How economic inequality affects prosocial behavior in children across development

Highlights

• Four- to 6-year-olds and 7- to 9-year-olds were exposed to high or low inequality.

• Those exposed to high inequality gave more resources to the poor.

• Older children gave more resources to the poor compared to younger children.

• Children who thought the game was unfair were more likely to give to the poor.

Abstract

Research has linked economically unequal environments to lower prosocial behavior in adults. However, we know little about how inequality affects children’s prosociality. Here, 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 128) played a series of games with several puppets where points were awarded. The distribution of points was characterized by either high inequality or low inequality. Children’s donation behavior (i.e., the number of stickers they donated to a poor child), resource division behavior (i.e., how they divided extra points among poor and rich puppets), and fairness perceptions (i.e., how fair they perceived the game to be) were measured in response. Although the experimental manipulation of inequality did not affect children’s donations, exploratory analyses revealed that higher inequality in children’s home suburb was linked to lower donation rates. Furthermore, with age, children distributed points with increasing concern for poorer individuals, and negative judgments of the inequality were linked to distributing resources to poorer individuals. Here we present the first comprehensive analysis of children’s prosocial reactions to high and low inequality across development.

Introduction

During the 1st century AD, the Greek historian Plutarch noted, “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics” (Marmot, 2006). This imbalance refers to economic inequality, denoting situations where a minority of individuals hold a majority of wealth (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). An uneven distribution of wealth has dominated 21st-century politics as a key concern for the future of many Western societies. There is also an accumulating body of evidence demonstrating negative effects of high inequality on human behavior and cognition (e.g., Elgar, 2010, Wilkinson and Pickett, 2017). Most notably, high inequality has been linked with decreased prosocial behavior in adult populations (Côté et al., 2015, Nishi et al., 2015, Sands, 2017; however, see Schmukle, Korndörfer, & Egloff, 2019, for alternative findings). This link is thought to exist because high inequality incites greater feelings of status threat, which in turn increases feelings of competition and decreases prosocial responses (Jetten et al., 2017, Sánchez-Rodríguez et al., 2018). Despite this, we know little about how children experience inequality and how this affects their prosocial behavior.

Uncovering a child’s experience of inequality is necessary for a number of reasons. First, childhood is a period where many traits and behaviors are acquired. Cultural and social environments have vast implications for children’s attainment of certain behaviors, and these can remain stable into adulthood (e.g., Kolb and Gibb, 2011, Rijlaarsdam et al., 2013). Moreover, understanding when children begin processing their economic environment is informative for educational interventions. Thus, researchers are beginning to chart perceptions and experiences of inequality in children. However, there has been a disproportionate focus on preadolescents and adolescents (Arsenio and Willems, 2017, Rivenbark et al., 2019, Roy, Raver, Masucci, & DeJoseph, 2019, Ruck et al., 2019). This focus rests on the assumption that younger children do not process their economic environment (Ruck et al., 2019)—an assumption that is perhaps premature.

Although research on economic inequality is limited, there is an extensive body of literature that examines children’s responses to unequal resources and how this intersects with their fairness concerns. Preschool-aged children tend to rely on simple heuristics that favor equal outcomes, and this is often irrespective of merit and need (Kirkland et al., 2020, Rizzo and Killen, 2016). However, when the option for equality is removed (e.g., they need to divide three cookies between two individuals), young children typically behave meritocratically (Baumard, Mascaro, & Chevallier, 2012). As children approach the middle childhood years, they consistently prioritize merit and need over equality (e.g., Noh, 2017, Schmidt et al., 2016). A similar change occurs in resource allocation that involves the self; preschool-aged children tend to focus on achieving fair outcomes for themselves, which later develops into a desire for fairness for themselves and others (e.g., Blake and McAuliffe, 2011, McAuliffe, Blake, Steinbeis, & Warneken, 2017).

