Children Quickly Learn Ritualistic Behavior

Young children quickly learn ritualistic behavior such as shaking hands or saying "Bless You" when somebody sneezes. The study shows that children have the ability to pick up arbitrary social cues.

The study, conducted by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, offers a new insight on how children learn cultural aspects.

"Attention to social cues and contextual information guides children's imitation, a key component of the development and transmission of cultural knowledge," said Cristine Legare, an assistant professor in psychology at The University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study.

The study included nearly 300 children who were made to watch one of several videos of a person or two people performing tasks using repetitive behavior. For example, in one of the videos, two people were tapping pegs into a pegboard in a particular sequence. In some videos, a verbal explanation was given before the task while in others the explanation came after the task.

Researchers found that kids, who watched videos where the explanation preceded the task, were more likely to perform the task in the same way as they had seen in the video. When asked why they performed the tasks exactly like the people in the video, they replied, "I had to do it how they showed me" or "I had to do it the way they did it."

However, kids watching videos of solo demonstrators that explained at the end of the task didn't do the task as they had seen. They explained their behavior by saying, "I can do whatever I want" or "I wanted to do it the way I did it."

According to the experts, when children see two or more people performing a task in the same way, they take it to a social convention and try to follow. The team theorizes that even preschool children can tell the difference between tasks that are goal-oriented and ritualistic behavior.

"Seeing two people do the same thing at the same time is a strong indication that the specific form of the activity-the exact way in which it is performed-is regulated by convention," Legare said in a news release. "We speculate that when such uniformity is detected, children are disposed to ascribe it to social factors-more specifically, to norms regulating how each person should act."

The study is published in the journal Cognition.

Previous research has shown that repetitive behavior and more specifically ritualistic behavior evolved in both humans and animals as a way to manage stress. Ritualistic behavior helps by giving humans a sense of relief.