Children’s and Adolescents’ Conceptions About Wealth Inequality: Individual and Structural Sources

• In Event: Moral Reasoning From Childhood to Emerging Adulthood: New Perspectives

Abstract

Recent research has focused on how children and adolescents conceptualize wealth as well as wealth inequalities. While wealth inequalities have many negative outcomes, inequalities are not necessarily viewed as wrong or unfair. For example, individuals may view wealth inequalities as fair when wealth is perceived to stem from individual effort and hard work, or as unfair when stemming from structural advantages provided for some but not others. Understanding the emergence and development of psychological attitudes about wealth inequalities requires revealing how individuals think these inequalities are formed. The present study investigated participants’ expectations of the likelihood that wealth and poverty were caused by individual, structural, and random reasons.
Participants were children (n = 122, M = 9.95 years old, SD = 0.49) and adolescents (n = 67, M = 13.83 years old, SD = 0.43) residing in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Participants completed a survey depicting groups of high- and low-wealth peers, and rated the likelihood that the peers’ familial wealth status was caused by individual factors (2 items: “how hard they work”, “how smart they are”), structural factors (2 items: “they were born into families with a lot/a little bit of money”, “they received/didn’t receive many opportunities”), or random factors (1 item: “how lucky they are”) on a 6 point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (really unlikely) -- 6 (really likely). Participants also selected one of the factors (from above) as the most important reason to explain each group’s wealth status and provided reasoning for their choice.
Results indicated that participants held higher expectations that structural factors (inheritance and opportunities) caused low wealth status than individual factors (hard work and intelligence) or luck (ps < .05). However, they held higher expectations that both hard work and structural factors caused high wealth status than intelligence or luck (ps < .05). Additionally, overall, participants expected that inheritance, hard work, intelligence, and luck were more likely causes of high wealth than low wealth status (ps < .01), while holding equal expectations about the likelihood of access (or inaccess) to opportunities causing either wealth status (see Figure 1). Further, most participants (86%) selected a structural reason as the most important explanation for low wealth status (p < .001). Most children predicted that high wealth status was caused by individual factors (63%), while most adolescents predicted that high wealth status was caused by structural factors (61%) (ps < .05). Reasoning analyses will also be reported.
Conceptions of the sources of wealth status emerge in childhood and change throughout adolescence. With age, participants were more likely to refer to structural factors as contributing to barriers to the acquisition of wealth. A next step for this research program would be to investigate how structural factors such as gender, race, and ethnicity contribute to conceptions of wealth. Understanding the development of the psychological attitudes that contribute to perceptions and judgments about wealth status will help to address issues of wealth inequality.

Authors

• Amanda Rose Burkholder, Furman University
  Presenting Author

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

• Melanie A. Killen, University of Maryland - College Park
  Non-Presenting Author