Nonverbal displays of dominance and prestige: Evidence for cross-cultural and early-emerging recognition.

Two universal strategies for attaining influence-dominance, or the use of intimidation and force to obtain power, and prestige, or garnering respect by demonstrating knowledge and expertise-are communicated through distinct nonverbal displays in North America. Given evidence for the emergence and effectiveness of these strategies across cultures, including non-Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic small-scale, traditional societies in Africa, Asia, and South America, the nonverbal displays that are used to reliably communicate these strategies also might be universal. Here, we demonstrate that the dominance display is recognized by the Mayangna, a small-scale society in rural Nicaragua, and by Canadian children as young as 2 and 3 years old. We also find that the prestige display is reliably differentiated from dominance by both groups, and judged as a high-rank signal by the Mayangna. However, members of the Mayangna confused the prestige display with happiness, and children confused the prestige display with a neutral expression. Overall, findings are consistent with a ubiquitous and early-emerging ability to recognize dominance, and with the suggestion that the prestige display is more culturally variable and ontogenetically slower to emerge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Infants infer third-party social dominance relationships based on visual access to intergroup conflict.

During a conflict, having a greater number of allies than the opposition can improve one's success in a conflict. However, allies must be aware that has a conflict has occurred, and this is often influenced by what they are able to see. Here, we explored whether infants' assessment of social dominance is influenced by whether or not social allies have visual access to an episode of intergroup conflict. In Experiment 1, 9-12-month-olds only expected an agent to be socially dominant if their allies were able to witness the conflict. Experiment 2 provided further support for this finding, as infants did not expect an agent from a numerically larger group to be socially dominant when allies were unable to witness the conflict. Together, these results suggest that infants do not simply use a heuristic in which "numerically larger groups are always more dominant". Importantly, infants are able to incorporate social allies' ability to witness a conflict when predicting social dominance between groups.

Developmental antecedents of representing "group" behavior: A commentary on Pietraszewski's theory of groups.

Central to Pietraszewski's theory is a set of group-constitutive roles within four triadic primitives. Although some data from the developmental and biological sciences support Pietraszewski's theory, other data raise questions about whether similar behavioral expectations hold across various ecological conditions and interactions. We discuss the potential for a broader set of conceptual primitives that support reasoning about groups.

The effect of familiarity on infants' social categorization capacity.

Recent studies indicate that a preference for people from one's own race emerges early in development. Arguably, one potential process contributing to such a bias has to do with the increased discriminability of own- vs. other-race faces-a process commonly attributed to perceptual narrowing of unfamiliar groups' faces, and analogous to the conceptual homogenization of out-groups. The present studies addressed two implications of perceptual narrowing of other-race faces for infants' social categorization capacity. In Experiment 1, White 11-month-olds' (N = 81) looking time at a Black vs. White face was measured under three between-subjects conditions: a baseline "preference" (i.e., without familiarization), after familiarization to Black faces, or after familiarization to White faces. Compared to infants' a priori looking preferences as revealed in the baseline condition, only when familiarized to Black faces did infants look longer at the "not-familiarized-category" face at test. According to the standard categorization paradigm used, such longer looking time at the novel (i.e., "not-familiarized-category") exemplar at test, indicated that categorization of the familiarized faces had ensued. This is consistent with the idea that prior to their first birthday, infants already tend to represent own-race faces as individuals and other-race faces as a category. If this is the case, then infants might also be less likely to form subordinate categories within other-race than own-race categories. In Experiment 2, infants (N = 34) distinguished between an arbitrary (shirt-color) based sub-categories only when shirt-wearers were White, but not when they were Black. These findings confirm that perceptual narrowing of other-race faces blurs distinctions among members of unfamiliar categories. Consequently, infants: a) readily categorize other-race faces as being of the same kind, and b) find it hard to distinguish between their sub-categories.

The power of allies: Infants' expectations of social obligations during intergroup conflict.

Many species of animals form social allegiances to enhance survival. Across disciplines, researchers have suggested that allegiances form to facilitate within group cooperation and defend each other against rival groups. Here, we explore humans' reasoning about social allegiances and obligations beginning in infancy, long before they have experience with intergroup conflict. In Experiments 1 and 2, we demonstrate that infants (17-19 months, and 9-13 months, respectively) expect a social ally to intervene and provide aid during an episode of intergroup conflict. Experiment 3 conceptually replicated the results of Experiments 1 and 2. Together, this set of experiments reveals that humans' understanding of social obligation and loyalty may be innate, and supported by infants' naïve sociology.

Foundations of infants' social group evaluations.

Previous research has suggested that infants exhibit a preference for familiar over unfamiliar social groups (e.g., preferring individuals from their own language group over individuals from a foreign language group). However, because past studies often employ forced-choice procedures, it is not clear whether infants' intergroup preferences are driven by positivity toward members of familiar groups, negativity toward members of unfamiliar groups, or both. Across six experiments, we implemented a habituation procedure to independently measure infants' positive and negative evaluations of speakers of familiar and unfamiliar languages. We report that by 1 year of age, infants positively evaluate individuals who speak a familiar language, but do not negatively evaluate individuals who speak an unfamiliar language (Experiments 1 and 2). Several experiments rule out lower-level explanations (Experiments 3-6). Together these data suggest that children's early social group preferences may be shaped by positive evaluations of familiar group(s), rather than negative evaluations of unfamiliar groups.

Infants use relative numerical group size to infer social dominance.

Detecting dominance relationships, within and across species, provides a clear fitness advantage because this ability helps individuals assess their potential risk of injury before engaging in a competition. Previous research has demonstrated that 10- to 13-mo-old infants can represent the dominance relationship between two agents in terms of their physical size (larger agent = more dominant), whereas younger infants fail to do so. It is unclear whether infants younger than 10 mo fail to represent dominance relationships in general, or whether they lack sensitivity to physical size as a cue to dominance. Two studies explored whether infants, like many species across the animal kingdom, use numerical group size to assess dominance relationships and whether this capacity emerges before their sensitivity to physical size. A third study ruled out an alternative explanation for our findings. Across these studies, we report that infants 6-12 mo of age use numerical group size to infer dominance relationships. Specifically, preverbal infants expect an agent from a numerically larger group to win in a right-of-way competition against an agent from a numerically smaller group. In addition, this is, to our knowledge, the first study to demonstrate that infants 6-9 mo of age are capable of understanding social dominance relations. These results demonstrate that infants' understanding of social dominance relations may be based on evolutionarily relevant cues and reveal infants' early sensitivity to an important adaptive function of social groups.