Accessibility statement

PhD Talks

Tuesday 21 May 2024, 4.00PM to 5.00pm

Speaker(s): Sophie Marshall, Charlotte Knapper

  1. Charlotte Knapper - "How does children’s conformity to social norms change over development in the UK and Uganda?"
    Conformity to social norms (shared and mutually-enforced rules of behaviour) supports cooperation within cultural groups (Rakoczy & Schmidt, 2013), and has been instrumental in our success as a species (Fessler, 2004). Children need to acquire the ability to conform to their society’s norms, but there are gaps in our understanding of how norm conformity develops, and whether there are factors that could lead to variation in development across diverse societies. In this study, we presented 4-11 year-old children from two societies (the UK and Uganda), with (i) a novel card-sorting game and (ii) normative rules about how to play the game. We found that conformity to normative rules increased with age in both cultural groups, however rates of conformity increased more gradually with age in Uganda as compared to the UK. Our findings suggest that the developmental trajectory of norm conformity differs across the UK and Uganda, highlighting the importance of research with non-Western societies. Furthermore, children were more likely to conform when they performed well on a task-switching task (in both the UK and Uganda) and when they had more experience with formal education (in Uganda), highlighting the importance of executive functioning for the development of norm conformity.
  2. Sophie Marshall - " Children's developing sensitivity to approval "
    Social norms are an important motivator of human prosociality, but there is much we don’t know about how our sensitivity to norms develops in early childhood, particularly in diverse cultural settings. Adults follow social norms by paying attention to what others approve of, but how does this attention to social approval develop? In this study, 4-year-old children from the UK (n=68) and Uganda (n=61) participated in an experiment where we tested their willingness to share (using a variant of the frequently-used Dictator Game). Across four experimental conditions we varied (i) whether the experimenter approved of sharing generously, and (ii) whether the experimenter watched the participant share. Despite the two cultural groups varying in their societal attitudes about following norms, we observed no cultural differences in children’s sensitivity to social approval. Instead, we observed a sex difference: (i) girls shared more than boys overall, but (ii) boys’ sharing was more sensitive to the approval of others, and more similar to what has been observed in adults. This suggests that the development of this aspect of normative behaviour may be less influenced by cultural attitudes about norms, and perhaps more influenced by development or socialisation relating to sex.

Location: PS/B/020