Who Takes the Risk? Children’s Expectations of Dominant and Prestigious Leaders in Risky Situations

Abstract

Humans navigate status hierarchies through two pathways: dominance, where individuals attain influence through coercion and intimidation, and prestige, where individuals are granted influence based on competence and prosociality. How do children expect leaders to behave in a collaborative context involving risk? In this ongoing study (N=77), we explored whether children ages 6 to 8 have different expectations about who should take on risky tasks in dominance- and prestige-based hierarchies. Children learned about two novel social groups: the dominant Glerks and the prestigious Zonks, and watched scenarios in which a leader and follower from each social group approached obstacles (crossing a river and jumping over a trench) attempting to harvest apples. We then asked children to predict whether the leader would complete the risky task, or delegate the task to a follower. In preliminary results, we find that children expect that dominant leaders are more likely to complete the risky task (74% “complete” responses) than prestigious leaders (66% “complete” responses; β= -0.51, SE = 0.30, z = -1.72, p = .086). Overall, this work may suggest that children modulate their expectations of dominant and prestigious leaders depending on the demands of the collaborative task, pointing to early-developing intuitions about how risk and costly action should be distributed among those with different forms of social power.