Children do not learn how to behave around other people in exactly the same way.
In one household, sharing may be encouraged from an early age. In another, children may be expected to help younger siblings, respect older relatives or place the needs of the wider family before their own. Schools, friends, religious communities and neighbourhoods add still more expectations about what counts as fair, kind or unacceptable behaviour.
These differences are part of culture. But new research suggests that some of the behavioural differences they create become smaller as children grow older.
A large international analysis found that cultural differences in both helpful and harmful social behaviour decreased with age among boys and girls, providing evidence that young people from different cultural backgrounds may gradually become more similar in how they interact with others.
More than 27,000 comparisons across 150 cultures
The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, brought together research involving children and adolescents between the ages of one and 18.
Rather than conducting one new experiment, researchers analysed more than 27,000 existing comparisons between cultural groups. The final dataset covered approximately 150 cultures and included studies of both prosocial and antisocial behaviour.
Prosocial behaviour included actions such as cooperation, sharing and altruism, while antisocial behaviour included behaviours such as aggression and bullying.
The researchers calculated how large the behavioural differences were between pairs of cultures and then examined whether those differences changed across childhood and adolescence.
Culture clearly mattered.
Their analysis found significant cultural differences in both categories, although differences were larger for prosocial behaviour than for antisocial behaviour. The estimated cultural effect was moderate for prosocial behaviour and smaller for antisocial behaviour.
The more interesting pattern emerged when age was considered.
Cultural differences became smaller with age
For both males and females, cultural differences declined as children became older.
The researchers describe this pattern as being consistent with cultural convergence. This does not mean that different cultures gradually become identical. Instead, it suggests that some differences in observable social behaviour may become narrower during development.
That distinction is important.
Two communities may have very different traditions for teaching children about cooperation, fairness or responsibility while eventually producing young adults whose everyday social behaviour is more similar than it was earlier in childhood.
A child does not only learn from the culture of the household in which they were raised. As children get older, the number of environments influencing them expands.
Schools introduce common rules. Friendships expose children to different expectations. Adolescents engage more independently with media and technology. Larger economic, institutional and social systems also begin to influence how people are expected to behave.
The researchers suggest that greater exposure to these broader influences may contribute to convergence, although the study cannot establish exactly which forces are responsible.
Growing up means entering a larger social world
This makes the findings particularly interesting from a societal perspective.
Young children often spend much of their time inside relatively small social environments centred on their households and immediate communities. Adolescence brings considerably greater exposure to people, institutions and ideas outside those circles.
Modern communication expands that environment further.
A teenager can participate in a local community while simultaneously consuming the same entertainment, social media, sporting culture and online discussions as young people thousands of kilometres away.
Globalisation therefore does not necessarily require local culture to disappear. Instead, people can retain different identities and traditions while sharing more behavioural norms.
The study’s findings suggest that this process may begin much earlier in life than is often assumed.
What this could mean in South Africa
South Africa provides an especially useful setting in which to think about this distinction.
Children grow up across communities that differ in language, family structures, schooling environments, economic circumstances, religious traditions and local customs. Yet they also enter institutions and social spaces where people from those different backgrounds increasingly interact.
A school, university, workplace or online community does not remove those cultural differences. It does, however, create situations where people need some common understanding of cooperation, fairness and acceptable behaviour.
The new research suggests that shared behaviour and cultural diversity do not have to be opposites.
Societies can retain meaningful cultural differences while people simultaneously become more similar in some of the ways they interact with one another.
The evidence is broad, but not evenly distributed
There are important limitations.
The researchers did not follow the same children from early childhood into adulthood. Their analysis combined results from previously published studies, meaning the developmental pattern was reconstructed across different samples and research projects.
The evidence was also unevenly distributed. The final analysis contained 1,632 comparisons for prosocial behaviour and 26,384 for antisocial behaviour, and some age groups were represented much more heavily than others. Most prosocial evidence involved children aged four to 11, while the antisocial literature was concentrated more heavily among teenagers.
The authors also identified biases in the existing literature, meaning the findings should not be interpreted as proof that every culture follows the same developmental path.
Different paths can still lead towards common ground
Culture remains a powerful influence on how children learn to live alongside other people.
What this research adds is the possibility that those early differences do not necessarily grow wider with age.
Children may begin life learning cooperation, kindness and acceptable behaviour through very different families, traditions and communities. As their social worlds expand, however, some of those behavioural differences appear to narrow.
A more connected world may therefore produce something more complicated than either cultural uniformity or cultural division.
People can remain different while learning increasingly similar ways of living together.
Source Information
Study Title: Evidence of cultural convergence through development for prosocial and antisocial behaviour
Authors: Bonaventura Majolo, Federica Amici, Eliza Florence Dunn and Robin Watson
Journal: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Published: 22 July 2026
DOI / Source: 10.1098/rspb.2026.0191
