Nonverbal displays of dominance and prestige: Evidence for cross-cultural and early-emerging recognition.

Two universal strategies for attaining influence-dominance, or the use of intimidation and force to obtain power, and prestige, or garnering respect by demonstrating knowledge and expertise-are communicated through distinct nonverbal displays in North America. Given evidence for the emergence and effectiveness of these strategies across cultures, including non-Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic small-scale, traditional societies in Africa, Asia, and South America, the nonverbal displays that are used to reliably communicate these strategies also might be universal. Here, we demonstrate that the dominance display is recognized by the Mayangna, a small-scale society in rural Nicaragua, and by Canadian children as young as 2 and 3 years old.

Infants infer third-party social dominance relationships based on visual access to intergroup conflict.

During a conflict, having a greater number of allies than the opposition can improve one's success in a conflict. However, allies must be aware that has a conflict has occurred, and this is often influenced by what they are able to see. Here, we explored whether infants' assessment of social dominance is influenced by whether or not social allies have visual access to an episode of intergroup conflict.

Developmental antecedents of representing "group" behavior: A commentary on Pietraszewski's theory of groups.

Central to Pietraszewski's theory is a set of group-constitutive roles within four triadic primitives. Although some data from the developmental and biological sciences support Pietraszewski's theory, other data raise questions about whether similar behavioral expectations hold across various ecological conditions and interactions. We discuss the potential for a broader set of conceptual primitives that support reasoning about groups.

The effect of familiarity on infants' social categorization capacity.

Recent studies indicate that a preference for people from one's own race emerges early in development. Arguably, one potential process contributing to such a bias has to do with the increased discriminability of own- vs. other-race faces-a process commonly attributed to perceptual narrowing of unfamiliar groups' faces, and analogous to the conceptual homogenization of out-groups.

The power of allies: Infants' expectations of social obligations during intergroup conflict.

Many species of animals form social allegiances to enhance survival. Across disciplines, researchers have suggested that allegiances form to facilitate within group cooperation and defend each other against rival groups. Here, we explore humans' reasoning about social allegiances and obligations beginning in infancy, long before they have experience with intergroup conflict.

Foundations of infants' social group evaluations.

Previous research has suggested that infants exhibit a preference for familiar over unfamiliar social groups (e.g., preferring individuals from their own language group over individuals from a foreign language group).

Infants use relative numerical group size to infer social dominance.

Detecting dominance relationships, within and across species, provides a clear fitness advantage because this ability helps individuals assess their potential risk of injury before engaging in a competition. Previous research has demonstrated that 10- to 13-mo-old infants can represent the dominance relationship between two agents in terms of their physical size (larger agent = more dominant), whereas younger infants fail to do so. It is unclear whether infants younger than 10 mo fail to represent dominance relationships in general, or whether they lack sensitivity to physical size as a cue to dominance.