Societal hierarchies within and between groups are prevalent and impactful. Young children’s thinking about societal hierarchies offers a valuable lens into how the structure of the social world becomes represented in people’s minds and into ways of thinking about and responding to societal structures that may remain intuitive across the lifespan and over time. In this dissertation, I identify some general learning principles through which young children build representations of societal hierarchies. In doing so, I aim to provide conceptual nuance to this research area by disentangling children’s thinking about two hierarchy-related constructs: power (i.e., dominance; control over resources and outcomes) and status (i.e., social standing; prestige or value in the eyes of others). In Part I, I underscore patterns of social choices (i.e., whom people choose for positive interactions or roles) as a powerful cue to hierarchies between groups at both the individual level (which groups an agent prefers) and the societal level (which groups are privileged). I further demonstrate that children track social choices to reason about groups’ relative social standing but not their relative physical power. In Part II, I show that children readily use numerical group size as a cue to social rank, but do so differently depending on whether the context evokes thinking about power or status. I additionally show that whereas representations of power structures emerge early and remain relatively stable over development, representations of status structures develop more gradually. In Part III, I show that children’s relative valuation of power and status as embodied in individual leaders (i.e., the people at the top of status hierarchies) depends on the context in which a leader is chosen. Specifically, I demonstrate that children choose prestigious (i.e., respected, skilled) leaders during times of cooperation and peace but prefer dominant (i.e., powerful, strong) leaders during times of conflict and competition. Mirroring the findings of Part II, I find that preferences for dominant and prestigious leaders unfold over different developmental timelines: Whereas preferences for dominant leaders emerge early, preferences for prestigious leaders strengthen with age, and this especially appears to be the case among children with more liberal (vs. conservative) parents. In Part IV, I conclude by presenting a theoretical synthesis of recent findings on children’s thinking about societal power and status hierarchies and point to outstanding questions for future research.