Social status is related to children's responses to third-person inequalities

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Fairness; Inequality; Moral development; Resource allocation; Social development; Social status.