Children's understanding of dominance and prestige in China and the UK

Abstract

Individuals can gain high social rank through dominance (based on coercion and fear) and prestige (based on merit and admiration). We conducted a cross-cultural developmental study and tested 5- to 12-year-olds, and adults in the UK and China, aiming to determine (a) the age at which children distinguish dominance and prestige, and (b) the influence of cultural values on rank-related reasoning. We specifically tested participants in China because of the value of prestigious individuals modestly yielding to subordinates, a social skill that becomes more salient with age. In both populations, the distinction between dominance and prestige emerged at five years, and improved over childhood. When reasoning about a resource conflict between a high-ranking party and a subordinate, adults in both countries expected high-rank individuals to win, although Chinese adults were less likely to do so regarding prestigious individuals. Across the two countries, younger children (5–7 years) responded similarly to each other, not favoring either party as the winner. Older children (9–12 years), however, diverged. Those in the UK chose the high-rank party, while those in China made no systematic inference. Overall, our findings suggest that while children distinguish prestige and dominance comparably in the two countries, they develop culturally-influenced expectations about the behavior of high-rank individuals.

Introduction

Children start to understand hierarchical relations from a very young age. For example, infants expect a physically larger agent to win right-of-way against a smaller competitor at 10 months (Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, & Carey, 2011), and by a few months later generalize dominance roles across different situations (Mascaro & Csibra, 2012). These are instances of infants predicting who would win zero-sum conflicts through force or threat of force. In their second year, infants also recognize that non-coercive forms of social interaction can convey differences in social rank. Specifically, 21-month-old infants expect subordinates to obey a revered and respectful character, even when absent (Margoni, Baillargeon, & Surian, 2018). This second form of social rank has been called prestige. It is different from the coercive dominance of individuals who impose their will on others by eliciting fear and avoidance, and instead relies on admiration and respect (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). Prestige has been studied from different angles with adults (Cheng & Tracy, 2014), but barring a few exceptions (Chudek, Heller, Birch, & Henrich, 2012; Margoni, Baillargeon, & Surian, 2018), it has been overlooked in developmental research. Consequently, previous work seems to suggest that infants and children have a stronger grasp on dominance than prestige. However, most studies have used cues that can indicate both dominance and prestige, such as physical size (Thomsen et al., 2011), age difference (Charafeddine et al., 2015), and being imitated (Over & Carpenter, 2015). Thus, whether and to what degree children distinguish these two forms of hierarchical processes has not been investigated systematically. We address this by testing two age groups of children.

Apart from delienating possible ontogenetic shifts, we also compare two cultural groups. Our goal is to investigate predictions about future behaviors of prestigious and dominant individuals. Typically, children expect individuals of higher rank to gain more resources than those of lower rank (Charafeddine et al., 2016; Enright, Gweon, & Sommerville, 2017). Because developmental findings about social rank typically come from Euro-American populations, it is unclear whether children from other cultural environments reason similarly. Thus, our aim is to investigate the influence of cultural learning on inferences about resources and social rank, for both dominance and prestige. On the basis of ongoing anthropological research by one of the authors in Nanjing, China, we predicted that China would offer an interesting comparative test case due to cultural values about yielding in conflict that are markedly different from Euro-American societies. This involves, in particular, the value of prestigious individuals yielding to others, which raises the question as to whether inferences about social rank and conflict might be affected. The comparison between children in the two countries will help answer these questions. We first review previous work on children's understanding of social hierarchies, then outline differences between the two populations.

Dominance hierarchies organize the social worlds of many species (Drews, 1993), including humans (Fiske, 1992), not just in adulthood, but also early in ontogeny. Infants (11–16 months) observed in a daycare could be identified as being dominant or subordinate in relation to others based on the outcomes of their agonistic disputes (Russon & Waite, 1991). Interestingly, infants preferred to imitate high-ranking individuals. Similarly, an observational study of four- and five-year-old children found dominance relationships to be relatively stable over time (La Freniere & Charlesworth, 1983). This study also revealed that aggressive physical exchanges decreased over the course of the year, perhaps reflecting the entrenchment of the dominance hierarchy and the lessened need to assert rank at each turn. Once again, dominant children were the objects of attention, affiliation, and popularity (La Freniere & Charlesworth, 1983; also see Hawley, 1999; Abramovitch, 1976; Chance, 1967; Fiske, 1993; Hold, 1976; Vaughn & Waters, 1981).

Taking an evolutionary perspective, Henrich & Gil-White (2001) proposed prestige as a uniquely human process that provides the individual with high rank, but operates on an entirely different premise. Instead of relying on force or threat of force, prestige is achieved through “merit in the eyes of others” (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001, p. 170). Prestigious individuals typically possess highly-prized expertise, which others strive to witness in action and learn from. As a result, prestigious parties exert considerable influence over “clients”, but are careful to avoid enforcing their views. In turn, lower-status individuals treat prestigious persons with respect, seek proximity to them, express admiration for, and pay tribute to them. The key similarity between dominance and prestige is that they both bring about deference from others, but through different mechanisms: Deference towards a dominant person is driven by fear and an intention to avoid a showdown, which would most likely result in the lower-ranking person losing. In contrast, deference towards a prestigious person is given freely because it grants lower-status individuals proximity, which provides learning opportunities.

