Chapter 36: Developing an Understanding of Normativity

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Welcome back to The Deep Dive.

You've brought us an incredibly rich set of sources today, and we're going to extract the core insights, giving you a deep dive into, well, the very foundation of human social life.

It's a big topic.

A huge topic, and it's not about biology, not really, and it's not rocket science.

It's about how the human brain decides what is right.

That's right.

Today, we are engaging with a chapter dedicated to the developmental psychology of normativity.

We are tackling one of the most fundamental philosophical and psychological problems, which is the transition from

merely understanding the physical world, you know, what is the case, to navigating the social world, what ought to be done.

Okay, let's unpack this immediately, because if we think about what separates us from, say, a really clever chimpanzee, it might not just be language or tools.

It's the sheer density of rules, obligations, and rights that govern our every single interaction.

We are creatures just obsessed with rules, and this deep dive is about tracing the origins of that obsession.

The central mission today is to understand how young children psychologically integrate these two distinct realities.

On one side, you have the realm of prediction and causes.

That's our descriptive reality.

How things are.

Exactly.

And on the other, you have the realm of prescription and reasons, our social and normative reality.

Understanding the emergence of human norm psychology, focusing almost entirely on experimental evidence from early childhood.

We're talking ages two to five here.

That is our clear path forward.

So if you're a parent, a student of development, or just someone who is constantly puzzled by the social contracts that bind all of us, we've got your shortcut to being well informed on this.

Let's start with the cognitive baseline.

Let's do it.

Okay.

So let's define the terrain by looking at basic cognition versus social cognition.

If we examine the physical world, many animals, humans included, are just phenomenal problem solvers.

They use cognition to perform tasks like, I don't know, estimating projectile trajectories, tracking objects that are hidden from view, detecting regularities, making causal inferences.

And all of this is cognition that's optimized for one thing.

Prediction.

It deals with the natural laws of physics, of biology.

If a rock is released, it falls.

If a specific thing happens three times, it is probably going to happen a fourth.

This is absolutely necessary for survival.

But then we introduce social cognition.

We aren't just dealing with rocks and trees anymore.

We're dealing with conspecifics, other members of our species, who have observable behaviors and unobservable mental states.

Right.

The inner world.

And we call this mind dreading or theory of mind.

And this mind dreading itself, it's not just one thing.

It's on a spectrum, right?

Oh, absolutely.

Comparative research suggests that non -human animals like chimpanzees clearly navigate their social world by tracking simple perceptual states.

For instance, a chimp can understand what another chimp sees and can use that information strategically.

But the source material highlights that this is fundamentally different from the human capacity for what it calls complex propositional mental states.

Precisely.

A chimp might track what another chimp can see, but they may not grasp sophisticated beliefs proper.

That is, understanding that someone holds a false representation of the world or that their mental state is propositional, like X believes that Y is the case.

Okay.

That's a key distinction.

It is.

Human social cognition is so sophisticated that researchers often categorize it using these two process accounts.

Ah, the classic cognitive distinction.

We hear about this everywhere, from decision making to social processing.

Exactly.

You have one process that's fast, efficient, and often pretty inflexible.

That might be how we quickly track what we call belief -like states, those quick intuitive responses to another person's apparent intention.

Got it.

But then there's the second process.

It's slower, more effortful, but it's incredibly flexible.

And this is what allows us to engage in explicit, full -blown reasoning about complex beliefs and propositional attitudes.

It's what makes us truly subtle mind -readers capable of deep psychological insight.

So, okay, if we can already predict complex behavior by mind -dreading, by knowing what someone wants and what they believe,

why do we need normativity?

Where's that transition point?

This is the central problem.

It's the shift from tracking causes to recognizing reasons.

If I know your beliefs and desires, I can predict that you will act a certain way.

That's the descriptive causal sense.

That's it.

But human social cognition goes far beyond this.

We start recognizing obligations, commitments, rights, entitlements, institutions, customs, rules.

We understand that there are reasons to believe certain things and reasons to act in specific ways, not merely causes driving our belief in action.

This is the philosophical crux of it all.

If I see a delivery driver speed past me, I can causally predict they're doing it because they're late and they believe they won't get caught.

Mm -hmm.

A prediction.

But the moment I feel that flash of outrage or frustration, I've shifted realms.

I've shifted to the normative realm.

