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

SUBMITTER: Meng X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8149634 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature