Young children and adults associate social power with indifference to others' needs

Abstract

In hierarchical societies, what do we expect from people at the top? Early in life, children use horizontal relationships (e.g., affiliation) to predict selectivity in others’ prosocial behavior. But it is unknown whether they also view asymmetries in prosocial behavior as characteristic of vertical relationships (e.g., differences in social power). In two experiments, we investigated 4- to 7-year-old children’s and adults’ (N = 192) intuitions about links between relative authority status, helpful action, and unhelpful inaction. In Experiment 1, participants at all ages viewed a character who chose not to help another person as holding a position of authority over them; they also viewed this unhelpful character as less nice than the person in need. However, no age group made consistent inferences about the relative authority of a helper and helpee. In Experiment 2, children had mixed intuitions when separately predicting whether high- and low-authority characters would be helpful in the future. However, older children and adults consistently indicated that a subordinate would be more likely than an authority to help a third party. These findings establish that children’s social theories include expectations for links between power and prosociality by at least the preschool years. Whereas some judgments in this domain are stable from 4 years onward, others emerge gradually. Whether consistent responses occurred early or only later in development, however, all measures converged on a single intuition: People more easily associate authority with indifference to others’ needs.

How Preschoolers Associate Power with Gender in Male-Female Interactions: A Cross-Cultural Investigation

“…Adopting an antisocial behavior is often a consequence of exercising power (Guinote et al 2015;Lammers and Stapel 2011). Preschoolers are sensitive to this dimension because they are more likely to infer power from antisocial and malevolent behavior (e.g., mean, unhelpful) than from pro-social and benevolent behavior (Gülgöz and Gelman 2017;Terrizzi et al 2019). This aspect of power may guide children in their gender assignation.…”

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

“…We presented children and adults with visual depictions of two social groups and asked participants which group was “in charge.” To test what factors may push around participants’ reasoning, we selected a prompt that we thought could elicit thinking about either power or status. Indeed, the phrasing “in charge” has been used in past studies with children to measure reasoning about both of these constructs (e.g., Charafeddine et al, 2016; Gülgöz & Gelman, 2017; Kinzler & DeJesus, 2012; Terrizzi et al, 2019, 2020). Between subjects, we varied the ratio between the groups’ numerical sizes.…”

“…Across three experiments, we asked children and adults which group was "in charge" (Experiment 1), "the leader" (Experiment 2), and most likely to "get the stuff" in a zero-sum conflict (Experiment 3). We first asked which group was "in charge" because this phrase could conceivably elicit representations of power or status and has been shown to be understood by even young children (e.g., Charafeddine et al, 2016;Gülgöz & Gelman, 2017;Kinzler & DeJesus, 2012;Terrizzi et al, 2019Terrizzi et al, , 2020. We anticipated that a tendency to associate greater social rank with numerically smaller groups in this context would increase with age and depend on the ratio between the groups' numerical sizes.…”

Conceptual Development and Change Precede Adults’ Judgments About Powerful Appearance

“…They are also capable of utilizing this knowledge to identify which of two people is "in charge" within third-party interactions. For children, people that are in charge establish rules and gives orders (Bernard et al 2016;Charafeddine et al 2016), control resources (Charafeddine et al 2014;Gülgöz and Gelman 2016), are less likely to help in low-cost situations (Terrizzi et al 2020), are more likely to be imitated by others (Over and Carpenter 2014), and generally influence how other people behave in their presence (Chudek et al 2011;Gülgöz and Gelman 2016;Zhao and Kushnir 2017).…”