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

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Wealth factors prominently in children's early social cognition. For instance, children associate wealth with intelligence and prefer rich peers as friends (Shutts et al., 2016). Yet, sources of children’s wealth concepts – including how their development shifts as a function of environmental influences – remain unclear. The submitted talks bridge these gaps, offering insights into children’s conceptualizations of wealth and poverty.

Talks one–two present converging trajectories of children’s pro-wealth biases. Talk one presents data collected in the United States, China, and Turkey, finding decreased pro-rich biases over childhood in all samples. Talk two investigates moral reasoning about wealth, demonstrating that with age, children in the United States come to associate wealth with negative actions.

Talk three finds convergence in the wealth- and geography-based stereotyping of children from diverse socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds. Talk four illustrates that children located in a rural area of the United States essentialize wealth on some dimensions but not others.

All talks provide novel insights into causal origins of children’s wealth concepts, illustrating how random assignment to wealth groups (talk 1), explanations of wealth attainment (talk 2), intersectional concepts (talk 3), and essentialist reasoning about wealth (talk four) influence children’s beliefs. Talks one, three, and four present research with populations often excluded from studies of children’s wealth concepts – children who are low-income, living in rural areas, and outside of the United States – despite the relevance of wealth inequality to children throughout the country and world. Overall, this work provides a more holistic understanding of children’s wealth concepts.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Rachel Ann King, University of Chicago

• Tonghui (Kailee) Zhu, University of California Merced

Individual Presentations

• Children’s attitudes towards the wealthy and reasoning about wealth inequalities across four cultures - Presenting Author: Xin Yang, Yale University; Ilayda Orhan; Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University

• Big dreams: Age-related changes in wealth-related moral expectations - Presenting Author: Cassidy Faith Wolfe, University of California - Irvine; Nadia Chernyak, University of California - Irvine; Tamar Kushnir, Duke Univeristy

• The development of social group concepts and stereotypes about wealth and urban-rural geography - Presenting Author: Rachel Ann King, University of Chicago; Katherine D. Kinzler, University of Chicago

• Do children essentialize wealth and poverty? Evidence from a diverse, rural sample - Presenting Author: Tonghui (Kailee) Zhu, University of California Merced; Rose M Scott, University of California - Merced