Abstract
Social hierarchies are ubiquitous and determine a range of developmental outcomes, yet little is known about when children develop beliefs about status hierarchies in their communities. The present studies (3.5–6.9 years; N = 420) found that children begin to use gender and race as cues to status in early childhood, but that gender and race related to different status dimensions and had different consequences for inter-group attitudes. Children expected boys to hold higher status as defined by access to resources and decision-making power (e.g., having more toys and choosing what other people play with) but did not expect boys to have more wealth overall. Gender-related status beliefs did not relate to gender-related social preferences; instead, children preferred members of their own gender, regardless of their status beliefs. In contrast, children expected White people to be wealthier than Black people, and among some populations of children, the belief that White people were higher status (as defined by access to resources and decision-making power) weakly related to pro-White bias. Children’s status-expectations about others were unrelated to beliefs about their own status, suggesting children more readily apply category-based status beliefs to others than to themselves.
Highlights
Status hierarchies are ubiquitous across diverse human cultures and many animal species [1], and have a range of personal and group-level implications [2,3]
Participants were recruited and tested at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (CMOM)—a private, not-for-profit museum located in a large, urban city—in a single 5–15 minute research session conducted between September 2016 and July 2018
By assessing children’s status beliefs on the rope task, where social power and wealth were included in the definition of high status, we found that young children used gender to predict the status of others, a novel finding in the literature
Summary
Status hierarchies are ubiquitous across diverse human cultures and many animal species [1], and have a range of personal and group-level implications [2,3]. Despite the fact that social status can have this multi-dimensional nature, comprising asymmetric relations along one or more of the aforementioned dimensions, the ability to detect and track status hierarchies emerges early in human development. Infants use cues such as physical size and group size to predict dominance relations [6,7,8], and preschool-aged children show sensitivity to a broad set of cues to status (e.g., [9,10,11,12,13]) and use these cues to predict a range of behaviors. 4-yearolds expect resource-rich (high-status) individuals to share more than resource-poor (low-status) individuals [14].
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