Children's understanding of dominance and prestige in China and the UK

Children attribute higher social status to people who have extraordinary capabilities

Throughout history, individuals believed to have extraordinary capabilities were generally highly ranked in their communities; this suggests a universal "extraordinary-dominant expectation" in human minds, which may play a key role in religious thought, even in modern societies. This study shows that 5-6-year-old children, who begin to understand real-world causalities regarding how the body and mind of human beings work, predict that individuals who exhibit extraordinary capabilities have higher social status in interactions with individuals who exhibit ordinary capabilities. In Experiment 1, we showed children two individuals achieving goals using either humanly possible or impossible methods, the latter involving simple forms of violation of intuitive psychology (knowing without seeing), physics (flying), or biology (fire breathing). The children clearly judged the latter as surprising and unusual. More importantly, the children predicted that individuals showing extraordinary capabilities will gain contested resources and play a dominant role in interactions with ordinary individuals, indicating a higher social status. Further investigations suggested that the children specifically linked extraordinary capacities to social status, as they did not attribute dominance to individuals who apply surprising/unusual but possible methods (Experiment 2), and that they did not indiscriminately attribute positive characteristics to extraordinary capabilities despite a strong extraordinary-dominant expectation being replicated (Experiment 3). These findings demonstrate that extraordinary-dominant expectations can be observed in childhood across different intuitive knowledge domains, helping understand the cognitive mechanisms of religious thought and the cognitive foundations of hierarchical social systems.

Dominance and Prestige as Self-Concept Facets

Two basic strategies can be applied to navigate hierarchies: (a) dominance, which involves the induction of fear, intimidation, or coercion to obtain status, or (b) prestige, which involves using one's skills, knowledge, or expertise to pursue status. In the present research, we refined the original dominance and prestige account and the respective self-report scale and conceptualized and assessed both variables as stable self-concept facets. By doing so, we extended the explanatory power of the model. Four studies (total N = 1,993) showed good psychometric properties for the newly developed dominance and prestige questionnaire (DPQ). Both dominance and prestige showed high temporal stability. In testing associations with 72 personality variables and 14 objective criteria, nomological and criterion validity were supported. For the first time, the concepts were shown to predict friendship satisfaction. Further, in testing a truth and bias model, we found high self-other agreement for both self-concept facets. Thus, self-perceptions of dominance and prestige proved to be stable, valid, accurate, and relevant in contexts beyond leadership. Future research concerning the self-perception of these concepts could test the relevance of dominance and prestige in additional spheres of life (e.g. families, academia).

Perceiving and pursuing legitimate power

How do people perceive and pursue legitimate power? For the social sciences, this question is venerable. Yet, for cognitive science, it offers fresh and generative opportunities to explore how adults evaluate legitimacy, how children learn to do so, and what difference legitimate power makes for people's thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Children's thinking about group-based social hierarchies

Wealth, power, and status are distributed unevenly across social groups. A surge of recent research reveals that people being recognizing, representing, and reasoning about group-based patterns of inequity during the first years of life. We first synthesize recent research on what children learn about group-based social hierarchies as well as how this learning occurs. We then discuss how children not only learn about societal structures but become active participants in them. Studying the origins and development of children's thoughts and behavior regarding group-based social hierarchies provides valuable insight into how systems of inequity are perpetuated across generations and how intergroup biases related to wealth, power, and status may be mitigated and reshaped early in development.

Group Norms Influence Children's Expectations About Status Based on Wealth and Popularity

Children’s understanding of status and group norms influence their expectations about social encounters. However, status is multidimensional and children may perceive status stratification (i.e., high- and low-status) differently across multiple status dimensions (i.e., wealth and popularity). The current study investigated the effect of status level and norms on children’s expectations about intergroup affiliation in wealth and popularity contexts. Participants (N = 165; age range: 5–10 years; M_age = 7.72 years) were randomly assigned to hear two scenarios where a high- or low-status target affiliated with opposite-status groups based on either wealth or popularity. In one scenario, the group expressed an inclusive norm. In the other scenario, the group expressed an exclusive norm. For each scenario, children made predictions about children’s expectations for a target to acquire social resources. Novel findings indicated that children associated wealth status to some extent, but they drew stronger inferences from the wealth dimension than from the popularity dimension. In contrast to previous evidence that children distinguish between high- and low-status groups, we did not find evidence to support this in the context of the current study. In addition, norms of exclusion diminished children’s expectations for acquiring social resources from wealth and popularity groups but this effect was more pronounced between wealth groups. We found age differences in children’s expectations in regards to norms, but not in regards to status. The implications of how these effects, in addition to lack of effects, bear on children’s expectations about acquiring resources are discussed.

Children’s social evaluation toward prestige-based and dominance-based powerholders

Objective

Social scientists have suggested two typical ways of acquiring social power: dominance approach (gaining social power by applying violence, coercion, threat, and punishment) and prestige approach (gaining admiration and liking by demonstrating competence and sharing experience and knowledge). However, little is known about how people recognize and evaluate the differentiated process of the approaches, and even less about the early development of these processes. In the current study, 5–6-year old children heard stories about pairs comprising a dominance-based and a prestige-based powerholder, chose one of the powerholders as their friend and leader, and predicted which powerholder will gain the contested resources.

Results

Compared to a dominance-based powerholder, children were more likely to choose a prestige-based powerholder as a friend and leader in different situations. Moreover, children predicted that prestige-based powerholders, and not dominance-based powerholders, would gain contested resources. These findings suggest that since childhood, human beings tend to be biased to not only judge prestige-based aspects as socially preferable, but also endorse the prestige-based powerholders’ priority to possess valuable resources, which subsequently strengthens their high social status. These early childhood preferences can be instrumental in providing more harmonious environments for children in educational and daily contexts.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13104-022-06072-6.

