How Do Children Learn to Cooperate? New Cross-Cultural Study Sheds Light on the Role of Social Norms in Childhood Development
The question of how children learn to cooperate with others has long intrigued scientists across disciplines. A groundbreaking cross-cultural study now reveals that children’s cooperative behaviors are not governed solely by universal principles, but rather significantly shaped by the social norms embedded within their own communities. This research, involving over 400 children from diverse societies including the United States, Canada, Peru, Uganda, and the Shuar communities of Ecuador, offers a profound understanding of how varying cultural environments influence the emergence and evolution of cooperation during formative years.
This extensive observational study focused on children aged five to thirteen, engaging them in a series of well-designed experimental scenarios aimed at dissecting facets of trust, fairness, forgiveness, and honesty. The researchers administered simple yet telling games where children had to decide on sharing limited resources—symbolized by Starbursts—reciprocating favors, excusing mistakes, and choosing honesty even at personal cost. Complementing these behavioral observations, the study also incorporated surveys directed at both children and adults within each community to gauge prevailing norms and expectations around cooperative behavior.
Strikingly, the results indicate that while young children universally begin with a predominantly self-interested approach—seeking to maximize their individual gains—their trajectories diverge markedly as they grow. By middle childhood, roughly between the ages of eight and thirteen, children’s cooperative strategies increasingly mirror the culturally specific values and social norms prevalent in their environments. This suggests an adaptive, culturally mediated learning process wherein children internalize and enact the cooperation models most salient and functional in their social worlds.
One striking example of cultural specificity emerged from the Shuar hunter-horticulturalist communities in the Amazonian region of Ecuador. In these societies, where resources can be scarce, children emphasized minimizing resource waste and optimizing utility rather than equal sharing. Such behavior coincides with ecological demands and social organization, illustrating a cooperation logic rooted in resource conservation rather than egalitarian distribution. These findings underscore that cooperation is not a monolithic construct but is instead tuned to local environmental and cultural contingencies.
Dorsa Amir, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, emphasizes the importance of contextualizing cooperative behavior within cultural frameworks. She notes, “In cross-cultural research, it’s common to measure behavior and then speculate about the causes. But we wanted to contextualize the work: to actually talk to people in these communities and understand how those choices fit their environment.” This methodological rigor lends credibility to the assertions that what might appear as non-cooperation in one culture could actually represent normative, cooperative conduct in another.
Importantly, the investigators caution against simplistic moral evaluations that position some children as inherently more or less cooperative or moral than others. Rather, their behaviors should be understood as adaptive responses to the norms and expectations of their social milieu. This perspective challenges ethnocentric biases and highlights the plasticity of human cooperative development, governed by the interplay of innate capacities and culturally transmitted norms.
Further insight was gained by juxtaposing children’s actual behaviors against adults’ normative beliefs. The alignment between actions and norms varied with age and domain of cooperation. For instance, norms relating to fairness and trust showed a strong convergence between adults and older children, while in domains such as honesty, children often recognized what was “right” before consistently enacting those behaviors. Forgiveness emerged as a unique domain where both adults and children across all societies demonstrated robust consensus: mistakes—especially accidental ones—should be forgiven.
A noteworthy outcome of this research is the identification of three distinct cooperative strategies among children: maximizing individual gain, broad cooperation with unknown others, and selective cooperation contingent on situational factors. The prevalence of these strategies fluctuated with age and differed cross-culturally. Children in industrialized societies tended to extend cooperation towards strangers, reflecting social environments where such interactions are normative and often rewarded. Conversely, in less industrialized, resource-limited contexts, cooperation was more selective and oriented toward efficient resource use within familiar networks—a finding that further refines our understanding of cooperation as a culturally constructed behavior.
Middle childhood emerges from this research as a critical juncture for social and cognitive development related to cooperation. During this extended period, children not only absorb complex social norms but also begin to enact them even when they might entail personal sacrifices. The ability to navigate these social demands and align one’s behavior with communal expectations represents a key step in the ontogeny of human cooperation. This protracted developmental window likely contributes to the remarkable scale and adaptability of human cooperative systems compared to other species.
The broader implications of these findings challenge the entrenched bias that treats Western, industrialized cultural patterns of social development as universal benchmarks. By illuminating the cultural contingency of cooperative behaviors, this research invites a more nuanced appreciation of human development that respects cultural diversity and cautions against overgeneralization. Amir’s statement encapsulates this ethos: “There’s no culture-free development. You cannot take culture out of the developmental process.”
Technically, this research employed a robust mixed-methods approach including controlled behavioral experiments and ethnographic interviews, ensuring ecological validity alongside analytical depth. The use of game-theoretic paradigms adapted for young children allowed quantifiable measurement of complex social behaviors, while qualitative insights from familial and community surveys contextualized these findings within lived cultural realities. Such multidisciplinary methodologies represent a gold standard for future investigations into the interplay between culture and development.
In summary, this pioneering study redefines our understanding of the origins and pathways of cooperation in human children by demonstrating that while the impulse toward cooperation may be innate, its specific manifestation is deeply sculpted by cultural context and social norms learned during middle childhood. This work not only advances theoretical frameworks in developmental psychology and social neuroscience but also proposes new directions for policy and educational strategies aimed at fostering prosocial behavior in diverse cultural settings.
Subject of Research: People
Article Title: Children Learn Cooperation Through Cultural Norms: A Cross-Cultural Study of Social Development
Web References: DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adw9995
References: Science Advances Journal
Keywords: Developmental psychology, Social psychology, Social development, Perceptual development, Interpersonal skills, Human social behavior