These findings have enhanced our understanding of children’s developing conceptions of fairness. However, prior research has tended to focus on inequality between two individuals, where this exposure is often momentary and children are frequently passive observers (Kirkland, Jetten, & Nielsen, 2019). In the real world, inequality occurs at scale, exposure can be extensive, and children are usually implicated. Prior experimental research has not sufficiently studied the latter contexts—contexts where children process and react to unequal and equal environments.

Kirkland et al. (2020) established a paradigm that charted the effect of high and low inequality on children’s prosocial behavior. Children aged 4 to 5 years were immersed in a mock economy where they played a series of games alongside six puppets, and each accrued points over time. However, they experienced either low inequality (i.e., resources were distributed relatively equally between children and puppets) or high inequality (i.e., resources were distributed unequally, with some having few and others having many). Children then participated in two prosocial behavior tasks and were asked questions about their perceptions of fairness. Compared with children exposed to low inequality, those exposed to high inequality donated fewer stickers to a child in need. This finding suggests that high inequality may suppress prosocial behavior in young children in similar ways as in adults (Côté et al., 2015). However, children divided extra points equally among puppets and rated the resource distribution as equally fair across both high and low inequality. Together, these findings suggest that preschoolers’ prosocial behavior may be negatively affected by experiences of high inequality even though they only have a rudimentary understanding of fairness. These results also highlight that there is much to learn about children’s fairness concerns and prosocial reactions when inequality is placed in a broader sociostructural context.

The current study aimed to address the limitations of past research and is, to our knowledge, the first exploration of how children’s prosocial responses to persistent inequality change with age. Kirkland et al. (2020) examined children’s behavior in the face of pervasive sociostructural inequality. However, the paradigm they employed was appropriate for young children only and thus yielded no data on how reactions to unequal outcomes might change with age. The study also did not ask children for their reasons for each prosocial decision, providing limited insight into the rationale for their behavior. Thus, the current study aimed to replicate the findings by Kirkland et al. (2020) with a wider range of ages to establish any developmental patterns. To achieve this, the original paradigm was adapted to also be suitable for children in the middle childhood years. Moreover, we extended the measures of the prior study and included open-ended questions to gauge children’s reasoning for their behavior.

Here we examined developmental shifts between 4- to 6-year-old and 7- to 9-year-old children’s prosocial reactions to inequality. The age separation was deemed appropriate because 7-year-old children begin accounting for the needs of themselves as well as others in the face of inequality (Blake and McAuliffe, 2011, Corbit et al., 2017). Specifically, children played games with other puppets that resulted in high or low inequality of outcomes among the players. Children’s prosocial responses to the inequality was measured in several ways: (1) their donation behavior toward a needy child, (2) how they divided extra resources among the players in the games, and (3) their perceptions of how fair it was that some puppets got more than others.

There were reasons to suspect that the inequality manipulation would affect prosocial responses on the donation task and the division of resources among the players differently. In the literature, adults (Côté et al., 2015) and young children (Kirkland et al., 2020) have been less altruistic in the face of high inequality compared to low inequality. In addition, children during the middle childhood years tend to behave similarly to adults in the face of inequality (Shaw, Choshen-Hillel, & Caruso, 2016). It was thus predicted that, regardless of age, children would donate fewer stickers to a child in need after being exposed to high inequality compared with low inequality.

In contrast to the donation task, the resource division task was nonaltruistic; children did not incur a personal cost. Thus, this task allowed us to examine children’s assignment of deservedness toward the puppets without the constraints of self-serving desires. Because children develop a more refined appreciation of merit and need between the preschool years and middle childhood (McAuliffe, Blake, Steinbeis, & Warneken, 2017), we predicted that younger children would divide the additional points equally across both conditions, as demonstrated in prior research (Kirkland et al., 2020). In contrast, we predicted that older children would give the extra points (i.e., ostensibly stickers) away to the puppets who received less in both high and low inequality. We further predicted that all children would judge the distribution of points as more fair in the low-inequality condition compared with the high-inequality condition. However, we expected this difference to be greater for older children compared with younger children.