The Rules We Live By: The Development of the Normative Ape

Shortly after arriving in Germany, I found myself waiting to board a train. Based on my experiences with both trains and Germans, I thought I had a pretty reasonable expectation about what was about to happen. Boy was I wrong. I believe I audibly gasped when I discovered that unlike Canadians, Germans do not queue up and board according to who arrived first, but instead, all rush the train simultaneously; To the victor goes the seat! Six months later, this memory remains vivid, in part because it violated my expectations of both train behaviour and Germans as orderly and predictable. When these violations relate to the use of public transportation the effects are relatively trivial. Yet when they occur in more consequential domains – such as the comportment of our political leaders – the implications can be devastating, highlighting the importance of understanding how people identify and uphold these expectations.

Humans are a hyper social species. We live in large groups and depend on others to both survive and thrive.¹ Moreover, many humans live in groups so large that most days we are required to coordinate our behaviour with individuals we do not have personal knowledge of. One way humans manage this challenge is through the use of norms. That is, across human societies, we identify some behaviours as good, desirable, or permissible, and others as bad, undesirable, or impermissible. To be an effective member of a social group, one needs to know these different expectations and act accordingly. Importantly, some of these rules are explicit, idiosyncratic, and tied to specific contexts (e.g., requiring permission to use the toilet in grade school, but simply leaving a university lecture hall) whereas others are implied, universal, and applicable to most contexts (e.g., one is expected not to harm classmates regardless of whether the instructor makes this expectation explicit). Despite these challenges, people not only learn to identify these rules, but they also enforce them and prefer others who follow them starting early in childhood.

Research in the area of developmental psychology suggests that children construct their understanding of how they should and should not behave through their interactions with others and others’ reactions to their behaviour. Before children enter into formal schooling, they already differentiate between three important concepts: psychological, social, and moral.² Psychological concepts relate to the understanding that individuals have thoughts, goals, and desires that are unique to that person. While we can disagree on the content of these mental states (e.g., I may prefer salty foods, while others prefer sweets), failing to converge on these concepts does not constitute a transgression (i.e., while I may disagree with your preference for sweet over salty, I cannot deem your preference incorrect or transgressive). While psychological concepts help us understand others, they do little to help us know what is expected of us.

In contrast, social and moral concepts involve expectations around the correct way to behave and typically entail proscriptions (what one should do) and prohibitions (what one should not do). Social concepts refer to conventions that organize interpersonal behaviour, whereas moral concepts refer to acts that affect another’s well-being and rights. Social concepts, or social conventions, often entail rules and expectations that are relatively arbitrary, and tend to apply narrowly to specific contexts and can be modified by authority figures (for example, how to board a train, what utensil to use, how to prepare for recess, or even what to call the break in the middle of a school day). In contrast, moral concepts typically have consequences for others’ welfare and tend to apply generally across diverse contexts and cannot be modified by authority figures (for example, hitting, name calling, or bullying).

Of particular interest, has been how children judge transgressions across these two domains.³ As early as three years of age, children differentiate between social conventional and moral transgressions rating social conventional transgressions as less negative, less generalizable across contexts, and more contingent on authority status and rule knowledge than moral transgressions. When asked about their evaluations, children tend to invoke traditions or authority figures to justify social conventions while referring to concepts such as fairness, rights, and welfare, to justify morals. Relatedly, while children have been found to protest against others’ transgressions in both the social conventional and moral domains,⁴ they protest more in the face of conventional violations than moral violations, especially in early development.⁵

These prototypical cases are well-studied and informative in demonstrating how children differentiate between these two normative domains, yet there are many examples of transgressions that are multifaceted.

Multifaceted cases involve transgressions where either both conventional and moral concerns bear on the judgment, or when conventional and moral considerations lead to conflicting judgments. For example, the decision about which side of the road a country will drive on is arbitrary and can be changed by authority figures (e.g., 3 September 1967 in Sweden). Yet, once a side has been selected, failing to follow the convention has moral consequences related to the safety and well-being of both oneself and others (this claim can be verified by anyone who has approached a roundabout while driving in the UK or Australia). Relatedly, following gendered expectations about dress and behaviour demonstrates compliance with social conventions, while potentially leading to moral transgressions (i.e., having different rules and expectations for boys and girls is itself unfair). In this instance, when social and moral considerations conflict, children appear to judge gender non-conforming peers more negatively than gender conforming peers, suggesting that they are weighing the conventional violation more heavily than the associated moral concerns.⁶ Finally, although stealing is often identified as a prototypical moral violation, both children⁷ and adults⁸ take both the authority status of the taker and the harm (or lack thereof) caused by the taking into consideration when evaluating these acts. Although moral transgressions are supposed to be authority independent, people rate stealing by authority figures as less negative than stealing by individuals. Together, these results demonstrate that human normativity is complex, and that the certainty gleaned from prototypical cases may obscure the interesting nuances that are illuminated when multiple considerations compete.

