Children’s thinking about group-based social hierarchies

Social stratification along lines of wealth, power, and status is prevalent in the world and is mirrored in people’s representations of the social world.Children come to use social group information to predict who is likely to hold greater wealth, power, and status in ways that, over development, increasingly reflect an awareness of group-based hierarchies in the world.Children learn about group-based hierarchies from a range of inputs including their direct observations, people’s nonverbal behaviors and intergroup interactions, and people’s verbal statements about groups.Whereas children show an early emerging tendency to perpetuate group-based hierarchies, efforts to rectify group-based hierarchies develop more gradually and involve explicit awareness of group-based inequities and their structural origins. Wealth, power, and status are distributed unevenly across social groups. A surge of recent research reveals that people being recognizing, representing, and reasoning about group-based patterns of inequity during the first years of life. We first synthesize recent research on what children learn about group-based social hierarchies as well as how this learning occurs. We then discuss how children not only learn about societal structures but become active participants in them. Studying the origins and development of children’s thoughts and behavior regarding group-based social hierarchies provides valuable insight into how systems of inequity are perpetuated across generations and how intergroup biases related to wealth, power, and status may be mitigated and reshaped early in development. Wealth, power, and status are distributed unevenly across social groups. A surge of recent research reveals that people being recognizing, representing, and reasoning about group-based patterns of inequity during the first years of life. We first synthesize recent research on what children learn about group-based social hierarchies as well as how this learning occurs. We then discuss how children not only learn about societal structures but become active participants in them. Studying the origins and development of children’s thoughts and behavior regarding group-based social hierarchies provides valuable insight into how systems of inequity are perpetuated across generations and how intergroup biases related to wealth, power, and status may be mitigated and reshaped early in development. Children’s thinking about group-based social hierarchiesSocial stratificationAcross the world, wealth (see Glossary), power, and status are distributed unevenly. Sociologists characterize these patterns of inequity as social stratification – the structuring of society into social hierarchies in which some groups of people hold greater wealth, power, and status than others. Importantly, social stratification intersects with other social categories (e.g., gender, race, nationality), resulting in specific types of stratification (e.g., gender stratification, racial stratification, global stratification) whereby people’s group memberships shape their social standing, opportunities, and experiences in the world.Research in social psychology has revealed that group-based hierarchies exist not only in the world but also in people’s minds [1.Axt J.R. et al.The rules of implicit evaluation by race, religion, and age.Psychol. Sci. 2014; 25: 1804-1815Crossref PubMed Scopus (80) Google Scholar, 2.Cheryan S. Markus H.R. Masculine defaults: identifying and mitigating hidden cultural biases.Psychol. Rev. 2020; 127: 1022-1052Crossref PubMed Scopus (3) Google Scholar, 3.Kteily N.S. et al.Hierarchy in the mind: the predictive power of social dominance orientation across social contexts and domains.J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 2011; 48: 543-549Crossref Scopus (67) Google Scholar]. People’s representations and attitudes regarding social hierarchies guide their social perceptions and interactions [4.Kteily N.S. Hierarchy in the eye of the beholder: (anti-)egalitarianism shapes perceived levels of social inequality.J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 2017; 112: 136-159Crossref PubMed Scopus (58) Google Scholar,5.Ho A.K. et al.Status boundary enforcement and the categorization of black–white biracials.J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 2013; 49: 940-943Crossref Scopus (74) Google Scholar], often leading to pernicious outcomes such as stereotyping and prejudice [6.Mandalaywala T.M. et al.Essentialism promotes racial prejudice by increasing endorsement of social hierarchies.Soc. Psychol. Personal. Sci. 2018; 9: 461-469Crossref PubMed Scopus (36) Google Scholar,7.Swencionis J.K. et al.Supporting social hierarchy is associated with White police officers’ use of force.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. 