Infants' reasoning about social hierarchies: Key insights from the past 25 years and a research agenda for the next 25 years

One of the most consequential discoveries about infant cognition and behavior in the past 25 years is the finding that infants appear able to perceive and reason about social hierarchies and social status. Yet, there are many important and fascinating questions yet to be answered. Here, we highlight major questions across three domains: conceptual, developmental, and applied. The conceptual questions concern the nature of infants’ representations of social status. For example, what features of an individual or context do infants perceive as status-relevant, and how abstract are the ensuing representations that infants form? The second set of questions address the development of status-based cognition. How early do abstract representations of status hierarchies emerge and are they stable or variable across development and across different situational or cultural contexts? The final set of questions are applied and address how and when children map hierarchies onto real-world groups, and the consequences once they do so. For example, how do early conceptions and representations of status relate to the beliefs that children express about themselves and about others across development? Together, we hope that our review of the rich findings from the past 25 years, and our framework for addressing the remaining questions, may serve as a springboard for the next 25 years of research into the theoretically and practically rich question of how, when, and why infants develop their sophisticated capacities to reason about social hierarchies and social status.