Toddlers prefer winners - but avoid those who win by force

Authored by bss.au.dk and submitted by mvea

They have only just learnt to walk and talk - and have only just started to develop social relationships with children of their own age. Yet, these tiny toddlers already use cues of social status to decide which people they prefer or would rather avoid. This has just been established by researchers from Aarhus BSS and the University of California, Irvine, through experiments carried out on toddlers aged 21 to 31 months.

Previous research has shown that even nine-month-old infants can grasp a simple conflict of interest. When two individuals block each other’s path, the infants will automatically assume that the largest person will defeat the smallest. Lotte Thomsen, professor of psychology at the University of Oslo and associate professor at Aarhus BSS, and her colleagues, established this.

Now researchers are taking it one step further by demonstrating how toddlers also themselves prefer to affiliate with the winners of these conflicts and avoid those who they have seen yield to others. The research results have recently been published in Nature Human Behavior in the article ”Toddlers prefer those who win, but not when they win by force”.

“The way you behave in a conflict of interest reveals something about your social status,” says Ashley Thomas from UC Irvine, who is the lead author of the article. She continues:

“Across all social animal species, those with a lower social status will yield to those above them in the hierarchy. We wanted to explore whether small children also judge high and low status individuals differently.”

To explore this question, the researchers used the basic paradigm of Lotte Thomsen’s previous research where two puppets attempt to cross a stage in opposite directions. When the puppets meet in the middle, they block each other’s way. One puppet then yields to the other and moves aside, allowing the other puppet to continue and reach its goal of crossing the stage. Afterwards, the children were presented with the two puppets. 20 out of 23 children reached for the puppet that had “won” the conflict on the stage - the unyielding puppet. Thus, the children preferred the high-status puppet - the one that others voluntarily yield to.

vaselineeater on September 10th, 2018 at 02:26 UTC »

People who can win at games fairly are who people gravitate towards. These games can take the form of social games also, where a display of confidence, self-assuredness and wit indicate that you're capable of winning.

CallMeKarlton on September 10th, 2018 at 02:23 UTC »

This theory has existed in cultural psychology for a while now. I think its called the prestige effect where we tend to imitate and learn from those that are successful or hold some presitge in what it is they do. Success in this instance meaning being talented at a task.

mvea on September 10th, 2018 at 00:18 UTC »

The title of the post is a copy and paste from the title, subtitle and secondary title of the linked academic press release here :

Toddlers prefer winners - but avoid those who win by force

Toddlers aged just 1 1/2 years prefer individuals whom other people yield to. It appears to be deeply rooted in human nature to seek out those with the highest social status.

We do not like people winning by force

Journal Reference:

Ashley J. Thomas, Lotte Thomsen, Angela F. Lukowski, Meline Abramyan, Barbara W. Sarnecka.

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

Nature Human Behaviour, 2018; 2 (9): 662

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0415-3

Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0415-3

Abstract

Social hierarchies occur across human societies, so all humans must navigate them. Infants can detect when one individual outranks another1,2,3, 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.