Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and theories in different domains of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology and the social sciences.

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What are the origins of humans' capacity to represent social relations? We approached this question by studying human infants' understanding of social dominance as a stable relation. We presented infants with interactions between animated agents in conflict situations. Studies 1 and 2 targeted expectations of stability of social dominance. They revealed that 15-mo-olds (and, to a lesser extent, 12-mo-olds) expect an asymmetric relationship between two agents to remain stable from one conflict to another. To do so, infants need to infer that one of the agents (the dominant) will consistently prevail when her goals conflict with those of the other (the subordinate). Study 3 and 4 targeted the format of infants' representation of social dominance. In these studies, we found that 12-and 15-mo-olds did not extend their expectations of dominance to unobserved relationships, even when they could have been established by transitive inference. These results suggest that infants' expectation of stability originates from their representation of social dominance as a relationship between two agents rather than as an individual property. Infants' demonstrated understanding of social dominance reflects the cognitive underpinning of humans' capacity to represent social relations, which may be evolutionarily ancient, and may be shared with nonhuman species.cognitive development | naïve sociology | human evolution | social cognition | relational reasoning S ocial relations have two key properties that distinguish them from other social entities. First, unlike social interactions, relations are stable across relatively long time periods and variable situations (1). Second, unlike individual dispositions, such as traits, relations apply over at least two individuals. We report four studies that investigated these two key properties in human infants' representation of social dominance. Studies 1 and 2 focused on infants' expectation of social dominance's stability across time and situations. Studies 3 and 4 focused on whether infants represent social dominance as an individual property or as a relation.In line with other approaches in biology (2), cognitive science (3), and social sciences (4), we define dominance as the tendency to prevail when one's goals conflict with those of another agent. The goals of two agents "conflict" when the fulfillment of the goal of one of the agents would prevent the other agent from fulfilling her goal. For example, if individuals A and B both aim to acquire a resource, but only one of them can get it, then their goals conflict. Note also that the notion of "general tendency to prevail" does not specify the source of this capacity, and may map to notions, like "power" (4-6) or "social status" (7) in the literature. Dominance relations are characteristic to many animal species that live in social groups. In some species of nonhuman primates and in humans, individuals not only track who is dominant or subordinate to them, but also recognize the dominance relations of others. This capacity may appear ...

Classic studies in developmental psychology demonstrate a relatively late development of equity, with children as old as 6 or even 8-10 years failing to follow the logic of merit-that is, giving more to those who contributed more. Following Piaget (1932), these studies have been taken to indicate that judgments of justice develop slowly and follow a stagelike progression, starting off with simple rules (e.g., equality: everyone receives the same) and only later on in development evolving into more complex ones (e.g., equity: distributions match contributions). Here, we report 2 experiments with 3-and 4-year-old children (N = 195) that contradict this constructivist account. Our results demonstrate that children as young as 3 years old are able to take merit into account by distributing tokens according to individual contributions but that this ability may be hidden by a preference for equality.

Looking times (LTs) are frequently measured in empirical research on infant cognition. We analyzed the statistical distribution of LTs across participants to develop recommendations for their treatment in infancy research. Our analyses focused on a common within-subject experimental design, in which longer looking to novel or unexpected stimuli is predicted. We analyzed data from 2 sources: an in-house set of LTs that included data from individual participants (47 experiments, 1,584 observations), and a representative set of published articles reporting group-level LT statistics (149 experiments from 33 articles). We established that LTs are log-normally distributed across participants, and therefore, should always be log-transformed before parametric statistical analyses. We estimated the typical size of significant effects in LT studies, which allowed us to make recommendations about setting sample sizes. We show how our estimate of the distribution of effect sizes of LT studies can be used to design experiments to be analyzed by Bayesian statistics, where the experimenter is required to determine in advance the predicted effect size rather than the sample size. We demonstrate the robustness of this method in both sets of LT experiments.