The Origins of Intergroup Resource Inequality Influence Children's Decision to Perpetuate or Rectify Inequality

The Role of Recipients' Inter-Group Relations and Routine Behaviors in the Development of Children's Sharing Behavior

Sharing with others is an important prosocial behavior, which is widely developed in early childhood. Numerous studies have demonstrated that single characteristics (routine behaviors or inter-group relations) of the recipient impact children's sharing behavior. However, there is still a lack of understanding of the factors that influence sharing decisions in children with dual characteristics. In Experiment 1, 112 children aged 4-6 years (Mage = 5.55, girls account for 50%) participated in a sticker-sharing task, and the results indicated that older children (aged 5 and 6 years) were more willing to share and shared more stickers. Additionally, children shared more stickers with recipients who exhibited good routine behaviors compared to those who had poor behaviors. In total, 134 children aged 4-6 years (Mage = 5.47, girls account for 50.1%) participated in Experiment 2. The results indicated that children share more stickers with a friend than with a stranger. When recipients possessed dual characteristics, they shared more stickers with a stranger who had good routine behaviors than with a friend who had poor ones. Therefore, children are selective in their sharing, and when confronted with a recipient with dual characteristics, children prioritize the recipient's prior performance of moral norms over interpersonal distance.

Korean and American adolescents' judgments of group-based inequalities

The current study examined how adolescents from different cultural backgrounds perceive and reason about group-based inequalities. Korean (N = 84, 42 females) and American (N = 72, 36 females) adolescents, aged 12 to 17, evaluated resource distribution inequalities in school contexts among social groups differentiated by social class, race, and gender. Across both cultures, nearly all adolescents found race and gender inequalities unacceptable based on moral concerns for equality. However, judgments about inequalities based on social class were more complex; adolescents evaluated these inequalities as less wrong and coordinated equality concerns with other considerations. They further distinguished between two types of social class situations that varied in the level of inequality, judging group-level social class inequality as more unacceptable than individual-level inequality. Cultural variations were evident in the justifications for their evaluations: American adolescents coordinated moral concerns of equality and welfare with personal and conventional reasons, while Korean adolescents also considered moral concerns of merit and property rights. Different interpretations of situational contexts led to varying prioritizations of moral concerns across the two cultures.

Structural explanations for inequality reduce children's biases and promote rectification only if they implicate the high-status group

Children begin to participate in systems of inequality from a young age, demonstrating biases for high-status groups and willingly accepting group disparities. For adults, highlighting the structural causes of inequality (i.e., policies, norms) can facilitate adaptive outcomes-including reduced biases and greater efforts to rectify inequality-but such efforts have had limited success with children. Here, we considered the possibility that, to be effective in childhood, structural interventions must explicitly address the role of the high-status group in creating the unequal structures. We tested this intervention with children relative to a) a structural explanation that cited a neutral third party as the creator and b) a control explanation (N = 206, ages 5 to 10 y). Relative to those in the other two conditions, children who heard a structural explanation that cited the high-status group as the structures' creators showed lower levels of bias, perceived the hierarchy as less fair, and allocated resources to the low-status group more often. These findings suggest that structural explanations can be effective in childhood, but only if they implicate the high-status group as the structures' creators.

Children's thinking about group-based social hierarchies

Wealth, power, and status are distributed unevenly across social groups. A surge of recent research reveals that people being recognizing, representing, and reasoning about group-based patterns of inequity during the first years of life. 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.