In addition to multifaceted cases, exploring factors that lead different individuals to endorse rules differently is a practically important and understudied topic. Because people’s understanding, and evaluation, of norms and transgressions are constructed through their interactions with others. The consistency with which children receive feedback on moral violations likely leads to the breadth of contexts in which they apply these rules. Yet, there are many differences across individuals that may lead to variability in these judgments. For example, in our study examining adults’ evaluations of stealing, we found that more politically conservative students rated taking more negatively than more liberal students and that conservative students were more likely to justify their judgments with reference to property rights, while liberal students appealed to fairness.⁹ Together, these results highlight that even when people agree on the importance of adhering to a particular norm, the underlying motivations may vary.

One individual difference that we have been particularly interested in is bilingualism.¹⁰ Language is itself a multifaceted case in that what we choose to call a particular object is both arbitrary (i.e., a mug in English, is a tasse in French, and a Becher in German) and normative.¹¹ While a mug by any other name will still function, if you choose the wrong word for your local context (i.e., use tasse instead of Becher in a German preschool) children will protest, and if you use language arbitrarily (i.e., make up your own words) you will not be understood. Bilingual individuals have the experience of regularly shifting between two conventional systems (i.e., recognizing that the “right” way to communicate varies based on the context in which one is communicating) which led us to hypothesize, that relative to monolinguals, bilinguals might be hyper-aware of the arbitrary nature of social conventions, and particularly lenient in their judgments of conventional transgressions. Consistent with our hypothesis, bilinguals rated both language and social conventional transgressions as less bad than monolinguals did. Inconsistent with our expectations – and quite surprisingly – we also found that bilinguals rated moral transgressions as less bad than monolinguals! We’re currently conducting follow up studies to try and better understand the mechanism underlying this effect. It might be that the unique experience of bilingualism makes people more open to the possibility that all things could be variable (e.g., species essential characteristics¹² ), or maybe the flexibility is specific to things in the social domain (e.g., religion and social groups but not race). Preliminary results suggest that bilinguals’ permissive flexibility may arise from the fact that they appear more likely to believe that they could be a member of an unfamiliar social group than monolinguals do. If true, this may help to explain why bilinguals are less judgmental of the transgressive behaviour of others and provide a mechanism to support greater intergroup tolerance.

Increasing tolerance for individuals who violate norms, particularly in the social conventional domain, is important because people judge not only the transgression but also the transgressor. That is, when children are asked to evaluate individuals who either follow or transgress a norm, they display a “halo” (or “horn”) effect, broadly generalizing their evaluations of a norm follower as positive, and a norm transgressor as negative. Regardless of the domain – social conventional, moral, or multifaceted – children prefer norm followers over norm transgressors, identifying norm followers as better playmates, more likeable, and more popular than norm transgressors.¹³ While it is understandable to avoid individuals who regularly act immorally and label them as bad, it is hugely problematic when these attributions are applied to individuals who speak different languages, use different utensils, or board trains in ways that we find unexpected. Interestingly, it may be the ways in which we talk about these transgressions and these transgressors (e.g., good/bad versus liar/truthful) that affects how these attributions are applied and change over development.

In our interconnected, multicultural lives, knowing how to behave across contexts and knowing when to accept or protest violations, and embrace or isolate transgressors is critical to both individual and group wellbeing. Despite a long history of academic inquiry, there is still much we don’t understand about human normativity. Examining how children acquire, enforce, and evaluate norms, tells us much about this unique human tendency. Recent violations of our expectations of how individuals, particularly those in leadership positions, are expected to behave have highlighted how much we rely on norms to navigate our social lives. A better understanding of the nature and development of normative understanding and the individual difference factors that affect how people adopt and enforce norms may help us to support a return to more predicable times. Luckily, my experiences with trains and transgressions only made me more interested in the quirks of the normative ape. I’m looking forward to boarding another train to rejoin the other Ontogeny of Normativity CAS Fellows and explore new, interdisciplinary questions that may help us to identify ways in which we can foster the better angels of our nature. I know the rules this time, so I expect it to be a much smoother trip.¹⁴