The boss is always right: Preschoolers endorse the testimony of a dominant over that of a subordinate

Who holds the social power? The development of children's social power perceptions in China

This study examined the development of social power perceptions among Chinese children aged 3-5 years (N = 105). After watching videos about various social power cues, such as resource possession, resource control, goal achievement, permission, giving orders, setting norms and popularity, the children were asked to identify the powerful agents (whom do you believe is the more powerful person?) in the videos and provide explanations (why do you think he (she) is a powerful person?). Three-year-olds can recognize powerful agents who can grant 'permission' to other agents. By the age of 4, children begin to associate 'popularity', 'resource possession' and 'goal achievement' with social power. Five-year olds demonstrated the ability to recognize agents who control resources as being more powerful. Analysis of the reasons the children provided for their judgements revealed that for almost every cue (except giving orders), more than 14% of the responses highlighted 'possession of material resources' as an indicator of power. For children aged 3-5 years, 'resource possession' cues may be their preferred basis for inferring and explaining power differences. These results would facilitate researchers to further unravel the mechanisms underlying the development of children's social power perceptions.

Children consider informants' explanation quality with their social dominance in seeking novel explanations

Identifying high-quality causal explanations is key to scientific understanding. This research (N = 202; 50% girls; Mage: 5.82 years; 64% Asian, 33% White, and 3% multiracial; data collected from 2018 to 2024) examined how explanation circularity and informants' social dominance impact children's learning preferences for causal explanations. Raised in a culture valuing circular logic, Chinese children still preferred non-circular explanations and learning from informants providing non-circular explanations (d ≥ 0.50). When informants with non-circular explanations were subordinate to those with circular explanations, Chinese and American children preferred non-circular over circular explanations (d = 1.10), but did not prefer learning new information from either informant. Although children weigh explanation quality over informant dominance when seeking explanations for given questions, they consider both cues when evaluating informants' credibility.

How infants predict respect-based power

Research has shown that infants represent legitimate leadership and predict continued obedience to authority, but which cues they use to do so remains unknown. Across eight pre-registered experiments varying the cue provided, we tested if Norwegian 21-month-olds (N=128) expected three protagonists to obey a character even in her absence. We assessed whether bowing for the character, receiving a tribute from or conferring a benefit to the protagonists, imposing a cost on them (forcefully taking a resource or hitting them), or relative physical size were used as cues to generate the expectation of continued obedience that marks legitimate leadership. Whereas bowing sufficed in generating such an expectation, we found positive Bayesian evidence that all the other cues did not. Norwegian infants unlikely have witnessed bowing in their everyday life. Hence, bowing/prostration as cue for continued obedience may form part of an early-developing capacity to represent leadership built by evolution.

How young children use manifest emotions and dominance cues to understand social rules: a registered report

Given the complexity of human social life, it is astonishing to observe how quickly children adapt to their social environment. To be accepted by the other members, it is crucial to understand and follow the rules and norms shared by the group. How and from whom do young children learn these social rules? In the experiments, based on the crucial role of affective social learning and dominance hierarchies in simple rule understanding, we showed 15-to-23-month-olds and 3-to-5-year-old children videos where the agents' body size and affective cues were manipulated. In the dominant rule-maker condition, when a smaller protagonist puts an object in one location, a bigger agent reacts with a positive reaction; on the contrary, when the smaller protagonist puts an object in another location, the bigger agent displays a negative reaction. In the subordinate rule-maker condition, the roles are shifted but the agents differ. Toddlers expect the protagonist to follow the rules (based on anticipatory looks), independent of the dominant status of the rule-making agent. Three-to-five-year-old pre-schoolers overall perform at the chance level but expect the protagonist to disobey a rule in the first trial, and obey the rule in the second trial if the rule-maker is dominant.

