@article{ref1,
title="Infants choose those who defer in conflicts",
journal="Current biology",
year="2019",
author="Thomas, Ashley J. and Sarnecka, Barbara W.",
volume="29",
number="13",
pages="2183-2189.e5",
abstract="For humans and other social species, social status matters: it determines who wins access to contested resources, territory, and mates [1-11]. Human infants are sensitive to dominance status cues [12, 13]. They expect conflicts to be won by larger individuals [14], those with more allies [15], and those with a history of winning [16-18]. But being sensitive to status cues is not enough; individuals must also use status information when deciding whom to approach and whom to avoid [19]. In many non-human species, low-status individuals avoid high-status individuals and in so doing avoid the threat of aggression [20-23]. In these species, high-status individuals commit random acts of aggression toward subordinates [23] and even commit infanticide [24-26]. However, for less reactively aggressive species [27, 28], high-status individuals may be good coalition partners. This is especially true for humans, where high-status individuals can provide guidance, protection, and knowledge to subordinates [2, 29, 30]. Indeed, human adults [31-33], human toddlers [34], and adult bonobos [35] prefer high-status individuals to low-status ones. Here, we present 6 experiments testing whether 10- to 16-month-old human infants choose high- or low-status individuals-specifically, winners or yielders in zero-sum conflicts-and find that infants choose puppets who yield. Intriguingly, toddlers just 6 months older choose the winners of such conflicts [34]. This suggests that, although humans start out like many other species, avoiding high-status others, we shift in toddlerhood to approaching high-status individuals, consistent with the idea that, for humans, high-status individuals can provide benefits to low-status ones.<br><br>Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0960-9822",
doi="10.1016/j.cub.2019.05.054",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.05.054"
}