Structural Explanations Promote Resource Allocations that Compensate for Inequality

• In Event: 3-137 - Children's View of Social Inequality: Evaluations and Decisions About Wealth

Integrative Statement

Decisions about how to allocate resources profoundly affect groups and individuals across society. In a study with 189 participants, we investigated 4-5-year-old children’s decisions about how to allocate resources, given conditions of existing inequality. Specifically, we asked whether explanations regarding the cause of existing inequalities influence preschoolers’ decisions about how to allocate new resources. Do children believe that inequalities produced by structural forces––stable external constraints affecting access to resources––should be corrected more than inequalities attributed to internal causes, like lack of effort?
Prior research shows that when children as young as 4 are presented with a resource inequality attributed to internal causes, they tend to endorse social stratification (Hussak & Cimpian, 2017) and allocate new resources in a way that perpetuates rather than compensates for the existing inequality (Rizzo & Killen, 2017). Here, we asked whether giving children a structural explanation for an inequality might instead promote compensation for inequality (as Ellenbaas & Killen, 2017, suggest; see Vasilyeva, Gopnik, & Lombrozo, forthcoming, for evidence that preschoolers understand structural causes of differential access to goods). To address this question, we presented children with an existing inequality: one group baked five pies, another group baked only one. We offered children either no explanation for the inequality (baseline condition) or an explanation that appealed to merit (one group worked harder) or structural constraints (one group had access to more ingredients). Participants were then asked to divide new resources (six new pies) between the two groups, and to evaluate third-party resource allocations that either corrected for or perpetuated the initial inequality.
The merit-based explanation did not significantly affect allocation decisions: participants in both the baseline and the merit conditions divided the new resources roughly evenly between the two groups. In contrast, the structural explanation shifted this baseline preference toward compensation for inequality: children gave more to the resource-poor group (allocations to the “poor” group: baseline M=3.05, SD=1.39; merit M=2.97, SD=1.52; structural M=3.71, SD=1.44). Participants’ justifications of their allocation decisions also varied as a function of condition. Children in the structural condition were more likely to appeal to structural constraints acting on each group than children in the baseline or merit conditions (p’s < .001). Children in the structural condition were also more likely to appeal to the goal of evening out resulting wealth across groups, compared to the baseline condition (p = .028). In contrast, participants in the merit-based condition were more likely to justify their allocation decisions by referencing what each group deserved based on how hard they had worked (p’s < .001). Finally, when asked to evaluate third-party allocation decisions, only the participants in the structural condition reliably rated allocations perpetuating inequality as “not ok” (comparison to chance p <.001), and rated allocations rectifying inequality as significantly better than those perpetuating it (p <.001).
Together, these findings suggest that even preschoolers can appreciate structural explanations for inequality. Thus, structural explanation could be a powerful tool for mitigating system-justifying tendencies that sustain inequalities across the lifespan.

Authors

• Nadya Vasilyeva, Princeton University
  Presenting Author

• Mahesh Srinivasan, UC Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author

• Monica E. Ellwood-Lowe, University of California, Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alison Gopnik, University of California - Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tania Lombrozo, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author