The boss is always right: Preschoolers endorse the testimony of a dominant over that of a subordinate
Introduction
Young children learn most of their factual knowledge through testimony. Using a paradigm in which children need to choose between two contradictory testimonies, studies have revealed that several cues such as reliability (e.g., Koenig, Clément, & Harris, 2004), emotions (Clément, Bernard, Grandjean, & Sander, 2013), and linguistic markers (Bernard, Mercier, & Clément, 2012) influence the selection of testimony by children. Another set of studies has investigated the influence of social cues in young children’s endorsement of testimony such as accent (e.g., Kinzler, Corriveau, & Harris, 2011), and consensus (e.g., Bernard et al., 2015, Corriveau et al., 2009). This latter research has shown, for instance, that children endorse more strongly information provided by a consensual group than information provided by a single dissenter. The current study explores the influence of another important social cue that has received very little attention: the dominance of one informant over another.
Dominance is often characterized as the competitive ability to prevail in conflicting interactions between two individuals that typically involve resource control (e.g., toys, locations) and decision making (e.g., deciding which game to play, deciding where to go). Dominance relations might be achieved through different conducts such as agonistic physical behavior, verbal command, and persuasion. Ethological studies have established that 2-year-olds form stable and transitive dominance hierarchies and that these hierarchies play an important role in their everyday interactions (e.g., Boyce, 2004, Russon and Waite, 1991). Recent experimental studies have demonstrated that young children (and in some cases even infants) can infer dominance from a variety of relational cues such as physical supremacy, holding resources, and decisional power (Charafeddine et al., 2015, Mascaro and Csibra, 2012, Thomsen et al., 2011).
Of particular relevance here is a series of experiments that have shown that 3- to 5-year-olds take a variety of cues into account when inferring dominance. For instance, in one condition of the first experiment of Charafeddine and colleagues (2015), two puppets verbally expressed conflicting goals over which game to play together. The situation occurred twice, and the same puppet successfully imposed its favorite game on both occasions. The children were then asked which puppet was the dominant (dominance inference). They responded significantly above chance that the puppet imposing its goal was the dominant. Other conditions and other experiments in Charafeddine and colleagues’ (2015) study have shown that 3- to 5-year-olds can also take physical supremacy, age, and amount of resources held as cues to infer dominance (see also Gulgoz & Gelman, accepted for publication).
These experiments revealed a general increase in the ability to infer dominance with age, with no interaction between age and ability to infer dominance from specific cues (i.e., the ability to infer dominance from various cues increased equally with age). However, observational studies show clear developmental trends in the way that dominance is expressed in young children. In particular, with age dominance moves away from physical agonism toward expressions of verbal and decisional power (Hawley, 1999, La Freniere and Charlesworth, 1983, Roseth et al., 2007, Strayer and Trudel, 1984). Therefore, it is possible that some of the inferences drawn from dominance might display an age by type of dominance (e.g., physical supremacy vs. decisional power) interaction.
Several experiments have tested the inferences young children draw from dominance. For instance, 3- to 5-year-olds expect dominants to win competitive games, and to hold more resources, even if dominance was established in an unrelated way (Charafeddine et al., 2015). These inferences seem to be robust within this age range. Given the observed developmental differences in the expression of dominance, it would not be surprising to observe some developmental differences in the inferences drawn from dominance. For instance, in a related task, Charafeddine and colleagues (accepted for publication) have shown that as children grow older—from 3 to 8 years of age—they become increasingly likely to be more generous toward a subordinate than a dominant.
The question raised here is whether young children infer that dominants should be more or less trusted than subordinates in testimony tasks. On the one hand, it is not clear that dominance status provides much ground for epistemic trust. On the other hand, we know that dominance plays a crucial role in young children’s social lives and that young children can infer dominance from various cues and make various inferences from dominance. Moreover, young children have been shown to take other social cues into account when evaluating testimony even when those cues do not have obvious epistemic value such as gender (Terrier, Bernard, Mercier, & Clément, 2016) and minimal group membership (MacDonald, Schug, Chase, & Barth, 2013).
To our knowledge, only one study has investigated the role of dominance in the evaluation of testimony. In that study, two characters were introduced to 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds (Castelain, Bernard, Van der Henst, & Mercier, in press). In two short stories, the physical dominance of one character over the other was established; the dominant won a play fight with the subordinate and acquired a toy they both wanted. After this dominance induction phase, the children completed a testimony task in which a third character who had lost an animal was introduced. The dominant and the subordinate then gave contradictory information about the location of the lost animal, and the children needed to say where they thought the animal was (localization task). Children from each of the three age groups tended to endorse the testimony of the dominant individual over that of the subordinate.
Although Castelain and colleagues’ (in press) study provides evidence that young children take dominance into account in evaluating testimony, the generality of this finding is debatable. The current research extends this finding in four directions.
