Where Do Kids Develop Their Behaviors?

According to a study of children in five different countries, they tend to come from a culture as a whole

Photo of children in silhouette holding hands and jumping in unison against an cloudy, orange sunset

The following is a summary of a story that appears on Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.

A new cross-cultural study suggests that how children learn to cooperate hinges less on universal rules and more on the social norms that are part of the child’s environment.  

In the study, researchers investigated how more than 400 children ages five to 13 from the United States and four other countries behaved in situations involving fairness, trust, forgiveness and honesty. The results show that while young children across cultures begin with similar behaviors, their choices over time reflect local cultural norms. 

“We wanted to try and map the regularities and variation in how cooperation develops, and what it looks like across different cultures,” said study author Dorsa Amir, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. “We wanted to uncover the roots of human cooperation, which surpass those of all other species in scale and flexibility.” 

To observe how children make choices, researchers played a set of four simple games with them. Using Starbursts candy, children were asked to make choices about sharing resources, returning favors, forgiving mistakes, and telling the truth, often at a cost to themselves. 

The study found that across all five societies, younger children tended to prioritize their own interests. But as children entered middle childhood, their behavior increasingly aligned with their community’s values. 

In some societies, children became more likely to reject unfair advantages or share their candy with anonymous others. The researchers pointed to hunter-horticulturalist communities in Amazonian Ecuador, where children focused on using resources wisely, which parallelled with how their society functioned. 

The study shows that behaviors observed in U.S. children and industrialized Western societies shouldn’t be considered the global standard.  

“It’s important to remember there isn’t one single ‘normal developmental pattern’ when it comes to behavior, because whatever we observe is happening within a culture,” Amir said.

For more information this study and other Trinity faculty work go to Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.