Children will change behavior that’s rewarded in order to conform

If you know how to do something and people around you start doing it differently, you have two options: stick to what you know, or change to use their strategy. If the new strategy is more efficient than yours, or gets better results, it’s a no-brainer, so you switch. But if it’s exactly as efficient and produces the same results, the decision to switch is based on another factor—conformity.

We know that we have a tendency to fall in line with those around us, sometimes even when this results in obvious mistakes. This tendency can explain why human culture varies so widely among different societies, but is so similar within groups. Our closest primate relatives don’t have cultural variation to the same degree, so what makes humans different?

Previous research on non-human great apes has shown that they learn from their peers. However, what hasn’t been established is whether this process is similar in humans and non-humans, including when the learning involves overriding existing habits. A group of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, recently found that human children are more likely than chimpanzees and orangutans to change their behavior to conform to their peers.