Children’s and Adolescents’ Evaluations of Different Causes of Wealth Inequality

• In Event: 3-137 - Children's View of Social Inequality: Evaluations and Decisions About Wealth

Integrative Statement

Extensive research has examined how children and adolescents evaluate the fair distribution of resources. Most of the focus of this research has been on children’s and adolescents’ distribution of rewards in the context of individual effort regarding a game, a peer group or dyadic task. More recently, research has broadened to investigate how children and adolescents think about societal levels of access to economic resources and wealth. For example, American adolescents who view wealth and poverty as products of individual traits and decisions are more likely to believe that the United States provides equal opportunities for everyone, and systems of social support encourage dependency. Even among young children, beliefs about wealth as a component of individual factors leads to harsher criticism of the poor. Yet no research has yet directly investigated how children and adolescents evaluate different types of reasons for wealth inequalities. The present study investigated children’s and adolescents’ evaluations of wealth inequalities due to individual, structural, random or no explicit reason, along with their views about whether they would choose to redistribute wealth among individuals who vary in their own amount.
Participants (N = 129, goal = 216) were an ethnically and economically diverse sample of children (9 to 10-years-old, n = 92, M = 10.00, SD = .52) and adolescents (13 to 14-year-olds, n = 37, M = 13.98, SD = .40). Participants completed a written survey depicting groups of high and low wealth peers, and evaluated wealth inequalities (“How okay is it that some people have a lot of money and some people have a little bit of money?”) under four conditions: 1) no explicitly labelled cause; 2) an individual cause (work ethic); 3) a structural cause (differential access to opportunities); and 4) a random cause (winning the lottery). Evaluations were recorded on a 6-point Likert-type scale from 1 (really not okay) to 6 (really okay). After each prompt, participants were also asked whether they would elect to redistribute the wealth equally among the characters. Responses were recorded as either 0 (no) or 1 (yes).
Regarding evaluations of wealth inequalities (Figure 1), children had mixed evaluations when no explicit cause was labelled. Additionally, they evaluated individual and random causes positively overall and more positively than when no cause was labelled. Further, participants evaluated structural causes negatively overall and more negatively than when no cause was labelled. Regarding preferences for redistributing wealth equally (Figure 2), children overall preferred to redistribute the wealth equally when no cause for the wealth inequality was labelled and when a structural cause was labelled. They preferred not to redistribute the wealth under individual and random causes. Participant level predictors, including age and wealth, as well as participants’ reasoning will also be analyzed with the full sample.
The findings revealed that children and adolescents differentially evaluate wealth inequalities when caused by individual, structural, random, or ambiguous reasons, which may aide interventions promoting wealth understanding as well as issues of fairness.

Authors

• Amanda R. Burkholder, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Riley N. Sims, University of Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author

• Melanie Killen, University of Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author