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Theory & Psychology
2014, Vol. 24(6) 737 –754
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0959354314555792
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Developing an understanding
of social norms and games:
Emotional engagement,
nonverbal agreement, and
conversation
Ingar Brinck
Lund University
Abstract
The first part of the article examines some recent studies on the early development of social
norms that examine young children’s understanding of codified rule games. It is argued that the
constitutive rules that define the games cannot be identified with social norms and therefore the
studies provide limited evidence about socio-normative development. The second part reviews
data on children’s play in natural settings that show that children do not understand norms as
codified or rules of obligation, and that the norms that guide social interaction are dynamic,
situated, and heterogeneous. It is argued that normativity is intersubjective and negotiable and
starts to develop in the first year, emerging as a practical skill that depends on participatory
engagement. Three sources of compliance are discussed: emotional engagement, nonverbal
agreement, and conversation.
Keywords
constitutive rule, development, intersubjectivity, norms, social cognition
Testing children’s understanding of norms
In a series of studies, Hannes Rakoczy and his colleagues investigated young children’s
understanding of norms in pretend play using a new experimental paradigm, which tests for
the understanding of constitutive rules (Rakoczy, 2006, 2007; Rakoczy, Warneken, &
Tomasello, 2008; Wyman, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2009). The idea behind the paradigm is
that constitutive rules, as opposed to regulative rules, are typical of human forms of life. The
theoretical framework of the experiments comes from philosopher John Searle. Constitutive
Corresponding author:
Ingar Brinck, Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Lund University, Box 192, SE 221 00, Lund,
Sweden.
Email: ingar.brinck@fil.lu.se
555792TAP0010.1177/0959354314555792Theory & PsychologyBrinck
research-article2014
Article
738 Theory & Psychology 24(6)
rules introduce novel social and institutional facts into a community or group of people
(Searle, 1969, 2005). In contrast, regulative rules guide activities or practices that depend on
means–end relations and in principle could occur independently of rules (Searle, 1969).
The studies aim to determine at what age young children appreciate the basic norma-
tive structure of rule games and games of pretence and examine their awareness of the
context-relativity of normative rules (Rakoczy, Brosche, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2009;
Wyman et al., 2009). The experiments rely on the assumption that children’s rule games
and games of pretence share the normative structure of social reality (Rakoczy et al.,
2009). The suggestion is that if a child understands how rules or norms function in play,
then she understands how social norms function at large in society. Rakoczy et al. (2009)
claim that the normative structure of games underlies the whole of institutional reality. If
true, this claim justifies the belief that investigating children’s awareness of the norma-
tive structure of rule games is central to explaining the development of normative under-
standing. But why think that the structure of rule games and pretence is the same as that
of social reality? And why think that this structure is normative?
There is something puzzling about Rakoczy’s suggestion that rule games and the
human social world share the same normative structure. Indeed, it is doubtful whether
the fundamental ontological structure of social reality at all is normative. Searle himself
(1995, 2008, 2010) argues that human social reality is a construction of objective, non-
normative social facts, some of which are institutional and arbitrary. He holds that social
facts are created by a group’s collective assignment of conventional status functions to
objects, events, and individuals by way of constitutive rules. He does not claim that these
rules are normative. The rules constitute or define social facts.
Constitutive rules are declarative speech acts of the form “X counts as (constitutes) Y in
context C.” They tell us that in a certain context (say, a game of football), an action of type
Y (say, scoring) can be performed by means of an action of a different type X (say, kicking
the ball into the goal), and an entity of type X can count as an entity of a different type Y. As
an example of how a constitutive rule creates an institutional fact, consider the declaration
(CRmoney) This kind of piece of paper <euro note> counts as money in Europe
uttered while demonstrating a euro note. Systems of constitutive rules bring human insti-
tutions into existence, such as money, government, education, and legal structures.
Rakoczy’s claim that children’s games and social reality share the normative structure
revolves around the presupposition that constitutive rules are normative, that is, they do
not merely define a form of activity (say, a game), but prescribe behaviour. Rakoczy
et al. (2009) argue that the normative structure of games depends on the collective assign-
ment of status function to entities by constitutive rules, and the experiments target social
norms that regulate the interaction between agents or groups of agents. However, because
the experiments are designed to test the understanding of constitutive rules in the exact
form that Searle gives to such rules, the outcome is other than predicted (Brinck, in
press). The experiments determine at what age children understand constitutive rules—
not the social norms that regulate the ensuing interaction once a social fact such as a
game has been created. To see this, consider the following experiment which tests for
children’s capacity to understand what it means to “dax” (Rakoczy et al., 2008).
Brinck 739
In the model phase, an adult shows 2- and 3-year-old children new game actions accord-
ing to the schema “Action X counts as activity (game) Y in context C.” The adult performs
actions A1 and A2. A1 is marked as “daxing,” A2 as an accidental mistake. In the action
phase, it is the child’s turn to play the game of daxing and learn how to dax. In the test phase,
a third person (a puppet) enters and announces: “I’m gonna dax now!” In the target condi-
tion, the puppet performs an action that is mistaken, given the structure of the game.
Children’s responses to such mistaken actions, in particular protest and correction, are taken
as indicators of their awareness of the normative structure of the game.