Epistemic trust: a comprehensive review of empirical insights and implications for developmental psychopathology

Originally rooted in philosophy and sociology, the concept of epistemic trust has recently transitioned to developmental psychopathology, illuminating social-cognitive processes in psychopathology. This narrative review synthesizes empirical evidence on epistemic trust to inform future research. A literature search highlighted 3 areas: i) the development of selective trust in children; ii) epistemic trust in non-clinical adults; iii) its link to mental health. Young children demonstrate selective learning from reliable sources using epistemic cues. Empirical studies beyond childhood were greatly facilitated in the last 2 years with the introduction of the Epistemic Trust, Mistrust and Credulity Questionnaire, a self-report scale measuring epistemic stance. Cross-sectional studies pinpointed dysfunctional epistemic strategies as factors in mental health vulnerability, and some qualitative work offered initial evidence linking restored epistemic trust to effective psychotherapy. For future research, we propose focusing on 3 primary areas. First, empirical investigations in adolescent samples are needed, as adolescence seems to be a pivotal phase in the development of epistemic trust. Second, more experimental research is required to assess dysfunctional and functional epistemic stances and how they relate to vulnerability to mental health disorders. Finally, intervention studies should explore the dynamics of epistemic stances within and between therapy sessions and their impact on therapeutic outcomes.

How fairness and dominance guide young children's bargaining decisions

Reaching agreements in conflicts is an important developmental challenge. Here, German 5-year-olds (N = 284, 49% female, mostly White, mixed socioeconomic backgrounds; data collection: June 2016-November 2017) faced repeated face-to-face bargaining problems in which they chose between fair and unfair reward divisions. Across three studies, children mostly settled on fair divisions. However, dominant children tended to benefit more from bargaining outcomes (in Study 1 and 2 but not Study 3) and children mostly failed to use leverage to enforce fairness. Communication analyses revealed that children giving orders to their partner had a bargaining advantage and that children provided and responded to fairness reasons. These findings indicate that fairness concerns and dominance are both key factors that shape young children's bargaining decisions.

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.

Of Kids and Unicorns: How Rational Is Children's Trust in Testimonial Knowledge?

When young children confront a vast array of adults' testimonial claims, they should decide which testimony to endorse. If they are unable to immediately verify the content of testimonial assertions, children adopt or reject their informants' statements on the basis of forming trust in the sources of testimony. This kind of trust needs to be based on some underlying reasons. The rational choice theory, which currently dominates the social, cognitive, and psychological sciences, posits that trust should be formed on a rational basis, as a result of probabilistic assessments and utility-maximizing calculations. In this paper, the predictions stemming from the rational choice approach to trust are systematically compared with the empirical evidence from the field of developmental psychology on how children establish their trust in testimonial statements. The results of this comparison demonstrate an obvious inadequacy of the rational choice explanation of the emergence and development of children's testimonial trust, regardless of which form of trust rationality-weighting, threshold, or ordering-is examined. As none of the three forms of rationality of children's trust in testimony squares with the empirical data, this paper introduces a new version of trust rationality, adaptively rational trust. It explores the compatibility of the concept of adaptively rational trust with the recent empirical findings in the area of developmental psychology and addresses some avenues for future research on the rationality of testimonial trust.

Infants' representation of social hierarchies in absence of physical dominance

Social hierarchies are ubiquitous in all human relations since birth, but little is known about how they emerge during infancy. Previous studies have shown that infants can represent hierarchical relationships when they arise from the physical superiority of one agent over the other, but humans have the capacity to allocate social status in others through cues that not necessary entail agents’ physical formidability. Here we investigate infants’ capacity to recognize the social status of different agents when there are no observable cues of physical dominance. Our results evidence that a first presentation of the agents' social power when obtaining resources is enough to allow infants predict the outputs of their future. Nevertheless, this capacity arises later (at 18 month-olds but not at 15 month-olds) than showed in previous studies, probably due the increased complexity of the inferences needed to make the predictions.

Determining social power: Do Chinese preschoolers integrate verbal and nonverbal cues?

