Representation of stable social dominance relations by human infants
Representation of stable social dominance relations by human infants
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1113194109
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发表时间：
2012-05-01
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Csibra, Gergely
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Mascaro, Olivier;Csibra, Gergely
人类代表社会关系的能力的起源是什么？我们通过研究人类婴儿对社会支配地位作为一种稳定关系的理解来解决这个问题。我们向婴儿展示了冲突情况下动画代理之间的互动。研究1和研究2的目标是对社会支配地位稳定性的预期。他们发现，15个月的人(在较小程度上，12个月的人)希望两个代理人之间的不对称关系从一个冲突到另一个冲突保持稳定。要做到这一点，婴儿需要推断，当一个代理人(主导)的目标与另一个代理人(从属)的目标冲突时，她将始终如一地占上风。研究3和4的目标是婴儿表现社交优势的形式。在这些研究中，我们发现，12个月和15个月的孩子并没有将他们对支配地位的期望扩展到未被观察到的关系，即使他们本可以通过传递性推理建立起来的。这些结果表明，婴儿对稳定的期望源于他们将社会支配地位表现为两个主体之间的关系，而不是作为个人属性。婴儿表现出的对社会支配地位的理解反映了人类代表社会关系的能力的认知基础，这种能力可能在进化上是古老的，可能与非人类物种共享。
What are the origins of humans' capacity to represent social relations? We approached this question by studying human infants' understanding of social dominance as a stable relation. We presented infants with interactions between animated agents in conflict situations. Studies 1 and 2 targeted expectations of stability of social dominance. They revealed that 15-mo-olds (and, to a lesser extent, 12-mo-olds) expect an asymmetric relationship between two agents to remain stable from one conflict to another. To do so, infants need to infer that one of the agents (the dominant) will consistently prevail when her goals conflict with those of the other (the subordinate). Study 3 and 4 targeted the format of infants' representation of social dominance. In these studies, we found that 12- and 15-mo-olds did not extend their expectations of dominance to unobserved relationships, even when they could have been established by transitive inference. These results suggest that infants' expectation of stability originates from their representation of social dominance as a relationship between two agents rather than as an individual property. Infants' demonstrated understanding of social dominance reflects the cognitive underpinning of humans' capacity to represent social relations, which may be evolutionarily ancient, and may be shared with nonhuman species.