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Even infants know who's more powerful

Infants understand social dominance and use relative size as a measure to predict who will prevail when two individuals’ goals conflict.

Even infants know whos more powerful

Infants understand social dominance and use relative size as a measure to predict who will prevail when two individuals' goals conflict.

Researchers from California conducted five experiments on 144 American infants ranging from 8 months to 16 months old, gauging their reactions to videos of interactions between cartoon figures of various sizes.

Since preverbal infants can't be interviewed, their experiences and expectations must be assessed by their behaviour. Infants tend to watch longer when something surprises them, so hypotheses about what they expect can be tested by measuring how long they look at scenarios that either violate or confirm their expectations. Previous studies indicated that infants tend to watch something longer when it surprises them.

The videos used in the research depicted a large and small block with eyes and a mouth bouncing across a stage in opposite directions. Next, infants watched the two blocks meet in the middle, impeding one another's progress. They then saw either the large or the small block bow and step aside, deferring to the other.

When a larger figure yielded to a smaller one - an unexpected outcome - the infants watched much longer, an average of 20 seconds compared to just 12 seconds when a smaller character made way for a larger one.

In a follow-up experiment, the babies' reactions indicated that 8-month-olds failed to grasp the significance of the larger block deferring to the smaller one. But those aged 10 months to 16 months consistently demonstrated surprise at depictions of the larger yielding to the smaller, suggesting this conceptual understanding develops between 8 and 10 months of age.

This work shows that apparently, infants come prepared to understand abstract aspects of their social world. The reactions of infants seen in these experiments suggest that people are either born with - or develop at a very early age - some understanding about social dominance and how it relates to comparative size, an association universally found in human and animal cultures alike. Traditional kings and chieftains sit on large, elevated thrones and wear elaborate crowns or robes that make them look bigger than they really are, and subordinates often bow or kneel to show respect to superior humans and gods. Many animals, like birds and cats, puff themselves up to look physically larger to an adversary, and prostrate themselves to demonstrate submission, like dogs do. This knowledge may help infants face the formidable challenge of learning the structure of their social environment, specifying ways of recognising who is socially dominant in their particular culture.

The findings of this study suggest that even with limited socialisation, preverbal human infants may understand such displays. The results go with previous research suggesting that infants come into the world with a quite sophisticated set of basic conceptual building blocks that they use to make sense of the world and learn about it.
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