The Role of Sympathy and Trust for Resource Allocation Decisions Within Preexisting Social Inequalities

• In Event: 2-124 - Children’s Emotions and Prosocial Behavior in the Context of Intergroup Relations

Integrative Statement

With increasing levels of disparities in wealth, creating equal access to social resources is crucial for sustainable development. Recent research has revealed important parameters for how adolescents make allocation decisions, such as the type of resource, the legitimacy of the claim, and whether the recipient is advantaged or disadvantaged (Rizzo & Killen, 2016). What has yet to be determined, is how intergroup relations, specifically based on socioeconomic status (SES), affect how adolescents allocate different types of resources in the context of resource scarcity and social hierarchies.
To address this issue, we investigated whether adolescents living in a developing country with strong social inequalities would consider existing inequalities when allocating necessary and luxury resources. Since intergroup trust and sympathy are important components of intergroup relations, we hypothesized that adolescents who expressed higher trust and sympathy for low SES individuals would be more likely to rectify inequalities.

For this project, 764 adolescents (53% girls, Mage = 13.49; SDage = 1.75) from a rural area in Nepal completed a resource allocation task (see Figure 1) and justified their allocation. Justifications were coded to reflect either considerations of equality, equity, other-oriented concern, or stereotypes. Intergroup sympathy and trust were measured by three items each, following short descriptions about low and high SES individuals (e.g., “How much would you feel sorry for X if he/she was excluded?”, “How much would you trust X?”, gender-matched, α = .73-.83).

The results revealed that most of the adolescents rectified social inequalities and allocated more resources to the low-income relative to the high-income school (range: 0-6, M books = 3.57, SDbooks = 0.95, Mpaint = 3.44, SDpaint = 0.95). Participants were significantly more likely to distribute more necessary resources than luxury resources to the low-income than the high-income school, t (754) = 3.21, p < .01. Thereby, 81% of the adolescents who perpetuated social inequalities when allocating luxury resources based their decisions on stereotypes about low and high SES individuals.
Moreover, trust for the low SES target significantly predicted the allocation of more necessary resources to the low-income school while trust for the high SES target significantly predicted higher resource allocation of necessary resources to the high-income school (see Table 1). Sympathy for the low SES story character significantly predicted the allocation of more luxury resources to the low-income relative to the high-income school. Interestingly, sympathy for the high SES story character did not significantly predict resource allocation (see Table 1). Similar results were found for the reasoning data: Intergroup trust predicted a greater reference to equity (log-odds = 1.34, p < .01), and intergroup sympathy predicted significantly fewer references to stereotypes (log-odds = 0.48, p < .001).

Taken together, these findings indicate that adolescents growing up in contexts of scare resources are sensitive to issues of social inequalities. Moreover, intergroup trust is an important predictor for the distribution of necessary resources while intergroup sympathy for low SES targets promotes more equitable distributions of luxury resources. Thus, trust and sympathy reflect important components in the promotion of intergroup prosociality.

Authors

• Jeanine Grütter, University of Zurich / University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Sandesh Dhakal, Tribhuvan University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Melanie Killen, University of Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author