Who will get the lion’s share? FatCamera/Getty

Even babies seem to expect bullies to get more in life. For the first time, there’s evidence that infants expect socially dominant people to be treated differently.

From as young as 6 months, babies begin to judge other people’s characters, and by the age of 10 months, infants anticipate that bigger things will dominate smaller ones. Now an experiment has found that 17-month-old infants expect dominant people to have more toys and other resources.

Previous studies have found that, in the absence of any social differences, infants expect objects to be equally shared out between people. This was discovered by playing videos of Lego pieces being shared between two people, and seeing how long a toddler looked at variations from a fair procedure – a sign of surprise. Other studies involving sharing crackers or milk had similar findings.


Now a team has discovered that 17-month-old toddlers follow social cues to adjust their expectations of what a person should have. “They are tuned to what they observe – who is more powerful or competent – and use that to make further predictions,” says team member Hyo Gweon at Stanford University in California.

Surprising sharing

The team studied 80 infants across five different experiments that involved them sitting on their parents’ laps and watching videos of human-like puppets. In one set of videos, the puppets happily sat down on a purple chair and a brown stool, without any conflict. In the second set, the puppets fought over who got to sit in the purple chair, and the pushier puppet won.

Lego pieces were then given to the puppets. When the puppets behaved themselves, the toddlers seemed to anticipate the puppets would be handed an equal number of pieces. If one puppet was given more, the infants showed surprise by looking at the screen for an average of 6 extra seconds.

But when the puppets had been fighting, the toddlers were instead surprised when the pushier, dominant puppet wasn’t given more Lego. They seem to have expected it would get more than its fair share, watching this scenario for an average of 13 seconds, but watching for 8 seconds longer than this when the Lego was shared equally.

“The fact that dominance and resource notions are aligned and established so early may have consequences for larger societal issues,” says team member Jessica Sommerville of the University of Washington, Seattle. “This might help to explain why people endorse egalitarian resource distributions, yet we struggle to change the status quo in which some folks wind up with more resources even if they are undeserving of them.”

All of the infants tested were from the US. Laura Van Berkel at the University of Cologne, Germany, wonders if toddlers from more egalitarian countries would have behaved in the same way.

Journal reference: Cognition, DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.03.008

Read more: Infants take a rational response to ‘broken’ toys