Our environment and social network undoubtedly play a significant  role in our decision making, but the extent by which our social norms influence our behavior is illustrated by a new study from the University of York, which conducted a number of experiments across the world into the decision making processes of both adults and children.

The researchers examined the sharing patterns of adults in each of the eight societies to establish social norms, before then working with children from the same communities to test whether they would behave in the same way.

Each child was given a choice between either sharing one of the two rewards they received with a stranger, or keeping both of them to themselves.  The results revealed that children below the age of seven typically chose to keep both rewards for themselves, but children aged between eight and 12 were much more likely to share, which was the response typically taken by the adults.

Social norms

The researchers believe that it’s at this age that children begin to observe and adapt to social norms.  Indeed, the data showed that children shared more often when they were told that doing so was the right thing to do (and less when told that sharing less was right).

“These results suggest that during middle childhood children become sensitive to culturally-specific information about how to behave. This “information” may be encoded in local norms, which children acquire through an evolved human psychology for learning and conforming to normative information. This implies that that we ought to have a universally-developing psychology for becoming sensitive to normative information, and that variation in prosocial behaviour ought to be linked to variation in the content of a society’s social norms, and not to variation in development,” the researchers say.

The findings are notable, not least because the research examined communities from urban locations in Germany, Argentina, USA and India, as well as rural communities in Vanuatu, Tanzania, Ecuador and Argentina.

“People in all of these groups share extensively, but they are used to doing so in different situations and probably for different reasons. This is likely why people in these different societies made very different choices when we put them all in the exact same sharing situation,” the researchers continue.  “One of the implications of the study is that we should start to pay attention not just to what children know but why they start to follow social norms. The next step is to pose the question of what is happening in a child’s development between the ages of eight and 12 that makes them more responsive to social norms around them. The goal of the work is to better understand how culture and psychological maturation work together to produce human diversity in cooperation and other behaviours.”