If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them: Preverbal Infants Expect Novel Agents to Choose the Majority Group

Society is characterized by negotiation of group interests, often favoring stronger majority groups. Preverbal infants expect members of larger coalitions will prevail in concrete conflicts, but it remains unknown if infants parse the social world by ascribing general default coalitional formidability motives to others, even in the absence of intergroup conflict. Here we show that 9–13-month-old Norwegian infants (N = 168, 83 girls, ethnicity unrecorded, data collected 2018–2025) expected an agent to approach the larger of two separate, coordinated groups (Cohen’s g = .15-.17). So did North American and Norwegian adults across explicit (N = 1704, d > .11) and implicit measures (N = 33, Cohen’s g = .23). Humans infer third-party group formidability motives across ontogeny.