DISTRIBUTE: Do Fundamental Resource Distribution Principles of Need, Effort & Coalition Size Manifest Even in the Infant Mind ?
Alternative title: FORDELING: Viser de grunnleggende fordelings-prinsippene som behov, innsats og koalisjons-størrelse sig allerede i spedbarnets sinn?
DISTRIBUTE is conducting political psychology with infants and preschoolers to reveal the meaningful mechanisms for coordinating resource distribution which are so basic that they manifest even in the preverbal mind. The distribution of resources, help, territory and priority decision rights are central dilemmas for group- living species and the core of politics. Navigating these dilemmas, young children must discover the structure of their social world: who is friend or foe, superior or subordinate, and what does this mean for how people interact? To solve this learnability problem, I argue that early- and reliably- developing core representations and motives have evolved for navigating basic kinds of social relationships with critical adaptive value. Consistent with this theoretical proposal, I discovered that preverbal human infants mentally represent social dominance and, like other animals, use relative size to predict the outcome of zero-sum conflict, spawning a new field of research (Thomsen et al, 2011, Science). Still, the origins of the gendered motives for coalitional dominance that potently predict political psychology among adults have remained unknown. We have used our novel experimental paradigm to demonstrate that adults and preverbal infants alike infer that third-parties will join a majority, rather than minority, coalition and that these inferences are independent of political ideology among adults (Kjos Fonn et al, 2024a). We have also shown that 3-6 year-old boys, but girls and not preverbal infants, themselves prefer a member of the largest majority group, and that these preferences robustly predict a wide range of ideologies and political attitudes that function to sustain (versus attenuate) societal hierarchy. These findings suggest that the basic motives for coalitional formidability we have documented among 3-year-olds continue to operate intuitively across life, undergirding political ideology. DISTRIBUTE may reveal Homo Politicus’ primary, most basic, bedrock principles for coordinating resource distribution.
DISTRIBUTE will do political psychology with infants to reveal the meaningful mechanisms for coordinating resource distribution which are so basic that they manifest even in the preverbal mind. The distribution of resources, help, territory and priority decision rights are central dilemmas for group- living species and the core of politics. Navigating these dilemmas, young children must discover the structure of their social world: who is friend or foe, superior or subordinate, and what does this mean for how people interact? To solve this learnability problem, I argue that early- and reliably- developing core representations and motives have evolved for navigating basic kinds of social relationships with critical adaptive value. Consistent with this theoretical proposal, I discovered that preverbal human infants mentally represent social dominance and, like other animals, use relative size to predict the outcome of zero-sum conflict, spawning a new field of research (Thomsen et al, 2011, Science). Still, the origins of the gendered motives for coalitional dominance that potently predict political psychology among adults remain unknown. We will 1) use our novel paradigm to test their emergence among infants and preschoolers. In addition, human society is also defined by reciprocity and by distributing resources according to need, effort and prior possession, yet it remains unknown if these coordination mechanism are inscribed already in the preverbal mind. We will also test the proposals that 2) preverbal infants prefer reciprocators, and 3) preverbal infants use the asymmetries of relative hunger need and prior relative effort to predict who will prevail in resource conflict. These mechanisms likely operate intuitively across life, and we will test if they undergird political ideology and -psychology. DISTRIBUTE may reveal Homo Politicus’ primary, most basic, bedrock principles for coordinating resource distribution.