Rules for Rulers: Children’s Beliefs About who Should Lead and how

• In Event: 2-195 - New Directions in the Study of Children’s Concepts of Leadership

Integrative Statement

Political theorists have long debated what are the fairest and best ways to govern. In many western countries, adults believe that elections confer legitimacy to leaders and decisions, and there is reason to think these beliefs emerge early in development. Early on, children are sensitive to fairness norms (e.g., Olson & Spelke, 2008). Indeed, by middle childhood, children require collective agreement when making group decisions (e.g., Zhao & Kushnir, 2017). The present research explores whether four- to eleven-year-olds hold beliefs about how leaders should be selected, and whether and when voting is a fair tool for governance.

In Experiment 1 (N=69), participants were asked who should be leader of a given country: a “popular” candidate, who most citizens want as leader, or a “powerful” candidate, who is influential and wealthy. While older participants (7+ years) robustly selected the popular candidate over the powerful candidate, younger participants (4-6 years) did not display a preference. In Experiment 2 (N= 74), participants were asked how a country should select a new leader, rather than who should be the leader. Children were told that citizens could vote to pick their new leader, or they could pick the person who has the most power and money to be leader. Again, by age seven, children were more likely to endorse voting as the way the country should select a new leader. It appears that, during the early school years, children begin believing that leaders, like group decisions, ought to be decided upon by a majority.

While the previous experiments examined children’s preference for voting as a way of picking leaders, Experiment 3 (N=114) examined how children think voting compares to other means of group decision-making. Participants considered voting and coin flips to be similarly fair, but considered it less fair for a powerful dictatorial leader to unilaterally decide for the whole group. Further, children thought group members would be similarly happy with decisions made by voting and coin flips, and less happy with a dictator’s decisions.

However, Experiment 3 featured an uninformed, dictatorial leader. In Experiment 4 (N=157), participants in the U.S. and in China were instead asked a question often faced by world leaders: Whose opinion should a group follow—that of an expert minority, who possesses relevant knowledge, or that of the uninformed majority? In the U.S. (n=72), children of all ages were more likely to pick the majority’s over the expert’s opinion. In China (n=85), younger children (4-6 years) strongly favored majority rule, but older children (7+ years) picked interchangeably between the majority and the expert.

By middle childhood, children in the U.S. view elections as the right way to pick leaders, and even younger children view voting as a fair way to make decisions. Further, children from disparate political contexts (the U.S. and China) both favor majority rule early in life, although these beliefs may diverge later due to cultural input. Future work will investigate whether the way leaders come into power influences children’s beliefs about the legitimacy of those leaders’ decrees.

Authors

• Emily Gerdin, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Hannah Hok, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alex Shaw, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author