Space and rank: infants expect agents in higher position to be socially dominant

Abstract

Social hierarchies exist throughout the animal kingdom, including among humans. Our daily interactions inevitably reflect social dominance relationships between individuals. How do we mentally represent such concepts? Studies show that social dominance is represented as vertical space (i.e. high = dominant) by adults and preschool children, suggesting a space-dominance representational link in social cognition. However, little is known about its early development. Here, we present experimental evidence that 12- to 16-month-old infants expect agents presented in a higher spatial position to be more socially dominant than agents in a lower spatial position. After infants repeatedly watched the higher and lower agents being presented simultaneously, they looked longer at the screen when the lower agent subsequently outcompeted the higher agent in securing a reward object, suggesting that this outcome violated their higher-is-dominant expectation. We first manipulated agents' positions by presenting them on a podium (experiment 1). Then we presented the agents on a double-decker stand to make their spatial positions directly above or below each other (experiment 2), and we replicated the results (experiment 3). This research demonstrates that infants expect spatially higher-positioned agents to be socially dominant, suggesting deep roots of the space-dominance link in ontogeny.

Preverbal infants expect agents exhibiting counterintuitive capacities to gain access to contested resources

“…Animated stimuli have been widely used in studies of infants’ cognition, partly because their superficial perceptual properties can be easily controlled. These studies show that 6-month-old infants mentally represent the occluded object 26 , 27 , 7- to 8-month-old infants perceive an object’s lightness in shadows by using an assumption that cast shadows dim the surface of an object 32 , 9-month-old infants apply principles of object solidity and cohesion 25 , and 12- to 16-month-old infants predict the outcome of a zero-sum conflict between two agents based on their previous spatial high- or low- positions 20 . Further, before their first birthday infants infer agents’ needs, goals and the costs of their actions in ways that take into account a wide range of physical constraints (e.g., gravity, friction, height, barriers, trenches) 25 , 33 – 35 .…”

“…For example, 6–9-month-old infants utilize number of allies, 9–13-month old infants utilize cues such as body-size, to predict which individuals will yield and prevail in the right-of-way dominance paradigm 16 , 17 . Twelve to 16-month old infants expect individuals in higher spatial location to gain contested resources 20 . Twelve-month-old infants expect hierarchical relationships in animated dyads to be stable over time 19 .…”

“…In the present study we consider whether physically counterintuitive capacities—capacities to achieve goals efficiently by physically counterintuitive methods—could serve as a cue for expectations of social dominance to prevail when two agents have conflicting goals 36 (see other related studies 16 , 17 , 19 , 20 , 37 , 38 ). In four experiments based on the violation-of-expectation paradigm, an extensively used method in infancy research that relies on looking time as an index of surprise 29 , 39 , 40 , we investigated 12- to 16-month-old infants’ looking time using animated videos in which two agents compete for a reward in a zero-sum situation (test phase) 19 , 20 after the agents had retrieved a reward by overcoming an obstacle by different methods 23 (familiarization phase; Fig. 1 ).…”

“…1 ). Past studies have shown that young infants may regard animated geometric figures, for example, as agents with goal-directed intentions and preferences, capable of engaging in social interactions such as cooperation and interference 20 , 33 , 34 , 41 . Infants attributing social dominance to agents exhibiting physically counterintuitive capacities, should expect an agent who achieved goals by physically intuitive methods to withdraw and allow an agent who achieved goals efficiently by physically counterintuitive methods to obtain the reward.…”

“…Accordingly, infants in the test phase should look longer at the screen (indicating surprise) after seeing a physically intuitive agent secure a reward in competition with a physically counterintuitive agent, as compared with scenarios in which the physically counterintuitive agent secures the reward in competition with an intuitive agent. Looking time following each test outcome thus served as the main dependent variable in our experimental design 16 , 17 , 19 , 20 . Looking times were measured as the time interval between the time point when an agent took the reward and the time point infants began to consecutively look away for 2 s or the outcome has been frozen for 60 s 20 (see “ Coding and analysis ” for detailed criterion).…”