Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
PLoS One. 2021 Feb 10;16(2):e0245450. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245450. eCollection 2021.
Social hierarchies are ubiquitous in all human relations since birth, but little is known about how they emerge during infancy. Previous studies have shown that infants can represent hierarchical relationships when they arise from the physical superiority of one agent over the other, but humans have the capacity to allocate social status in others through cues that not necessary entail agents' physical formidability. Here we investigate infants' capacity to recognize the social status of different agents when there are no observable cues of physical dominance. Our results evidence that a first presentation of the agents' social power when obtaining resources is enough to allow infants predict the outputs of their future. Nevertheless, this capacity arises later (at 18 month-olds but not at 15 month-olds) than showed in previous studies, probably due the increased complexity of the inferences needed to make the predictions.
社会等级在人类出生后就无处不在，但对于它们是如何在婴儿期出现的，人们知之甚少。之前的研究表明，当一个代理人在身体上优于另一个代理人时，婴儿可以表示出等级关系，但人类有能力通过不需要代理人身体威慑力的线索来赋予他人社会地位。在这里，我们研究了当没有可观察到的身体优势线索时，婴儿识别不同代理人社会地位的能力。我们的研究结果表明，当代理人在获得资源时第一次表现出社会权力，就足以让婴儿预测他们未来的结果。然而，这种能力出现得较晚（18 个月大，但 15 个月大时不会），这可能是由于做出预测所需的推理复杂性增加所致。
