Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Formal rules can influence behavior by deterring rule-breaking or broadening knowledge, but may also reveal why a rule was created in the first place. Across three experiments, we investi- gated whether adults and children use the presence of a written rule to infer past and present rule-breaking. Adults reliably in- ferred that groups with written rules had more rule-breaking in the past (Study 1) and, in some contexts, expected less rule- breaking in the present (Study 2). By late childhood (ages 8-11), children showed increasingly adult-like inferences when rules were concrete and familiar (Study 2). Younger children (ages 5-7) additionally were able to make this inference (Study 3). Together, these findings suggest that by middle childhood, children treat formal rules as historical evidence about past rule-breaking. These results shed light on the developmental origins of reasoning about formal rules and their informational value.