Social status is related to children’s responses to third-person inequalities
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: • Children assigned to advantaged/disadvantaged statuses evaluated an inequality. • Advantaged children were less likely to rectify the third-person inequality. • Younger advantaged children judged rectifying third-person inequality as less fair. • Children focused on advantaged recipient’s resources were less likely to rectify. • Advantaged status shaped children’s views of inequality beyond personal benefits. The current study investigated how children’s experiences with advantaged or disadvantaged status within one inequality influence their responses to other inequalities that they are neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by. Children ( N = 161; 3–8 years of age; 80 girls and 81 boys; sampling population: 70% White, 16% African American, 10% Latine, and 4% Asian American; middle-income families) were first randomly assigned to an advantaged or disadvantaged status within a first-person, gender-based inequality and were then assessed on their allocations of new resources and judgments of rectifying, equal, and perpetuating allocations in response to a separate third-person, economic-based inequality between two other recipients. We found that children who were advantaged by the first-person inequality were less likely to rectify the third-person inequality, especially if they focused on the advantaged recipient’s perspective when reasoning about their allocation. Younger advantaged children were also less likely to judge rectifying the third-party inequality as fair. Taken together, these results demonstrate how children’s experiences with inequalities inform their responses to other third-person inequalities and conceptions of fairness more broadly.
Authors: Tim Wei-Ting Chao, Junyi Mei, Michael T. Rizzo
Institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,340
OpenAlex ID: W4404123873