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

The good, the rich, and the powerful: How young children compensate victims of moral transgressions depending on moral character, wealth, and social dominance

Theories of justice suggest that it serves two main purposes: punishment and restoration. Although punishment emerges early and has been well-documented, little is known about the contexts in which young children engage in restorative practices like compensation for victims. The current study investigated whether children's engagement in compensation and punishment (which often involve a redistribution of resources) was sensitive to characteristics of the perpetrator and victim known to shape distributive justice decisions (decisions about how resources should be distributed), such as social dominance, resource inequality, and moral character. A total of 54 children aged 3 to 7 years completed a series of moral judgment experiments. Each experiment featured interactions between a perpetrator and a victim, ending with the perpetrator stealing the victim's toy. In Experiment 1 (N = 44), social dominance did not affect punishment or compensation overall, but older children compensated the dominant victim (but not the subordinate victim) less than younger children. In Experiment 2 (N = 42), children compensated the poor victim more than the rich victim, but they did not punish the rich perpetrator more than the poor perpetrator. In Experiment 3 (N = 45), children compensated the victim with a good moral character more than the victim with a bad moral character, and the victim's moral character did not influence punishment. Altogether, these findings offer new insights into how children resort to compensation for victims as a complement to, rather than an alternative to, punishment.

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.

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.

Investigating the effects of prenatal testosterone exposure (via 2D:4D) and socio-relational factors on 3-6-year-old preschoolers' prosocial choices

BACKGROUND AND AIMS

Prosocial behavior such as helping and sharing develops early in childhood. Yet very few studies have investigated physiological and relational factors shaping prosociality among children. Here, we systematically examined the role of prenatal androgen exposure alongside prestige, dominance, and friendship in 3-6-year-old preschoolers' prosocial sharing with familiar peers.

METHODS

We tested a sample of 65 children, predominately of European descent. We used a cost-free direct-interaction prosocial choice task to assess children's prosocial tendencies. Second-to-fourth digit ratio (2D:4D) was used as a retrospective biomarker for prenatal androgen exposure. Prestige was measured through behavioral observations of interaction partners and visual regard, dominance through teacher questionnaires, and friendship via peer preference assessments.

RESULTS

We found that children acted prosocially when tested with a familiar peer. Children with lower 2D:4D (higher prenatal androgen exposure) behaved more prosocially. Further, there were marginal associations between the donors' prosocial tendencies and their visual regard as a proxy of their prestige (positive effect) and their teacher-rated dominance relative to the recipient (negative effect). Neither age, sex, nor friendship influenced prosocial choices.

CONCLUSIONS

Prenatal androgen exposure, approximated via 2D:4D, was associated with prosocial behavior. In contrast to previous research in older children, higher exposure was related to stronger prosocial tendencies, which corresponds to earlier findings on fairness in adults. Our findings point towards a potential role of sex steroids in the early development of children's social behavior, but they have to be interpreted with caution due to the small sample size of the current study. Nevertheless, they underscore the importance of integrating biological and psychological perspectives, while also highlighting the significance of studying the development of prosocial behavior within peer groups.

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.

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.