The study found that babies expect a larger individual will get his or her way in a conflict. To make such a prediction, babies have to understand on some level that individuals have goals, that they can conflict with each other, and that these conflicts have winners and losers.
According to study researcher Lotte Thomsen, "social hierarchies are everywhere in the human world, so it would make a lot of sense if infants were able to understand this aspect of their world."
Researchers used a method called "violation of expectation" in this study. In this method, babies are shown photos or videos of situations that proceed as expected, as well as images that break everyday rules. If the baby understands the rules, he or she will be bored by the expected situation and look away. But the weird situation will catch the baby's eye, and he or she will stare longer.
In this study, babies saw 2 blocks onscreen, both with an eye and a mouth. First, the blocks moved across the screen individually but in opposite directions, to establish that they each had a goal of crossing to the other side. Next, the babies saw the blocks try to cross simultaneously and bump into one another. After a pause, one block would bow down and scoot to the side, letting the other pass. In some cases, the subservient block was the larger one, and in others, the smaller one yielded.
By the time they were 9 or 10 months old, the babies stared the longest when the big block yielded to the little block, suggesting they knew the big block was supposed to win. 8-month-olds did not understand the interaction, while 10-month-olds did, suggesting that babies develop this social understanding between 8 and 10 months of age.
To rule out alternate explanations, such as the babies being intrigued by the relative increase in motion when the big block moved aside, researchers conducted additional experiments. A big block that bowed and scooted away behind the little block's back was not interesting to the babies, suggesting that the infants understood the social nature of the interaction and weren't reacting to the motion.
"It's very hard to see how they could learn to understand about social hierarchy from scratch before they have a language," Thomsen said. She suspects infants are born not with ingrained knowledge of hierarchy, but with a predisposition to look for relevant clues about who is in charge. As a dominance cue shared throughout the animal kingdom, size is a good candidate for this type of core concept.
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