Conceptual Development and Change Precede Adults’ Judgments About Powerful Appearance

Abstract

Objective Adults' mental representations of the physical appearance of people that are "strong" and people that are "in charge" are remarkably similar. Some have explained this feature of adults' thinking by positing innate mental representations. However, specific details about the nature and structure of these representations, and an appropriate empirical foundation for these claims has been lacking. In this review, my objective is to provide a high-level summary of recent research exploring infants' and young children's intuitions about the physical manifestations of power. I argue that the social responses and judgments of these young participants are more informative about the existence and nature of putatively innate mental content. Methods Narrative review of developmental studies. Results Preverbal infants exhibit a remarkably early sensitivity to the relative power of two agents. By early childhood, children exhibit increasingly adultlike intuitions about powerful appearance. However, there are significant revisions in the appearance-to-power correspondences that people detect between childhood and adulthood. Conclusions These complex developmental patterns are inconsistent with the idea that adults' intuitions about the physical manifestations of power are straightforward outputs of an innate psychology. Rather, despite an early-emerging sensitivity to appearance-based cues to power, significant conceptual development and change precede adults' judgments about powerful appearance.

Intuitive Sociology: Children Recognize Decision-Making Structures and Prefer Groups With Less-Concentrated Power

“…Even within cultures, ideas about authority vary with factors like religious background (Bulbulia et al, 2013) and political affiliation (Graham et al, 2009). An important question for future studies is whether children's preferences for egalitarian or hierarchical groups covary with the same demographics that predict adult attitudes (Terrizzi, 2020).…”

Evidence for a kernel of truth in children’s facial impressions of children’s niceness, but not shyness.

“…The tendency to form facial impressions emerges early in life. Evidence from preferential looking paradigms suggests that infants as young as seven months old are sensitive to facial signals of trustworthiness in adult faces (Jessen & Grossmann, 2016, 2020Sakuta et al, 2018). Young children also show high agreement in character judgments from faces (Charlesworth et al, 2019;Palmquist et al, 2019;Tang et al, 2019).…”

“…Niceness is a general valence (positive-negative) dimension. Indeed, valence evaluations underlie a range of different social-cognitive stimuli (e.g., Fiske et al, 2007;Todorov, 2008), and sensitivity to valence-related traits may reflect a fundamental ability that emerges early in life (see Jessen & Grossmann, 2016, 2020. In contrast, it is possible that other more specific traits, such as shyness, require sensitivity to more subtle face attributes, and therefore might be slower to develop (also see Palmquist & DeAngelis, 2020).…”

“…Our second aim was to determine the similarity of children’s and adults’ impressions, irrespective of accuracy. Investigating the maturity of children’s facial impressions is an area of current theoretical interest (Mondloch et al, 2019; Nelson et al, 2019; Over & Cook, 2018; Terrizzi, 2020). To date, the face images used to investigate children’s impressions have not been very natural.…”

“…Given the widespread influence of impressions on social outcomes, it is important to understand the origin and development of these crucial social judgements. Indeed, understanding the development of impression formation is a current priority within the field of person perception and a topic of theoretical deliberation (see Mondloch et al, 2019; Over & Cook, 2018; Sutherland et al, 2020; Terrizzi, 2020).…”