For adults, dominance and prestige are effective ways of achieving high rank (Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Kingstone, & Henrich, 2013; Redhead, Cheng, Driver, Foulsham, & O’Gorman, 2019), but exhibit differences in many dimensions such as leadership strategies (e.g. Case, Bae, & Maner, 2018; Case & Maner, 2014; Maner & Mead, 2010), associated emotions (hubristic vs. authentic pride, Cheng, Tracy, & Henrich, 2010), personality traits (Cheng et al., 2010), and testosterone levels (Johnson, Burk, & Kirkpatrick, 2007).

Prior to Henrich & Gil-White (2001), Hawley (1999) put forth a similar-minded but developmentally-couched theory of strategies that lead to social dominance. Her framework differentiated between coercive and prosocial strategies—analogous to dominant and prestigious processes respectively—and suggested that infants' and younger preschoolers' repertoire of behaviors only includes coercive strategies. These coercive strategies buy attention, affiliation, and influence among subordinate group members. However, a bifurcation then begins such that prosocial tendencies exist alongside coercion between the ages of four and seven (Hawley, 2002, Hawley, 2003), and take over by age eight. At this point, coercive strategies cease to be effective in winning influence (Hawley, 1999).

Finally, recent work on social hierarchies has distinguished between power and status as bases of social rank (Anicich, Fast, Halevy, & Galinsky, 2016; Blader, Shirako, & Chen, 2016; Fast, Halevy, & Galinsky, 2012; Hays & Bendersky, 2015; Magee & Galinsky, 2008). Power is defined as asymmetric control over outcomes, while status is respect and admiration in the eyes of others (Fast et al., 2012). Both dominant and prestigious individuals may possess some degree of power and status, but dominance is more closely associated with power – coercive power in particular – while prestige is more closely associated with high status. An individual's high rank in a particular social hierarchy can be based on either power or status, and therefore both prestigious and dominant individuals are of high rank.

Infants and preschoolers infer rank based on a wide range of cues as third-party observers, and most research to date has used cues that could signal both dominance and prestige. In addition to 10-month-old infants recognizing size as a cue to rank (Thomsen et al., 2011), slightly younger infants expect members of larger groups to win (Pun, Birch, & Baron, 2016). Three-year-olds similarly expect larger groups to prevail over smaller ones (Lourenco, Bonny, & Schwartz, 2016), and preschoolers recognize the “boss” or the “person in charge” based on cues of physical size, decision-making ability, age asymmetry, resource asymmetry (Charafeddine et al., 2015), resource control, goal achievement, being asked permission (Gülgöz & Gelman, 2017), being imitated (Over & Carpenter, 2015), and non-verbal gestures such as posture (Brey & Shutts, 2015). Further, representations of hierarchical roles in a pair are stable during infancy, meaning that infants expect an agent who has won a zero-sum conflict to win again in other situations (Mascaro & Csibra, 2012). Infants also succeed at inferring transitivity of rank by around 11 months (Gazes, Hampton, & Lourenco, 2017; Mascaro & Csibra, 2012, Mascaro & Csibra, 2014). Simultaneously, infants and young children expect high rank to grant benefits. Infants at 17 months expect high-ranking parties to receive more resources (Enright, Gweon, & Sommerville, 2017), preschoolers allocate more resources to them (Charafeddine et al., 2016), expect them to win competitive games (Charafeddine et al., 2015), and trust their testimony (Castelain, Bernard, Van der Henst, & Mercier, 2016; Bernard et al., 2016). At around age two, infants even show a preference for a character who wins a right-of-way contest, but not if they won through physical force (Thomas, Thomsen, Lukowski, Abramyan, & Sarnecka, 2018).

Although this literature has mostly framed these findings in terms of dominance, the provided cues (e.g. age asymmetry) could be indicative of either dominance or prestige. In fact, only one study has used a cue specifically linked to prestige (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001), namely bystander attention, and found that four-year-olds tended to imitate the actions of an actor who had been observed by others. Thus, while it may seem that infants and preschoolers have a solid grasp of dominance, and potentially a shakier one of prestige, all we know for certain is that children are sensitive to hierarchical relationships as observers. Consequently, the question of whether they differentiate between dominance and prestige as two rank-forming strategies remains understudied. The most relevant investigation is a looking-time study recently conducted by (Margoni, Baillargeon, & Surian, 2018), who showed 21-month-olds either a high-rank character who was revered by subordinates and respectful towards them (prestige-like), or another character who was physically abusive towards subordinates and feared by them (dominance-like). Infants' expected subordinates to heed the respected leader's wishes even after she was gone, but held no such expectation for the bullying figure. Hence, recognizing both forms of social rank has early roots. Nonetheless, it is still unknown whether children differentiate prestige from dominance. Experiment 1 tackles this question directly by matching characters against each other in a within-subjects design, presenting characters with cues of dominance and prestige, and asking whether children understand the combination of cues that define dominance and prestige: Do children understand that (1) dominant and prestigious individuals are both high in social rank, but (2) prestigious individuals are liked and approached, whereas (3) dominant individuals are feared and avoided? Moreover, we test two age groups of children (5–7 years, and 9–12 years) to examine the developmental trajectory of this reasoning.

