What Cues do Infants use to Represent Legitimate Leadership?

• In Event: The Many Faces of Social Power: Children's Reasoning About Respect-, Dominance-, and Institution-based Control

Abstract

Prior research has shown that infants distinguish between fear-based social power or bullying and respect-based social power or legitimate leadership (Margoni et al., 2018). However, what cues do infants use to represent legitimate leadership? Across eight experiments that varied the cues provided, we assessed whether infants expected agents to obey a character. In Experiment 1, we asked whether the act of bowing (which matches the respect displays found across many cultures, and the prostration cues for subordination found across many species) suffices in generating the representation of legitimate leadership. We addressed this question by assessing whether Norwegian 21-month-olds expect agents to obey a character if they have previously bowed to it.

Infants saw three geometric agents bowing to a character. Next, the character instructed them to go to bed, and they either complied while the character watched but disobeyed after it left (disobedience) or continued to comply after it left (obedience). Infants looked longer at disobedience than at obedience, indicating that they expected the agents to obey. Experiment 2 replicated this finding. In Experiment 3 (control), the same events were shown but now agents no longer bowed down (they instead simply moved back-and-forth sideways). In Experiment 4, the character conferred a benefit to the group, giving them a ball to play with. In Experiments 5 and 6, the character imposed a cost to the group, by stealing the ball (in Experiment 5) or hitting them with a stick (in Experiment 6). In Experiment 7, the character was now bigger in size compared to the three agents, and was shown to possess abundant resources (three balls) before handing over one ball to the group (as in Experiment 4). In Experiments 3 to 7, we found Bayesian evidence supporting that infants did not have any clear expectations. Last, in Experiment 8, the character received a tribute (the ball) from the group, and infants expected disobedience rather than obedience (they looked longer at obedience than at disobedience, confirming prior results reported in Margoni et al., 2018).

In sum, Norwegian infants do not use physical size, the ability to confer a benefit, the ability to impose a cost, or the fact that the main character is receiving a tribute from the group as cues for leadership. They instead use bowing as a cue for representing legitimate leadership. As it is unlikely that these Norwegian infants saw anyone bow in their everyday life, we argue that this understanding may be part of a fundamental, dedicated, early-emerging capacity to represent leadership built by evolution.

Authors

• Francesco Margoni, Universitetet i Oslo
  Presenting Author

• Lotte Thomsen, University of Oslo, Aarhus University