Defending peers who have been bullied is often thought to put defenders at risk of becoming victimized themselves. The study investigated the concurrent and prospective associations between defending and (peer- and self-reported) victimization, and examined popularity and classroom norms as potential moderators. Participants included 4085 Finnish…

A critical skill of childhood is learning social norms. We examine whether the generic pronouns "you" and "we," which frame information as applying to people in general rather than to a specific individual, facilitate this process. In one pre-registered experiment conducted online between 2020 and 2021, children 4- to…

This study examined the developmental profiles of children's social reasoning about individual agentive and deontic concerns. Tongan children (N = 140, 47.9% male), aged 4-8 years, were given a set of mentalistic (standard theory-of-mind) and deontic reasoning tasks. On average, children found diverse desires, knowledge access, hidden emotion, and…

This three-armed randomized controlled trial examined how moral disengagement and social norms account for change in bullying behavior and their potential as targets of anti-bullying components within separate interventions among 1200 French-speaking Belgian elementary students (48% boys, 9-12 year-olds, 57 classes, nine schools) during 2018-2019…

This study examined the coevolution of prosocial and aggressive popularity norms with popularity hierarchy (asymmetries in students' popularity). Cross-lagged-panel analyses were conducted on 2,843 secondary school students (N[subscript classrooms] = 120; M[subscript age] = 13.18; 51.3% girls). Popularity hierarchy predicted relative change in…

Advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development was investigated in three separate studies involving 82, 466, and 402 elementary school children (8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds). Rasch and factor analyses assessed whether common conceptual development underlies higher-order false-belief understanding, social understanding, emotion recognition, and…

Rule violations are likely to serve as key contexts for learning to reason about public identity. In an initial study with 91 children aged 4-9 years, social emotions and self-presentational concerns were more likely to be cited when children were responding to hypothetical vignettes involving social-conventional rather than moral violations. In 2…

The effects of social group norms (inclusion vs. exclusion vs. exclusion-plus-relational aggression) and school norms (inclusion vs. no norm) on 7- and 10-year-old children's intergroup attitudes were examined. Children (n = 383) were randomly assigned to a group with an inclusion or exclusion norm, and to 1 of the school norm conditions. Findings…

Children and adolescents evaluated group inclusion and exclusion in the context of generic and group-specific norms involving morality and social conventions. Participants ("N" = 381), aged 9.5 and 13.5 years, judged an in-group member's decision to deviate from the norms of the group, whom to include, and whether their personal…

Tattling, defined as the reporting to a second party of norm violations committed by a third party, is a frequent but little-studied activity among young children. Participant observation and quantitative sampling are used to provide a detailed characterization of tattling in 2 preschools (initial mean age = 4.08 years, N = 40). In these…

The moral realism of everyday life is neither Piaget's childlike egocentrism nor Gabennesch's reification. Natural moral law is seen by Turiel, a cognitivist, as a code of harm, rights, and justice. Other cognitivists accept codes of duty and natural order. (BC)

Two studies examined whether social norms and children's concern for self-presentation affect their intergroup attitudes. Study 1 examined racial intergroup attitudes and normative beliefs among children aged 6 to 16 years (n=155). Accountability (i.e., public self-focus) was experimentally manipulated, and intergroup attitudes were assessed using…

Some studies indicate that individuals recognize conventional norms as social contrivances; others, that individuals reify social formations as something other than social products. Questions about comparatively transparent rules and the use of simplistic questions for complex phenomena give an exaggerated portrayal of individuals' awareness of…

Children of 5, 9, and 13 years of age were asked to allocate resources in hypothetical situations in which norms of equity, equality, or need were applicable. Young children were insensitive to the contextual information, whereas older children appropriately tailored their decisions to the situation. (BC)

First- and fifth-grade kibbutz and city children (320 in two studies) individually were requested to distribute rewards between themselves and a partner who had produced either more or less than the subject had. Fifth graders were also asked about the level of effort and merit displayed by themselves and their partners. (Author/RH).