Children aged about 5 years can use verbal and nonverbal cues to determine social power. However, it is not clear what kinds of nonverbal cues preschoolers can use and whether they can integrate each nonverbal cue with verbal content when determining social power. Therefore, this research examined the ability of Chinese preschoolers to use and integrate visual, auditory, and verbal cues when determining social power as well as how this ability develops with age. In Study 1 (N = 478), 4- to 6-year-old Chinese children were recruited to judge the social power in visual, auditory, content, visual-auditory, visual-content, auditory-content, visual-auditory-content, and neutral cues. The results showed that 4-year-olds could not use any cues, 5-year-olds could not use content cues, and 6-year-olds could use all the cues. Children's performance improved with increasing age and the number of channels. Study 2 (N = 240) investigated whether speech tempo influences children's performance when using content cues. The results showed that 5- and 6-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, could use content cues to determine social power under normal and slow tempos. Study 3 (N = 80) was conducted to clarify which visual cues 5- and 6-year-olds can use and the age difference. The results revealed that 5- and 6-year-olds could use head, eye, posture, and mixed cues to determine social power, whereas their performance was steady for both 5- and 6-year-olds. In sum, the results show that Chinese children aged about 5 years are already able to use and integrate visual, auditory, and content cues when determining social power. Moreover, the ability to determine social power is gradually improved with age during the preschool period.

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.

Why do children essentialize social groups?

The tendency to essentialize social groups is universal, and arises early in development. This tendency is associated with negative intergroup attitudes and behaviors, and has thus encouraged the search for remedies for the emergence of essentialism. In this vein, great attention has been devoted to uncovering the cognitive foundations of essentialism. In this chapter, I suggest that attention should also be turned toward the motivational foundations of essentialism. I propose that considerations of power and group identity, but especially a "need to belong," may encourage children's essentialization of social groups. Namely, from a young age, children are keen to feel members of a group, and that their membership is secure and exclusive. Essentialism is the conceptual gadget that satisfies these feelings. And to the extent that groups are defined by what they do, this motivated essentialism also impels children to be adamant about the maintenance of unique group behaviors.

Children's use of race and gender as cues to social status

Social hierarchies are ubiquitous and determine a range of developmental outcomes, yet little is known about when children develop beliefs about status hierarchies in their communities. The present studies (3.5-6.9 years; N = 420) found that children begin to use gender and race as cues to status in early childhood, but that gender and race related to different status dimensions and had different consequences for inter-group attitudes. Children expected boys to hold higher status as defined by access to resources and decision-making power (e.g., having more toys and choosing what other people play with) but did not expect boys to have more wealth overall. Gender-related status beliefs did not relate to gender-related social preferences; instead, children preferred members of their own gender, regardless of their status beliefs. In contrast, children expected White people to be wealthier than Black people, and among some populations of children, the belief that White people were higher status (as defined by access to resources and decision-making power) weakly related to pro-White bias. Children's status-expectations about others were unrelated to beliefs about their own status, suggesting children more readily apply category-based status beliefs to others than to themselves.

Trust me, I'm a competent expert: Developmental differences in children's use of an expert's explanation quality to infer trustworthiness

In this study, we examined how 3-, 4-, 5-, and 7-year-old children respond when informants who are labeled as experts fail to provide high-quality explanations about phenomena within their realm of expertise. We found that 4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds discounted their initial trust in an expert who provided low-quality explanations in a task related to the expert's area of expertise. The 5-year-olds' distrust of the expert who provided low-quality explanations also generalized to additional learning tasks. When an expert provided explanations consistent with the expert's labeled expertise, 5-year-olds maintained a similar level of trust in the expert, but 7-year-olds displayed an increased level of trust in the expert within the expert's area of expertise. We did not find consistent preferences in 3-year-olds' judgments. We discuss the implications of these findings for age-based differences in children's relative weighting of trait-based versus real-time epistemic cues when evaluating informant reliability.

The role of epistemic and social characteristics in children's selective trust: Three meta-analyses

Over the last 15 years, researchers have been increasingly interested in understanding the nature and development of children's selective trust. Three meta-analyses were conducted on a total of 51 unique studies (88 experiments) to provide a quantitative overview of 3- to 6-year-old children's selective trust in an informant based on the informant's epistemic or social characteristics, and to examine the relation between age and children's selective trust decisions. The first and second meta-analyses found that children displayed medium-to-large pooled effects in favor of trusting the informant who was knowledgeable or the informant with positive social characteristics. Moderator analyses revealed that 4-year-olds were more likely to endorse knowledgeable informants than 3-year-olds. The third meta-analysis examined cases where two informants simultaneously differed in their epistemic and social characteristics. The results revealed that 3-year-old children did not selectively endorse informants who were more knowledgeable but had negative social characteristics over informants who were less knowledgeable but had positive social characteristics. However, 4- to 6-year-olds consistently prioritized epistemic cues over social characteristics when deciding who to trust. Together, these meta-analyses suggest that epistemic and social characteristics are both valuable to children when they evaluate the reliability of informants. Moreover, with age, children place greater value on epistemic characteristics when deciding whether to endorse an informant's testimony. Implications for the development of epistemic trust and the design of studies of children's selective trust are discussed.

