Children’s Motivated Reasoning About Social Inequalities Between Groups

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic -Diversity, Equity & Social Justice

Abstract

Economic inequality has been on the rise in the last 50 years, approaching unprecedented levels in the United States. A similar disheartening phenomenon appears globally. How do children understand this phenomenon, and become supporters or opponents of social justice and equality? When interviewed about social inequalities in the lab, children above a certain age (around middle childhood) often claim that inequalities are unfair and choose to rectify inequalities when they allocate resources (Elenbaas & Killen, 2016; Li et al., 2014; Shutts et al., 2016); however, adults still tend to justify and perpetuate inequalities in the real world. How do inequality-rectifying children become inequality-justifying adults? No research to date has explored this paradox. We propose one potential answer, which is that people who benefit from the system (e.g. rich people) are motivated to downplay inequalities and justify the system (e.g., Kraus & Tan, 2015).

We pre-registered to recruit 180 US children (current n = 95; we will finish data collection and analyses prior to the meeting), with 30 children in each age group (two age groups, 5-6-year-olds and 8-9-year-olds) and condition (three conditions, assigned-to-rich, assigned-to-poor, and no-assignment control). Children are introduced to the two novel social groups before hearing any information about wealth. In the rich and poor conditions, children are then randomly assigned to one of the groups; in the control condition, children are not assigned to any group. Next, children in all conditions hear about the wealth status of the groups (one group has nice possessions while the other group does not). They are then asked about 1) attitudes (“which group do you like more”); 2) behavioral decisions on allocation of new resources (two resource types, medicine and toys), and 3) forced-choice justification questions including attributions (whether they think inequality is due to internal or external factors), fairness judgments, social mobility beliefs, meritocratic beliefs, and opinions on e.g. maintaining vs. changing the status quo (responses that show system-justifying beliefs are coded as 1, with the full scale ranges from 0 to 7).

We predict that on attitudes, children in both the rich and the control conditions will favor the rich; though older children and children assigned to the poor condition may show a weaker or non-significant pattern (Horwitz, Shutts, & Olson, 2014). On allocations, overall children will give more toys to the poor but allocate medicine equally between the two groups, though younger children and children in the rich condition may allocate more resources to the rich. On justifications, younger children and children in the rich condition will show stronger system-justifying beliefs. Data will be analyzed using linear regressions with each of the dependent measures as the response variables, and age, condition, type (on allocations only), and the interactions as the predictors.

Taken together, this study investigates the effect of motivated social cognition in children’s reasoning about social inequalities, shedding light on whether prolonged socialization and real-world experience with wealth are necessary for developing such justifications. It also has important implications for developing interventions to promote social equity.

Authors

• Xin Yang, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author