When Do Children Think Inequality Is Fair?

• In Event: Invisible but Powerful: Children’s Social and Moral Reasoning Shapes and Mitigates Intergroup Power Imbalances

Abstract

Meritocracy, the idea that social power and resources should be distributed based on effort and abilities, have been widely accepted by many modern western societies (Wooldridge, 2021). However, there might be a dark side to meritocracy; people might also use the meritocratic logic to justify existing inequalities, as this logic might lead one to believe if someone has more resources, then they must have worked harder than others (Sandel, 2021, Young, 1958). In this project, we ask whether children and adults use this logic to justify inequalities. More specifically, we ask if children assume that when jobs are differently compensated the higher paying job is more meritorious.

In a preregistered experiment, we show 5-6 and 10-11 year-old children and adults cases in which two groups of people received different amounts of compensation (i.e., one group received a larger salary) for their work in producing some novel resources. We have 3 between-subjects conditions depending on how people collaborate in this production process: 1) correlative cooperation: two groups collaborated to produce a resource by doing the same jobs, 2) complementary cooperation: two groups collaborated to produce a resource by doing different jobs (i.e., division of labor), and 3) no cooperation: two groups produced two different products by doing different jobs. Then we ask participants how fair this unequal compensation structure is in addition to some follow-up questions about the jobs and people.

Results from an adult sample (N = 312) suggested that adults think unequal payment is less fair in the correlative condition (Mperceivedfairness = -1.98, SD = 1.71) compared to the complementary (Mperceivedfairness = -1.43, SD = 1.45) and the no cooperation conditions (Mperceivedfairness = -1.37, SD = 1.43), which did not differ from each other (pairwise corrected p values = .03, .01, .96, respectively, see Fig. 1). Analysis of the follow-up questions about the jobs suggested that participants think the better-paying job is more cognitively and physically demanding, even though no such information was provided. This suggests that unequal payment led participants to spontaneously generate meritocratic explanations (i.e., the high-paying job must be more difficult).

Data collection continues for children (current N = 43 for 5-6 year-olds and 39 for 10-11 year-olds, target N = 90 for each age group. Data collection started in June 2022 and will be finished by December 2022). Preliminary analyses suggest that overall, older children (Mperceivedfairness = -2.09, SD = 1.19) think unequal payment less fair compared to younger children (Mperceivedfairness = -1, SD = 2.15) (Estimate = 1.06, t = 2.77 p = .006) but as of now there is no condition effect (see Fig. 2). Once the data collection is completed, we will also analyze the follow-up questions on children’s assumptions about the high and low paying jobs, as well as whether parental teaching of just world beliefs or family income influences children’s fairness judgments.

Authors

• Pinar Aldan, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University