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American Psychological Association, 2015: 317-340Crossref Google Scholar]. On the flip side, an awareness of group-based hierarchies and inequalities in society also provides a necessary foundation for motivation toward social change [12.Kraus M.W. et al.The misperception of racial economic inequality.Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 2019; 14: 899-921Crossref PubMed Scopus (59) Google Scholar,13.Craig M.A. et al.Acting for whom, against what? Group membership and multiple paths to engagement in social change.Curr. Opin. Psychol. 2020; 35: 41-48Crossref PubMed Scopus (17) Google Scholar]. For these reasons, an important question for psychological scientists concerns how group-based hierarchies initially become represented in people’s minds, especially among young children as they first learn about social systems.A surge of recent research on the development of social cognition investigates how young children learn and think about the stratified structure of the world around them. This research reveals that young children recognize and represent differences in wealth, power, and status between social groups (e.g., [14.Olson K.R. et al.Children associate racial groups with wealth: evidence from South Africa.Child Dev. 2012; 83: 1884-1899Crossref PubMed Scopus (89) Google Scholar, 15.Mandalaywala T.M. et al.Children’s use of race and gender as cues to social status.PLoS One. 2020; 15e0234398Crossref PubMed Scopus (26) Google Scholar, 16.Yazdi H. et al.Children’s intergroup attitudes: insights from Iran.Child Dev. 2020; 91: 1733-1744Crossref PubMed Scopus (6) Google Scholar, 17.Charafeddine R. et al.How preschoolers associate power with gender in male–female interactions: a cross-cultural investigation.Sex Roles. 2020; 83: 453-473Crossref Scopus (10) Google Scholar, 18.Santhanagopalan R. et al.Leadership, gender, and colorism: children in India use social category information to guide leadership cognition.Dev. Sci. 2022; 25e13212Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar, 19.Marshall J. et al.The role of status in the early emergence of pro-White bias in rural Uganda.Dev. Sci. 2022; (Published online February 6, 2022)https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13240Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar]). But beyond uncovering when representations of group-based hierarchies form, the value of a developmental perspective lies in the opportunity to uncover how these representations take shape. Studying thinking about group-based stratification as it develops allows for a real-time examination of the mechanisms at play, the influence of early-life contexts and experiences, and the routes through which children come to uphold or challenge societal structures.Here, we first review research on children’s conceptual abilities to recognize asymmetries in social rank – in other words, where people are positioned in a social hierarchy. We then turn to evidence that children begin thinking about different social groups as having differing amounts of wealth, power, and status. We next synthesize research on the mechanisms through which learning about group-based hierarchies in the world occurs. In the remainder of the paper, we focus on how children not only learn about the social world but become active participants in social systems, capable of reifying or rectifying the hierarchies about which they become aware (Figure 1). Our goal in presenting this literature is to provide an overview of this quickly growing research area and to spark future questions within it.Early abilities to recognize and reason about social rank asymmetriesBeginning early in life, children are sensitive to basic markers of power asymmetries. For example, infants expect bigger (vs. smaller) individuals and numerically larger (vs. smaller) groups to prevail in zero-sum conflicts [20.Thomsen L. et al.Big and mighty: preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance.Science. 2011; 331: 477-480Crossref PubMed Scopus (223) Google Scholar,21.Pun A. et al.Infants use relative numerical group size to infer social dominance.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2016; 113: 2376-2381Crossref PubMed Scopus (5) Google Scholar]. Further, toddlers expect those who prevailed in the past to prevail in the future and across contexts [22.Bas J. Sebastian-Galles N. Infants’ representation of social hierarchies in absence of physical dominance.PLoS One. 2021; 16e0245450Crossref PubMed Scopus (1) Google Scholar,23.Mascaro O. Csibra G. Representation of stable social dominance relations by human infants.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2012; 109: 6862-6867Crossref PubMed Google Scholar], and expect resource distributions to favor those who prevail [24.Enright E.A. et al.‘To the victor go the spoils’: infants expect resources to align with dominance structures.Cognition. 