The second question at the heart of this paper is whether children infer that high-ranking individuals have a higher chance at accessing a resource compared to a low-ranking individual. We chose to test children in China on the basis of 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork on children's social relationships in and out of school, carried out by one of the authors (an anthropologist) in Nanjing Kajanus, 2016, Kajanus, 2019, Kajanus, 2018; Kajanus, McAuliffe, Warneken, & Blake, 2019). The key Chinese cultural value of modest yielding of higher-ranking individuals to lower-ranking ones does not have an equivalent of equal importance in Euro-American cultural contexts. The concept of yielding (rang) refers to the ability to avoid, manage and end conflicts, as well as to display one's high rank through humility. For example, toddlers are taught to give up prized toys to children younger than themselves. Yielding is part of a more sophisticated system of status and power practiced by adults. In addition to modest yielding of higher-ranking persons to those of lower rank in relatively unimportant matters, lower-ranking persons can respectfully yield to those of higher rank.

The classic moral story on yielding, Kong Rong Rang Li, ‘Kong Rong Modestly Declines [yields] a Pear’, teaches both forms of yielding. In the story, 4-year-old Kong Rong has to distribute pears among himself, his older brothers and one younger brother. He distributes them according to age, giving the largest pear to the oldest brother, but keeps the smallest to himself. When questioned by his father, Kong Rong says, “I am younger, I should give the big pears to the older brothers.” Father asks: “But isn't little brother even younger than you?” Kong Rong responds: “Because he is younger than me, I should also yield to him.” The story of Kong Rong has appeared in moral education texts, including San Zi Jin, Three Character Classic, from late imperial times, and reproductions of the story are popular in children's books and TV-shows today. Yielding is taught and enacted in various ways in children's everyday life. For instance, adults often break up a conflict between two children by addressing the older one with criticisms such as “Why can't you just yield to her?” Further, the ethnographic research found that children who are high in prestige in their peer group are especially expected to yield to others.

While the value of yielding is upheld in China today, it is not uncontested. As a generation of children has come of age as the only child of their family, unprecedented emphasis has been placed on individualistic orientations over collective ones (Anagnost, 2004; Fong, 2004; Kajanus, 2015; Kleinman, Yan, Jun, Lee, & Zhang, 2011; Kuan, 2015; Rofel, 2007; Xu, 2014; Yan, 2009). Values imported from Euro-American pedagogies into education, such as the freedom of expressing personal opinions and individualistic desires, have also come to compete with the importance of yielding to others. Further, as the primary context for practicing modesty would traditionally have been sibling relationships, the fact that most children do not have siblings diminishes their opportunities for learning and expressing it. In light of all this, children struggle to adapt the norm of modest yielding in their behavior (Xu, 2017). In response, parents and educators often consciously facilitate situations for children to practice yielding, which in turn leads to concerns that pressuring children into yielding to others encourages hypocrisy and scheming rather than appropriate moral development. For example, children may strategically yield to get praised by adults, which is against the value placed on sincerity and freedom of expression (Xu, 2017). In short, showing modesty and yielding to others, even those lower in rank to oneself, is highly valued and encouraged in China, but within a complex social context that acknowledges its difficulty for children.

The cultural difference between Chinese and Euro-American contexts was further explored through 6  months of ethnographic fieldwork in a school and community in London, UK, on children's hierarchies and conflict behaviors. This work revealed clearly different ideas about hierarchy and conflict in comparison to the ones observed in China. More dominant and aggressive behaviors were tolerated by peers in London than in Nanjing. In Nanjing, children were taught by adults to give up resources or hold back their views in order to prevent or resolve conflicts; in London, children were encouraged to defend their view in a respectful manner. In London, therefore, winning conflicts was a sign of high status; while in Nanjing losing conflicts could also be a sign of leadership.

On the basis of this ethnographic comparison, we hypothesized that the Chinese values surrounding yielding may result in a difference between children in Nanjing and London, in their inferences about who would win a desired resource in a conflict. Alternatively, children in Nanjing may manifest the same expectations as children in London in light of the sophistication of the norms of yielding in different situations, as well as the increasing emphasis on individualistic values and children's lack of opportunities to practice yielding with siblings. The second experiment tests for a potential difference in expectations between adults in China and the UK, and the final experiment tests it with two age groups of children (5–7 years, and 9–12 years).