Small Groups Lead, Big Groups Control: Perceptions of Numerical Group Size, Power, and Status Across Development

• In Event: Children’s Early Understanding of Group Coordination in Social and Epistemic Conflicts.

Abstract

Groups are a defining feature of the social world. The salience of social groups is mirrored in children’s early recognition of and reasoning about groups (e.g., Liberman, Woodward, & Kinzler, 2017; Plötner, Over, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2016; Rhodes & Baron, 2019). Within the first years of life, children reason about social groups’ relative preferences, abilities, and position within social hierarchies (e.g., Bigler, Brown, & Markell, 2001; Shutts, Roben & Spelke, 2013; Bian, Leslie, & Cimpian, 2017).
A relatively understudied—yet always present and important—feature of social groups is their relative numerical size. More often than not, social groups are numerically unequal. Existing research on children’s reasoning about numerical group size focuses almost exclusively on situations eliciting thinking about relative group power (i.e., power-based hierarchies). In such cases, infants and children associate numerically larger groups with greater social power (Pun, Birch, & Baron, 2016; Lourenco, Bonny, & Schwartz, 2016). Yet, there exist other dimensions of social hierarchy in which larger numerical size may be less indicative of higher social rank. Indeed, some social hierarchies (e.g., status- or leadership-based hierarchies) often take on a pyramidal structure, with a numerically smaller group of individuals ascribed the greatest social rank. Open questions concern whether numerical group size also guides children’s reasoning about social hierarchy outside of situations involving power.
We examined the conditions under which children and adults ascribe greater social rank to numerically larger versus smaller groups. We posited that numerically larger social groups would be ascribed higher social rank when the context elicited conceptions of power-based hierarchies, but that numerically smaller social groups would be ascribed higher social rank when the context elicited conceptions of status-based hierarchies. Additionally, we examined whether reasoning about power- and status-based hierarchies changes over development and depends on the ratio between groups’ numerical sizes.
To test these questions, we showed children (N = 384 3–10-year-olds) and adults (N = 610) cartoon depictions of 20 individuals split into two social groups and asked them which group was “in charge” (Experiment 1), “the leader” (Experiment 2), or more likely to “get the stuff” (i.e., resources) in their town (Experiment 3). Across experiments and participants, we varied the groups’ relative numerical sizes (depictions of 1:19; 2:18; 5:15; 8:12 individuals per group).
When groups were competing over resources, participants ascribed greater social rank to numerically larger groups. Participants’ likelihood of doing so did not change across development (see Figure 1), nor did it depend on the ratio between the groups’ sizes (see Figure 2). In contrast, when asked which group was “in charge” or “the leader,” an association between numerically smaller groups and higher social rank strengthened with age (see Figure 1) as well as when the ratio between groups was larger, thereby depicting a numerically smaller group that was relatively rarer (see Figure 2).
The present findings provide evidence for the flexibility of the perceived relation between numerical group size and social group hierarchy and inform theory regarding the differing developmental trajectories of children’s thinking about group-based power and status hierarchies.

Authors

• Isobel A Heck, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Jesús Bas, Université Paris Descartes
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine D. Kinzler, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author