According to Rakoczy and his colleagues, the 3-year-olds, but not the 2-year-olds,
saw the puppet’s actions as not conforming to the social norm of daxing, and enforced
the norm, telling the puppet how to act. They take the experiments to show that 3-year-
olds understand social norms. However, notice that the experiments test the understand-
ing of constitutive rules, whereas the conclusion concerns the understanding of social
norms. Identifying constitutive rules with social norms is a crucial step in the argument,
one that it is likely that Searle himself would resist. The question is whether it is valid.
Next, it will be argued that constitutive rules are not identical to social norms and there-
fore the argument is invalid.
What the experiments show
A constitutive rule specifies a social fact by declaring what an action, object, or indi-
vidual counts as, or constitutes. The declarative utterance involves a demonstration (e.g.,
an act of pointing or showing) of the object, event, or person that the rule concerns and
specifies the context in which the definition holds. Declaratives bring social facts into
existence by mere definition, as in the following examples:
(Ex. 1) This [beanbag] counts as a chair in Denmark.
(Ex. 2) This [move] counts as checkmate in the game of chess.
Searle (1969) denies that constitutive rules are prescriptive and constitute norms that
may be violated and of which violations are penalized. Rhetorically, he asks: “[A]fter all,
what penalty is there for violating the rule that baseball is played with nine men on a
side?” (1969, p. 41).
Constitutive rules determine what counts as doing Y, but do not commit nor entitle
anybody to perform the action Y. For instance, none of the rules of football commits
the players to scoring a goal, nor to not scoring a goal. The rules determine what counts
as scoring a goal (what it means to score a goal), but do not determine that the players
should score. Thus, constitutive rules do not enforce, but create social facts. They
define and so identify and introduce new activities. By using constitutive rules to
ascribe status functions relative to contexts, humans create novel states of the world
(Searle, 1995). Once declared, the rule opens up for the possibility to enforce it or cre-
ate a policy for its implementation. Generally, constitutive rules reveal new domains of
action and interaction that then require regulation. Usually, social facts come with
commitments or powers. They do not themselves bring about powers, but are embed-
ded in shared practices that are normative.
740 Theory & Psychology 24(6)
Millikan (2014) makes the same point as Searle, arguing that constitutive rules such
as those of chess do not mandate behaviour or tell you what to do. She argues that con-
stitutive rules are “constitutive” only in the purely verbal sense; they define what is
called “playing chess” and that is all they do. Suppose you agree to play chess with
somebody but get tired and stop half way through, or because of pity refuse to pronounce
the other player checkmate although you are in the position to do so. Have you then
broken the agreement? There is a social or normative mandate not to break it, but this
mandate does not concern the game itself, but the players and their mutual expectations.
The set of constitutive rules that defines the game of chess does not also force or oblige
you to show certain manners or adhere to certain etiquette.
Searle and Millikan show that we need to distinguish between rules that define a
given social fact, say, the game of daxing, and those that subsequently will guide or pre-
scribe how to behave while daxing. The latter kind of rule is normative and not in the
strict sense entailed by constitutive rules, but has to be introduced separately. Constitutive
rules per se are not normative, but the fact that a given constitutive rule is enforced in a
certain way embeds the rule in normativity. How prescriptive rules or norms emerge is
another issue, whether by decree, habit, or tradition. Searle holds that in the case of arbi-
trary institutional facts, the normative force of constitutive rules is derivative of a policy
or regulation. In themselves, institutional facts do not determine which norms follow
from them. Any norm could be made to agree with the facts. This is why there is a need
for explicit policies.
The following analysis of what it entails to misunderstand a constitutive rule as com-
pared to a social norm, explains the difference between constitutive rules and social
norms in detail. Let us introduce the following constitutive rule:
(CRschool teacher) A person with background B <specification of the required education, age,
competence, etc.> counts as a schoolteacher in England.
The rule defines the concept of a teacher. Once there is a rule that does this job, we can use
it to appoint individual teachers, that is, to classify individuals as schoolteachers. Now sup-
pose that the university diploma of a person who is working as a schoolteacher turns out to
be a forgery. Then, that person will no longer be considered a teacher, but lose the status
function that comes with the diploma (and probably his or her job too). Using a fabricated
diploma for the purpose of passing as a schoolteacher and nominating an unqualified person
both count as violations of the constitutive rule. If a person acquires the function of a teacher
without meeting the criteria, then the constitutive rule has misfired, or failed, and the appoint-
ment went wrong (Austin, 1975). Compare with the case when the violation concerns the
social norms that regulate the import of the constitutive rule in real-life contexts. Suppose
that a person has acquired the status function of a teacher by satisfying the criteria, but
neglects a teacher’s obligations (turns up late for school, is playing computer games during
working hours, or does not teach what he or she is supposed to do). Then the social norms
that regulate how a teacher ought to behave are abused (Austin, 1975), or misused. The
person may be punished, but still will count as a teacher and retain that function. The conse-
quences of abusing the norms that surround a given constitutive rule are quite different from
those that result from failing to use the constitutive rule itself.
Brinck 741
That constitutive rules and social norms are distinct means that a crucial step in the
line of reasoning which bolsters the design of Rakoczy’s and his colleagues’ experiments
is invalid. To repeat, the experiments are built around the constitutive rule for daxing.
The adult declares that action A1 counts as daxing. Then, the puppet enters the scene and
exclaims “I’m gonna dax now!,” but performs an action other than A1, that is to say, an
action other than the one that counts as daxing. Does the puppet’s behaviour constitute a
misfire or an abuse—a misunderstanding of the constitutive rule or violation of a social
norm?
