They have only just learnt to walk and talk - and have only just started to develop social relationships with children of their own age. Yet, these tiny toddlers already use cues of social status to decide which people they prefer or would rather avoid. This has just been established by researchers from Aarhus BSS and the University of California, Irvine, through experiments carried out on toddlers aged 21 to 31 months.

Previous research has shown that even nine-month-old infants can grasp a simple conflict of interest. When two individuals block each other’s path, the infants will automatically assume that the largest person will defeat the smallest. Lotte Thomsen, professor of psychology at the University of Oslo and associate professor at Aarhus BSS, and her colleagues, established this.

Now researchers are taking it one step further by demonstrating how toddlers also themselves prefer to affiliate with the winners of these conflicts and avoid those who they have seen yield to others. The research results have recently been published in Nature Human Behavior in the article ”Toddlers prefer those who win, but not when they win by force”.

“The way you behave in a conflict of interest reveals something about your social status,” says Ashley Thomas from UC Irvine, who is the lead author of the article. She continues:

“Across all social animal species, those with a lower social status will yield to those above them in the hierarchy. We wanted to explore whether small children also judge high and low status individuals differently.”

To explore this question, the researchers used the basic paradigm of Lotte Thomsen’s previous research where two puppets attempt to cross a stage in opposite directions. When the puppets meet in the middle, they block each other’s way. One puppet then yields to the other and moves aside, allowing the other puppet to continue and reach its goal of crossing the stage. Afterwards, the children were presented with the two puppets. 20 out of 23 children reached for the puppet that had “won” the conflict on the stage - the unyielding puppet. Thus, the children preferred the high-status puppet - the one that others voluntarily yield to.