Foundations of Reasoning About Social Dominance

Understanding the factors that shape the social landscape is essential for living in a group, where dominant individuals often have greater control over and access to desired resources such as food and mates. Recently, researchers have demonstrated that preverbal infants, similar to their nonhuman primate relatives, already possess the cognitive schemas necessary to represent social dominance in relationships, using ecologically relevant cues such as relative physical size and group size. In this article, we discuss the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins of infants' and children's capacity to represent social dominance in relationships and hierarchies, and examine how these initial representations are enriched across early childhood.