Infants expect leaders to right wrongs

Abstract

Anthropological and psychological research on direct third-party punishment suggests that adults expect the leaders of social groups to intervene in within-group transgressions. Here, we explored the developmental roots of this expectation. In violation-of-expectation experiments, we asked whether 17-mo-old infants (n = 120) would expect a leader to intervene when observing a within-group fairness transgression but would hold no particular expectation for intervention when a nonleader observed the same transgression. Infants watched a group of 3 bear puppets who served as the protagonist, wrongdoer, and victim. The protagonist brought in 2 toys for the other bears to share, but the wrongdoer seized both toys, leaving none for the victim. The protagonist then either took 1 toy away from the wrongdoer and gave it to the victim (intervention event) or approached each bear in turn without redistributing a toy (nonintervention event). Across conditions, the protagonist was either a leader (leader condition) or a nonleader equal in rank to the other bears (nonleader condition); across experiments, leadership was marked by either behavioral or physical cues. In both experiments, infants in the leader condition looked significantly longer if shown the nonintervention as opposed to the intervention event, suggesting that they expected the leader to intervene and rectify the wrongdoer’s transgression. In contrast, infants in the nonleader condition looked equally at the events, suggesting that they held no particular expectation for intervention from the nonleader. By the second year of life, infants thus already ascribe unique responsibilities to leaders, including that of righting wrongs.

Children Hold Leaders Primarily Responsible, Not Entitled

“…The present research adds to existing literature on children's understanding of leadership. To our knowledge, it is the first to show that children construe leaders as individuals with more responsibility, relative to nonleaders (for related findings in infants, see Stavans & Baillargeon, 2019), and that this construal is more salient than viewing leaders as more entitled individuals. Second, our focus on collaborative situations, extends prior research that had probed social rank concepts only in competitive or neutral contexts.…”

“…In turn, the evidence concerning early expectations about the behavior of leaders toward followers has been somewhat mixed, with different contexts probed. In one report, 17-month-olds expected a leader to intervene and rectify a fairness transgression within its group, but held no particular expectation of intervention from a nonleader, equal in standing to the conflicting parties (Stavans & Baillargeon, 2019). In contrast, a recent report found that 5-to-7-year-olds held no particular expectation about whether a leader or a follower would prevail in a competition over a limited resource (Kajanus et al, 2020).…”

“…Evidence further suggests that children as young as 5 years, can identify a leader based on a variety of cues, such as being imitated (Over & Carpenter, 2015), offering advice in a friendly tone, or having one's opinion sought (Kajanus et al, 2020). Even infants in their second year, do so based on reverent bowing, bestowing goods to an individual, size, or implicit order giving (Margoni et al, 2018;Stavans & Baillargeon, 2019). Moreover, as mentioned, children hold expectations about the behaviors and attitudes of followers toward leaders (Kajanus et al, 2020;Margoni et al, 2018).…”

Correlates of conflict resolution across cultures

“…Effective mediators of conflict then are not necessarily leaders who can be conceptualized as particularly prestigious or dominant but are more likely to be individuals who effectively identify overlapping interests between individuals with distinct priorities fairly, consistent with emerging views on leadership and followership focused on process and outcomes over individual traits (Vollan et al 2020;Wiessner 2019). Strong preferences for fairness potentially have deep evolutionary origins (Stavans and Baillargeon 2019;Nowak, Page, and Sigmund 2000;Haidt 2007). The importance of these leader qualities support an evolved psychology of procedural fairness and evaluations of welfare trade off ratios, or psychological preferences for leaders who will weight appropriately individual welfare in conflict resolution decision-making processes (Petersen et al 2010;Sell, Tooby, and Cosmides 2009;Bøggild and Petersen 2016).…”

First steps toward an understanding of procedural fairness

“…For example, extending previous relevant studies (e.g., Surian, Ueno, Itakura, & Meristo, ), it would be important to assess whether infants do not expect hindering agents to use fair procedures. Another fruitful goal would be to investigate whether and how infants’ expectations of procedural fairness are linked to other aspects of their social cognition, such as their understanding of ingroup‒outgroup and dominance relations (e.g., Jin & Baillargen, ; Stavans & Baillargeon, ; Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold‐Smith, & Carey, ; Ting, He, & Baillargeon, ). For example, would they hold different fairness expectations depending on whether a distributor is represented as a dominant or a subordinate individual, or would they generate different inferences about individuals on the basis of the type of power they display (Margoni, Baillargeon, & Surian, ; Thomas & Sarnecka, )?…”