ArticleScientific reports2021
Preverbal infants expect agents exhibiting counterintuitive capacities to gain access to contested resources.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Core Intuitions of Psychological Non-Contradiction: Infants Assume That Individual Agents Act and Communicate Coherently.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Active inference goes to school: the importance of active learning in the age of large language models.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Human and animal dominance hierarchies show a pyramidal structure guiding adult and infant social inferences.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Children's social evaluation toward prestige-based and dominance-based powerholders.BMC research notes · 2022Article
- A cross-cultural investigation of people's intuitive beliefs about the origins of cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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