to people's moral concerns has yet to be considered. Here, we examine the relationship between language usage and the moral concerns of Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity as conceptualized by Moral Foundations Theory. We collected Facebook status updates (N = 107,798) from English-speaking participants (n = 2691) along with their responses on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. Overall, results suggested that self-reported moral concerns may be traced in language usage, though the magnitude of this effect varied considerably among moral concerns. Across a diverse selection of Natural Language Processing methods, Fairness concerns were consistently least correlated with language usage whereas Purity concerns were found to be the most traceable. In exploratory follow-up analyses, each moral concern was found to be differentially related to distinct patterns of relational, emotional, and social language. Our results are the first to relate individual differences in moral concerns to language usage, and to uncover the signatures of moral concerns in language.