Do children essentialize wealth and poverty? Evidence from a diverse, rural sample

• In Event: Children's reasoning about wealth and poverty: Causal mechanisms and intersectional approaches

Abstract

Research on children’s social essentialism has focused largely on race and gender (e.g., Rhodes & Gelman, 2009). Less is known about whether children essentialize socioeconomic status (SES). del Rio and Strasser (2011) found that Chilean children used SES to make inferences about individuals’ behavior, and higher SES children viewed SES as having an inherited, biological basis. However, Davoodi et al. (2020) found that children in Boston and Istanbul exhibited low levels of essentialism for SES.

There are two possible explanations for these mixed findings. First, children’s beliefs about SES might depend on their background and exposure to economic inequality, which differed across these studies. Second, these studies measured different dimensions of essentialism, and children might essentialize SES along some dimensions but not others.
To address these possibilities, this study tested children from a rural area of the US that has high economic inequality using multiple tasks that examine distinct dimensions of essentialism. 5-year-old children (Mage = 5.6 years) from ethnically and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds completed 3 essentialism tasks in a random order. Each task involved 3 social categories: SES (rich, poor), ethnicity (Hispanic, White) and sports team fan (Raiders’ fan, 49ers’ fan), which served as a control.

The first task, adapted from Davoodi et al. (2020), examined whether children think a social category has an inherited, biological basis that cannot be changed. Children were asked 5 Yes/No questions about each category (Table 1). Children received 1 point for each essentialist response. The boundary task (Diesendruck et al. 2013) examined whether children view social categories as discrete and objectively correct. Children were asked which of two contrasting exemplars (e.g., rich, poor) were the same kind as a target character (e.g., poor; Figure 1); they received 1 point for each category match. Finally, the inference task (Birnbaum et al. 2010), examined whether children used a social category to draw causal inferences about an individual’s behavior (Figure 1). Children saw two exemplars from different social categories (e.g., Hispanic/Rich vs White/poor) and a target that belonged to one of the same categories as each exemplar (e.g., Hispanic/poor); children were asked which exemplar the target shared characteristics with. We counted the number of times children selected each social category. In all tasks, higher scores indicated higher levels of essentialism for a given category.

Children exhibited low essentialism scores for SES on the Davoodi task, comparable to the original study, and their SES scores were significantly lower than their scores for ethnicity, p = .011. Similarly, on the inference task children selected the SES match significantly less often than expected by chance, p = .011. This suggests that unlike children in Chile, children in our rural US sample did not view SES as inherited/biological and did not use it to make inferences about individual’s behavior. However, in the boundary task, children grouped individuals by SES more often than expected by chance, p < .001, suggesting they viewed rich and poor as discrete, objective categories. This suggests that children essentialize SES along some dimensions but not others.

Authors

• Tonghui (Kailee) Zhu, University of California Merced
  Presenting Author

• Rose M Scott, University of California - Merced