I understand they had a reason not to speed, an obligation to follow the law.

That's the perfect illustration.

The descriptive world tells us how things are and allows for prediction.

The normative world tells us how things ought to be and allows for prescription and moral judgment.

Our daily lives require us to constantly integrate these two frames.

We predict a friend will be late.

Which is a causal prediction.

But we still critique them for being late.

Yeah.

And that critique is based on a reason, an expectation.

Exactly.

And what's so interesting is the sources point out is that despite normativity being the underpinning of our entire shared civilization, I mean, morality, language, law,

there has been surprisingly little developmental research on when and how this capacity emerges in early childhood.

But that's changing.

Fortunately, that is changing rapidly.

The developmental evidence we're about to review suggests that even very young children, long before they can articulate these complex

distinctions, they grasp the basic phenomena of normativity.

But before we get to the experiments, we need to get crystal clear on our terms.

We have to first define the various types of normativity.

And second, we have to figure out how on earth you measure something so abstract in a child.

Let's tackle that definition challenge first.

When we talk about normativity in general, it's about setting some kind of standard.

It's distinct from just how the world is.

Yes.

Normativity refers to some ideal state that can either be attained or not, which implies conditions of success and failure.

For example, a belief is normative because it can be correct or incorrect.

A linguistic act can successfully convey meaning or it can fail.

But we are focusing on the narrow sense of normativity here, which is practical social rules.

And the sources break this down into four essential features.

The first one is, I think, the most intuitive.

Standards of correctness.

This is the baseline.

An action is judged right or wrong by a standard that's accepted by the group.

So to understand a norm, an agent has to compare an observed action, that's the descriptive reality, with an ideal standard, the normative prescription.

That comparison is really the engine of critique.

Okay, that makes sense.

The second feature is generality.

A norm isn't just a command given to one person at one time.

No, it's abstract, and it applies generally.

Norms are agent independent.

A rule, whether it's the steps for washing your hands or the rules of a national election, is valid for anyone in equivalent circumstances.

It holds generally, regardless of who the individual actor is.

And then the third feature, and this is where the real complexity lies, I think, is normative force.

This is that distinctive power of the ought.

This is absolutely critical.

Normative force is the peculiar binding authority of norms, and it has to be distinguished from, say, physical force or simple coercion.

How so?

Well, if a gun is pointed at my head, I move because of a physical threat, not because of normative force.

The norm binds us internally.

And the key element here, this is crucial, is the possibility of violation.

We understand what we ought to do, even though we could do otherwise.

That internal pull is what makes the rule binding.

So if I'm trying to stick to a strict diet, and I see a piece of cake when I'm alone in the kitchen,

no one is around to sanction me.

Gravity isn't making me eat the cake.

But the moment I feel that internal friction, the should not competing with the want to, that's the normative force at work.

It's the self -imposed binding authority of the rule.

Exactly.

And this concept immediately leads to a crucial distinction in our expectations,

what we call the direction of fit.

Let's spend some time on this, because this concept seems core to the entire discussion normativity.

What is the direction of fit?

So we use it to distinguish between the two types of expectations we have about the world.

On the one hand, you have descriptive expectations.

These are about how people will behave.

If I believe it's raining outside, that belief state is trying to match reality.

The direction of fit is mind to world.

It's like a map trying to match the territory.

If the map doesn't match the territory.

Map is wrong.

The map is wrong, and that's the world of is.

And the normative side.

That's normative expectations.

These are about how people should behave.

This isn't about matching the world.

It's about making the world conform to the ideal.

The direction of fit is world to mind.

It's like a blueprint trying to force the territory to match the plan.

If the world doesn't match the blueprint, the world is wrong, and critique or intervention is warranted.

So the blueprint is the rule.

Exactly.

And these normative expectations carry that motivational force we just talked about.

That analogy helps immensely.

Belief is the map.

The rule is the blueprint.

And finally, the fourth feature.

Context relativity.

This simply acknowledges that norms operate within defined contexts.

The rule about standing in line is valid at the grocery store, but probably not in the middle of a desert.

The concept of generality, the idea that the norm applies to everyone in that context, is not in conflict with context relativity.

The idea that the norm doesn't apply outside that context.

Perfect.

So with those four features, standards, generality, force, and context establish, let's categorize the types of practical norms that dictate human action.

