Preschoolers Learn New Moral and Conventional Norms from Direct Experiences

By observing others, children can learn about different types of norms, including moral norms rooted in concerns for welfare and rights, and social conventions based on directives from authority figures or social consensus. Two studies examined how preschoolers and adults constructed and applied knowledge about novel moral and conventional norms from their direct social experiences. Participants watched a video of a novel prohibited action that caused pain to a victim (moral conditions) or a sound from a box (conventional conditions), and then saw a transgressor puppet, who had either watched the video alongside the participant or not, engage in the prohibited action. Preschoolers and adults rapidly constructed distinct moral and conventional evaluations about the novel actions. These distinctions were evident across several response modalities that have often been studied separately, including judgments, reasoning, and actions. However, children did not reliably track the puppet’s knowledge of the novel norms. These studies provide experimental support for the idea that children and adults construct distinct moral and conventional norms from social experiences, which in turn guide judgments, reasoning, and behavior.