The developmental origins of social hierarchy: how infants and young children mentally represent and respond to power and status

The learnability problem of social life suggests that innate mental representations and motives to navigate adaptive relationships have evolved. Like other species, preverbal human infants form dominance hierarchies where some systematically supplant others in zero-sum conflict, and use the formidability cues of body and coalition size, as well as previous win-lose history, to predict who will prevail. Like other primates, human toddlers also seek to affiliate with allies of high rank, but unlike bonobos they pay unique attention whether others voluntarily defer to their precedence, reflecting the importance of consensual authority in cooperative human society. However, young children appear not to readily infer authority from benevolence, and expectations for inequality correlate with unwillingness to share resources even among infants.

Two sources of bias affecting the evaluation of autistic communication

We support Jaswal & Akhtar's interrogation of social motivational accounts of autism and discuss two sources of bias that contribute to how others construe autistic people's communications: (1) an experience-based bias that limits our ability to discern the speaker's action as communicative and (2) a prejudice against the credibility of certain speakers that limits a listener's willingness to believe their testimony.

Toddlers prefer those who win but not when they win by force

Social hierarchies occur across human societies, so all humans must navigate them. Infants can detect when one individual outranks another^1-3, but it is unknown whether they approach others based on their social status. This paper presents a series of seven experiments investigating whether toddlers prefer high- or low-ranking individuals. Toddlers aged 21-31 months watched a zero-sum, right-of-way conflict between two puppets, in which one puppet 'won' because the other yielded the way. Of the 23 toddlers who participated, 20 reached for the puppet that 'won'. However, when one puppet used force and knocked the other puppet down in order to win, 18 out of 22 toddlers reached for the puppet that 'lost'. Five follow-up experiments ruled out alternative explanations for these results. The findings suggest that humans, from a very early age, not only recognize relative status but also incorporate status into their decisions about whether to approach or avoid others, in a way that differs from our nearest primate relatives⁴.

Infants distinguish between leaders and bullies

We examined whether 21-month-old infants could distinguish between two broad types of social power: respect-based power exerted by a leader (who might be an authority figure with legitimate power, a prestigious individual with merited power, or some combination thereof) and fear-based power exerted by a bully. Infants first saw three protagonists interact with a character who was either a leader (leader condition) or a bully (bully condition). Next, the character gave an order to the protagonists, who initially obeyed; the character then left the scene, and the protagonists either continued to obey (obey event) or no longer did so (disobey event). Infants in the leader condition looked significantly longer at the disobey than at the obey event, suggesting that they expected the protagonists to continue to obey the leader in her absence. In contrast, infants in the bully condition looked equally at the two events, suggesting that they viewed both outcomes as plausible: The protagonists might continue to obey the absent bully to prevent further harm, or they might disobey her because her power over them weakened in her absence. Additional results supported these interpretations: Infants expected obedience when the bully remained in the scene and could harm the protagonists if defied, but they expected disobedience when the order was given by a character with little or no power over the protagonists. Together, these results indicate that by 21 months of age, infants already hold different expectations for subordinates' responses to individuals with respect-based as opposed to fear-based power.

Cognitive Foundations of Learning from Testimony

Humans acquire much of their knowledge from the testimony of other people. An understanding of the way that information can be conveyed via gesture and vocalization is present in infancy. Thus, infants seek information from well-informed interlocutors, supply information to the ignorant, and make sense of communicative acts that they observe from a third-party perspective. This basic understanding is refined in the course of development. As they age, children's reasoning about testimony increasingly reflects an ability not just to detect imperfect or inaccurate claims but also to assess what inferences may or may not be drawn about informants given their particular situation. Children also attend to the broader characteristics of particular informants-their group membership, personality characteristics, and agreement or disagreement with other potential informants. When presented with unexpected or counterintuitive testimony, children are prone to set aside their own prior convictions, but they may sometimes defer to informants for inherently social reasons.