2017; 164: 8-21Crossref PubMed Scopus (43) Google Scholar].As children develop, the range of cues they recognize as indicating social rank broadens and becomes increasingly nuanced. Children begin to infer individuals’ relative rank from cues including physical appearance (e.g., posture and facial features [25.Brey E. Shutts K. Children use nonverbal cues to make inferences about social power.Child Dev. 2015; 86: 276-286Crossref PubMed Scopus (56) Google Scholar,26.Terrizzi B.F. et al.Children’s developing judgments about the physical manifestations of power.Dev. Psychol. 2019; 55: 793-808Crossref PubMed Scopus (25) Google Scholar]), resource quality and quantity (e.g., [27.Shutts K. et al.Children use wealth cues to evaluate others.PLoS One. 2016; 11e0149360Crossref PubMed Scopus (80) Google Scholar, 28.Charafeddine R. et al.How preschoolers use cues of dominance to make sense of their social environment.J. Cogn. Dev. 2015; 16: 587-607Crossref Scopus (54) Google Scholar, 29.Enright E.A. et al.Children’s understanding and use of four dimensions of social status.J. Cogn. Dev. 2020; 21: 573-602Crossref Scopus (8) Google Scholar, 30.Gülgöz S. Gelman S.A. Who’s the boss? Concepts of social power across development.Child Dev. 2017; 88: 946-963Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar]), and degree of control and influence over others (e.g., [29.Enright E.A. et al.Children’s understanding and use of four dimensions of social status.J. Cogn. Dev. 2020; 21: 573-602Crossref Scopus (8) Google Scholar, 30.Gülgöz S. Gelman S.A. Who’s the boss? Concepts of social power across development.Child Dev. 2017; 88: 946-963Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar, 31.Kajanus A. et al.Children’s understanding of dominance and prestige in China and the UK.Evol. Hum. Behav. 2020; 41: 23-34Crossref Scopus (17) Google Scholar, 32.Over H. Carpenter M. Children infer affiliative and status relations from watching others imitate.Dev. Sci. 2015; 18: 917-925Crossref PubMed Scopus (33) Google Scholar, 33.Chudek M. et al.Prestige-biased cultural learning: bystander’s differential attention to potential models influences children’s learning.Evol. Hum. Behav. 2012; 33: 46-56Crossref Scopus (0) Google Scholar]) (Box 1). In one study [30.Gülgöz S. Gelman S.A. Who’s the boss? Concepts of social power across development.Child Dev. 2017; 88: 946-963Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar], researchers showed 3–9‐year‐old children vignettes depicting interactions between individuals and asked the children which character was 'in charge'. By age 3, children said that individuals who controlled resources, achieved goals, and gave others permission were 'in charge', and by age 5, children also conferred rank to those who set norms [30.Gülgöz S. Gelman S.A. Who’s the boss? Concepts of social power across development.Child Dev. 2017; 88: 946-963Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar]. In sum, young children are sensitive to a range of cues to wealth, power, and status differences when thinking about individuals and their interactions.Box 1Power versus statusPower and status often co-occur but are likely distinct. Whereas power is enacted (through control over resources and outcomes), status is conferred (through the respect and valuation of others) (reviewed in [120.Fiske S.T. et al.Status, power, and intergroup relations: the personal is the societal.Curr. Opin. Psychol. 2016; 11: 44-48Crossref PubMed Scopus (54) Google Scholar]; for a related distinction between dominance and prestige, which map closely onto power and status, respectively, see [121.Cheng J.T. et al.Two ways to the top: evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence.J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 2013; 104: 103-125Crossref PubMed Scopus (482) Google Scholar,122.Maner J.K. Dominance and prestige: a tale of two hierarchies.Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 2017; 26: 526-531Crossref Scopus (18) Google Scholar]).Dual considerations of power and status appear in reasoning about social rank early in life. For instance, children differentially employ the same social rank cues depending on whether a context evokes power or status. For example, whereas infants expect physically bigger (vs. smaller) individuals to achieve their goals in zero-sum conflicts (that likely bring to mind considerations of relative power) [20.Thomsen L. et al.Big and mighty: preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance.Science. 2011; 331: 477-480Crossref PubMed Scopus (223) Google Scholar], infants do not expect physically bigger individuals to prevail when one individual simply follows the other (without any indication of conflict) [123.Thomsen L. The developmental origins of social hierarchy: how infants and young children mentally represent and respond to power and status.Curr. Opin. Psychol. 2020; 33: 201-208Crossref PubMed Scopus (21) Google Scholar]. Likewise, whereas infants and children think that numerically larger groups are more likely to prevail in zero-sum resource conflicts [21.Pun A. et al.Infants use relative numerical group size to infer social dominance.