2-029 - The Powerful and Mighty: How Social Dominance shapes children's preferences, trust and social inferences

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

A person’s ability to interpret and engage in social relationships is key to his or her well-being. In order to do this successfully, children must first learn to identify and distinguish among various types of social relationships, including those based on dominance. This symposium examines infants’ and children’s capacity to represent social dominance, and highlights how initial representations are enriched over the course of early childhood.
Recent research shows that infants, like several non-human animals, have a rudimentary understanding of social hierarchy—infants expect agents that are larger (Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, & Carey, 2011), have a history of winning (Mascaro & Csibra, 2012, 2014), or have more allies (Pun, Birch, & Baron, 2016) to prevail in zero-sum dominance contests. However, it remains an open question what other cues young children use to infer dominance and how representations of dominance shape patterns of preference, trust, and learning. Paper 1 shows that 15-month-olds also use facial characteristics to predict social dominance. Paper 2 shows that three to five-year-olds use similar cues to attribute physical dominance (i.e. who is stronger) as they do to attribute social dominance. Finally, Papers 3 & 4 demonstrate that two to five-year-old children prefer dominant over non-dominant individuals and selectively trust dominant individuals; inferring that they are more reliable sources of knowledge. Together, these findings suggest that children have a robust representation of social dominance—they infer it from both physical and social cues and also incorporate these cues into fundamental social decisions.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Ashley J. Thomas, University of California, Irvine

• Lotte Thomsen, University of Oslo

Individual Presentations

• Infants’ Evaluation of Social Dominance from Facial Features - Presenting Author: Lauren E. Hartstein, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Seyyed Borgheai, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Erik Cheries, UMass Amherst

• Preschoolers’ attributions of physical and social power - Presenting Author: Brandon Frank Terrizzi, University of Maryland, College Park; Elizabeth Brey, University of Hawaii-Manoa; Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin; Jonathan S Beier, University of Maryland, College Park

• Young Children’s Selective Trust in Dominant Agents - Presenting Author: Anthea Pun, University of British Columbia; Jessica Lai, University of British Columbia; Susan Birch, University of British Columbia; Andrew Scott Baron, University of British Columbia

• Two-Year Old Children Prefer Novel, Dominant Agents to Subordinate Ones - Presenting Author: Ashley J. Thomas, University of California, Irvine; Meline Abrayams, University of California, Irvine; Lotte Thomsen, University of Oslo; Angela Lukowski, UC Irvine; Barbara W. Sarnecka, University of California, Irvine