Navigating the social world

Humans share 99.9% of their DNA, yet there is an astonishing variety in how people dress, talk, eat, make a living, or raise their children that cannot be explained by biological factors alone. Underlying much of this social and cultural variety are differences in social norms. Social norms are rules that coordinate and constrain behaviour in a group and are based on mutually known commitments, obligations and expectations about how members of one’s group ought to behave. Even though many animal species behave in coordinated ways such as flocks of birds or schools of fish they do not follow social norms. Social norms do not describe how something is, but how it should be.

Humans possess unique cognitive and social abilities that enable them to collectively create social norms, to sustain them and to pass them on to following generations. The ontogenetic roots of these norm-related abilites have been primarily investigated in Western societies: from about three years of age children begin to treat the social practices of their group as normative. In particular, children will actively intervene when they observe others disobeying social rules and will start to treat ownership and fairness rules as well as verbal promises as normatively binding.

However, we know very little about how these socio-cognitive skills and behaviours develop in other societies. Anthropologists have documented huge variation in childhoods around the world, while research with adults from non-Western societies has revealed large cross-cultural variation in social norms. This project aims to undertake a systematic, cross-cultural investigation into the development of social norm understanding. We will work in different small- and large-scale societies, representing a wide range of living conditions, forms of subsistence, languages, and social structures. These studies will provide insight into how universal patterns of development and socio-cultural environments interact and shape norm understanding.