Source: Zboralski via Wikimedia Commons

In order to enforce the norms and values of our culture, adults will give up resources to punish other people. On a grand scale, we build prisons as a way to punish those who break the law. At a smaller scale, people will avoid shopping at a store that they feel has treated customers badly, even if that requires traveling further or paying more money for goods.

Do we have to learn to treat people who transgress social norms differently from those who do not?

One way to explore this question is to study children. This approach was taken by Arber Tasimi and Karen Wynn in a paper in at 2016 issue of Cognition.

In one study, they gave 5- and 8-year-old children a chance to choose to take stickers from one of two people. One person had one sticker to give away, while the other person had more stickers. That second person had between 2 and 16 stickers. It is important to note that children of this age love stickers, so it is a real reward for them to get some to play with.

One group of children was just shown pictures of the two people and were told the number of stickers they had. They were told that each person wanted to give their stickers to the child and the child had to decide which person to take stickers from. Unsurprisingly, nearly all the children took stickers from the person who had more stickers.

A second group of children was shown these pictures. They were told that one person was nice and helps people on the playground while the other person was mean and hit someone one the playground. After being introduced to the people, the children were told that each person wanted to give the child stickers. The nice person always had one sticker. The mean person always had more.

When the mean person had only two stickers, the children only rarely took stickers from the mean person. When the mean person had 4 or 8 stickers, the children still took the larger number of stickers less than half the time. Only when the mean person had 16 stickers were children likely to take the stickers from the mean person, and still they did so somewhat less often than children in the control condition who were given no information about the people who had the stickers.

Of course, children have learned a lot by the time they are 5. For example, some studies suggest that five-year-olds will try to protect their reputation. So, perhaps the children in this study avoided taking the stickers from the mean person, because they thought other people would think they were mean too.

To rule out this possibility, the experimenters also did a study with 12- to 13-month-old infants. In this study, the reward was graham crackers. In this case, there were puppets who wanted to give their crackers to the infants. One puppet always had 1 cracker, while the other puppet had either 2 crackers or 8 crackers. Children who were just shown the puppets and then had the puppets offer them their crackers chose to take crackers from the plate that had more crackers about 75% of the time.

A second group was shown one puppet being helpful by helping a lamb puppet to open a box to get something. The other puppet prevented the lamb from opening the box by slamming it shut. Similar to the previous study, the nice puppet had only one cracker while the mean puppet had more.

When the mean puppet had only two crackers, infants rarely took the crackers from the mean puppet. When the mean puppet had eight crackers, they took crackers from that puppet about 75% of the time.

This second study suggests that even infants will avoid engaging with a mean puppet at a small personal cost. Though, if the mean puppet had a lot of crackers, they were still willing to take them. Because 13-month-old infants are not concerned about their reputation, it is unlikely that is the explanation for the findings in the study with older children.

Instead, it appears that—even in children—there is a strong to avoid dealing with people who have transgressed a social norm. That means that either this is an ability that is learned very quickly or it is an innate behavior for a social species like humans.

It may seem strange that even children are willing to bear a cost to avoid dealing with mean individuals. However, while there may be a short-term cost to avoiding someone who is mean, sending a message about what behavior will be tolerated is an important way to help reinforce the importance of social norms in others in a way that provides a long-term benefit to society.

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