Knowing who likes who: The early developmental basis of coalition understanding

Abstract

Group biases based on broad category membership appear early in human development. However, like many other primates humans inhabit social worlds also characterised by small groups of social coalitions which are not demarcated by visible signs or social markers. A critical cognitive challenge for a young child is thus how to extract information concerning coalition structure when coalitions are dynamic and may lack stable and outwardly visible cues to membership. Therefore, the ability to decode behavioural cues of affiliations present in everyday social interactions between individuals would have conferred powerful selective advantages during our evolution. This would suggest that such an ability may emerge early in life, however, little research has investigated the developmental origins of such processing. The present paper will review recent empirical research which indicates that in the first 2 years of life infants achieve a host of social-cognitive abilities that make them well adapted to processing coalition-affiliations of others. We suggest that such an approach can be applied to better understand the origins of intergroup attitudes and biases.

Thin Slices of Athletes’ Nonverbal Behavior Give Away Game Location: Testing the Territoriality Hypothesis of the Home Game Advantage

“…The behavioral dimensions of assertiveness, dominance, and aggression have all been linked to territoriality in the past (Dabbs et al, 1997;Edney, 1974;Gleason et al, 2009;Jansen et al, 2011;Mazur, 2005;Mazur & Booth, 1998;O'Connor et al, 2002). Therefore, it seems likely that the results are about nonverbally communicating territoriality and not some other dimension of nonverbal behavior, for example, coalitional behavior (Platten, Hernik, Fonagy, & Fearon, 2010)-that is, athletes feel more comfortable and friendly in front of a supportive home crowd as compared to an away crowd and this is what shows in their nonverbal behavior. If the coalitional explanation were true, we would not have expected the finding that athletes playing at home were rated as more aggressive and more dominant as this is not typical when showing coalitional behavior (Platten et al, 2010).…”

Social Effects of Movement Synchrony: Increased Infant Helpfulness only Transfers to Affiliates of Synchronously Moving Partners

“…The present paper is the first to suggest that infants might transfer cued prosociality to the positive affiliate of a “good” social partner. Understanding which individuals in their social environment have coalitions is an important skill to develop (Platten et al., ), and these findings suggest that by 14 months of age, infants may be using these skills to direct their own affiliative behaviors.…”

“…By evaluating social interactions that they themselves are not part of, infants also begin to understand third-party coalition over the first two years after birth, and quickly develop the prerequisites for making assumptions about third-party group membership (for a review, see Platten, Hernik, Fonagy, & Fearon, 2010). By at least as young as 9 months of age, infants expect that two people who share food quality evaluations will later affiliate, but that two people with opposing evaluations will not (Liberman, Kinzler, & Woodward, 2014).…”

Origins of intergroup bias: Developmental and social cognitive research on intergroup attitudes

“…Platten and colleagues take a very general approach, reviewing both comparative research with primates and developmental research with infants to ask what universal learning tools or basic assumptions infants and young children start out with (Platten et al, 2010). This approach is a classic one in cognitive development, in which the overall project can be characterized as the need to describe the initial state, the nature of the input, and how mechanisms present in the initial state are used to build new knowledge and perhaps even new learning mechanisms on the road to the mature ''end state''.…”

“…Put simply, infants make different allowances for agents like hands than for artifacts like metal claws, suggesting that what is learned depends on the sorts of things being observed. In the present context, this could be taken to suggest that children may also have characteristic, domain-specific ways of reasoning about social entities such as social groups (a topic taken up by Kinzler, Shutts, & Correll, 2010;Platten, Hernik, Fonagy, & Fearon, 2010).…”