When the puppet performs the wrong action, that is, an action other than A1, the stipu-
lated one, this is a case of misunderstanding, and the act misfires. The action will not
count as daxing, because it does not meet the criteria for daxing. The puppet will not be
daxing at all, and needs to be told that this is the case, and furthermore, merits an expla-
nation of how to dax. However, when the puppet performs A1 but in an irregular way,
for example, while hiding from the other player or playing with its back to him or her, or
is playing in a scary way or to hurt other players, this constitutes an abuse, a violation of
the norms for daxing. Norms determine how the action, once defined and created, ought
to be implemented and applied in social contexts. How to apply the action of daxing is
constrained by the policy of the game, for example, that we play daxing together, play
peacefully, etc. The puppet is daxing, but inappropriately, and so is blameworthy.
Which is the correct interpretation of the data? Remember that first, the puppet per-
forms the wrong action, then, the children protest and try to correct the puppet. In view
of the previous discussion, the children are reacting to the puppet’s misunderstanding of
the constitutive rule, that is, what it means to dax. A mistaken action is based in error, not
manipulation or misuse. Even if purposive, it is not blameworthy and does not deserve
punishment. Accordingly, the children attempt to show the puppet what counts as daxing,
viz., what constitutes daxing, and are not punishing the puppet. Utterances from the
video-recordings confirm the present hypothesis; they say “You can’t do that! It is
wrong!” and “I’ll show you, this is how you dax!”
I submit that the experiments do not demonstrate that the children think that the puppet is
violating the norms for daxing, but that the puppet is not daxing at all. Given that Rakoczy
has modelled the experiments on Searle’s notion of a constitutive rule, it is not surprising that
the experiments do not tell the whole story about how children understand social norms. This
is not to contest that the experiments highlight a central aspect of human life—that constitu-
tive rules are essential for having institutional facts. They show something about children’s
understanding of social life, which is in itself interesting and important: By 3 years of age,
children have acquired the linguistic abilities necessary for understanding constitutive rules
and creating institutional facts, and also appreciate the structure of codified rule games.
The criticism of earlier accounts of normative development for focusing on regulative
rules appears misguided: to understand the development of social norms, it is not more
appropriate to focus on constitutive than regulative rules. The two approaches sooner call
for integration. As argued above, constitutive rules acquire a normative dimension when
they occur with a set of commitments and obligations that prescribe how to apply or
implement them. Understanding the norms that regulate social interaction over time is as
essential to normativity and human life as understanding the constitutive rules that define
what social institutions and activities there are.
742 Theory & Psychology 24(6)
The emergence of normativity in contexts of spontaneous
play
Laboratory experiments do not constitute the only way to gain an understanding of the
development of normativity. Observational studies of children’s spontaneous play in
natural settings can tell us a great deal. Thus, children’s pretence games have names or
descriptions (Let’s play Doctor! Let’s play Family! Let’s play Batman! Let’s play Seek
and Find!) that subsume the kind of activity that constitutes the game and assign certain
roles and functions to those who play it and the artefacts that appear in it (e.g., I’m the
doctor! This is the scalpel! You are the patient!). What individual actions are appropriate
and permissible is determined locally in the context of play. There is a major difference
between pretence games and rule games such as Monopoly, Poker, cricket, and football:
The actions of pretence games such as Doctor or Family are negotiable, but those that
pertain to rule games in principle are not so. For instance, you can play Doctor individu-
ally as well as socially, and make-up and change the rules as you go along, whereas play-
ing Monopoly requires following the codified rules that define the game.
It is important to recognize that the concepts of a role (or function) and a rule are distinct.
Assigning somebody the role or function of Nurse or Doctor does not entail a determinate
set of rules. Paglieri’s (2005) distinction between three types of play clarifies this issue. In
solitary play, the child assigns her or himself roles within a frame of make-believe, but sets
the boundaries of the game as the activity proceeds in real time. In social symbolic play, the
players explicitly co-create and negotiate their individual make-believe situations and spec-
ify rules for how to proceed during the play. The rules are transient. Rule games, finally, rely
on a pre-codified system of rules that players must accept to play the game at all.
The fact that symbolic play relies on pretence and imagination reduces the importance
of codified rules for spontaneous play and the everyday normativity that it involves.
Pretence is pivotal to all symbolic play, solitary or social: the child pretends that an
object is other than what it really is, or that he or she is a different person than he or she
really is (Sinha, 2009). Imaginary cognitive and symbolic values are projected onto enti-
ties and relationships in the immediate environment. The entities may be objects (the
stick becomes a gun, the doll is made to speak), social roles (mother, cowboy), and entire
settings that contain both people and artefacts.
Play episodes endure through time. In the process of symbolic play, the narrative is
continuously updated; as the storyline develops, new characters and artefacts appear and
others disappear (the gun becomes a sword, the doll a knight and then a witch). From
early to middle childhood, children elaborate skills for narrative structure and socio-
dramatic play (Sinha, 2009; cf. Piaget, 1962). They are not disposed to play rule games
strictly, by enforcing the rules, until late childhood. Then it becomes a central concern to
play in the conventional way, by following the rules of the game and aspiring to win.