The first and most important novelty is that the current study was conducted in a population of Western middle- and upper-middle-class children. By contrast, Castelain and colleagues’ (in press) study was conducted in a preliterate traditional population (indigenous Kaqchikel Maya from Guatemala). Compared with this type of traditional populations (i.e., subsistence farmers), Western populations tend to be relatively egalitarian (see, e.g., Morris, 2015). Moreover, parenting in traditional societies often relies on power assertion, significantly more so than parenting in Western cultures (especially in middle- and upper-middle-class children; see, e.g., Tizard, Hughes, Carmichael, & Pinkerton, 1983). In traditional cultures, parents tend to rely on imperatives to address their children, and the children are expected to comply without questioning their parents’ decisions (Gauvain et al., 2013, Maratsos, 2007, Nicolaisen, 1988). As a result, the Maya children investigated in Castelain and colleagues’ (in press) study likely face a much more hierarchical social structure than the Western middle- and upper-middle-class children usually tested in experimental developmental psychology. This might explain Maya children’s tendency to endorse the testimony of the dominant, in which case we might expect different results in Western middle- and upper-middle-class children. In particular, the latter might take dominance into account less than the Maya children. The plausibility of cross-cultural differences in this respect is bolstered by findings of significant differences between adults of different cultures in the processing of dominance (e.g., Freeman et al., 2009, Liew et al., 2011).
The second novelty of the current study is that it introduces different cues to dominance. In Experiment 1, dominance was induced in a way that is very similar to that of Castelain and colleagues (in press). By contrast, in Experiment 2, dominance took the shape of an asymmetry in decisional power; two protagonists disagree over which decision to make, and one always gets her way. As mentioned above, we know that 3- to 5-year-olds are able to infer dominance both from physical supremacy and from decisional power (Charafeddine et al., 2015). However, we do not know whether those two ways of establishing dominance elicit selective inferences regarding the trustworthiness of either the dominant or the subordinate. In particular, given the developmental changes in the way that dominance is expressed among young children—from physical toward verbal cues—we might expect developmental differences so that, for instance, individuals whose dominance was established through physical supremacy become less trusted with age.
The third novelty of the current experiments is the inclusion of younger children: 3-year-olds. The inclusion of this age range is relevant for two reasons. First, as mentioned above, it is interesting to test for potential developmental differences in the importance of physical supremacy as an expression of dominance because it is known to be more prevalent in early ages (e.g., Hawley, 1999). Second, several experiments in the trust in testimony literature have revealed significant differences in the way that 3- and 4-year-olds evaluate testimony (see, e.g., Clément, 2010). Moreover, many experiments have shown that 3-year-olds respond well to the type of paradigm used here (e.g., Clément, 2010, Harris, 2012).
Finally, the fourth novelty involves the introduction of a new testimony task. Besides the localization task used in Castelain and colleagues’ (in press) study, our experiments also used a labeling task. In this task, children are presented with a novel object, and they need to name it on the basis of the contradictory suggestions of two informants. This labeling task has been used in many previous experiments on the development of trust in testimony. Moreover, the use of both a localization task and a labeling task allows testing for the effects of dominance on trust in two different domains: episodic (localization task) and semantic (labeling task) (Koenig & Stephens, 2014).
Although the existing literature does not allow for very strong predictions regarding the effects of these novel features, there are grounds to expect that they would have some effects. The current participants might be less likely to trust dominants than the Maya participants, and younger children might put more weight on dominance induced through physical supremacy as compared with older children, who might put more weight on dominance induced through decisional power.
Besides their theoretical import, these novel features have great practical import; they make it much easier for other researchers to build on the results of our experiments. Nearly all the experiments in the development of trust in testimony literature rely on Western middle- and upper-middle-class children, many test 3- to 5-year-olds, and many use a labeling task. The current results provide a crucial step forward before more refined hypotheses about the influence of dominance on testimony can be tested—as they likely will because trust in testimony, on the one hand, and dominance, on the other, are currently the focus of significant efforts in developmental research.
Section snippets
Participants
This experiment involved 74 children: 25 3-year-olds (13 girls, Mage = 43.9 months, SD = 2.36, range = 40–47), 23 4-year-olds (14 girls, Mage = 53.6 months, SD = 3.87, range = 48–59), and 26 5-year-olds (10 girls, Mage = 65.6 months, SD = 2.84, range = 61–71) from two schools in Lyons, France. All the participants were French, and all the experiments were conducted in French. Most children came from middle- or upper-middle-class families. Each child was seen individually in a quiet room by a single experimenter for
Participants
This experiment involved 67 children: 22 3-year-olds (15 girls, Mage = 43.77 months, SD = 2.75, range = 39–47), 23 4-year-olds (9 girls, Mage = 54.34 months, SD = 3.56, range = 48–59), and 22 5-year-olds (10 girls, Mage = 66.50 months, SD = 4.23, range = 60–73) from two schools in Lyons. The demographics were similar to those of Experiment 1. Most children came from middle- or upper-middle-class families. Each child was seen individually in a quiet room by a single experimenter for about 10 min.
Materials and procedure
As in Experiment 1,
Discussion
Like infants, who are shown to infer dominance from physical size (Thomsen et al., 2011) and from the capacity to prevail in a situation where there is a conflict between agents’ goals (Mascaro & Csibra, 2012), preschoolers have been shown to infer dominance from a variety of relational cues such as physical competition and decisional power (Charafeddine et al., 2015). Preschoolers have also been shown to draw a variety of inferences from attributions of dominance (Charafeddine et al., 2015). A
Acknowledgments
We thank all the children and the schools for their enthusiastic participation in the research and also Jérémy Collomb-Clerc and Alan Ferreira for their help in data collection. The study was supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the program “Licornes” (ANR-12-CULT-0002) and by an Ambizione grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation to H.M. (PZ00P1_142388/1) and by a grant from Région Rhône Alpes (CIBLE program) to Jean-Baptiste Van
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