Representation of stable social dominance relations by human infants

Abstract

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 ...

Teleological reasoning about nature: intentional design or relational perspectives?

“…On this view, the origins of teleological thinking are social and relational rather than individual and intentional. This has implications for ongoing debates about the primacy of social and relational theories in human development [34,38,39].…”

“…An alternative interpretation: the relational-deictic framework To resolve these paradoxes, we propose an alternative framework for 'promiscuous' teleological reasoning about nature that highlights the contribution of relational and ecological reasoning across development and cultural communities [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] and aligns well with recent research on contextual, relational cognition [34][35][36][37][38][39]. Because discussions of teleological reasoning [23,[40][41][42] have not yet engaged this relational dimension, the conceptual distinctions articulated here are new (Table 1).…”

Infants use relative numerical group size to infer social dominance

“…However, we found that 6-to 9-mo-old infants can use the relative numerical size of two groups to infer the social dominance relationship between competing individuals from those groups. Second, Mascaro and Csibra (25) demonstrated that 12-and 15-mo-old infants have to witness one agent prevail over another agent when encountering competing goals to make inferences about the agents' dominance relationship. Because none of the infants in our study observed a direct competition between agents within the same group, our infants would not have enough information to assess dominance relationships within each group.…”

“…Indeed, if young human infants have core knowledge of social relationships, as some have argued (13,25), along with the capability to track the numerical size of small groups (26), it is possible that infants may be able to draw on both capacities to support inferences about the social dominance relationship between groups that differ in numerical size. If infants infer that individuals from larger groups are more dominant than individuals from smaller groups, this would demonstrate that infants' understanding of social dominance can extend beyond the direct relationship between two competing individuals.…”

Social information changes the brain

“…Social rank is conceptually represented by 15-mo-old human infants (6), used by 2-y-olds (7), and activates discrete brain regions in human adults (8,9). The importance of rank is underscored by the fact that many nonprimate species can predict social rank through observation of others using transitive inference, including birds (10) and the cichlid fish that is our model system (11).…”