If you can’t beat them, join them: Preverbal infants expect novel agents to choose the majority group

A central feature of human society is the coalitional negotiation of the shared interests of members of different groups, where majority groups are often afforded greater power and status than minority groups. In order to navigate the politics of their social worlds, humans must make appropriate predictions about the coalitional behaviors of others. While previous research suggests that infants expect more formidable agents and groups to prevail in zero-sum conflict, it remains unknown if coalitional characteristics motivate and predict group choice in the infant mind. Here, we show that 9-13-month-old infants expect a novel agent to approach larger over smaller groups (N = 135), which was also the case among adults (N = 1003). These findings suggest that well before they engage in coalitional positioning themselves, human infants hold core expectations about majority motives, even in the absence of conflict, which guide social inferences across ontogeny.