Race-Based Resource Allocations in Children

• In Event: 2-033 - Active and Reactive Roles in Allocation Contexts: Infants’ and Children’s Social Preferences, Biases, and Reciprocity

Integrative Statement

Children use gender and race to guide their behaviors and interactions with others. Although group membership takes on special importance in intergroup relations early in childhood, less is known about how children incorporate group membership into their decisions about whom to share or allocate resources to. This is an important question to address, as there is evidence suggesting children’s intergroup attitudes sometimes diverge from their resource allocation decisions (Rhodes et al., 2017). Moreover, although children exhibit strong preferences for fairness and equality from an early age, they simultaneously show marked preferences for resource rich, high social status individuals. This combination of preferences and beliefs sets up an interesting conundrum for children to solve; fairness norms might dictate children override preferences for resource rich individuals to share with low status individuals instead.
Here, we examine this conundrum in the domain of race, asking whether children (4.0 – 5.9 years old, N = 91) allocate resources differently to White targets and Black targets. Previous research shows children at these ages are aware of societal stereotypes conflating race and social status (Elenbaas & Killen, 2016). Using a Dictator Game paradigm to measure costly sharing of a non-essential resource with two peers (one White, one Black, presented one at a time in counterbalanced order), we found that children were more likely to allocate resources to the White than the Black target (β = -0.76, SE = .26, z = -2.9, p = .004, Figure 1), and that there was a marginal tendency to allocate fewer resources to the Black target with increasing age (target race x age: β = -0.36, SE = .22, z = -1.66, p = .096). Using a Feelings Thermometer measure to assess racial attitudes toward White and Black targets, we found no evidence for a relation between racial preferences and decisions about whom to allocate resources to (p = .60), even though children overall expressed greater warmth toward White (M = 3.1) than Black targets (M= 2.7; t = 3.6, p < .001). This lack of relation is in line with previous research that was conducted with 4- and 5-year-old White participants (Shutts et al., 2016), and suggests that something other than social preferences for White, high status, individuals is driving White-biased resource allocation. Extending this previous work by collecting data from a diverse sample of participants, we can also rule out the possibility that White-biased allocations are driven by in-group preference. Among our sample, non-White participants (β = -0.60, SE = .32, z = -1.9, p = .056) were more likely to show White-biased allocations than were White participants (p = .85; Figure 2).
These results suggest that although young children engage in race-based economic decision-making, it is not a simple side effect of racial attitudes that favor White individuals. Ongoing work is examining whether White-biased resource allocation are more directly related to children’s expectations of reciprocity, such that children preferentially allocate resources to those they expect to share with them in the future.

Authors

• Tara Mandalaywala, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  Presenting Author

• Kaajal Sagar, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marjorie Rhodes, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author