Children’s essentialist views of social status and ingroup favoritism

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic -Diversity, Equity & Social Justice

Abstract

Background: Children and adults’ perceptions of how they rank relative to others, or their subjective socioeconomic status (SES), are strong predictors of several outcomes, including physical and mental health, educational attainment, and social interactions (Quon & McGrath, 2014). Moreover, higher subjective SES adults endorse more essentialist or fixed views of SES (i.e., that social class is biologically based) and show greater ingroup favoritism of their SES ingroup (Kraus & Keltner, 2013). However, it is unclear whether higher subjective SES children show similar essentialist views of SES and behavioral biases. Here, we created a novel measure of children’s essentialist beliefs about social class, and tested whether children’s subjective social status was associated with their own essentialist beliefs and SES ingroup favoritism. Further, these associations were compared between younger and older children to test developmental differences in essentialist views of SES.
Methods: A diverse sample of 115 children ages 4-9 (66% White, 10% Black, 5% Latino, 5% Asian, 3% Multiracial, 11% no response) was recruited. Children were grouped into younger (4-6-year olds, N = 71; 47.9% female) and older (7-9 year olds, N = 49; 57.1% female) groups. Participants were introduced to a small physical ladder made in our lab, placed a marker of themselves on the ladder designating their subjective social status, and completed our lab-developed five-item SES Essentialist Beliefs measure (Child Version). Participants were assigned randomized group labels (Orange or Green group) based on their ladder placement (e.g., high SES vs. low SES). From these groups, they also completed a resource distribution (e.g., giving out stickers) and inclusion task (e.g., selecting who to invite) of high and low status targets.
Results & Discussion: There was no association between children’s subjective SES and essentialism beliefs. However, younger children endorsed stronger essentialism beliefs about SES than older children and participants with stronger essentialism beliefs favored high status others during the resource allocation and inclusion tasks. Furthermore, results from the resource allocation and inclusion tasks showed that children from a low SES background tended to favor equality between low status and high-status individuals. However, high SES participants showed a bias in resource allocations split by age group such that younger children favored high-status targets and older children favored low-status targets (see Figure 1). Moreover, both low SES participants and high SES participants demonstrated an ingroup bias, preferring to include their respective ingroup, across age groups (see Figures 1 and 2). These data suggest that the association between essentialism, subjective social status and ingroup favoritism may vary by age and status. SES essentialism beliefs decrease with age but are positively related to resource allocation behaviors. To our knowledge, this is the first study of children’s essentialist views on social status and provides novel insights on how group biases by socioeconomic status may emerge.

Authors

• Analia Albuja, Duke Univeristy
  Presenting Author

• Brenda Straka, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sarah Elizabeth Gaither, Duke Univeristy
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kaelah Brauher, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Margarita L Svetlova, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author