Children's thinking about group-based social hierarchies
Year: 2022
Type: preprint
Abstract: Wealth, power, and status are distributed unevenly across social groups. A surge of recent research reveals that people begin recognizing, representing, and reasoning about group-based patterns of inequity during the first years of life. In this paper, we first synthesize recent research on what children learn about group-based social hierarchies as well as how this learning occurs. We then discuss how children not only learn about societal structures but become active participants in them. Studying the origins and development of children’s thoughts and behavior regarding group-based social hierarchies provides valuable insight into how systems of inequity are perpetuated across generations and how intergroup biases related to wealth, power, and status may be mitigated and reshaped early in development.
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4224434641