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

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

A fundamental component of morality in childhood is the developing propensity for fairness and equal treatment of others. While much research has explored children’s conceptions of fairness, less research has investigated children’s understanding about social inequalities, particularly those focused on access to wealth and resources. This symposium features four papers investigating the development of understanding about wealth inequalities. The first paper explored how inter-wealth contact impacts young children’s resource allocation decisions in a context of a wealth inequality. Children’s contact with lower wealth peers predicted their reasoning about access to resources, which in turn positively predicted the number of resources allocated to a low wealth peer. The second paper investigated whether highlighting structural or meritorious reasons for an inequality affected young children’s decisions to rectify or perpetuate that inequality. Children gave more resources to groups when given a structural explanation for the inequality. The third paper explored children’s developing sense of their own perceived wealth (subjective social status) between early through middle childhood. On average, children from lower income families highly rated themselves on subjective social status, while children from higher income families overall had a more accurate perception of their social status and this became more accurate with age. The final paper examined children’s and adolescents’ evaluations of wealth inequalities created by individual, structural, or random causes. Participants positively evaluated individually and randomly caused inequalities, and negatively evaluated structural inequalities. These papers provide novel evidence for children’s developing understanding of inequality and their desire to rectify disparities of resources.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Amanda R. Burkholder, University of Maryland

Individual Presentations

• Inter-Wealth Contact and Young Children’s Concern for Equity - Presenting Author: Laura Elenbaas, University of Rochester

• Structural Explanations Promote Resource Allocations that Compensate for Inequality - Presenting Author: Nadya Vasilyeva, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Mahesh Srinivasan, UC Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Monica E. Ellwood-Lowe, University of California, Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Alison Gopnik, University of California - Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Tania Lombrozo, Princeton University

• Do Young Children Have a Subjective Social Status? - Presenting Author: Teresa Harvey, Boston University; Non-Presenting Author: Peter R Blake, Boston University

• Children’s and Adolescents’ Evaluations of Different Causes of Wealth Inequality - Presenting Author: Amanda R. Burkholder, University of Maryland; Non-Presenting Author: Riley N. Sims, University of Maryland; Non-Presenting Author: Melanie Killen, University of Maryland