Small groups lead, big groups control: Perceptions of numerical group size, power, and status across development

Abstract

Participants (N = 384 three‐ to ten‐year‐olds; 51% girls, 49% boys; 73% White, 18% multiracial/other, 5% Asian, and 3% Black; N = 610 adults) saw depictions of 20 individuals split into two social groups (1:19; 2:18; 5:15; or 8:12 per group) and selected which group was “in charge” (Experiment 1), “the leader” (Experiment 2), or likely to “get the stuff” (resources) in a conflict (Experiment 3). Whereas participants across ages predicted the larger group would “get the stuff,” a tendency to view smaller groups as “in charge” and “the leader” strengthened with age and when the smaller group was rarer. These findings suggest the perceived relation between numerical group size and hierarchy is flexible and inform theory regarding the developmental trajectories of reasoning about power and status.

Political Ideology in Early Childhood: Making the Case for Studying Young Children in Political Psychology

“…Around the same age, infants expect a dominant individual to obtain more resources than a submissive individual (Mascaro & Csibra, 2012) and to dominate others lower in the hierarchy (Gazes et al, 2017 ). While the inferences above pertain to hierarchical relations among individuals, infants also recognize and draw inferences from hierarchies among groups : For example, they expect the interests of a member of a larger group (i.e., a group with more members) to supersede the interests of a member of a smaller group (Pun et al, 2016; see also Heck et al, in press). Together, these findings suggest that young children not only notice hierarchical and dominance relations among social entities but also—much like adults—expect a distinct set of consequences to follow from these relations.…”

Building representations of the social world: Children extract patterns from social choices to reason about multi‐group hierarchies

“…Thus, this comparison aims to disentangle between the possibility that children would use the agent's pattern of social choices to arrange the groups hierarchically along any positive dimension (i.e., a broader "halo effect"), and the possibility that children display greater specificity in their reasoning. This comparison also adds to a growing body of work focused on distinguishing between children's reasoning about various hierarchy-related concepts (e.g., status vs. power; prestige vs. dominance; see Kajanus et al, 2020;Margoni et al, 2018;Heck et al, 2022a). We predicted that children's placement of the groups would mirror the pattern across the agent's choices when asked about the groups' relative social but not physical power.…”

“…Indeed, recent research underscores a potential duality in children's thinking about the relation between leading and helping: On the one hand, children view helping others as an important aspect of leadership (Stavans & Diesendruck, 2021), but on the other hand, children associate being helpful with not being “in charge” (Terrizzi et al., 2020). Another possibility is that some children—specifically those who said that Group‐D was the “leader” and that Group‐A was the “helper”—were attempting to rectify the biased pattern of choices they observed (e.g., see Elenbaas et al., 2016; Olson et al., 2011; Rizzo et al., 2020; for a review, see Heck et al., 2022b), particularly given that this response was more common among older (vs. younger) children (79% of children providing this response were age 8 or older).…”

“…Across early childhood, children build complex mental representations of the social world. Young children categorize individuals into groups (e.g., Liberman et al., 2017; Plötner et al., 2016; Rhodes & Baron, 2019) and come to reason about how groups fit into societal structures: Children's group‐based thinking increasingly mirrors real‐world patterns of group‐based stratification and inequity along lines of power, status, and wealth (e.g., Charafeddine et al., 2020; Kinzler & DeJesus, 2012; Mandalaywala et al., 2020; Olson et al., 2012; Santhanagopalan et al., 2021; 2022; Shutts et al., 2016; for review, see Heck et al., 2022b).…”

“…Important questions involve the processes by which children construct representations of group‐based hierarchies. In some cases, children may learn about group‐based hierarchies directly by observing differences between groups (e.g., groups' relative resources or numerical sizes; e.g., Charafeddine et al., 2015; Heck et al., 2022a; Horwitz et al., 2014; Pun et al., 2016; Shutts et al., 2016). But in other cases, children may also learn about group‐based hierarchies more indirectly as they manifest in people's choices about whom to select for positive interactions, positions, and roles (“social choices”; Eason et al., 2019; Heck et al., 2021).…”