One reason why children do not focus on codified rules at a younger age may be that
they do not see the point in following rules strictly, but find it more useful and rewarding
to adapt the rules to the situation and constraints at hand, thus ensuring that the game
goes on without pauses or delay. Rakoczy et al. have shown that by the age of 3 children
understand that there are constitutive rules that define fixed activities. Yet, observational
studies suggest that from an early age children prefer to engage both in solitary play and
Brinck 743
with peers in a more dynamic manner, expanding the activity in unforeseen ways. Thus,
in a study of play among 2- and 3-year-olds at two day-care centres, Alvestad (2012)
reports that playing successfully demands that those sharing the play are prepared for
negotiations about social relations, play materials, and the content of the play. Play from
early to middle childhood is a situated activity that typically rewards fluency and elabo-
ration of action instead of adequacy to standards and rules. Children practise reconstruc-
tion of ongoing play in real time, responding to environmental challenges, or making
room for new impressions and ideas.
Another reason why younger children do not play by the book may be that they do not
automatically make the connection between constitutive rules and social norms. Although
they recognize the function of constitutive rules, they do not understand that constitutive
rules usually are accompanied by a policy that prescribes how to act and holds univer-
sally, for every player (Brinck, in press). This suggestion further illustrates the point
made above, that there is a fundamental difference between constitutive rules and pre-
scriptive norms. The former do not (conceptually) entail the latter, but you have to learn
to appreciate the connection and its meaningfulness. For instance, the game of football
does not merely comprise kicking a ball of a certain kind with your feet and legs and
thereby getting it into the goal of the opposing team, but there also are regulations that
prescribe how the game ought to be played and how the constitutive rules should be
implemented. These regulations do not leave room for individual players to invent new
ways of playing or adopt any manners they wish.
Children as old as 9 years do not consistently play rule games as prescribed, but some-
times behave as in social symbolic play. A study of children playing rule games in after-
school care shows that children who play in the absence of adults tend to change the
prescribed rules to make the game more amenable and less complicated, and compensate for
each player’s individual capacities and weaknesses (Harvard, in press). If they are uncertain
about how to go on or do not agree about it, they negotiate how to play and invent new rules
together. However, when one of the players is an adult, the tendency is to renounce the ini-
tiative, ask the adult about the rules, and then follow them without questioning. Adults who
function as authorities introduce another structure to the activity. By this age, children cer-
tainly are aware that there is a prescribed manner of playing that players are supposed to
follow, and the presence of an authority seems to increase their motivation to comply. They
expect adults to take the role of an authority and maintain order. In contrast, when among
peers, they feel free to set the policy aside, and flexibly design the game in a way that suits
everybody involved and will maintain the interaction. That the game no longer corresponds
to Monopoly does not seem to matter to them.
The children in the study demonstrate strong cooperative and creative skills that are
inherently intersubjective. Harvard’s observations suggest that reaching an agreement by
taking contextual factors into account is more central to children’s play than are codes
and constitutive rules that once and for all lay down what to do and how to proceed.
Dialogue and negotiation contribute to solve emerging coordination problems, and solu-
tions sometimes are transitory, soon to be replaced by new agreements.
Winther-Lindqvist’s (2009) observations of a group of 5-year-old kindergarten boys
playing football unsupervised by adults, point in the same direction. Winther-Lindqvist
uses Hughes’ (1991) distinction between explicit game rules (i.e., constitutive rules),
744 Theory & Psychology 24(6)
implicit rules of the social context (i.e., social norms), and higher-order gaming rules
(“rules for rules”) to analyse the structure of play. Rules for rules establish how, when,
and why other rules should be deployed. She reports that the local football rules that the
boys actually were using were continuously re-negotiated. They were inspired by both
the conventional game rules and terminology and the boys’ ideas about good behaviour,
friendship, and justice, and sometimes contradicted the conventional rules.
A spontaneous play episode of three 5–6-year-old girls transcribed by Smolka, de Goes,
and Pino (1997) and further discussed in Sinha and Rodríguez (2008), illustrates the equally
collaborative and creative character of social symbolic play. Roles and functions of the indi-
viduals change as the interaction goes on to develop the narrative or solve problems that
emerge in the interaction. In the transcribed episode that Sinha and Rodríguez discuss, the
children are initially playing Family (one has the role of daughter, another the role of mother,
the third girl does not yet have a role). A hat falls of a shelf, one of the girls pick it up, and
the hat, which is a replica of a hat from a famous character in a theme park, becomes the
centre of the new game that spontaneously emerges and will involve all three girls. Sinha
and Rodriguez stress that social interaction is central to children’s play, referring to a study
by de Oliveira (1998) to substantiate their claim. Roles, identities, and conventions are con-
tinually re-negotiated against the background of socially shared norms and representations
(cf. Winther-Lindqvist, 2009). As Sinha and Rodriguez argue, social norms are not exclu-
sively verbal, but subsist in the material setting, in artefacts where conceptual and material
structure blend (cf. Hutchins, 2005). Normativity is “materially instantiated in the artefac-
tual objects that are most frequently implicated in early triadic engagements” (Sinha, 2009,
p. 167). Toys and other artefacts are entrenched in a web of procedures or routines—nonver-
bal and verbal interactions—that give them meaning. Children learn how to handle artefacts
together with others by socialization from birth onwards (Rodriguez & Moro, 2008; Sinha,
2005), and internalize norms for individual and joint action without reflection. Sørensen
(2012) presents a strategy that may be fruitful for clarifying how normativity is distributed
across human minds and bodies, material entities, activities, and technologies in space and
for explaining its development. It involves considering how normativity materializes in con-
crete contexts and permits comparison of different age groups. Sørensen approaches know-
ing (in the present case, of norms) as a spatial pattern that re-enacts an available infrastructure,
and argues that knowing takes different spatial patterns in different practices and depending
on the circumstances can be less or more distributed.
