Representation of stable social dominance relations by human infants

Olivier Mascaro, Gergely Csibra

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

What are the origins of humans' capacity to represent social relations? We approached this question by studying human infants'understanding of social dominance as a stable relation. We presented infants with interactions between animated agents in conflict situations. Studies 1 and 2 targeted expectations of stability of social dominance. They revealed that 15-mo-olds (and, to a lesser extent, 12-mo-olds) expect an asymmetric relationship between two agents to remain stable from one conflict to another. To do so, infants need to infer that one of the agents (the dominant) will consistently prevail when her goals conflict with those of the other (the subordinate). Study 3 and 4 targeted the format of infants' representation of social dominance. In these studies, we found that 12- and 15-mo-olds did not extend their expectations of dominance to unobserved relationships, even when they could have been established by transitive inference. These results suggest that infants' expectation of stability originates from their representation of social dominance as a relationship between two agents rather than as an individual property. Infants' demonstrated understanding of social dominance reflects the cognitive underpinning of humans' capacity to represent social relations, which may be evolutionarily ancient, and may be shared with nonhuman species.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)6862-6867
Number of pages6
JournalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume109
Issue number18
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 May 2012

Keywords

  • Cognitive development
  • Human evolution
  • Naïve sociology
  • Relational reasoning
  • Social cognition

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Representation of stable social dominance relations by human infants'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this