To give consent, to make a deal, to adapt to school, to participate in a game or a friendship, children must be able to negotiate permissions, identify obligations, recognize what is right, and be sensitive to norms. Informally, we do not expect infants to obey rules; legally, children cannot be judged guilty of some kinds of violations, nor can they enter in to contracts.  What are the abilities and knowledge structures underlying proficiency with these and other normative relations?

This site reports the results of a workshop exploring how children come to understand norms, rules, and obligations: a social cognition of norms. The workshop will bring together scholars who are leaders in the fields of moral development and theory of mind. While moral development research has, over the last 20 years, documented the richness of children’s knowledge of principles of justice, fairness, and rights, only recently have moral development researchers started asking how children’s psychological understandings inform their moral thinking. During the same time period, there has been an extensive research program on children’s knowledge about others’ psychological states, referred to as “theory of mind”. Parallel to the new directions in moral development research, an emerging direction for theory of mind research is exploring the relation between normative and psychological construals of human action. Surprisingly, there has been little collaboration between researchers on children’s moral development and researchers on children’s theory of mind, despite the extensive lines of research in these two respective areas and the potential conceptual overlaps. The charge of this workshop will be to explore how those perspectives together generate a deeper understanding of the social cognition of normative relations.  If the goal is to develop a full account of how children develop the abilities to use and form norms, rules, permissions, and obligations, what are the key concepts and distinctions? The challenge is to define a field of reasoning about norms, and to encourage researchers to view existing questions in this new light.