Social norms are transmitted and enacted in everyday activities. Normativity is part of
the procedure. The following real life episode exemplifies how adults teach children to
share and encourage them to solve problems together. At a birthday party, 4-year-old
Albin is crying beside 5-year-old Tina’s model railroad because he does not know how
to play with it. Tina is playing by herself, having a lot of fun. Then Albin’s mother tells
him to ask Tina how to play. Thereby she both makes Albin stop crying and involves Tina
with him in a way that will let him play too.
Another episode from the same setting illustrates how young children play with social
norms and test the limits for how far they can go in enforcing norms. One of the parents
puts on some music and encourages both parents and children to dance. Five-year-old
Emma tells her friend Eve and the adults around her that you have to warm up first and
you cannot dance any way you like. She shows how to do the warm-up and explains for
Brinck 745
how long, then tells everybody to go through the procedure with her. The reactions
Emma gets and the dialogue she engages in with Eve, her mother, and other adults makes
it possible for her to asses her own authority and try out and test the strength of norms
that she previously has encountered in other social contexts (at dance and aerobics
classes).
In everyday life, social norms are far from codified rules, neither do they have the form
of rules of obligation. Rather, social norms are dynamic and heterogeneous, apply to con-
crete situations, and are tweaked to temporary conditions, guiding the interaction while it is
unfolding. This raises a host of questions concerning compliance and conformity. How do
young children perceive of conformity? In what ways, to what extent, and when do they start
to comply with norms and prescriptions? The remainder of the article traces compliance to
three sources: emotional engagement, nonverbal agreement, and conversation.
The sources of compliance: Emotional engagement
On the view advocated here, social norms are interaction patterns, grounded in interper-
sonal relations. The primary relation is emotional engagement (cf. Reddy 2010a, 2010b).
Emotional engagement that consists in the coordinated interaction of display of primarily
positive affect provides the desire and incentive for joint action and maintaining interaction
over time and also promotes the development of shared values. In the specific form of inter-
affectivity, intersubjectivity constitutes the foundation of normativity and prepares for com-
pliance by motivating the agent to develop shared routines with close others, routines that
embody knowledge of how you ought to do and behave. Interaffectivity first emerges via
emotional contagion, and the infant soon develops skills for identifying and sharing the
emotions of self and other. Stern (1985, p. 132) describes interaffectivity as the infant’s
matching his or her own “feeling state as experienced within” with the feeling state “seen
‘on’ or ‘in’ another,” which means that it involves emotional convergence. Stern associates
it with positive and negative attitude and evaluation. Importantly, the affective communica-
tion that results from emotional engagement also changes the emotional experiences and
behaviour of the participants. Conceiving of affect and emotion as cross-modal, embodied,
and relational explains how affective communication may occur by imitation, synchroniza-
tion, and variation of facial expression, movement, posture, and vocalization. Active partici-
pation in interpersonal relations from birth onwards is integral to the development of
conventional social norms. In a longitudinal, cross-cultural study of compliance with direc-
tives in the first year, Reddy, Liebal, Hicks, Jonnalagadda, and Chintalapuri (2013) found
that cooperation with requests develops from 6 months of age and is situationally embedded
and based on practice. The study shows that normativity develops from shared routines
when infant and adult together create ways of doing things and manners of behaving relative
to particular contexts, and that learning to follow objective rules is marginal to early norma-
tive development. A study of mother–infant dyads during diaper change presents a dynamic
analysis of a similar process (Rączaszek-Leonardi, Nomikou, & Rohlfing, 2013). The study
describes how regularities gradually arise from the interaction and constrain the way in
which the next action is to take place. These regularities cause expectations of specific
behaviour that eventually enable the emergence of routines and conventionalized forms of
interaction.
746 Theory & Psychology 24(6)
Reddy et al. (2013) emphasize the intense parental involvement in infant actions in
the second year. Over time, parents and infants push the routines they are creating in
independent directions, causing the expansion of learning what normativity is and how
to deal with it as an enlarging circle or spiral of forward movement. Normative develop-
ment unfolds in time because of joint effort. Reddy et al. suggest that directing and com-
plying need to be “redefined as continuous, emergent, and mutually enlarging rather than
categorical and separate phenomena” (p. 1760). They promote a different approach to
normative development than found in the experimental paradigm of Rakoczy and his
colleagues, an approach that has much in common with the one put forward here.
I have stressed the motivating function of emotional engagement for normative devel-
opment. Rossano (2012) emphasizes that norms are connected to values and that values
are first experienced as emotions. He claims that the caregiver embodies social and cul-
tural values to which the infant becomes emotionally committed via early ritualized
interaction. The research on psychopathy shows that emotions are developmentally nec-
essary for the capacity for making moral judgements (Prinz, 2006, p. 31f.). Prinz (2006)
argues that emotions are sufficient for moral appraisal, say, for judging an action as
wrong: we can form the belief that something is morally wrong by simply having a nega-
tive emotion directed towards it. Decety and Svetlova (2012) supply neuropsychological
evidence that young children understand the normative implications of emotions and that
empathy has deep evolutionary roots. They hold that empathy is necessary to perceive
and respond appropriately to other people’s evaluative and normative attitudes, arguing
that it depends on core mechanisms associated with affective communication, social
attachment, and parental care.