Dominance in humans

Dominance captures behavioural patterns found in social hierarchies that arise from agonistic interactions in which some individuals coercively exploit their control over costs and benefits to extract deference from others, often through aggression, threats and/or intimidation. Accumulating evidence points to its importance in humans and its separation from prestige-an alternate avenue to high status in which status arises from information (e.g. knowledge, skill, etc.) or other non-rival goods. In this review, we provide an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of dominance as a concept within evolutionary biology, discuss the challenges of applying it to humans and consider alternative theoretical accounts which assert that dominance is relevant to understanding status in humans. We then review empirical evidence for its continued importance in human groups, including the effects of dominance-independently of prestige-on measurable outcomes such as social influence and reproductive fitness, evidence for specialized dominance psychology, and evidence for gender-specific effects. Finally, because human-specific factors such as norms and coalitions may place bounds on purely coercive status-attainment strategies, we end by considering key situations and contexts that increase the likelihood for dominance status to coexist alongside prestige status within the same individual, including how: (i) institutional power and authority tend to elicit dominance; (ii) dominance-enhancing traits can at times generate benefits for others (prestige); and (iii) certain dominance cues and ethology may lead to mis-attributions of prestige. This article is part of the theme issue 'The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies'.

Non-instrumental actions can communicate roles and relationships, not just rituals

Actions that do not have instrumental goals can communicate social goals that are not rituals. Many non-instrumental actions such as bowing or kissing communicate a commitment to or roles in dyadic relationships. What is unclear is when people understand such actions in terms of ritual and when they understand them in terms of relationships.

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

Theories of cultural evolution posit that cues of competence-based prestige, rather than formidability-based dominance, should guide culturally transmitted learning, but recent work suggested that French and Kaqchikel Guatamalan preschoolers place their epistemic trust in dominant others. In contrast, this study shows that 249 three- to six-year-olds (116 girls, tested between 2016 and 2018 across metropolitan locations with varying ethnic composition and socioeconomic status) randomly endorsed the word-labels of dominant and subordinate agents in the egalitarian culture of Norway, using stimuli which solicit dominance inferences among infants and manipulating anonymity across studies to control for egalitarian desirability bias. A meta-analysis estimated that 48% endorsed the dominant's testimony. This demonstrates that the tendency to endorse the epistemic claims of dominant individuals does not emerge reliably in early childhood.

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

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.

Erratum to "Bonobos and chimpanzees preferentially attend to familiar members of the dominant sex" [Animal Behaviour 177 (2021) 193-206]

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2021.04.027.].

Power grabbed or granted: Children's allocation of resources in social power situations

Notwithstanding alternative ways of obtaining power, social power is mostly commonly acquired through either a dominance approach, where power is grabbed by the powerholder, or a prestige approach, where power is granted by group members. Although children's attitude toward power in the dominance situation has been studied, little is known about how children understand and distinguish different ways of obtaining power. We examined the understanding of power in children aged 4-8 years by their resource allocation behavior in two social power acquisition situations. In Study 1, 4- to 8-year-olds (N = 123) gradually shifted from distributing more to the powerholder to showing no preference for either party (in the prestige situation) or to distributing more to the subordinates (in the dominance situation) as they age. Older children (6-8 years), but not 4- and 5-year-olds, were more likely to favor the powerholders in the prestige situation than in the dominance situation. In Study 2, when power did not produce unfair results, 7- and 8-year-olds (N = 48) favored the powerholder in the prestige situation but showed no preference in the dominance situation. The results suggest that children's attitudes toward the two ways of acquiring power are gradually differentiated with age, and children's resource allocation in the power situations is influenced by the way of acquiring power and children's equity concern.

Material and relational asymmetry: The role of receivers' wealth and power status in children's resource allocation

Asymmetries in social status, specifically social status related to wealth and relational power, appear to influence the ways in which children allocate resources. However, the impact of wealth and relational power status on children's resource allocation decisions has yet to be examined among children developing within a Chinese cultural context. In addition, how children weight the relative importance of these factors when they exist concurrently is not well understood. In Study 1, we examined the impact of recipients' wealth and relational power status on Chinese children's (3- to 8-year-olds; N = 199) allocation decisions. We found that across both categories of social status, 3- and 4-year-olds gave more to high-status individuals, whereas 7- and 8-year-olds gave more to low-status individuals, despite younger children also showing a strong egalitarian preference when the resources could be allocated equally. In Study 2, we investigated how children (3- to 8-year-olds; N = 219) weigh the relative importance of these two types of social status in situations where the level of recipients' wealth and relational power were either consistent or in conflict. When they needed to allocate the resources unequally, the youngest children were found to place greater emphasis on wealth over relational power and favored the high-status individual, whereas older children tended to favor the low-status individual and placed greater importance on relational power over wealth. Overall, we found a consistent age-related shift from favoring high-status individuals toward compensating low-status individuals, suggesting a developing concern for social equity.

Children Hold Leaders Primarily Responsible, Not Entitled

Do children construe leaders as individuals whose position of power entails primarily more responsibility or more entitlement, compared with nonleaders? To address this question, 5-year-old children (n = 128) heard a story involving a hierarchical dyad (a leader and a nonleader) and an egalitarian dyad (two nonleaders), and then assessed protagonists' relative contributions to a collaborative endeavor (Experiments 1 and 2) or relative withdrawals from a common resource pool earned jointly (Experiment 3). Children expected a leader to contribute more toward a joint goal than its nonleader partner, and to withdraw an equal share (not more) from a common pool. Children thus gave evidence that they construed leaders as more responsible, rather than more entitled, relative to nonleaders.