We're putting aside the epistemic norms, the reasons to believe, and just focusing on action.

Right.

And we have three major types of practical norms.

Conventional, moral, and instrumental rationality.

Starting with conventional norms, these feel like the most fluid category.

They are.

They regulate, organize, and importantly, they constitute social practices.

And they are typically arbitrary.

The norm could have been established differently.

We could all drive on the left.

Or we could use shells instead of paper money.

And within this group, you have what are called constitutive norms.

Yes.

And these are crucial.

They create new social and institutional facts using a simple formula.

X counts as Y in context C.

So a dollar bill is just a piece of paper, but because we all agree this piece of paper counts as X amount of wealth in our society, it becomes money.

That's a social fact created by a constitutive norm.

That's it.

Exactly.

Game rules, wedding vows, the definition of the queue, they only exist because we collectively accept the standard.

Okay.

Next up, we have moral norms.

These feel much more fixed.

They're considered non -arbitrary.

They concern fundamental issues of well -being, justice, rights.

And they often build upon pre -existing, you know, natural dispositions we share.

Like an innate aversion to causing harm or a preference for fairness.

The source material notes that because they tap into these deeper predispositions, moral norms tend to be internalized much more universally.

And finally, the highly rational category, norms of instrumental rationality.

These focus on efficiency and the means and relationship.

They basically dictate that an agent ought to adopt the most efficient means to achieve their established goal.

If your goal is to host a successful party, you ought to send invitations, not just hope people show up.

And like moral norms, they're not just for my group?

No, they are typically widen scope and apply to any rational agent attempting to achieve any goal.

They're sort of universal principles of good planning.

Now for the methodological hurdle.

How do we test whether a two or three -year -old who often lacks the language to explain the difference between a rule and a preference truly understands these abstract concepts?

It's a huge challenge.

The initial problem is that mere conformance, just acting in accordance with the norm, is not sufficient evidence.

A child might stand in line because they prefer the structure or they fear immediate punishment.

That doesn't prove they grasp the generality or the normative force.

Exactly.

We need to go beyond simple obedience.

We have had traditional methods, of course, like the interview studies associated with social domain theory.

Right.

Those studies pioneered by Turial were foundational.

They showed preschoolers, when you interviewed them, could differentiate between moral transgressions, like hitting,

and conventional transgressions, like wearing pajamas to school.

They'd rate the moral ones as more severe and authority independent.

But those have limits.

Big limits.

They rely on verbal reports, hypothetical scenarios that limits their use with very young children and it doesn't directly assess that moment -to -moment experience of normative force.

So if we can't rely on conformance or interviews, what is the gold standard for measuring a genuine understanding of norms?

The standard is spontaneous third -party norm enforcement.

This is where the research becomes just incredibly compelling.

The binding nature of a norm reveals itself when an individual who is not directly harmed or affected by the transgression cares enough about the rule itself to enforce it.

So the child has to act as a kind of disinterested regulator of the social world.

Precisely.

We test whether the child acting as an unaffected observer intervenes via critique, protest, or sanctioning when a third party violates the rule.

If a child criticizes a puppet for breaking a rule in a game that the child is only watching, that's incredibly strong evidence.

Because it shows they grasp the rule's standard of correctness, its generality, its normative force.

And it's all moving beyond pure self -interest.

This methodological shift is key because it allows researchers to pinpoint the emergence of the motivational aspect of normativity.

So it's not just that they know the rule, it's that they care that the rule is followed.

Exactly.

And the findings based on this method are striking.

Between two and three years of age, children move beyond just cognitive recognition to becoming motivationally invested in upholding norms.

They become little social referees.

Okay, let's now dive into that empirical data, starting with the earliest forms of enforcement we see.

Conventional normativity, specifically constitutive game rules.

And the most famous study here has to be the Daxing game.

It is.

It's the cornerstone.

Walk us through the setup and the finding.

Okay, so this 2008 study wanted to test if children understood that a rule only applies if you intend to participate in that defined social practice.

They showed two and three -year -olds a simple novel game they called Daxing,

explicitly introducing the rule with normative language.

This is how we Dax.

Then a puppet comes in.

And the puppet breaks the rule.

Yes.

The puppet announces, I am going to Dax now, but then intentionally violates the established rule.

And the key finding was the strength of the three -year -old's response.

