Poster #35 - A Comprehensive Investigation of U.S. Children's Understanding of Social Hierarchies

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

How do children reason about the factors that contribute to social hierarchies? Understanding children’s concepts of hierarchies is important because these concepts likely drive their motivations (e.g., effort in school, career aspirations) and behavior towards others (e.g., biased behavior toward low-status groups; Enright et al., 2020; Mandalaywala, 2020). Most developmental research on this topic to date has investigated a small set of dimensions relevant to social hierarchies (e.g., physical size, wealth; Charafeddine et al., 2015; Gülgöz & Gelman, 2017). Here, we provide a much more comprehensive investigation of children’s concepts of societal hierarchies across as many as 20 dimensions. This strategy also enabled us to identify which dimensions are perceived as more central vs. peripheral to societal hierarchies by children vs. adults. In Study 1, we first reviewed the social psychological literature to compile 34 attributes that have been identified in the past as relevant to adults’ perception of status. From those, we tested a sample of U.S. adults (N = 157) to select 20 attributes that were most important to adults’ perceptions of societal hierarchies. Finally, we adapted the wording of the selected attributes to make them more child-friendly and compared how important U.S. children (N = 120, ages 9-12) and adults (N = 110) thought these attributes were for an individual’s ultimate position in the societal hierarchy. Participants were first presented with a metaphor about a ladder in American society, with those at the top of the ladder representing high-status individuals and those at the bottom of the ladder representing low-status individuals. Then, participants rated each attribute on a 5-point-scale for their importance for one’s position on the ladder (e.g., “Do [people of different levels of the attribute] end up on different parts of the ladder in America? How important is [attribute] for where a person is on the ladder?”; 1=Not at all, 5=A whole lot). We found that adults rated wealth, fame, occupation, race, and education to be the most important attributes, while children rated more meritocratic and internal attributes (e.g., work ethic, morality) as the most important (see Figure 1). It is possible that compared to adults, children are less aware of the systemic biases that shape societal hierarchies, such that they often do not reflect individual merit. An alternative explanation for the developmental difference observed in Study 1 is that children misunderstood the task to report what should matter for someone’s position in the societal hierarchy—not what actually does. To examine this possibility, in Study 2 (in progress) we are comparing children’s and adults’ perceptions of attributes that they perceive as being actually important (“descriptive” attributes) vs. what should be important (“prescriptive” attributes). We predict that the descriptive questions will replicate results from Study 1, but that adults’ prescriptive answers (compared to their descriptive answers) will be much closer to children’s descriptive answers. Understanding children’s and adults’ associations between these attributes and societal hierarchies provides us with an important first step towards addressing status-based bias from an early age.

Authors

• Vivian Liu, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Andrei Cimpian, New York University