To Accept or Reject? Hindu and Muslim Children’s Views of Religious, Moral, and Conventional Norms

ABSTRACT

Faced with myriad societal norms, children must decide which norms to accept and which to reject. These decisions hold consequences for how norms change over time. Decisions about norms are particularly salient for religious children in pluralistic societies, who encounter norms both from their own as well as from other religious and non-religious communities. Although children follow norms and disapprove of their violation from early in life, this should not be taken to mean that children approve of the norms themselves: a person can disapprove of a norm that they follow and enforce upon others. The present study examined religious children’s views about the authorship, utility, changeability, and changeworthiness of norms. Ninety-seven Hindu and Muslim 9- to 14-year-olds (46 female and 51 male) in India were interviewed about familiar religious, moral, and conventional norms. As predicted, children’s views about whether a norm should be changed (its changeworthiness) were predicted by how good they perceived the norm to be (its utility). Also as hypothesized, children’s views about who, if anyone, could change a norm (its changeability) was predicted by their views about who made the norm (its authorship). Children distinguished between norms based on their perceived authorship, utility, changeability, and changeworthiness. Age and religious differences also emerged. Together, these findings elucidate how children come to accept or reject norms, which ultimately affects how norms persist, change, or disappear over time.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Raw data and analyses scripts are available at our OSF repository, at https://osf.io/9sge6/?view_only=a164a363ecaf4b65980db155e03ce512.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2024.2346105

Notes

¹ To validate our choice of representative norms, we performed a Latent Class Analysis on participants’ responses about the authorship, utility, changeability, and changeworthiness of the eight norms. We conducted the analysis using the poLCA package in R. Fit indices (AIC, BIC, Chi-squared) supported our choice of four latent classes. In a four-class model, the two Hindu norms were typically placed in one class (67% of trials), the two Muslim norms in a second (59%), the conventional norms in a third (85%), and the moral norms in a fourth (78%). The two norm types most readily “confused” with each other were Hindu norms (34% of trials landing in the “Muslim” class) and the Muslim norms (28% of trials landing in the “Hindu” class). These analyses gave initial validation to our assumption that we had identified four religious norms that were treated as distinct from secular conventions and moral norms.

² Preliminary analyses revealed no significant effects of participant gender or whether the norm was prescriptive versus proscriptive. To mitigate the risks of Type I error in these tests of non-hypothesized effects, we reduced the test-wise alpha level to .007. This test-wise alpha level was set using a Bonferroni correction for seven tests, corresponding to the seven dichotomous dependent variables we analyze below.

³ Social conventions have sometimes discussed in the literature as being arbitrary and wholly unconnected from human welfare. However, a more recent view – to which we subscribe – is that children and adults see social conventions as serving important social functions (e.g., Dahl & Waltzer, 2020). What is arbitrary is the exact way in which that function is served. For example, there are many ways students could call attention to themselves if they wanted to speak in class – holding up a sign, raising their hand, standing up, etc. The choice between these different conventions can be seen as arbitrary. But having no convention at all would be detrimental to the functioning of the classroom.

⁴ We thank a reviewer for prompting us to address these questions.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Hellman Family Foundation James S. McDonnell Foundation, University of California Santa Cruz Faculty Research Grant.