| Popis: |
When children form opinions about what the moral thing to do is and how they should act, they often look at what others are doing. That is, their injunctive norms about what they should do is influenced by descriptive norms of what people actually do. However, it remains unclear how exactly these regularities in the social environment influence different kinds of normative beliefs: To what extent do children flexibly tune their beliefs depending on the frequency and type of behavior? We examined this question in 6-9-year-olds (N = 138) from the US in a preregistered study, asking whether children’s injunctive beliefs, moral evaluations, behavioral intentions, and punishment ratings are influenced by descriptive norm information that a behavior is relatively common or uncommon. Since children readily distinguish between different categories of normative behaviors, we explored whether the influence of descriptive norm information varies depending on the category of normative behavior. Specifically, because the coronavirus pandemic offered a natural case study of novel norm learning, we explored this question in relation to COVID-related behaviors which children have only more recently acquired. Participants saw eight vignettes spanning four categories of behavior—negatively valenced conventional, positively valenced conventional, personal preferences, and COVID-related health behaviors—in which they either received a strong descriptive norm that the behavior was common or a weak descriptive norm that the behavior was uncommon. By 6 years of age, children’s injunctive beliefs, moral evaluations, and behavioral intentions were more influenced by strong than weak descriptive norms across behaviors with the exception of the personal preferences, in which they were largely insensitive to the descriptive norm or were more influenced by weak than strong descriptive norms. Punishment judgements were also influenced by the commonality of the behavior, although this varied across behaviors. Our findings suggest that, by middle-childhood, children’s injunctive and moral beliefs are influenced by the strength of descriptive normative information and, more broadly, point to the bottom-up influences of children’s normative beliefs. |
