Children’s experience of economic inequality: How earning position influences prosocial behavior

Highlights

• Four- to six-year-old children played games with puppets and were awarded points.

• The point distribution was either unequal (Experiment 1) or equal (Experiment 2).

• In both experiments, children were also 1) high earners or 2) low earners.

• In high inequality only, high earning children gave an extra point to poor puppets.

• However, low earning children gave the point to rich puppets.

Abstract

Across two experiments, children aged 4–6 years (N = 120) played a series of games with six puppets where each accrued tokens to exchange for stickers. Children were high or low earners, experiencing high inequality in Experiment 1 and low inequality in Experiment 2. Prosocial behavior towards the puppets assessed how children treat those who directly experience the economic environment, and children’s donation behavior towards a poor, unknown child measured whether earning status affects children’s broader generosity. When experiencing high economic inequality, children were more likely to give a spare token to a puppet who was in a contrasting position (e.g., poor children gave to rich puppets and rich children gave to poor), suggesting children will give to those who are least likely to threaten their own relative position. This study demonstrates for the first time how economic status can alter young children’s prosocial behavior when confronted with inequality.

Introduction

Economic inequality can greatly influence how we interact with others in our environment. A population’s level of economic inequality is defined by its how wealth is distributed; when there is high economic inequality, poor individuals co-exist with wealthier individuals whereas when inequality is low, all individuals have relatively equal amounts of wealth (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). In adults, high inequality has been linked to reduced prosocial behavior (Côté, House, & Willer, 2015; Cronin, Acheson, Hernández, & Sánchez, 2015; Nishi, Shirado, Rand, & Christakis, 2015; Sands, 2017) and greater competitive sentiments (Sánchez-Rodríguez, Willis, Jetten, & Rodríguez-Bailón, 2018). However, children’s reactions to inequality remain underexplored (Ruck, Mistry, & Flanagan, 2019). This is problematic given a child’s rearing environment can have dramatic effects on cognition and behavior later in adulthood (e.g., Kolb & Gibb, 2011; Rijlaarsdam et al., 2013). Moreover, children’s concern for fairness, i.e., judgments about whether rewards adequately reflect the effort or skill put in to a task (Kirkland, Jetten, & Nielsen, 2019), begins to develop in the preschool years (e.g., Baumard, Mascaro, & Chevallier, 2012; Blake & McAuliffe, 2011), suggesting the pervasive effects of inequality may impact children from early in development. The current study thus aimed to investigate the impact of inequality and earning position on young children’s prosocial tendencies.

Children begin showing a concern for fairness and inequality from around three years of age (Hamann, Warneken, Greenberg, & Tomasello, 2011). However, their behavior does not always align with their judgments (Rizzo & Killen, 2016) - known as the knowledge-behavior gap (Blake, McAuliffe, & Warneken, 2014; Smith, Blake, & Harris, 2013). For example, preschoolers will verbally judge meritocratic outcomes as fair but will still divide resources equally regardless of merit (although see Baumard et al., 2012). However, these studies, as with most others in the field, focus on inequality between two individuals with children being passive, third-party observers. This focus misaligns with children’s experiences of economic inequality in the real world; inequality exists between many and individuals are rarely passive observers but are part of the unequal or more equal world around them. Only one study to date has directly addressed these limitations by examining the role of environmental inequality on children’s prosocial behavior.

Kirkland, Jetten, and Nielsen (2020) exposed four- to five-year-old children to a series of games played with six other puppets. As children and puppets played the games, they accrued tokens which could be later swapped for stickers. Importantly, the number of tokens received was never clearly correlated with the effort or skill of the individual. Children experienced either high inequality (some puppets earned few tokens/stickers while others earned a lot) or low inequality (puppets earned similar amounts). Across both conditions, children received the same number of tokens (i.e., 14) and finished in the same relative position (i.e., fourth place of seven).

At the conclusion of the games, children received 14 stickers and were asked if they would like to donate some to an unknown, fictional child (Kirkland et al., 2020). The children exposed to a high inequality environment donated fewer stickers to a child in need compared to children exposed to low inequality. Additionally, children were asked to give out six extra tokens to the puppets. Regardless of condition, children gave the puppets one token each and this provides further evidence of an early preference for giving equally (Rizzo & Killen, 2016). The paradigm established by Kirkland et al. (2020) was successful in creating an effective economic environment. However, children were middle earners across both high and low inequality. It remains unclear how children would react if they were low or high earners, i.e., ostensibly poor or rich.

Research with adults suggests that one’s economic position has an impact on how inequality is experienced (e.g., Cheung & Lucas, 2016; Côté et al., 2015; Jetten, Mols, & Postmes, 2015; Jetten et al., 2017). Jetten et al. (2017) postulated that inequality affects both the wealthy and poor negatively, albeit for slightly different reasons. They hypothesized that inequality enhances feelings of being deprived in poorer individuals whereas higher income individuals experience greater perceived insecurity of their status, leading to increased competitive sentiments and reduced cooperative behavior. Moreover, Côté et al. (2015) found that, compared to low inequality, high inequality negatively affects donation behavior in high income but not low income individuals (although, see Schmukle, Korndörfer, & Egloff, 2019, for alternative findings). This suggests that these different experiences at lower and higher positions in a hierarchy do not affect prosociality in the same way. Past work has shown young children recognise differences in wealth, and use these cues to guide their behavior (Shutts, Brey, Dornbusch, Slywotzky, & Olson, 2016). However, it remains unclear if relative position impacts children’s experience of unequal and equal environments, and how this may alter prosocial behavior.

The current study aimed to identify the role of high and low earning positions on prosocial behaviour in environments with varying degrees of inequality. We examined this in four- to six-year-olds as prior research has established that preschoolers have a basic understanding of fairness (Hamann, Bender, & Tomasello, 2014; Rizzo & Killen, 2016; Smith et al., 2013). In addition, preschoolers are sensitive to unequal outcomes (Hamann et al., 2011) and are less prosocial in the face of inequality (Kirkland et al., 2020). Thus, in the current study, four- to six-year-old children played a game with six puppets. Across four games, children and puppets completed the task and were rewarded tokens to be later exchanged for stickers. Children were then provided with a donation task where they were asked to donate some of their stickers to a needy child, and a resource division task where they were given an extra token to give to a puppet. These tasks differed in terms of generalisability; the resource division task assesses how children treat others directly implicated by the economic environment whereas the donation task examines whether inequality may have broader implications for generosity toward strangers, as it appears to in adults (e.g., Côté et al., 2015).

In Experiment 1, children experienced highly unequal outcomes between the puppets, where some received a small amount and others received a large amount. In addition, children themselves were either low or high earners. In Experiment 2, to clarify the role of economic status in the absence of a broader unequal environment, children were again either low or high earners but instead experienced highly equal outcomes between the puppets. Notably, comparing the role of earning position (i.e., high or low) directly to inequality (i.e., high or low) affords insight into the interaction between inequality and economic status. However, such comparison creates an unavoidable confound; children’s position relative to others changes as the degree of inequality changes. That is, a high earner in a low inequality condition would possess more than the others by a significant degree, but a high earner in a high inequality condition would earn an amount similar to other high earners. Thus, we examined the role of high and low inequality in two separate experiments to mitigate this confound and maximise control.