School of Psychology, University of Plymouth, Plymouth PL4 8AA, United Kingdom;
Faculty of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Jan 4;119(1). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2112521118.
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 ( = 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.
个体在所有社会中都遵守其文化群体的传统规范，从在某些场合如何着装到如何玩某些游戏。然而，一个悬而未决的问题是，当其他人违反这些规范时，所有社会中的个体是否会积极执行群体的传统规范。我们调查了来自八个不同小规模和大规模社会的 5 至 8 岁儿童（=376 人）对传统规范的第三方执行情况。孩子们学习了玩新分类游戏的规则，然后观察一个显然违反规则的同伴。在所有社会中，观察者儿童经常干预以纠正他们误导的同伴（即比同伴遵守规则时更频繁）。然而，干预的幅度和风格在社会之间存在差异。对儿童互动的详细分析揭示了儿童在言语抗议方式以及在使用行动、手势和非言语表达进行干预方面的社会差异。观察者的干预预测了他们的同伴是否会采用观察者的分类规则。传统规范的执行似乎是一种早期出现的人类普遍现象，它以文化上可变的方式表现出来。