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2016; 113: 2376-2381Crossref PubMed Scopus (5) Google Scholar,124.Lourenco S.F. Children and adults use physical size and numerical alliances in third-party judgments of dominance.Front. Psychol. 2016; 6e5707Crossref PubMed Scopus (26) Google Scholar,125.Heck I.A. et al.Small groups lead, big groups control: perceptions of numerical group size, power, and status across development.Child Dev. 2022; 93: 194-208Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar], young children do not necessarily view larger group size as a cue to higher status [125.Heck I.A. et al.Small groups lead, big groups control: perceptions of numerical group size, power, and status across development.Child Dev. 2022; 93: 194-208Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar].Young children also hold different expectations about those with power versus status. In one study [126.Margoni F. et al.Infants distinguish between leaders and bullies.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2018; 115: E8835-E8843Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar], 21‐month‐old children were introduced to a group and an individual who acquired social rank through either force or respect. Whereas toddlers expected the group to obey the forceful individual only in the presence of this individual, toddlers expected the group to obey the respected individual in both the presence and absence of this individual [126.Margoni F. et al.Infants distinguish between leaders and bullies.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2018; 115: E8835-E8843Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar]. Thus, young children distinguish between power and status, both in the cues they use to infer social rank and in their expectations of high-power and high-status individuals.At the same time, further evidence suggests that a distinction between power and status widens gradually over early childhood [31.Kajanus A. et al.Children’s understanding of dominance and prestige in China and the UK.Evol. Hum. Behav. 2020; 41: 23-34Crossref Scopus (17) Google Scholar,127.Cheng N. et al.Power grabbed or granted: children’s allocation of resources in social power situations.J. Exp. Child Psychol. 2021; 210105192Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar]; whereas reasoning about power seems to emerge early and remain relatively stable over development, reasoning about status develops more gradually over the early childhood years [125.Heck I.A. et al.Small groups lead, big groups control: perceptions of numerical group size, power, and status across development.Child Dev. 2022; 93: 194-208Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar]. One possibility is that reasoning about power may be more concrete – often based in physical interactions or represented visibly – whereas reasoning about status may involve representing more abstract social relations and concepts (e.g., respect, social value, knowledge). Whether and how differences in the developmental trajectories of reasoning about power and status inform the development of children’s thinking about group-based hierarchies remain important open questions. However, an intriguing possibility is that notions of social rank emerging earliest in life (e.g., power, dominance) may remain particularly intuitive into adulthood.However, representing the structure of the social world involves not only noticing social rank asymmetries between individuals but also attending to broader patterns across groups. An emerging theme in recent years unites research on children’s early sensitivity to social rank with research on the development of social categorization to ask whether children may also come to view social identities as indicative of social rank. In the next section, we review evidence that children indeed begin to use social category information to predict who is likely to hold greater wealth, power, and status. We focus in particular on gender and race as two prominent examples of social categories about which children’s developing thinking increasingly reflects an awareness of group-based hierarchies in the world.Using social category information to predict social rankChildren’s thinking about gender and social rankChildren’s early emerging tendency to prefer people in their own gender group is one of the most commonly replicated findings in the gender cognition literature (e.g., [34.Gülgöz S. et al.Similarity in transgender and cisgender children’s gender development.