Three-year-olds quickly absorb social norms. They even understand behaviors as rule-governed that are not subject to any norms, and insist that others adhere to these self-inferred “norms”.

In a study, recently published in the journal Psychological Science, Marco F. H. Schmidt, in collaboration with Lucas P. Butler (Assistant Professor at University of Maryland), Julia Heinz and Professor Michael Tomasello (Co-Director at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig), now shows that three-year-olds not only learn social norms from direct instruction and prohibition – as traditionally assumed, but also seek norms themselves – even inferring them where adults see none.