The boss is not always right: Norwegian preschoolers do not selectively endorse the testimony of a novel dominant agent

Abstract

Children are selective cultural learners, and they rely heavily on social cues when determiningwhom to trust in the face of conflicting information. Although theories of cultural evolution predict that prestige, rather than dominance, cues should guide culturally-transmitted learning, preschoolers in two cross-culturally diverse samples were recently reported to selectively endorse the claims of a socially dominant agent. Here we show, however, that preschoolers in Norway, a highly egalitarian culture, did not selectively endorse the claims of a socially dominant, novel agent. This was the case across five fully-blinded experiments, encompassing a total of 249 preschoolers, which also controlled for the possibility that social desirability biases or culturally contingent display rules might account for any lack of preferences for dominant agents. A meta-analysis of all five experiments indicated that participants were equally likely to choose the dominant and subordinate agent. These results suggest that the tendency to endorse the claims of socially dominant individuals do not reliably emerge across culture in early childhood.

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

“…Finally, our results also differ from those on testimony. Indeed, while in Norway and Japan preschool children did not believe the testimony of a dominant character more (Charafeddine et al, 2019;Fonn et al, 2019), French participants comparable to the current groups of participants did (Bernard et al, 2016). This suggests that high-power individuals influence children's representation of objective questions more than their desires and aspirations.…”

“…Preschool children endorsed the statements of the dominant character more than those of the subordinate character (see also Castelain et al, 2016). However, this effect was not replicated with children living in a more egalitarian culture, such as Norway (Fonn et al, 2019), and in Japan, a culture that places high value on modesty and subordination, preschool children have even been found to believe the testimony of the subordinate character more than that of the dominant character (Charafeddine et al, 2019).…”

“…Some found a preference for the high-power character among the youngest preschoolers only (Charafeddine et al, 2018) and some also found an effect of question position (Enright et al, 2020). Moreover, in testimony tasks, the greater endorsement of the dominant individual's statements was observed in some cultural environments (Bernard et al, 2016;Castelain et al, 2016), but not in others (Charafeddine et al, 2019;Fonn et al, 2019).…”

“…Some scholars have made this methodological choice to avoid the influence of beliefs about the link between power and gender (Gülgöz and Gelman, 2017;Enright et al, 2020) 1 . Other studies have also used gender-neutral stimuli (Charafeddine et al, 2015, Experiments 3 and 4;Fonn et al, 2019), and two studies systematically manipulated gender so that both female and male participants saw female-female and male-male interactions (Brey and Shutts, 2015;Charafeddine et al, 2018).…”

Children selectively favor leaders and prosocial agents in an economic exchange

“…Another small set of studies investigated the relation between children's understanding of social dominance and their decisions to allocate trust, reporting mixed results here too: Two studies found that preschoolers trusted dominants (with either physical or decisional power) over subordinates [26,27], but a third work found that children were equally likely to choose dominants and subordinates [28]. Finally, while a few studies looked at whether children selectively trust dominants vs. subordinates, no prior study investigated whether children trust different types of dominants, e.g.…”