Structural explanations lead young children and adults to rectify resource inequalities.

Decisions about how to divide resources have profound social and practical consequences. Do explanations regarding the source of existing inequalities influence how children and adults allocate new resources? When 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 201) learned that inequalities were caused by structural forces (stable external constraints affecting access to resources) as opposed to internal forces (effort), they rectified inequalities, overriding previously documented tendencies to perpetuate inequality or divide resources equally. Adults (N = 201) were more likely than children to rectify inequality spontaneously; this was further strengthened by a structural explanation but reversed by an effort-based explanation. Allocation behaviors were mirrored in judgments of which allocation choices by others were appropriate. These findings reveal how explanations powerfully guide social reasoning and action from childhood through adulthood.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

• Publication date

  2024-03-22

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.jecp.2024.105896PMID 38520769
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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