5. General discussion
The present research investigated how conventional violations affect preschool and young school-aged children’s social evaluations.Inbothexperiments, younger childrenconsistentlypreferredthe rule followers to the rule violators, regardless of the type of violation (e.g., helpful or harmful). In Experiment 1, younger children’s affiliative evaluations did not distinguish between rule violators who produced helpful or harmful outcomes, suggesting their evaluations were solely focused on the act of rule violating. In Experiment 2, however, when violations did not change the outcome of the game, younger children’s affiliative evaluations did distinguish between helpful and harmful violators. Together these results suggest that younger children’s evaluations are most sensitive to the presence or absence of a rule violation, but that they do show some recognition of the type of violation. In contrast, older children’s evaluations focused on ancillary qualities of the violations, namely the outcomes they produce. Across both experiments, older children evaluated the helpful rule violator more highly than the harmful rule violator on the affiliation measures. These differential ratings were most pronounced in Experiment 1, in which older children evaluated the helpful rule violator as highly as either rule following opponent. Overall, these results suggest developmental differences in how rule violations affect preschool-aged and young school-aged children’s social evaluations. Additionally, the present research adds to the growing literature on children’s motivation to learn and conform to conventional rules (see Kalish & Sabbagh, 2007) by also demonstrating that rule conformity and deviance affect children’s expectations and judgments of other people.