They immediately protested, they criticized the puppet, and often use explicit normative language like, that's wrong, or you have to do it like this.

They recognize the deviation from the standard.

But the crucial control in the experiment was the distinction between playing the game versus just demonstrating an action.

That's what makes the study so powerful.

When the puppet performed the exact same physical action, but framed it as just demonstrating something, not playing Daxing, the children's rate of protest dropped dramatically.

Wow.

They understood that the normative consequence, the rule,

only held for those who were participating in the established conventional practice.

By age three, children are not just enforcing actions, they are enforcing roles and intentions within a social fact.

So if they understand the rule holds for participants, the next logical question is, does the rule hold everywhere?

This brings us to the context relativity of norms.

Right.

Researchers tested this by prescribing an action at table A as part of a game, but explicitly stating it was not the rule at table B.

And the finding confirmed it.

Three -year -olds, and reliably the older ones,

intervened against transgressions only when they occurred in the context -appropriate location at table A.

They grasped that the norm's bindingness depends on the situation.

And we can see this concept of the conventional rule, that X counts as Y formula, in something as simple as pretense.

Pretense is the quintessential constitutive norm.

Using a block as a race car only holds if we agree that block X counts as car Y in this play context.

And studies show three -year -olds protested vehemently when a puppet violated a pretend identity.

For example?

If an object was designated a knife in the game, they protested if the puppet pretended to eat it.

But if it was designated a carrot, the protest just vanished.

This is a very early, very subtle understanding of how conventional facts are created and maintained through mutual agreement and context.

Once children grasp a rule, they also have to figure out who it applies to.

This is where the group relativity studies come in, especially for conventional norms.

Yes.

Schmidt and colleagues in 2012 tested three -year -olds on three types of transgressions.

Conventional, moral, and instrumental, committed by in -group versus out -group members.

And the results were incredibly insightful about social identity.

So what was the key difference between the conventional norms and the others?

For conventional norms, those arbitrary rules of the group children criticize an in -group violator significantly more than an out -group individual.

That's fascinating.

It's like a scent of betrayal.

You are one of us, you know our way of doing things, and you fail to uphold it.

Whereas for moral norms like stealing or instrumental norms like being inefficient, the protest was equal regardless of group membership.

Exactly.

And this is the crucial conclusion.

By age three, children understand that conventional norms are group -limited in scope.

They govern only the members of the social circle that establish them.

But moral and instrumental norms are considered to have a much wider scope or generality applying to anyone,

anywhere.

They are already distinguishing between community standards and universal principles.

Now we move to how quickly this emerging norm psychology integrates with our understanding of intention and responsibility.

As adults, we assess blame based on intentionality, but that assessment is different depending on the type of rule that's broken.

That's the subtlety we need to explore.

Let's use the analogy from the source material.

In soccer, a conventional rule violation like a handball results in a penalty, regardless of whether the player intended it or if it was a reflex.

The rule violation is objective.

But if a player causes an injury, which is a moral norm violation, the moral blame is judged differently.

There's less blame if it was an unintentional accident.

It's genuinely surprising that four -year -olds can grasp this complex distinction.

They do.

Researchers tested four -year -olds by having an agent violate either a moral norm, like destroying property, or a conventional norm, like breaking a game rule while being physically constrained, meaning they literally could not have acted otherwise.

And what happened?

The children did not assign blame or critique for the moral violation if the agent was constrained.

They understood.

This wasn't their fault.

They couldn't help it.

But they still criticized the agent who violated the conventional norm, even if that agent was also constrained.

Right.

And that shows the core difference.

Moral blame hinges on freedom of choice and intention, but a constitutive rule is just a standard of correctness.

If the standard wasn't met, the game rule was violated, regardless of physical constraint.

They recognize the constitutive violation occurred, even if they reduce their critique slightly due to the constraint.

Okay, moving on to rationality in competitive contexts.

This is an even more advanced integration.

It means understanding that rules are cooperative, but the strategy within the rules is competitive.

Yes.

When children engage in competitive games, they have to jointly intend to follow the rules, which is cooperative, but simultaneously aim to win, which is competitive.

A purely egoistic child would cheer when an opponent makes a self -defeating move.

But a child with a developed norm psychology should expect their opponent to adhere to instrumental rationality, to play smart.

And the research confirms preschoolers hold this exact expectation.