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2019; 116: 24480-24485Crossref PubMed Scopus (27) Google Scholar,35.Halim M.L.D. et al.Gender attitudes in early childhood: behavioral consequences and cognitive antecedents.Child Dev. 2017; 88: 882-899Crossref PubMed Scopus (29) Google Scholar]). Children’s gender ingroup favoritism suggests they might confer higher rank to members of their own gender group, just as they confer other positive attributes to their own group. However, recent research reveals a different picture: by the early elementary school years, both boys and girls view boys as having greater decision-making power [15.Mandalaywala T.M. et al.Children’s use of race and gender as cues to social status.PLoS One. 2020; 15e0234398Crossref PubMed Scopus (26) Google Scholar,17.Charafeddine R. et al.How preschoolers associate power with gender in male–female interactions: a cross-cultural investigation.Sex Roles. 2020; 83: 453-473Crossref Scopus (10) Google Scholar,26.Terrizzi B.F. et al.Children’s developing judgments about the physical manifestations of power.Dev. Psychol. 2019; 55: 793-808Crossref PubMed Scopus (25) Google Scholar], more resources [17.Charafeddine R. et al.How preschoolers associate power with gender in male–female interactions: a cross-cultural investigation.Sex Roles. 2020; 83: 453-473Crossref Scopus (10) Google Scholar], and higher-status positions [17.Charafeddine R. et al.How preschoolers associate power with gender in male–female interactions: a cross-cultural investigation.Sex Roles. 2020; 83: 453-473Crossref Scopus (10) Google Scholar,18.Santhanagopalan R. et al.Leadership, gender, and colorism: children in India use social category information to guide leadership cognition.Dev. Sci. 2022; 25e13212Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar,36.Bos A.L. et al.This one’s for the boys: how gendered political socialization limits girls’ political ambition and interest.Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 2022; 116: 484-501Crossref Scopus (1) Google Scholar, 37.Liben L.S. Bigler R.S. The developmental course of gender differentiation: conceptualizing, measuring, and evaluating constructs and pathways.Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev. 2002; 67: 1-183Crossref Google Scholar, 38.Patterson M.M. et al.Toward a developmental science of politics.Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev. 2019; 84: 7-185Crossref PubMed Scopus (17) Google Scholar] than girls. Indeed, the disconnect these studies reveal between girls’ social preferences and awareness of inequities demonstrates how children’s appreciation of social stratification goes beyond simple ingroup–outgroup categorization (Box 2).Box 2Decoupling social rank and social preferencesIt makes sense that children’s social preferences and their thinking about societal-level hierarchies may often parallel one another. One way to think about group-based hierarchies (and status hierarchies in particular) is as society’s relative valuation of different groups (i.e., societal-level preferences). Reflecting this, children’s relative preferences between outgroups mirror groups’ relative positions in group-based hierarchies and inequalities in the world [16.Yazdi H. et al.Children’s intergroup attitudes: insights from Iran.Child Dev. 2020; 91: 1733-1744Crossref PubMed Scopus (6) Google Scholar,55.Chen E.E. et al.Learning and socializing preferences in Hong Kong Chinese children.Child Dev. 2018; 89: 2109-2117Crossref PubMed Scopus (5) Google Scholar, 56.Qian M.K. et al.Differential developmental courses of implicit and explicit biases for different other-race classes.Dev. Psychol. 2019; 55: 1440-1452Crossref PubMed Scopus (8) Google Scholar, 57.Sacco A.M. et al.Race attitudes in cultural context: the view from two Brazilian states.Dev. Psychol. 2019; 55: 1299-1312Crossref PubMed Scopus (4) Google Scholar], and children’s inferences about the relative wealth, power, and status of different groups often correlate positively with children’s social group preferences [16.Yazdi H. et al.Children’s intergroup attitudes: insights from Iran.Child Dev. 2020; 91: 1733-1744Crossref PubMed Scopus (6) Google Scholar,19.Marshall J. et al.The role of status in the early emergence of pro-White bias in rural Uganda.Dev. Sci. 2022; (Published online February 6, 2022)https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13240Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar,27.Shutts K. et al.Children use wealth cues to evaluate others.PLoS One. 2016; 11e0149360Crossref PubMed Scopus (80) Google Scholar,51.Newheiser A.