It is surprising that there are inconsistent findings of transitive inference (TI) in young infants given that non‐linguistic species succeed on TI tests. To conclusively test for TI in infants, we developed a task within the social domain, with which infants are known to show sophistication. We familiarized 10‐ to 13‐month‐olds (M = 11.53 months) to a video of two dominance interactions between three puppets (bear > elephant; hippo > bear) consistent with a dominance hierarchy (hippo > bear > elephant; where ‘>’ denotes greater dominance). Infants then viewed interactions between the two puppets that had not interacted during familiarization. These interactions were either congruent (hippo > elephant) or incongruent (elephant > hippo) with the inferred hierarchy. Consistent with TI, infants looked longer to incongruent than congruent displays. Control conditions ruled out the possibility that infants’ expectations were based on stable behaviors specific to individual puppets rather than their inferred transitive dominance relations. We suggest that TI may be supported by phylogenetically ancient mechanisms of ordinal representation and visuospatial processing that come online early in human development. We used a violation‐of‐expectation paradigm to compare looking time to test videos of social dominance interactions that were congruent (expected) or incongruent (unexpected) with inferred social dominance relations between three puppets. Infants as young as 10 months looked longer to the incongruent than to the congruent test trials, and control conditions (one of which is depicted here) ruled out the possibility that these differences were due to expectations about the behavior of individual puppets. These results indicate that competence with TI in the social domain emerges as early as 10 months of age and may be supported by nonverbal, phylogenetically ancient ordinal and visuospatial processes.