By Maureen Salamon THURSDAY, Jan. 27 (HealthDay News) — Even
babies seem to know that might makes right, according to new
research that suggests infants use size as a measure to predict
who will prevail when two individuals have a conflict.
Scientists from Harvard University and the University of
California, Los Angeles, conducted five experiments on 144
infants ranging from 8 months to 16 months old, gauging their
reactions to videos of interactions between cartoon figures of
various sizes. When a larger figure yielded to a smaller one —
an unexpected outcome — the babies watched much longer, an
average of 20 seconds compared to 12 seconds, study author Lotte
Thomsen said. Previous studies indicated that infants tend to
watch something longer when it surprises them. These reactions
suggest people are either born with — or develop at a very early
age — some understanding about social dominance and how it
relates to comparative size, an association found in human and
animal cultures alike, Thomsen said. “To us