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Income and wealth inequality in the United States remains near historical highs, and analysts have called the disparity a “definition problem of our time.” Experts have highlighted the deep policy failures that fuel the problem and the economic solutions that can help alleviate the suffering.
Researchers now say our biases favoring the rich over the poor may take root earlier than previously thought, perhaps when we are very young children.
A new study by a University of California, Berkeley psychologist suggests that bias toward wealthier people can be traced back to beliefs formed as early as 14 months of age. However, the researchers say that a preference for wealthier people does not necessarily stem from children’s positive evaluations of them.
Rather, it may be due to a negative assessment of those who have less.
“All of this suggests that it’s around the beginning of the second year of life, between 12 and 15 months, that we really see these wealth biases emerge,” said Arianne Eason, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the study. “And once they’re there, they’re relatively strong.”
The research results were published this month in the Journal of experimental psychology: general.
In a series of seven experiments, the team measured how toddlers showed preferences for people who wanted different amounts of particular resources (toys and snacks). In addition to a bias toward the “richer” person who had more resources, the children showed aversion and avoidance toward what the researchers labeled in the experiments as “poorer” individuals.
Together, the findings highlight the deep ways in which humans form ideas about what they should value.
This research draws in part on Eason’s earlier work with children. In college, Eason worked in a lab that studied how infants and children thought about how resources were and should be distributed. That research consistently showed that toddlers and preschoolers generally preferred people who distributed resources fairly. At the time, it was thought that wealth bias emerged later in development, perhaps through direct conversations and socialization.
But Eason has increasingly focused less on how people distribute resources and more on how children perceive the mere possession of those resources. To find answers, Eason and her colleagues focused on young children, at an age when learning about the social world happens quickly.
To begin, they had to determine whether toddlers even retained information about who had more objects that were an indicator of “wealth.” They presented 35 children with two people in a room, each with a clear bowl. One bowl was filled with objects like toys or snacks; the other was nearly empty.
Then each person took out a new bowl and left the room. This time, however, the bowls were opaque. Even though participants couldn’t see how many items were in the bowls (or whether there were toys or snacks), they were much more likely to choose the bowl belonging to the person who had had the most previously. It was clear that toddlers could retain this information.
The researchers then wanted to test what they did with this knowledge and how it influenced the choice of who to help when adults were short on resources – in this case, blocks to build a tower. Toddlers were more likely to choose the person who, at the start of the study, had the most resources. This indicates a more enduring preference for wealthier people.
Time and again, children were shown to follow wealth, preferring to help those who were wealthier, and being more likely to play with those who had more resources.
The rich continued to come out ahead.
“It’s very clear that toddlers can track well and have these behavioral preferences in favor of people who have more,” Eason said, adding that the effects were diminished for those younger than about 13 months.
The team then tracked the young children’s eye movements while a video was played on a screen. An adult on the screen handed out unequal amounts of resources—Legos and cookies, this time. At first, the children’s gaze was barely different. But then they listened to either a positive recording that said of the adult in the video, “She’s a good girl, she did a good job,” or a negative recording that said, “She’s a bad girl, she did a bad job.”
Those who heard the positive message spent their time observing rich and poor individuals equally. In contrast, those who heard the negative message focused more of their attention on the poorer people.
“It’s not that toddlers had a preference for the rich,” Eason said. “They may have actually had a preference for the poor.”
Eason and his co-authors say their work shows that eliminating wealth inequality will require a concerted effort by adults to change the way young children perceive and act toward the poor. This must be done, they say, with the help of people and institutions that can help combat the negative attitudes that children begin to notice as they learn to walk.
“These are long-standing trends,” Eason said. “That means we have to work hard to eliminate them and make a lot of concerted efforts. But that doesn’t mean we have to avoid them.”
It’s true that some of this wealth bias may be evolutionary, she added. Perhaps humans naturally gravitate toward those who have the resources that will help them stay alive.
But Eason believes that’s not all. His research highlights the systemic ways we should start thinking about inequality and where this wealth-based “starting point” comes from. It’s the only way to combat the biases held by many adults that favor the rich and perpetuate policies that discriminate against the poor.
“Just because wealth bias kicks in in the second year of life doesn’t mean the world has to be that way,” Eason said. “We’re very flexible human beings. We can craft policies that go against some of our initial biases to produce the outcomes we want.”
More information:
Arianne E. Eason et al., The Haves and the Have-Nots: Infants Use Wealth to Guide Social Behavior and Evaluation., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2024). DOI: 10.1037/xge0001567
Provided by University of California – Berkeley
Quote:Can toddlers help explain the origins of our penchant for wealth? (2024, September 18) retrieved September 18, 2024 from
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