Children’s developing judgments about the physical manifestations of power.

Abstract

When navigating unfamiliar social environments, it is important to identify who is powerful. Determining who has power can be challenging because observers may have limited social information, and because people achieve influence for many reasons. In experiments with 3-to 5-year-old children (n = 192) and adults (n = 32), we investigated the developmental origins and conceptual structure of power judgments based on physical appearance. At 3 years of age, children already associated physical strength with expansive posture; soon after, expansive postures also supported judgments of normative authority and were joined by similar judgments about masculine facial structure. By the age of 4, children also matched high-and low-power versions of faces and postures together, indicating that they draw connections between different aspects of more or less powerful appearance. The complexity and timing of these changes highlights limitations in current accounts of the origins of adults' intuitions about powerful appearances. This study documents several novel developmental patterns that generate new hypotheses about the mechanisms that support the emergence of children's intuitions.

Infants expect leaders to right wrongs

“…Positive results in these 2 lines of research would not mean, of course, that experience plays no role in the development of infants' knowledge about leaders. Cultures vary in how leaders and followers interact (e.g., what cues mark leaders, what behaviors express deference to leaders), and children must learn these conventions to skillfully navigate their social environments (12,21,51,52,(71)(72)(73)(74). In addition, children may have the misfortune of being exposed to leaders who abuse their position of power to exploit their followers, and they must then learn to cope with these immoral leaders.…”

Conceptual Development and Change Precede Adults’ Judgments About Powerful Appearance

“…However, this emerging body of work establishes important aspects of continuity between children's and adults' judgments about powerful appearance. Regarding authority, 4-to 6-year-old children are more likely to interpret people enacting expansive poses and men with masculine facial features as being "in charge" (Brey and Shutts 2015;Charafeddine et al 2014;Keating and Bai 1986;Terrizzi et al 2019). At similar ages, children also infer related concepts like being "proud" from expansive poses (Nelson and Russell 2015;Tracy et al 2005), and view bearded males as older than men that are clean-shaven .…”

“…Some have done so by appealing to the presence of analogous inferences in non-human primates, preliminary evidence for cross-cultural stability in adults' judgments about powerful appearance, the apparent speed and automaticity of adults' judgments, or some combination of these features (Murray 2014;Murray and Schmitz 2011;Sell et al 2009;Van Vugt 2006;Van Vugt and Grabo 2015). While these observations are consistent with the possibility of innate capacities, the specific content and organization of the architecture supporting these judgements has been left unspecified (Over and Cook 2018;Terrizzi et al 2019). Moreover, researchers have tended to discuss the overall pattern of adults' judgments as if these were directly informative about innate psychological content (Lukaszewski et al 2016;Murray 2014;Sell et al 2009;Toscano et al 2014;Van Vugt and Grabo 2015).…”

“…However, other connections are less likely to be accurate. For example, although people know that being physically strong and having authority are different things, their mental representations of the physical manifestations of these characteristics are remarkably similar (Lukaszewski et al 2016;Murray and Schmitz 2011;Sell et al 2009;Terrizzi et al 2019;Toscano et al 2014Toscano et al , 2016. When attending to others' bodies, people rate strangers with a muscular physique as both physically stronger and more likely to hold a position of authority relative to people that are less muscular (Lukaszewski et al 2016;Toscano et al 2016).…”

“…People holding an expansive pose appear genuinely larger than people enacting more restrictive poses (Marsh et al 2009a, b), and observers closely associate overall size with physical strength (Fessler et al 2014;Mattan et al 2017;Murray and Schmitz 2011;Yu et al 2017). When attending to others' faces, the specific features (indeed, the same face images) that adults associate with being physically strong also support judgments about having greater authority (Holzleitner and Perrett 2016;Oosterhof and Todorov 2008;Terrizzi et al 2019;Toscano et al 2014Toscano et al , 2016. Thus, there is substantial overlap in the aspects of facial and bodily appearance that adults attend to in order to estimate others' social and physical power.…”