Five -year -olds in a competitive game protested when an opponent, a puppet played irrationally, even when that irrational move benefited the child and helped them win.

That's incredible.

They're enforcing good sportsmanship on their opponent.

They were enforcing the norm of instrumental rationality, the expectation that the opponent opt to adopt efficient means toward their goal of winning all within the cooperative structure of the game.

They weren't just sore losers.

They were enforcing rational standards.

Here's where it gets truly interconnected.

Norms influencing intentionality ascription, which is known as the side effect effect.

This is where our moral judgment actually alters our perception of reality.

This is genuinely mind -bending because it reverses the common assumption that intention dictates moral assessment.

Instead, this research shows that our moral assessment influences how we ascribe intention.

And adults and children starting around age four demonstrate this effect.

Can you explain the effect with a simple example?

Sure.

Imagine a CEO undertakes a new policy.

The CEO's primary goal is to increase profits.

They foresee two side effects.

One, they might pollute a local river, which is negative.

Two, they might accidentally create more local jobs, which is positive.

They don't intend either side effect.

Okay, so they're just side effects.

How do people view the intentionality?

When the side effect is negative, the pollution, people overwhelmingly say the CEO intentionally polluted the river.

But when the side effect is positive, the jobs, they say it was merely a foreseen but unintended outcome.

So the negative moral implication makes us ascribe intentionality more strongly.

That's it.

Our judgment of what ought to happen influences our perception of what was intended.

And this complex integrated feedback loop is already established by age four.

That is wild.

It shows that normative cognition and theory of mind are not separate modules developing independently.

Not at all.

They are deeply intertwined, shaping each other right from the start of the preschool years.

This might be the most fascinating section because it addresses the epistemological difficulty.

How does a child know that the action they just saw, a single instance of someone doing something, is a universal rule that applies to everyone?

How do they make that inductive leap?

It's the violation of David Hume's law, isn't it?

The jump from is to ought.

Children are constantly faced with these singular data points and they have to decide which ones are idiosyncratic and which ones are generalizable rules.

And since they don't always get explicit instruction, they rely heavily on subtle social epistemic cues.

Like the reliability and competence of the person they're watching?

Yes.

Four -year -olds selectively learned rule games from adults who had demonstrated competence.

For example, adults who correctly labeled objects in previous tasks over adults who were unreliable.

The competence of the model lends authority and normativity to the action being learned.

And they trust adults more than other kids.

Right.

They attribute higher normativity to the actions of adults over peers and they only criticize a deviating third party if that party deviated from the adult's action.

But the truly staggering finding is when there is no explicit instruction at all.

This is the concept of promiscuous normativity.

The tendency to just leap to the normative conclusion even without explicit teaching.

A study showed three -year -olds could attribute normativity and generality to novel game -like acts simply by observing an adult performing them confidently and intentionally.

So no, this is the rule, language, no direct address to the child.

Nothing.

They simply observed, internalized the action as a general standard and then later protested when a third party deviated.

They construct a social rule out of the blue based solely on observation.

But the extreme case study is almost alarming in its implications.

Tell us about the idiosyncratic action on the junk objects.

So in this experiment, children watched an adult performing a brief, completely arbitrary intentional action on some junk objects,

like pushing a snail shell with a stick or tapping a toy block.

It was idiosyncratic, it was contextless, and seemingly purposeless.

So an adult with obvious intent performs a useless action on garbage.

Logically, this should be discarded as noise.

Just a weird thing that person did.

You'd think so.

Yet the children normalized this singular individual behavior.

They treated it as an ought.

When a puppet later performed a slightly different action to achieve a similar end, the children protested.

That's incredible.

It suggests an overwhelming, innate bias in young humans to interpret observed intentional actions as binding, generalizable standards.

A kind of hyper -attunement that serves as a powerful engine for cultural transmission.

That strong tendency to impose order and rules onto arbitrary actions makes perfect sense if the ought is necessary for group coordination.

It is.

And the strength of this rule formation can be modulated.

While just incidentally observing can create a norm, other studies show that when norms are learned pedagogically, that is explicitly taught for the child's benefit,

children become much more resistant to counter -evidence.

Explicit teaching solidifies the normative commitment.

This deep learning mechanism is central to the phenomenon of overimitation, which we see so frequently in human children.

Right.

Overimitation.