Very likely, openness and respect for other people’s preferences and the construction of a
normative framework of one’s own build on processes that emerge very early in infancy in
interaction with others. Primary and secondary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen, 1979;
Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978) and the relations and values that arise through emotional
engagement (or the lack of it) forge a person’s normative profile from the first months in life
and continue to do so throughout life. Because social cognition is fundamentally different
when we interact with others as opposed to observing them or acting on our own (Becchio,
Sartori, & Castiello, 2010; Schilbach et al., 2013), the quality and quantity of early exposure
to intersubjectivity will have a profound impact on future social functioning.
From an early age, infants tend to engage with a number of people (e.g., relatives and
friends of the parents). Communication is not confined to the dyad but can include sev-
eral people at once (adults or infants) and involve multiple simultaneous engagements
(Bradley & Selby, 2004). As a consequence, infants participate in a variety of sometimes
quite complex forms of sense-making and learn that similar behaviour can acquire differ-
ent senses in different contexts and with different people.
Infants have a solid motivation to interact and align themselves with others and share
experiences (Carpenter, 2009; Carpenter & Liebal, 2011; Reddy, 2008). This motivation
constitutes an impetus towards conformity and expresses a desire to be and do like oth-
ers, which surfaces in imitation games. Carpenter (2011; Over & Carpenter, 2013) draws
attention to the fact that imitation can convey mutuality and understanding, as a feeling
of pure sharing and togetherness, of being similar or of the same kind. In the present
context, we can think of imitation as a display of conformity.
Brinck 747
In situations that involve teasing, imitation instead constitutes a way of testing bounda-
ries and norms for interaction (Reddy, 2000, 2003, 2008). Testing behaviour occurs when
the infant, while oriented toward an imitating adult, systematically modulates an object-
directed action to check whether the adult is following what the infant does and will copy
the action (Agnetta & Rochat, 2004). Keltner, Capps, Kring, Young, and Heerey (2001)
define it as a playful provocation in which a person comments on something relevant to the
target of imitation. By 9 months, teasing typically occurs in the reversal of newly mastered
social gestures, for example, request, or in actions that are directly obstructive to the adult
(Reddy, 2010a). Reddy explains how infants in their first year already start to play with
social routines to test the limits. For instance, they can pretend to respond to a request for an
object but then withdraw the object, repeatedly throwing the toy back on the floor as soon as
the parent has picked it up and handed it to the child, or they show provocative noncompli-
ance concerning actions that they know are forbidden. Norm violation and conflict prompt
teasing also in middle and late childhood (Keltner et al., 2001). Teasing continues to be a
strategy for learning about norms and challenging boundaries throughout childhood and
adolescence (Keltner, Young, Heerey, Oemig, & Monarch, 1998).
The primordial desire to be like and do as others removes the need for rules of obliga-
tion in the early development of normativity. According to Bicchieri (2006, p. 8), social
norms are not necessarily codified or supported by formal sanctions, and do not entail
enforcement. Rather, understanding social norms as rules of obligation presupposes
understanding (“perceiving”) that others’ expectations of one’s own behaviour are legiti-
mate expectations of compliance (Bicchieri, 2006, p. 42). A person will feel an obliga-
tion to obey social norms and recognize their legitimacy when they become part of his or
her system of values. How do social norms become part of a person’s system of values?
The present discussion suggests that concern and engagement as implicated in interaf-
fectivity motivate conformity in increasing the subjects’ willingness to comply with
directives. Unless children feel that a given norm has a bearing on what they are up to
and it makes sense in their own framework, they will not be motivated to act in accord-
ance with it (Glüer & Wikforss, 2010); they may not even notice or attend to it.
Studies on play in natural settings indicate that children do not primarily conceive of
social norms as rules of obligation in the strong, formal, or codified sense that you obey
no matter what. As argued above, rules and norms provide guidance of action in a loose
sense that opens up for new behaviour. They are starting points for a problem-solving
activity that occurs whenever ongoing interaction breaks down and needs repair. Such
activity also occurs when children need to agree on the preliminaries for playing together,
for instance, about what game they will play, how roles and functions will be distributed,
what actions are relevant, and what props may be used. When the players feel that the
rules they started out with have outplayed their role, they change them. There are no
limits for what direction a game can take, as long as everybody is in.
The sources of compliance: Nonverbal agreement
Many philosophers and social scientists hold that social norms and conventions are arbi-
trary and involve some form of behavioural regularity towards which people orient
themselves (cf. Lewis, 1969). However, regularity may not be essential (Millikan, 2014).
748 Theory & Psychology 24(6)
What matters is that behaviour patterns reproduce, or repeat themselves regularly or not,
and that there is arbitrariness about the means by which the convention or norm fulfils its
function in the sense that there are alternative ways of reaching the same goal. The ques-
tion remains what actually causes people to orient themselves to and share a certain
behaviour pattern, viz., to conform. Sinha (2009) suggests that social norms are negotia-
ble and involve verbal or nonverbal agreement, whether transitory or not, between two
or more persons. Indeed, whereas interaffectivity in the form of emotional engagement
enables and motivates normativity generally, agreement can explain how compliance is
established and negotiated in the individual case.