-K. Olson K.R. White and Black American children’s implicit intergroup bias.J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 2012; 48: 264-270Crossref PubMed Scopus (122) Google Scholar,67.Horwitz S.R. et al.Social class differences produce social group preferences.Dev. Sci. 2014; 17: 991-1002Crossref PubMed Scopus (70) Google Scholar,73.Heck I.A. et al.Social sampling: children track social choices to reason about status hierarchies.J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 2021; 150: 1673-1687Crossref PubMed Scopus (3) Google Scholar].At the same time, research provides evidence that children’s thinking about social rank goes beyond simple ingroup–outgroup categorization or their preferences for some groups over others. For example, although 5–10‐year‐old children in India ascribed higher status to speakers of British English than to speakers of Tamil (their linguistic ingroup), they tended to say that speakers of Tamil were kinder [63.Santhanagopalan R. et al.Nationality cognition in India: social category information impacts children’s judgments of people and their national identity.Cogn. Dev. 2021; 57100990Crossref Scopus (1) Google Scholar]. In another study, 3–6‐year‐old girls in the USA chose gender ingroup members as social partners, but they did not associate their gender ingroup with having greater wealth or power ([15.Mandalaywala T.M. et al.Children’s use of race and gender as cues to social status.PLoS One. 2020; 15e0234398Crossref PubMed Scopus (26) Google Scholar], also [40.Bian L. et al.Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children’s interests.Science. 2017; 355: 389-391Crossref PubMed Scopus (323) Google Scholar]).Further, recent evidence suggests that children’s conceptualizations of social rank are not always positive. For example, children associate being 'in charge' with not helping others [128.Terrizzi B.F. et al.Young children and adults associate social power with indifference to others’ needs.J. Exp. Child Psychol. 2020; 198104867Crossref PubMed Scopus (4) Google Scholar], and by age 3, children view malevolent displays of power and status (e.g., not giving permission, taking resources) as indicative of social rank [30.Gülgöz S. Gelman S.A. Who’s the boss? Concepts of social power across development.Child Dev. 2017; 88: 946-963Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar].Moreover, children develop increasingly specific and nuanced ideas about the relations between social rank and various positive traits. For example, whereas 4–5‐year‐old children in one recent study associated prosociality and effort with being rich, these associations weakened with age, such that, by the late elementary school years, children instead associated these traits with being poor [76.Yang X. Dunham Y. Emerging complexity in children’s conceptualization of the wealthy and the poor.Dev. Sci. 2022; (Published online January 3, 2022)https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13225Crossref Scopus (0) Google Scholar]. Providing further evidence of specificity to children’s thinking about social rank, 5–10‐year‐old children in India predicted that lighter-skinned South Asian and White boys would be chosen as class president but not necessarily for other positive (but relatively lower-status) classroom roles [18.Santhanagopalan R. et al.Leadership, gender, and colorism: children in India use social category information to guide leadership cognition.Dev. Sci. 2022; 25e13212Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar]. Together, these findings demonstrate specificity to children’s reasoning about social rank, while at the same time underscoring the close ties between social hierarchies and social preferences, both in children’s reasoning and in the world.In one study, 3–6‐year‐old children in the USA viewed a rope ladder (Figure 2) and heard that the top (vs. bottom) of the ladder indicated having more toys and clothes and greater control over what other people do. When asked to place boy and girl characters onto the ladder, children tended to place boys higher than girls, an effect that was particularly strong among boys ([15.Mandalaywala T.M. et al.Children’s use of race and gender as cues to social status.PLoS One. 2020; 15e0234398Crossref PubMed Scopus (26) Google Scholar]; similar evidence from children in France, Lebanon, and Norway is given in [17.Charafeddine R. et al.How preschoolers associate power with gender in male–female interactions: a cross-cultural investigation.Sex Roles. 2020; 83: 453-473Crossref Scopus (10) Google Scholar]). Moreover, although girls showed strong ingroup favoritism when asked which characters they preferred, at no age did girls place girl characters above boy characters on the ladder, and, with age, girls’ placement of girls increasingly declined [15.Mandalaywala T.M. et al.Children’s use of race and gender as cues to social status.PLoS One. 2020; 15e0234398Crossref PubMed Scopus (26) Google Scholar].Figure 2Three common methods to examine children’s awareness of group-based hierarchies.Show full caption(Left) Tasks in which children are asked to match individuals and groups to interactions. (Center) Tasks in which children are asked to match individuals and groups to different resources (in terms of quality or quantity) or roles (e.g., occupations, positions in a classroom). (Right) Tasks in which children are asked to match individuals and groups to abstract depictions of hierarchical dimensions. These methods are flexible with respect to the hierarchy-related concepts they can be used to measure (e.g., wealth, power, and status, as well as multiple concepts simultaneously). In th