How Preschoolers Associate Power with Gender in Male-Female Interactions: A Cross-Cultural Investigation
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
How Preschoolers Associate Power with Gender in Male-Female Interactions: A Cross-Cultural Investigation Rawan Charafeddine 1 & Imac Maria Zambrana 2 & Benoit Triniol 1 & Hugo Mercier 1 & Fabrice Clément 3 & Laurence Kaufmann 4 & Anne Reboul 1 & Francisco Pons 2 & Jean-Baptiste Van der Henst 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Interactions between males and females often display a power imbalance. Men tend to adopt more dominant physical postures, lead conversations more, and are more likely to impose their will on women than vice versa. Furthermore, social representations typically associate males with a higher power than females. However, little is known about how those representations emerge in early childhood. The present study investigated whether preschool children from different countries assign more power to males than to females in the context of mixed-gender interactions. In Experiments 1a (n = 148) and 1b (n = 403), which implemented power through body postures, 4–6 year-old children from France, Lebanon, and Norway strongly associated power with a male character. Experiment 2 (n = 160) showed that although both French boys and girls identified themselves more with a dominant than with a subordinate posture, girls were less likely to do so in a mixed-gender context. In Experiment 3 (n = 213), which no longer used body postures, boys from Lebanon and France attributed more decision power and resource control to a male puppet than did girls. By investigating gender representations through interactions, the present study shows that children associate gender and power at an early age. Keywords Power . Gender . Dominance . Preschoolers . Mixed-gender interactions . Cross-cultural comparisons
Because children grow up in a socially stratified world, they experience situations in which some individuals exert power and authority on others. Upon observing instances of such interactions, young children may appreciate that people who dominate and control others share common features. For instance, they will detect that adults often hold a position of Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-019-01116-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Rawan Charafeddine [email protected] Jean-Baptiste Van der Henst [email protected] 1
Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, Laboratoire Langage Cerveau Cognition, UMR-5304, 67 Boulevard Pinel, 69500 Bron Cedex, France
2
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
3
Université de Neuchâtel, 2000 Neuchâtel, Switzerland
4
Lausanne University, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
power when interacting with them. Similarly, as they begin to observe peer interactions, they might also learn that older children are likely to prevail over younger children in conflicts. Experimental work has shown that age and age-related features, such as body size, are robust cues used by young children and even infants to predict
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