The notion of verbal agreement has an intuitive meaning in everyday talk. The notion
of nonverbal agreement, perhaps more central to development, is less straightforward.
Pettit (2002) explains it in terms of agents’ nonverbal attitudes towards each other:
among a group of people, mutual approval (or disapproval) of each other’s behaviour
turns a behaviour pattern into a social norm, and lies behind the general conformity with
the behaviour. Pettit (2002) describes people’s attitudes towards each other as “involun-
tarily or nonconsciously formed attitudes of esteem and inesteem” (p. 280). People are
personally motivated to conform because they are rewarded by being thought well of and
punished by being thought badly of, and external sanctions are not necessary.
Emotional forms of reward and punishment are known to reinforce behaviour.
Millikan (2005, 2014) too explains conformity in terms of reward, making it clear that
rewarding behaviour reproduces without anyone’s having to think about anyone else’s
thoughts. Basically, people copy behaviour that has been successful in achieving wanted
results (Millikan, 2014). Normativity involves the dynamic, interactive coordination of
behaviour, where emotion and affect in the guise of embodied perceivable attitudes play
a guiding role, sometimes on levels below conscious awareness.
Millikan’s and Pettit’s accounts differ from those that conceive of social norms as strict
rules of obligation, the deviation from which motivates formal or institutionalized kinds of
punishment or reward. Whereas regulated formal sanctions intended to deter behaviour
rarely provide a strong personal motivation, one may be personally motivated to act in a
certain way by how people react to the self, especially if one has a close relation to these
people (they may be family members, friends, or co-workers). Motivation does not depend
on reason, but can be purely affective and implicit. Interestingly, implicit preferences for
ingroups and dominant groups that play a significant role for conformity emerge rapidly in
young children and remain stable across development (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2008).
In contrast to a view that appeals to emotion, Carpenter (2009) promotes a rational
account of the development of agreement in joint action that requires that each partner
intends to perform the joint action together “in accordance with and because of meshing
subplans” (Bratman, 1992, p. 338), and this needs to be common knowledge between the
participants. Joint action involves rational choices between action plans and presupposes
an understanding of others’ intentions as genuine psychological, representational states.
Carpenter (2009, p. 388) maintains that by 3 years of age, children begin to feel some of
the commitments and obligations inherent in joint action, as when they excuse them-
selves when they wish to leave a joint action. She furthermore argues that 1-year-olds
have the social-cognitive prerequisites needed to participate in joint action, viz., basic
understanding of others’ goals and intentions and common knowledge, and the ability
and motivation to help others achieve their goals.
Brinck 749
Clearly, infants understand others’ action goals and goal intentions and seem to agree
nonverbally. The question is if it is reasonable to explain these abilities in terms of com-
plex representational states. The philosophical theories that Carpenter (2009) relies on
have been developed to explain adult human cognition in quite complicated situations of
choice and decision-making, and there is no independent empirical evidence in support
of using them to explain infant behaviour or the early development of normativity. As
Carpenter herself points out, there are other, more parsimonious and less costly explana-
tions (cf. Sebanz, Bekkering, & Knoblich, 2006) that prima facie are just as plausible in
the kind of situation Carpenter considers.
From a biological perspective, a bottom-up approach that focuses on how basic pro-
cesses work and how complex functions develop from simpler mechanisms is preferable.
Like evolutionary complexity, one may expect developmental complexity and speciali-
zation to arise over time as the result of the interaction between a variety of processes at
lower levels and shorter time scales and via feedback from the environment (de Waal &
Ferrari, 2010). Cognitive capacities integrate a range of mechanisms, many of them
shared across a number of species. Consequently, it makes sense to search for the devel-
opmental sources of conformity elsewhere, than where rational accounts search.
In line with this, Carpenter and Liebal (2011) present a lean account of common
knowledge in terms of states of knowing-together that arise by visual joint attention.
Their account is useful for explaining nonverbal agreement in terms of the sharing and
exchange of attitudes that underlie joint action in secondary intersubjectivity and, later,
symbolic play. According to Carpenter and Liebal, so-called sharing looks (by having
eye contact) are meaningful and communicate the fact that both agents share the experi-
ence of sharing (cf. Hobson & Hobson, 2007), in short, that they are attending together.
Such looks can be used to establish a form of common knowledge that does not require
higher-order intentions about one’s own and others’ mental states. Sharing looks make it
public that agents have the same action goals in ongoing joint activities such as social
symbolic play. Because they wear their message on their sleeve, so-to-speak, they can
contribute to establish local norms in the form of shared behaviour patterns in ongoing
interaction. That people can perceive and act on each other’s mental states directly (cf.
Gallagher, 2001, 2008) makes nonverbal agreement possible. Whereas gaze expresses
interest and goal-intention, facial expression of emotion communicates attitude and eval-
uation (Brinck, 2008; Reddy, 2008). Fundamentally, everyday interaction is sensory-
motor and contextual, and people attune effortlessly to the meaningful perception of each
other’s emotion, attention, and intention in real time (Schilbach, Eickhoff, Rotarska-
Jagiela, Fink, & Vogeley, 2008).
