How Preschoolers Use Cues of Dominance to Make Sense of Their Social Environment

Charafeddine, Rawan; Mercier, Hugo; Clément, Fabrice; Kaufmann, Laurence; Berchtold, André; Reboul, Anne; Henst, Jean-Baptiste Van der

doi:10.1080/15248372.2014.926269

Cited by 111 publications

(166 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…After learning that one puppet was dominant and the other submissive, infants expect not only that resources will be distributed unequally, but also expect that unequal distributions will favor the dominant puppet over the submissive puppet. Prior work has demonstrated that preschool-age children explicitly expect dominant individuals to possess more resources than their submissive counterparts (Charafeddine et al, 2015); our findings add important new information to the literature by demonstrating that even at 17 months of age, infants expect resource distributions to align with the dominance structure.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

“…Charafeddine and colleagues (2015) found that 3 to 5 year olds, like adults, link dominance to obtaining more resources. In their study, after identifying one individual as dominant based on their posture, children inferred that the dominant individual had more resources.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent studies (Brey & Shutts, 2015; Charafeddine, Mercier, Clement, Kaufmann, Berchtold, Reboul, and Van der Henst, 2015) have demonstrated that 3- to 5-year-old children can reliably identify who is in charge, or who is the boss, based on cues such as body posture, eye gaze, head tilt, age, physical supremacy, and the ability to ‘impose one’s decisions’ on others. Children think that older individuals, individuals who win a play fight, and individuals who get to choose what game to play, are dominant.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘To the victor go the spoils’: Infants expect resources to align with dominance structures

2017

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Previous research has found that within the first year of life infants possess rich knowledge about social structures (i.e., that some individuals are dominant over other individuals) as well as expectations about resource distributions (i.e., that resources are typically distributed equally to recipients). We investigated whether infants’ expectations about resource distribution can be modulated by information about the dominance structure between the recipients. We first replicated the finding that infants attribute a stable dominance hierarchy to a pair of individuals when their goals conflicted and one individual yielded to the other (Expt. 1), and that this sensitivity is not driven by lower-level perceptual factors (Expt. 2). In Experiments 3 – 5, we tested our main hypothesis that infants’ attention to equal and unequal distributions varies as a function of prior social dominance information. We first replicated and extended prior work by establishing that infants looked significantly longer to unequal than equal resource distributions when no prior information about dominance was provided about recipients (Expt. 3). Critically, following social dominance information, infants looked significantly longer to an equal distribution of resources than a distribution that favored the dominant individual (Expt. 4), and looked significantly longer when the submissive individual received more resources compared to when the dominant individual received more resources (Expts. 4 & 5). Together, these findings suggest that infants expect resources to align with social dominance structures.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘To the victor go the spoils’: Infants expect resources to align with dominance structures

2017

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“…In real-life social settings, 1-2 year old children display dyadic dominance relations themselves, from which members of a group can be ranked along a linear hierarchy (Strayer & Trudel, 1984). By 3 years, children recognize asymmetries in dominance in an experimental setting by using a variety of cues, including body size, age, power, and possession of resources (Charafeddine et al, 2014). Thus, around one year of age, children recognize that dominance achieves a stable position of power, which is the foundation upon which a social hierarchy forms.…”

Section: Social Hierarchies and Status Cognition In Children And Amentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding social hierarchies: The neural and psychological foundations of status perception

Koski

Xie

Olson

2015

Social Neuroscience

154

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Social groups across species rapidly self-organize into hierarchies, where members vary in their level of power, influence, skill, or dominance. In this review we explore the nature of social hierarchies and the traits associated with status in both humans and nonhuman primates, and how status varies across development in humans. Our review finds that we can rapidly identify social status based on a wide range of cues. Like monkeys, we tend to use certain cues, like physical strength, to make status judgments, although layered on top of these more primitive perceptual cues are socio-cultural status cues like job titles and educational attainment. One's relative status has profound effects on attention, memory, and social interactions, as well as health and wellness. These effects can be particularly pernicious in children and adolescents. Developmental research on peer groups and social exclusion suggests teenagers may be particularly sensitive to social status information, but research focused specifically on status processing and associated brain areas is very limited. Recent evidence from neuroscience suggests there may be an underlying neural network, including regions involved in executive, emotional, and reward processing, that is sensitive to status information. We conclude with questions for future research as well as stressing the need to expand social neuroscience research on status processing to adolescents.

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“…Similarly, Charafeddine et al (2015) found that pre-school children are already familiar with the association of hierarchical positions and physical supremacy, decision-making power, age asymmetry, and resource asymmetry.…”

Section: Development Of the Space-power Associationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The spatial representation of power in children

Schubert

2017

Cogn Process

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Previous evidence demonstrates that power is mentally represented as vertical space by adults. However, little is known about how power is mentally represented in children. The current research examines such representations. The influence of vertical information (motor cues) was tested in both an explicit power evaluation task (judge whether labels refer to powerless or powerful groups) and an incidental task (judge whether labels refer to people or animals). The results showed that when power was explicitly evaluated, vertical motor responses interfered with responding in children and adults, i.e., they responded to words representing powerful groups faster with the up than the down cursor key (and vice versa for powerless groups). However, this interference effect disappeared in the incidental task in children. The findings suggest that children have developed a spatial representation of power before they have been taught power-space associations formally, but that they do not judge power spontaneously.Keywords: children; power; space; representation 3 The Spatial Representation of Power in ChildrenAn essential question that has received much attention within the domain of cognitive psychology is how abstract concepts are mentally represented. In the social domain, one of these abstract concepts is power. Systematic research over the last decade has demonstrated representation of power as magnitude, specifically spatial magnitude (Chiao et al., 2009;Chiao, 2010;Giessner & Schubert, 2007; Jiang et al., 2015ab;Mason, Magee, & Fiske, 2014;Schubert, 2005;Zanolie et al., 2012).However, little is known about how power is mentally represented in children. The current research examines the spatial representation of power in children. Modal Representations of PowerIn the psychological literature, power has been defined as the ability or capacity to influence others through the control of resources (Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Magee, 2003;Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). When we talk about power in our daily life, we often use vertical information in our language. For example, leaders who supervise their employees have "high" status, or are "up" in the hierarchy, whereas the employees are at the "lower" levels of the hierarchy. Simply put, power is often metaphorically understood, presented, and communicated nonverbally as vertical height in physical space: "control is up, lack of control is down" (Lakoff, 1987;Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Understanding the spatial representation of power is important because of its broad implications and use in communication in relations ranging from the interpersonal to societal. It concerns mate selection (Meier & Dionne, 2009) and leadership in organizations (Giessner & Schubert, 2007). For 4 example, Meier and Dionne found that males preferred female pictures which were presented near the bottom of the screen, whereas females preferred male pictures which were presented near the top of the screen, presumably because powerful males and powerless females are seen desirable in ...

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How Preschoolers Use Cues of Dominance to Make Sense of Their Social Environment

Cited by 111 publications

References 48 publications

‘To the victor go the spoils’: Infants expect resources to align with dominance structures

‘To the victor go the spoils’: Infants expect resources to align with dominance structures

Understanding social hierarchies: The neural and psychological foundations of status perception

The spatial representation of power in children

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