That puzzling behavior of children copying adult actions that are entirely unnecessary or irrelevant to achieving a goal, like tapping their head three times before opening a box.

Researchers now believe this is at least partly normatively motivated.

So when a child overimitates, they're not being inefficient, they are trying to be correct.

Precisely.

They see the irrelevant actions not as clumsiness, but as constituent parts of the rule of opening the box.

Studies show three and five -year -olds protested against a puppet who omitted those irrelevant actions.

Especially when the actions were learned in a conventional context, like this is the game, rather than a pure means -end context.

They were enforcing the full ritual of the rule.

But again, this isn't mindless obedience, it's rational and flexible.

It is.

Children criticize less when irrelevant actions are omitted in a completely novel context where no rule has been established.

And crucially, they criticize more when those irrelevant actions cause harm, showing they weigh the normative cost of the rule against the moral consequence of the action.

So to fully mature into a normative human, children need to understand that rules are not physical constants like gravity.

They're human -made social facts that can be created and changed.

They need to grasp the social ontology of rules.

And this capacity starts surprisingly early, but under very strict conditions.

Researchers investigated the role of agreement and unanimity in rule creation.

They tested three -year -olds on arbitrary game rules that were established via a discussion among participants.

What happened when the rule was agreed upon?

When all participants, the puppets and the child, agreed on the rule, the children robustly enforced it.

But here's the fascinating restraint.

If there was dissent during the norm -setting process, if just one participant objected, children failed to see the norm as established for anyone at all.

Not even for the ones who had agreed.

Not even for them.

Early on, it seems a rule requires 100 % buy -in to become a social fact.

Their early grasp of norm ontology seems confined to conditions of unanimity.

They need that collective undisputed agreement to establish the rule's binding authority.

Social facts are fragile, and early on, children need that complete consensus.

And we see the culmination of this process in reification, in peer interaction.

Reification, meaning making something abstract, real or concrete, is the key mechanism here.

In observed peer interaction studies, five -year -olds spontaneously co -constructed complex coordination norms, including assigning specific roles, while working on a shared goal.

But when they later transmitted these co -constructed rules to a novice peer, they didn't say, we decided to do it this way.

They used generic universal language.

Exactly.

They said one should do it like this.

They reified their created norms, treating the rules they literally just made up as if they were objective,

discovered facts about the world that applied universally.

This demonstrates that powerful, inherent human tendency to turn functional coordination into binding generalized social rules.

Language itself provides perhaps the cleanest demonstration of the distinction between the world of causes and the world of reasons because speech acts themselves have different normative structures.

This is a perfect example of the direction of fit in action.

Assertions, declarative sentences are descriptive.

They are merely trying to match the causal world that's a mind -to -world fit.

But imperative commands or instructions are prescriptive.

There are attempts to change the causal world that's a world to mind fit.

And the research shows three -year -olds already understand the structural difference.

They do.

In one study, if a commentator asserted she is doing X but the actor was actually doing Y, the children protested the commentator.

The commentator made a mistake because the assertion didn't match reality.

But if the same content was delivered as an imperative, do X and the actor did Y instead.

Then the children protested the actor.

The actor made the mistake because she failed to make the world match the command.

The three -year -olds correctly assign the mistake to the appropriate party based on the inherent normative structure and direction of fit of the speech act.

They understand the binding force of instructions.

This goes right down to the fundamental use of language.

Four -year -olds reinforce this distinction, recognizing that a prediction that doesn't come true means the speaker was wrong.

But an imperative that isn't followed means the actor was wrong.

That's right.

We've covered conventional and instrumental norms.

Now for morality.

Where do the foundations of moral normativity emerge?

The foundations are laid very early in infancy.

Infants show a preference for helping over hindering agents.

They demonstrate descriptive expectations about fairness and resource allocation.

They're surprised when resources are divided unequally.

And they exhibit clear empathic tendencies.

These are the cognitive and motivational prerequisites for morality proper.

What stands out to me is the interrelation between pro -social behavior and normative expectations of fairness.

Yeah, research has shown that infants who engage in costly sharing, voluntarily giving away a preferred toy, which demonstrates genuine other regard, are subsequently more concerned about third -party fairness violations than infants who only engage in non -costly sharing.

So caring about others predicts caring about justice.

It suggests that the development of strong normative expectations about justice is closely fostered by early sympathy and the capacity to genuinely care about others' well -being.

