Author: Scotty Hendricks / Source: Big Think
Then candidate Donald Trump holds a baby the end of a rally at Great Bay Community College in 2016. The baby is making definite judgments on the leadership abilities of Mr. Trump.(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
Researchers have just discovered that infants can determine the difference between a bully who coerces people into obedience and a leader who utilizes respect to encourage people to follow them.
They also found that the infants have certain expectations of what people facing bullies or leaders will do next.Even infants know a good leader when they see one
Francesco Margoni, a postdoc at the University of Trento, professor Luca Surian at Trento, and professor Renée Baillargeon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign carried out the study with a group of 21-month-old children using a series of cartoons.
The first test’s cartoons showed a bully coercing other characters into action and then featured a respected leader instructing people to do the same thing.
The cartoons indicated that the bully was mean and that the leader was respected before any other action took place. The bully was identified by showing them striking the characters and stealing their ball, while the leader was bowed to and given the ball as a gift.
The cartoon introduced the leader or bully (yellow) by showing them either being respected by the red characters or attacking them with a stick. The first test featured a large headdress on the yellow figure which was removed or altered for later tests. (Margoni et al. provided by Dr. Baillargeon)
The second half of the cartoon showed the characters going to bed, as the bully or leader told them to do. The bully or leader then left. The cartoons then either showed the remaining characters staying in bed or getting up as soon as the authority figure was gone.
For the test, the yellow figure, now identified as a leader or bully, would command the red characters to go to bed. After the yellow figure left, the red characters would either continue to obey or immediately go back to playing. The responses of the children varied accordingly. (Margoni et al. provided by Dr. Baillargeon)
In studies like this, the very young children tend to look longer at an unexpected event before their attention span gives out than at expected ones. By comparing how long they spend looking at each cartoon, the researchers can determine what the toddlers were expecting to happen.
As predicted, the infants expected the characters sent to bed by a leader to continue to obey after the leader was gone and paid more attention to the case where they left bed immediately. They were equally as interested in both cases with the bully, however. This suggests that they thought both outcomes were plausible as it was reasonable to take steps to avoid being hit again.
Size doesn’t matter
A second experiment was undertaken to confirm the first, and account for issues of interpretation. Since it is known that infants expect larger individuals to win confrontations, the headdresses of the leader and bully were removed to assure that the larger size of the characters didn’t influence the infants’ expectations.
The results were the same; the children expected a leader to be obeyed in their absence and were split on their expectations on if a bully would be obeyed or not after they left. It suggested that the children were able to distinguish the difference between the two based on behavioral cues and had different conceptions of how they acquired and…
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