Descriptive Norms Influence Children’s Injunctive and Moral Norm Beliefs

How do children integrate descriptive norms about how others commonly behave with their injunctive norm beliefs about how they should behave? Does this relationship vary depending on the type of normative behavior? We investigated these questions in 6-9-year-olds (N = 234) from the US in two preregistered studies. In Study 1, we examined whether children’s injunctive beliefs, moral evaluations, behavioral intentions, and punishment ratings were influenced by descriptive norm information that a behavior is relatively common or uncommon. In Study 2, we tested whether children updated their own beliefs in response to descriptive norm information using a within-subject, pre-post design. We also explored whether the influence of descriptive norm information varies by the type of normative behavior (Studies 1 & 2: negatively valenced conventional, positively valenced conventional, personal preferences; Study 1 only: COVID19 health behaviors). Across both studies, we found that by 6 years of age, children integrated descriptive norm information such that their average belief ratings were influenced more by common than uncommon descriptive norms for all behaviors except personal preferences. In contrast to our predictions, children did not consistently update their prior beliefs in response to novel descriptive norm information. However, when they did update, they did so to different extents depending on the normative belief measure, type of behavior, and its frequency. Our findings suggest that, by middle-childhood, children’s injunctive norm and moral beliefs are influenced by the frequency of descriptive normative information and, more broadly, point to the bottom-up influences of children’s normative beliefs.