RESULTSExperiment 1: Infants choose the puppet who yields the right-of-way over one who is yielded to.We began by operationalizing social status as a zero-sum, right-of-way conflict. This paradigm, which has been used in several previous studies [1,5,14,15] relies on the fact that in both prestige-based hierarchies and dominance-based hierarchies, status determines who is deferred to in conflicts [1,6,20]. Human toddlers [34] and adult bonobos [35] both prefer the winners of such conflicts, whom they presumably see as having higher social status. A preference for high-status individuals is likely adaptive in both species: for bonobos, high-status individuals provide coalitional support; for humans, they can also provide protection, knowledge and guidance [2,13,30,36]. In contrast, it is likely adaptive for individuals in more reactively aggressive species [37] to avoid high-status others. Among baboons and macaques, for example, high-status individuals commit random acts of violence against others [23]; high-status individuals of many species commit infanticide [24,25,38] and low-status wolves and chimpanzees often avoid or withdraw from high-status others to avoid provoking aggression [8,20,21].In Experiment 1, infants watched a puppet show where two puppets faced off in a rightof-way conflict like those used in previous studies [14,15,34]. In previous studies, infants who watched this kind of puppet show expected the behavior of the puppets to reflect the logic of dominance hierarchies that are found across species-they expected smaller individuals to yield the way for larger ones [14], and individuals with fewer allies to yield the way for those with more allies [15].The puppet show began with a familiarization phase, whose purpose was to show that each puppet had the goal of crossing the stage. In this phase, one puppet crossed the stage alone
