Preverbal infants expect agents exhibiting counterintuitive capacities to gain access to contested resources

Abstract

Claims to supernatural power have been used as a basis for authority in a wide range of societies, but little is known about developmental origins of the link between supernatural power and worldly authority. Here, we show that 12- to 16-month-old infants expect agents exhibiting counterintuitive capacities to win out in a two-way standoff over a contested resource. Infants watched two agents gain a reward using either physically intuitive or physically counterintuitive methods, the latter involving simple forms of levitation or teleportation. Infants looked longer, indicating surprise, when the physically intuitive agent subsequently outcompeted a physically counterintuitive agent in securing a reward. Control experiments indicated that infants' expectations were not simply motived by the efficiency of agents in pursuing their goals, but specifically the deployment of counterintuitive capacities. This suggests that the link between supernatural power and worldly authority has early origins in development.

Figure 1

The procedure of the experiments. In the familiarization phase of Exp 1 and 3, a pair of agents gain a reward using either a physically intuitive or physically counterintuitive method. The latter was more efficient because the agents move in a straight line, which was the shortest distance to the reward (Exp 1), or disappear before each bump and quickly reappear after it, which leads faster goal-achievement (Exp 3). In Exp 2 and 4, both agents obtained the reward by moving in trajectories and speed identical to Exp 1 and 3 using physically intuitive methods (Exp 2, 4). Dotted lines present the trajectory displays of the agents (the lines do not exist in the videos), which are the same between Exp 1 and 2, and between Exp 3 and 4. In the test phase, either of the agent from the same pair of familiarization phase gains a zero-sum reward.

Figure 2

Number of social looks in the familiarization phase of Experiment 1 and 2. Intuitive = intuitive events: physically intuitive and inefficient goal-achievement events, counterintuitive = physically counterintuitive and efficient goal-achievement events, inefficient = inefficient and physically intuitive goal-achievement events, efficient = efficient and physically intuitive goal-achievement events. Error bars present the standard errors (*p < 0.05).

Figure 3

Average looking time for when either agent obtains the reward in Experiments 1–4. Diamonds indicate the means of the original looking time (not log-transformed). The horizontal line of boxes indicates upper quarterly, median and lower quarterly. Grey dots indicate looking time linked with a grey line for the same infant (within-participant). Whiskers indicate 1.5 interquartile range of upper and lower quarterly, and data that did not fit in the range was circled in red (*p < 0.05).