%0 Journal Article %A Kanngiesser, Patricia %A Schäfer, Marie %A Herrmann, Esther %A Zeidler, Henriette %A Haun, Daniel %A Tomasello, Michael %+ Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society %T Children across societies enforce conventional norms but in culturally variable ways : %G eng %U https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0009-B2C2-2 %R 10.1073/pnas.2112521118 %7 2022-01-04 %D 2022 %8 04.01.2022 %* Review method: peer-reviewed %X Humans, as compared with other animals, create and follow conventional norms that determine how we greet each other, dress, or play certain games. Conventional norms are universal in all human societies, but it is an open question whether individuals in all societies also actively enforce conventional norms when others in their group break them. We show that 5- to 8-y-old children from eight highly diverse societies enforced conventional norms (i.e., game rules) when they observed a peer who apparently broke them. Magnitude and style of enforcement varied across societies. Third-party enforcement of conventional norms appears to be a human universal that is expressed in culturally variable ways.Individuals in all societies conform to their cultural group’s conventional norms, from how to dress on certain occasions to how to play certain games. It is an open question, however, whether individuals in all societies actively enforce the group’s conventional norms when others break them. We investigated third-party enforcement of conventional norms in 5- to 8-y-old children (n = 376) from eight diverse small-scale and large-scale societies. Children learned the rules for playing a new sorting game and then, observed a peer who was apparently breaking them. Across societies, observer children intervened frequently to correct their misguided peer (i.e., more frequently than when the peer was following the rules). However, both the magnitude and the style of interventions varied across societies. Detailed analyses of children’s interactions revealed societal differences in children’s verbal protest styles as well as in their use of actions, gestures, and nonverbal expressions to intervene. Observers’ interventions predicted whether their peer adopted the observer’s sorting rule. Enforcement of conventional norms appears to be an early emerging human universal that comes to be expressed in culturally variable ways.Anonymized behavioral data and reliability coding have been deposited in the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/x7r2q; ref. 63). All shared data appears in the main text or SI Appendix. %K norms, conventions, sanctions, coordination, cross-cultura %J Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences %V 119 %N 1 %] e2112521118 %I National Academy of Sciences