How Preschoolers Use Cues of Dominance to Make Sense of Their Social Environment

Abstract

A series of four experiments investigated preschoolers’ abilities to make sense of dominance relations. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that as early as 3 years old, preschoolers are able to infer dominance not only from physical supremacy but also from decision power, age, and resources. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that preschoolers have expectations regarding the ways in which a dominant and a subordinate individual are likely to differ. In particular, they expect that an individual who imposes his choice on another will exhibit higher competence in games and will have more resources.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are very grateful to the children, parents, and teachers at preschools who participated in this study. We are also grateful to Jean Fleury and Vincent Guili from Centre Académique Recherche Développement Innovation et Expérimentation and Académie de Lyon for offering us the opportunity to carry out these experiments. We thank Rachel Beaudoin, Emily Hewitt, Eric Koun, and Tiffany Morisseau for their help in data collection. We thank Audrey Breton, Stéphane Bernard, Laurent Cordonier, and Amélie Deschenaux for their valuable comments on previous versions of this article.