Boyce – kindergarten hierarchies

We have been interested for a long time in how human societies stratify themselves. It’s true of every society on earth, ranging from hunter-gatherers in New Guinea to the most sophisticated Western societies in the Western world. What we are not as aware of is the way in which stratification doesn’t just happen in societies, it’s happens in small human groups as well, and I mean small in terms of the number of individuals, and I also mean small in terms of the size of the human being because little kids coming together in new social groups form pecking orders that you can see in a couple of weeks of coming together, and every pre-school teacher, every kindergarten teacher can tell you this. Within a couple, three weeks you can see a very ordered relationship just like there is within the adult society.  

Now within the adult society the problem with stratification is that health is also stratified. The people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy have worse health than the people at the top of the hierarchy and then it’s graded in between. So the question that we asked in this study in Berkley was – does health stratify itself within little micro societies of kindergarteners in the same way that it stratifies itself within huge adult societies? And the long and the short answer of it is yes. We have found that within a kindergarten classroom, which is usually twenty five year olds, you can do observations and construct the hierarchy and you can look at early measures of developmental psycho-pathology and see those layering according to the position of the child within the social hierarchy. 

We find that boys and girls are equally likely to occupy the positions at the top and the bottom of the hierarchy. They express it in different ways, but they are throughout the hierarchy and we don’t find any perfect relationship between the temperament or personality of the child and his or her location in the pecking order who is aggressive, and externalizing, and combative will often sort to the bottom of the hierarchy, but it also may be the case that a child who is relatively withdrawn and shy and afraid of new situations will also find him or herself at the bottom of the hierarchy.