Abstract
Very early on, children understand the hierarchical dimension of the social environment and use a variety of cues to guess who has more power in an interaction. A crucial aspect of power perception lies in the evaluation of high-power and low-power individuals. The current study examined the evaluation of power by preschoolers through social influence. Past research has shown that preschoolers take social category information into account when expressing their preferences. In particular, they tend align their preferences with those of same-gender and same-age individuals. In the current study, 4- and 5-year-old children were presented with a power interaction between two children through body postures and were asked whether they would prefer the same items as those preferred by the high-power child or those preferred by the low-power child. Overall, the participants did not choose the items preferred by the high-power child significantly more often than those preferred by the low-power child. However, unexpected gender effects were found and indicated that the power asymmetry influenced more male than female participants. Indeed, when they saw a power interaction between two boys (Experiments 1 and 2), male participants aligned their choices with those of the high-power boy more than with those of the low-power boy. However, when male participants saw an interaction between two girls (Experiment 3), an opposite pattern was observed: they aligned their choices with those of the low-power girl more than with those of the high-power girl. In contrast, in the three experiments, there were approximately as many girls who aligned their preferences with those of the high-power child as there were girls who aligned their preferences with those of the low-power child. The current study reveals the importance of taking gender into account, both at the level of participants and stimuli, in the evaluation of power by preschoolers.
Highlights
From an early age, children experience asymmetrical relationships with adults who exercise various forms of authority over them and with their peers
This may suggest that power is not a social dimension that influences children’s preferences to the same extent as social similarity and prestige do
This would not necessarily imply that power is irrelevant to children and it could mean that the physical dimension preempted the power dimension
Summary
Children experience asymmetrical relationships with adults who exercise various forms of authority over them and with their peers. Children understand the hierarchical dimension of their social environment, even when they are in a bystander position They use a variety of cues to guess who the boss is or to predict who will win in a conflict. Preschoolers take into account differences in age, wealth and physical postures to predict who the boss is (Keating and Bai, 1986; Brey and Shutts, 2015; Charafeddine et al, 2015; Terrizzi et al, 2019) They are sensitive to different forms of behavioral asymmetries: imposing one’s choices, being imitated and setting norms for others are associated with more power (Over and Carpenter, 2013; Charafeddine et al, 2015; Gülgöz and Gelman, 2017)
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