The Developmental Origins of Social Hierarchy: How infants and young children mentally represent and respond to power and status

Lotte Thomsen

doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.07.044

The Developmental Origins of Social Hierarchy: How infants and young children mentally represent and respond to power and status

Department of Political Science

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Abstract

The learnability problem of social life suggests that innate mental representations and motives to navigate adaptive relationships have evolved. Like other species, preverbal human infants form dominance hierarchies where some systematically supplant others in zero-sum conflict, and use the formidability cues of body and coalition size, as well as previous win-lose history, to predict who will prevail. Like other primates, human toddlers also seek to affiliate with allies of high rank, but unlike bonobos they pay unique attention whether others voluntarily defer to their precedence, reflecting the importance of consensual authority in cooperative human society. However, young children appear not to readily infer authority from benevolence, and expectations for inequality correlate with unwillingness to share resources even among infants.

Original language	English
Journal	Current Opinion in Psychology
Volume	33
Pages (from-to)	201-208
Number of pages	8
ISSN	2352-250X
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.07.044
Publication status	Published - Jun 2020

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AB - The learnability problem of social life suggests that innate mental representations and motives to navigate adaptive relationships have evolved. Like other species, preverbal human infants form dominance hierarchies where some systematically supplant others in zero-sum conflict, and use the formidability cues of body and coalition size, as well as previous win-lose history, to predict who will prevail. Like other primates, human toddlers also seek to affiliate with allies of high rank, but unlike bonobos they pay unique attention whether others voluntarily defer to their precedence, reflecting the importance of consensual authority in cooperative human society. However, young children appear not to readily infer authority from benevolence, and expectations for inequality correlate with unwillingness to share resources even among infants.

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The Developmental Origins of Social Hierarchy: How infants and young children mentally represent and respond to power and status

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