Big and Mighty: Preverbal Infants Mentally Represent Social Dominance

Abstract

Human infants face the formidable challenge of learning the structure of their social environment. Previous research indicates that infants have early-developing representations of intentional agents, and of cooperative social interactions, that help meet that challenge. Here we report five studies with 144 infant participants showing that 10-to 13-month-old, but not 8-month-old, infants recognize when two novel agents have conflicting goals, and that they use the agents’ relative size to predict the outcome of the very first dominance contests between them. These results suggest that preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance and use a cue that covaries with it phylogenetically, and marks it metaphorically across human cultures and languages, to predict which of two agents is likely to prevail in a conflict of goals.

Three-month-old human infants use vocal cues of body size

“…This finding opens up three new directions for future research: (i) exploring the relative contributions of fundamental and formant frequencies in judgments of other differences between organisms, such as differences in dominance and formidability [4,16,22], (ii) more precisely determining if this size/sound expectation reflects expectations about different species, different age and sex morphs within a species, and/or expectations of size differences within these morphs, and (iii) assessing the ecological and taxonomic distribution of this competence by exploring if and when similar representations develop in non-human animal species, particularly in species that differ in the range of body size differences they encounter in their natural ecology.…”

“…B 284: 20170656 point on the stage, revealing both creatures, and continued until (i) the infant looked away from the display for two seconds, or (ii) the total trial length reached 45 s. A second independent coder subsequently evaluated infants' looking times from the video of the session. 4 All coders (live and video) were blind to condition during looking time coding. The live and video coders' looking times were highly correlated (r ¼ 0.99); trials with coder disagreements of greater than two seconds were evaluated by a third independent coder.…”

“…However, it is not yet known whether infants are sensitive to the relationship between vocalization and body size, specifically that larger organisms tend to produce lower frequency sounds and smaller organisms tend to produce higher frequency sounds. Here, this question was examined using a violation-of-expectation (VOE) looking time paradigm [4,36,37] with three-month-old infants. In a VOE paradigm, infants are presented with different event types-some that are predicted to be consistent with infants' underlying expectations, and others that are predicted to be inconsistent-while their looking times are measured.…”

Concordant preferences for actual height and facial cues to height

“…Consistent with these personality traits, taller people are perceived as stronger, smarter and more dominant (Cawley, Joyner, & Sobal, 2006;Montepare, 1995). The association between height and conflict success is even present in preverbal infants, who show more surprise when taller vertical lines back away from shorter lines in computer simulations (Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, & Carey, 2011).…”

La politique de l’enfant et le dilemme de la hiérarchie

“…Les poissons Burtoni 1 réalisent ainsi des inférences transitives sur la base des relations de dominance entre leurs congénères (Si un individu voit parmi un groupe de congénères que A domine B et que B domine C, il va prédire que A domine C [4]). À 10 mois, les bébés humains utilisent une asymétrie physique pour prédire une asymétrie sociale (si l'individu A est plus grand que l'individu B, alors ils s'attendent à ce que A s'impose socialement vis-à-vis de B [5]). Et à 3 ans, les enfants utilisent les relations de pouvoir entre deux individus pour inférer d'autres asymétries (s'ils…”