Do Preschoolers Align Their Preferences With Those of a Powerful Individual?

Abstract

Very early on, children understand the hierarchical dimension of the social environment and use a variety of cues to guess who has more power in an interaction. A crucial aspect of power perception lies in the evaluation of high-power and low-power individuals. The current study examined the evaluation of power by preschoolers through social influence. Past research has shown that preschoolers take social category information into account when expressing their preferences. In particular, they tend align their preferences with those of same-gender and same-age individuals. In the current study, 4- and 5-year-old children were presented with a power interaction between two children through body postures and were asked whether they would prefer the same items as those preferred by the high-power child or those preferred by the low-power child. Overall, the participants did not choose the items preferred by the high-power child significantly more often than those preferred by the low-power child. However, unexpected gender effects were found and indicated that the power asymmetry influenced more male than female participants. Indeed, when they saw a power interaction between two boys (Experiments 1 and 2), male participants aligned their choices with those of the high-power boy more than with those of the low-power boy. However, when male participants saw an interaction between two girls (Experiment 3), an opposite pattern was observed: they aligned their choices with those of the low-power girl more than with those of the high-power girl. In contrast, in the three experiments, there were approximately as many girls who aligned their preferences with those of the high-power child as there were girls who aligned their preferences with those of the low-power child. The current study reveals the importance of taking gender into account, both at the level of participants and stimuli, in the evaluation of power by preschoolers.

The good, the rich and the powerful: How young children compensate victims of moral transgressions depending on moral character, wealth, and social dominance

“…A tentative explanation may be that girls are more likely than boys to identify power cues (Brey & Shutts, 2015), but the vast majority of boys and girls succeeded at the comprehension check. An alternative explanation for the gender effect may then come from previous (albeit mixed) evidence on the relationship between gender and preferences for dominance, with girls being less interested in powerful individuals than boys (Charafeddine et al, 2021). This, however, may further be moderated by the gender of high-power and low-power individuals, a factor that was not manipulated in the present experiment.…”

Developmental Perspectives on Social Inequalities and Human Rights

“…As a part of understanding the societies that they live in, children actively think about these inequalities, seeking to explain why things are structured the way they are and forming judgments about the consequences (Elenbaas et al, 2020). Recent research has revealed that children think about social relationships in terms of social power (Charafeddine et al, 2021;Gülgöz & Gelman, 2017) and status hierarchies (Yee et al, 2022). Thinking about power and status however does not convey whether children think these relationships are legitimate or unfair.…”