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The spatial representation of power in children

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Abstract

Previous evidence demonstrates that power is mentally represented as vertical space by adults. However, little is known about how power is mentally represented in children. The current research examines such representations. The influence of vertical information (motor cues) was tested in both an explicit power evaluation task (judge whether labels refer to powerless or powerful groups) and an incidental task (judge whether labels refer to people or animals). The results showed that when power was explicitly evaluated, vertical motor responses interfered with responding in children and adults, i.e., they responded to words representing powerful groups faster with the up than the down cursor key (and vice versa for powerless groups). However, this interference effect disappeared in the incidental task in children. The findings suggest that children have developed a spatial representation of power before they have been taught power–space associations formally, but that they do not judge power spontaneously.

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Notes

  1. As a note of caution, we want to point out that Dahl and Adachi, 2013 did not control for the bodily height of the individual chimpanzees. In the animal world, an animal’s power is often determined by its body size. Therefore, it is possible that high-ranked individuals were taller than the low-ranked individuals and subjects were accustomed to looking up at them in their daily lives. Thus, even if identity discrimination did not activate up–down image schema, responses would also be facilitated when the participants looked up at the high-ranked individuals displayed in the higher locations of the test.

  2. We chose to present the analysis of only the children data first because only the children’s data are original; the adult data have been reported before by Jiang et al. (2015). Also note that we do not include the method factor animal versus human target in the analysis in order to not complicate Results section. Effects were always in the same direction for both, but in general somewhat stronger for human targets than animal targets. Further details can be obtained from the corresponding author.

  3. The analysis revealed a number of additional significant effects. The main effect of group was significant, F(1, 46) = 64.12, p < .001, η 2p  = .58, indicating that children gave slower responses than adults. We also found that participants responded faster to words representing powerful groups than words representing powerless groups, F(1, 46) = 6.52, p = .014, η 2p  = .12, and pressing the down key was slower than pressing the up key, F(1, 46) = 5.86, p = .019, η 2p  = .11.

  4. The main effect of group was significant, F(1, 46) = 12.92, p = .001, η 2p  = .22, indicating that children made more errors than adults.

  5. The analysis revealed several additional significant effects. The main effect of group was significant, F(1, 46) = 77.47, p < .001, η 2p  = .63, indicating that children gave slower responses than adults. We also found that judgments of words representing powerless groups were slower than judgments of words representing powerful groups, F(1, 46) = 6.31, p = .016, η 2p  = .12.

  6. Children made fewer errors for words representing powerful groups than words representing powerless groups, F(1, 23) = 5.69, p = .026, η 2p  = .20.

  7. The analysis revealed a number of significant effects. The main effect of group was significant, F(1, 46) = 8.16, p = .006, η 2p  = .15, indicating that children made more errors than adults. Participants made more errors on judgments of words representing powerless groups than words representing powerful groups, F(1, 46) = 10.38, p = .002, η 2p  = .18.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Projects Planning in Shanghai Philosophy and Social Sciences Research (2012JJY001) and the research fund of the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University. We thank Nora Grace Uhrich for proofreading the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Fudan University, Handan Road 220, Shanghai, SH, 200433, People’s Republic of China

    Lifeng Lu & Lei Zhu

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, P.O Box 1094, Blindern, 0317, Oslo, Norway

    Thomas W. Schubert

Authors
  1. Lifeng Lu
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  2. Thomas W. Schubert
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  3. Lei Zhu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lei Zhu.

Additional information

Handling editor: Martin H. Fischer (University of Potsdam).

Reviewer: Seyda Özçalışkan (Georgia State University).

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5, 6.

Table 5 Words represent people used in the experiments
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Table 6 Words represent animals used in the experiments
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Lu, L., Schubert, T.W. & Zhu, L. The spatial representation of power in children. Cogn Process 18, 375–385 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0814-9

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