The sources of compliance: Conversation
Conscious concern and explicit emotional empathy surface in the second year of life. In
a study that compared responses of infants to a distressed peer, Nichols, Svetlova, and
Brownell (2009) found that 12-month-olds did not show interest or concern in the peer,
18-month-olds showed high levels of social interest, whereas 24-month-olds showed
greater empathy, concern, and pro-social responsiveness. By 2 years, self-awareness
begins to develop that allows the child to take a normative attitude to the self, as in
shame. When she realizes she has not behaved as socially expected this causes her to
750 Theory & Psychology 24(6)
experience shame. Shame relies on experiencing oneself through the eyes of others. By
the middle of the second year, triadic exchanges take a new form and children begin to
engage in active, explicit negotiation regarding the values of things co-experienced with
others (Rochat, Passos-Ferreira, & Salem, 2009). Then children manifest a sense of
shared experience that rests on complex ongoing exchanges unfolding over time, and
start to express secondary emotions such as embarrassment or guilt. Guilt and resentment
signal that a public social norm has been established—that there is a set of shared expec-
tations that the subjects together understand should be met (Bicchieri, 2006).
The question is to what extent secondary emotions depend on verbal skill. Sinha
(2009) maintains that participatory engagements with adults in infancy and early child-
hood pave the way for the folk psychological capacities that emerge in middle childhood,
and thus for grasping the normativity inherent in requesting, proffering, and inferring
reasons. According to Sinha, ascriptions of reasons for actions typically are simultane-
ously judgements of normative validity and intelligibility that children hear from adults
and older children when participating in play and everyday activities. The conflation of
(individual) reason with (social) normativity in everyday talk (e.g., “She is running that
way because she wants to score a goal”) both constrains the space of possible reasons,
and affords the child a first, practical grasp of normativity.
Gallagher and Hutto (2008) argue that children learn to judge an action’s social appropri-
ateness by engaging with narratives. Narratives involve a wide range of emotive and interac-
tive abilities and suggest how to create shared routines. Actually, the quality of parents’ talk
about emotions with their toddlers has been shown to have significant impact on the devel-
opment of pro-social behaviour. Thus, Brownell, Svetlova, Anderson, Nichols, and
Drummond (2013) provide evidence that parents’ discourse about others’ emotions with
young children is an important socialization mechanism. They report two studies on how
parents’ reading picture books to their children affects sharing in 18- and 24-month-olds,
and instrumental and empathy-based helping in 18- and 30-month-olds. The studies showed
that children who helped and shared more quickly and more often, especially in tasks that
required complex emotion understanding, had parents who more often asked them to label
and explain the emotions depicted in the books. Parents’ elicitation of children’s talk about
emotions was the strongest indicator of pro-social behaviour.
In a longitudinal study of children aged 14 to 36 months, Rhee et al. (2013) report that
language skills have a specific role in the development of concern for others distinct from
that of general cognitive ability. They point out that conversation is important for learning to
identify a wide range of emotions and for the accurate interpretation of parents’ normative
reasoning. Conversation does not only give feedback on the appropriateness of the child’s
own behaviour but also on his or her normative responses to others’ actions. Hence, verbal
skills that are a prerequisite for conversation do play a significant role for developing rational
conformity, specifically, for having the words for mental states and normative attitudes and
so the means to learn how to conceptualize and reason about them in a way that can feed into
proper decision-making procedures. Moreover, language and the capacity to engage in nar-
ratives seem crucial for eventually making sense of the idea that the self and others belong
to the same deontic universe, having similar duties and rights.
Nevertheless, that social norms are anchored in interaffectivity and there is a continu-
ous negotiation of values in joint action suggest that normative understanding in many
cases consists in a pragmatic ability to act appropriately in particular situations (cf. de
Brinck 751
Jaegher, di Paolo, & Gallagher, 2010; Hodges, 2014). To act appropriately means to
behave as expected but also to be productive, or behave in a way that maintains the inter-
action by advancing it, even if this sometimes means to diverge. Normativity is a practi-
cal skill also in adults that often does not require verbalizing reasons for action. Hence it
seems more correct to think of the understanding of social norms as emerging from
processes such as participatory sense-making (de Jaegher & di Paolo, 2007) or participa-
tory engagement (Sinha & Rodriguez, 2008) than from the declarative speech acts that
lie behind constitutive rules.
In social cognition, the emphasis lies on the relation—concerning normativity, on
how norms are co-constructed and given content in and through ongoing interaction.
Meaningfulness arises in practical engagement (cf. Rączaszek-Leonardi et al., 2013).
Yet, verbal skills, doubtless, help to identify the mental states that are involved in norma-
tivity and to discern their socially accepted, public function in institutional contexts.
Narratives are instrumental for making sense of and justifying actions in retrospect and
for the verbal negotiation of ongoing and future joint actions. Moreover, conversation
grants social norms both a history and an afterlife.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the members of NORMCON. I also wish to thank the members of DRUST and
of the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics in Lund for valuable suggestions.
Funding
This work was supported by The European Science Foundation grant number 429-2010-7181.
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Author biography
Ingar Brinck is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Lund University. Her work concerns the
foundations, early development, and evolution of cognitive, communicative, and social skills. She
has published on metacognition, intersubjectivity, normativity, and cooperation in journals such as
Infant and Child Development, Pragmatics & Cognition, Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences, and Mind & Language.