The principle, the bigger the better, applies to many species in nature. Birds spread their feathers to appear larger. It seems that people vote for the highest candidate in the election. Even children as young as 10 months use sizes to interpret social hierarchy.
Lotte Thomsen and colleagues at Harvard showed children between 11 and 16 months a series of videos showing drawings. The drawings were intentionally made abstract so that infants would focus only on information related to size and conflict.
In movies, big and small drawing bump into each other while trying to cross the same path. Sometimes the smaller drawing bows to the larger rival, other times, the larger drawing retreats before the smaller one. Thomsen measures how long the baby stares at the screen after the battle is settled. The children looked at the screen for an average of 20 seconds when the large drawing lost to the smaller one, and only an average of 12 seconds when the large drawing won.
A long look
Psychologists agree that the child looked longer at the scene in which the surprise was greater. Thomsen thinks that even prelingual children (children who have not yet developed speech) understand social dominance enough to know that the battle in which David wins Goliath is not expected.
,,Children come into the world with some basic concepts. Even before they speak - they are ready to understand physics and causation," says Thomsen. Research has also shown that babies acquire the mental maturity to perceive social dominance around 10 months.
,,I was quite skeptical at first, because I thought it seemed like a very far-fetched concept for young children," says Sarah Kord, who studies child cognition at Boston College in New York. "The data are quite good. "Babies seem to be more aware of social dominance much earlier than we thought," she said.
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