Our Need to Make And Enforce Rules Starts Very Young

The Wall Street Journal:

Hundreds of social conventions govern our lives: Forks go on the left, red means stop and don’t, for heaven’s sake, blow bubbles in your milk. Such rules may sometimes seem trivial or arbitrary. But our ability to construct them and our expectation that everyone should follow them are core mechanisms of human culture, law and morality. Rules help turn a gang of individuals into a functioning community.

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In a clever 2008 study, the psychologists Hannes Rakoczy, Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello showed systematically how sensitive very young children are to rules. The experimenter told 3-year-olds, “This is my game, I’m going to dax” and then showed them an arbitrary action performed on an object, like pushing a block across a board with a stick until it fell into a gutter. Next, the experimenter “accidentally” performed another arbitrary action, like lifting the board until the block fell in the gutter, and said, “Oh no!”

Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal