So It Is, So It Shall Be: Group Regularities and Prescriptive Judgments

group norms;development;conceptual development;Psychology;Social Sciences;Psychology

Roberts, StevenWellman, Henry M ;

University of Michigan

关键词: group norms;    development;    conceptual development;    Psychology;    Social Sciences;    Psychology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/138520/sothello_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Children negatively evaluate those who fail to conform to group norms (e.g., doctors who harm people, boys who wear lipstick; Kalish, 2012), yet to what extent do groups per se evoke a prescriptive stance? This was unaddressed in previous research, which provided additional cues that may have encouraged a prescriptive stance (e.g., moral principles, membership in one of the groups, or cultural input regarding non-conformity). In this dissertation, I tested whether children interpreted innocuous behaviors of novel groups (harmless characteristics shared by individuals within an unfamiliar group) as prescriptive (characteristics that individuals should do). Children ages 4-13 and adults were introduced to two novel groups: Hibbles and Glerks, who engaged in innocuous behaviors (i.e., the kind of music they listened to, berries they ate, games they played, and language they spoke). They were then shown conforming and non-conforming individuals and were assessed on the extent to which they approved or disapproved of their actions (measured though evaluations, negativity ratings, and open-ended explanations). In Chapter II, I report three studies finding that children disapproved of non-conformity and justified their disapproval through norm-based reasoning (e.g., ;;Hibbles are not supposed to do that”; Study 1). These effects replicated across competitive and cooperative intergroup contexts (Study 2) and stemmed from reasoning about group norms rather than norms applied to individuals (Study 3). In Chapter III, to more precisely understand what information children used to detect group norms, a new group of children was randomly distributed across four conditions that manipulated how group norms were presented: group labels, generic statements, visual groups, or control. Children disapproved of non-conformity in all but the control condition. Because U.S. society tends to value independence over interdependence (Markus & Kitayama, 1991), U.S. children may come to perceive non-conformity as an expression of individuality, and thus evaluate it less negatively than children from societies that tend to value interdependence. I tested this in Chapter IV by assessing children and adults recruited in Jianshi, China (population ~ 500,000). Paralleling U.S. children, Jianshi children disapproved of non-conformity and their rates of disapproval declined with age. In contrast to U.S. children, however, they remained relatively more disapproving at an older age. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that children used group norms to generate prescriptive judgments, and that this tendency emerged 1) when reasoning about innocuous behaviors in novel groups, 2) with only minimal perceptual and linguistic input, and 3) across cultures, though variable in the rate at which it declined across development. I will discuss the implications for how readily children engage in group-based norm enforcement and stereotyping, as well as the theoretical and practical significance of the present findings, and will detail concrete directions for future research.