Speaker
Description
Successfully navigating the social world requires balancing strict adherence to social norms with their flexible interpretation. This poses a particularly interesting problem for early development: learning when to strictly follow rules and when not.
Across two preregistered experiments, we examined how 6- to 11-year-old children evaluate agents who follow different rule strategies: flexible (adapting to context), rigid (strict adherence), or noncompliant (knowingly neglecting the rule). Children rated the agents and chose one to guide them on an unknown planet.
Study 1 (n = 166) presented a safety-relevant rule scenario: agents crossed a street with a traffic light at either a busy or empty road. The flexible agent crossed only when the road was empty, the rigid agent always waited for green, and the noncompliant agent never waited. Younger children’s ratings were more favorable of the rigid agent, while older children increasingly favored the flexible one, suggesting a developmental shift in rule evaluation. We found no age-related differences in children’s choices of a guide for the unknown planet. To further explore this shift, we plan to collect data from adolescents and adults.
To test whether children’s flexibility depends on the type of rule, Study 2 (ongoing, n = 42) uses an arbitrary social rule: wearing a warm hat to avoid upsetting locals on a new planet. Again, agents followed flexible, rigid, or noncompliant strategies. We predict children will favor the flexible agent in this context, reflecting greater acceptance of rule adaptation when rules are conventional rather than safety-related.
