Children are selective cultural learners, and they rely heavily on social cues when determiningwhom to trust in the face of conflicting information. Although theories of cultural evolution predict that prestige, rather than dominance, cues should guide culturally-transmitted learning, preschoolers in two cross-culturally diverse samples were recently reported to selectively endorse the claims of a socially dominant agent. Here we show, however, that preschoolers in Norway, a highly egalitarian culture, did not selectively endorse the claims of a socially dominant, novel agent. This was the case across five fully-blinded experiments, encompassing a total of 249 preschoolers, which also controlled for the possibility that social desirability biases or culturally contingent display rules might account for any lack of preferences for dominant agents. A meta-analysis of all five experiments indicated that participants were equally likely to choose the dominant and subordinate agent. These results suggest that the tendency to endorse the claims of socially dominant individuals do not reliably emerge across culture in early childhood.

Theories of cultural evolution posit that cues of competence‐based prestige, rather than formidability‐based dominance, should guide culturally transmitted learning, but recent work suggested that French and Kaqchikel Guatamalan preschoolers place their epistemic trust in dominant others. In contrast, this study shows that 249 three‐ to six‐year‐olds (116 girls, tested between 2016 and 2018 across metropolitan locations with varying ethnic composition and socioeconomic status) randomly endorsed the word‐labels of dominant and subordinate agents in the egalitarian culture of Norway, using stimuli which solicit dominance inferences among infants and manipulating anonymity across studies to control for egalitarian desirability bias. A meta‐analysis estimated that 48% endorsed the dominant's testimony. This demonstrates that the tendency to endorse the epistemic claims of dominant individuals does not emerge reliably in early childhood.