Do infants expect physically competent agents to gain access to contested resources?

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Social Neuroscience

Background:

• Social hierarchy is crucial for group dynamics, but its developmental origins in humans are not fully understood.
• Previous research shows infants anticipate certain traits, like larger size, confer advantages in conflicts.
• Adults and children link higher social status with competence, but infant expectations remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if infants predict that physically competent agents will prevail over physically incompetent agents in conflicts.
• To determine if infants associate physical competence with success in social dominance scenarios.

Main Methods:

• Three preregistered experiments were conducted with 14- to 15-month-old infants.
• Infants observed agents demonstrating varying physical competence (e.g., jumping barriers).
• Expectations were measured by infants' looking times in response to different conflict outcomes.

Main Results:

• Infants looked longer when an incompetent agent prevailed over a competent one, signaling a violated expectation.
• Results suggest infants anticipate competent agents will win conflicts.
• Further experiments indicated this was not solely due to goal achievement or barrier height differences.

Conclusions:

• Infants expect physically competent agents to prevail in conflicts with less competent ones.
• This expectation implies that the bias to attribute higher social rank to competence is present in early infancy.
• Findings suggest early developmental roots for social hierarchy formation based on perceived competence.