When do we start seeing active enforcement of these moral norms?

By age three, children are protesting clear violations of moral norms, like destroying or throwing away someone's personal property.

In the domain of distributive justice, preschoolers enforce strict equality and resource allocation.

Interestingly, they move past this strict equality later, usually during early school age, when they begin to understand that inequality can be normatively justified if it's based on factors like need or merit.

And their understanding includes the concept of rights and entitlements.

This is the highest level of moral cognition we see in these preschool years.

Yes, this is crucial.

Three -year -olds will actively defend an actor's entitlement.

For instance, their right to play with a specific toy against someone who is threatening that right, even when they themselves are not the ones being threatened.

This act of intervening on behalf of an unaffected third party's right is an early, powerful manifestation of moral courage.

So the research is clear.

By age three, children are already operating in a fully normative world.

Applying rules rationally, context specifically, and with a robust moral motivation.

So let's step back and summarize this deep dive.

We started by stating that humans are unique, fraught with odd, constantly concerned with prescription, not just prediction.

And developmental research now confirms that this basic normative cognition emerges incredibly early, around ages two to three.

Children rapidly learn and enforce simple, conventional norms, engaging in that promiscuous normativity where they overzealously transform an observation into a binding rule.

And crucially, we saw that this normative processing is not isolated.

It is intimately related to and integrated with our ability to ascribe intentionality, understand competition, and use language effectively.

Which leads us to the ultimate question for future research.

How does this capacity even emerge?

What is the cognitive foundation that makes this whole odd system possible?

The strongest hypothesis links the development of norm psychology to our uniquely human forms of intentionality.

Let's clarify that distinction one last time.

We talked about individual intentionality, which is something that's shared with many species.

Right.

Individual intentionality just means having goals and beliefs and being subject to basic natural norms.

The success conditions of an action or the correctness conditions of a belief.

If a chimp tries to grab a piece of fruit and misses, the action failed its success condition.

But the complex, enforceable social normativity we've been discussing, the constitutive rules, the moral duties, the collective critique that seems to grow out of shared or collective intentionality.

This is the proposed engine of human normativity.

Shared intentionality involves two or more agents engaging in a joint goal, intending that we lift this box or that we dance this tango.

This mutual commitment to a shared project establishes a completely new form of social normativity.

That mutual commitment creates a binding expectation between the participants.

If I commit to walking with you and I suddenly start running away, you have a right to critique me.

Absolutely.

The critique, hey, you can't just leave.

We are taking a walk together is based entirely on the failure to uphold a mutual commitment, not an individual failure of efficiency.

And this capacity for shared intentionality is what allows us to create the most complex forms of norms, institutional facts.

These are the concepts that John Searle defined, which only exist because we collectively agree they exist.

Right.

They are created conventionally using that X counts as Y in context C formula.

Think of the rules of chess where a series of moves counts as checkmate or the concept of money.

These are facts that hold only because participants collectively accept them to hold and they carry inherent normative implications.

They're the rules that structure our lives, from the judicial sister to the morning commute.

And the developmental timeline strongly supports this hypothesis.

It's the clincher.

Basic shared intentionality like joint attention and simple coordination begins around 12 to 18 months.

The more complex forms joint pretense, using objects conventionally, creating conventional facts, emerge consistently around the end of the second year.

And what do we see emerging at the exact same time?

The first signs of children actively tracking and enforcing these socially constituted norms, just like in the Daxing game.

So the hypothesis is that basic individual intentionality is shared.

The unique ability to say we to create social commitments and institutional facts is the uniquely human capacity that gives birth to our sophisticated enforceable normative species.

That's the core conclusion.

We don't just predict what people will do.

We create the invisible rules that determine what they ought to do.

The ability to coordinate and commit collectively seems to be the ultimate psychological engine that drives us to be rule makers and rule followers.

We started by asking how we move from the world of the descriptive is to the prescriptive ought.

And the research points to a profound answer.

The ought is born out of the we.

The collective commitment is what transforms us from predictive animals into ethical and social beings.

An incredible thought.

The next time you see a child protesting a break in rule in a game,

remember you are witnessing the engine of human civilization firing for the first time.

They are not just being difficult.

They are constructing the social contract.

A truly incredible deep dive into the invisible architecture of the human mind.

Thank you for joining us on this exploration of normativity.

We'll see you next time.