Dominance among unfamiliar peers starts in infancy

摘要

Dominance has been conceived for a long time in terms of asymmetry in agonistic conflicts. But this conception has shown its limits in the complexity of children's social worlds. Today, dominance is rather conceived in terms of asymmetry in resource control within children's dyads. Some observational studies have been done in this context, but only on small groups of familiar children and often up to 3 years of age. Our aim was to reveal whether asymmetry in resource control would occur between younger children who met each other for the first time in the presence of an attractive toy. We observed 201 dyads of 19-month-old unfamiliar peers in four repetitive competitive sessions for a toy. Resource control and asymmetry between participants were highly consistent between sessions. The level of asymmetry in resource control between participants was very high. This asymmetry was influenced neither by gender nor by age, and coercive behaviors in the situation, physical aggression rated by parents, birth order, and day-care habits did not account for the asymmetry in our setting. However, body size at birth (although not at the time of testing) and anxiety rated by parents contributed significantly to the asymmetry in resource control.