Children’s Understanding and Use of Four Dimensions of Social Status

ABSTRACT

Beginning early in life, children are exposed to people who differ in social status. In five studies, we investigate whether 3- to 6-year-old children recognize different dimensions of status (i.e., wealth, physical dominance, decision-making power, and prestige) and use these dimensions to inform their social judgments (preferences and resource allocation). Across studies, we found that by age 3, children identify high-status people as in-charge. Further, while 3-6-year-olds favor higher status individuals over lower status individuals on a preference measure, 5-6-year-olds allocate a resource to a lower status individual over a higher status individual and 3-4-year-olds are at chance in their allocation. We observed minimal differences across dimensions of status in these studies. Taken together, across five pre-registered studies, we demonstrated that children identify and use social status distinctions to inform their social judgments across a variety of different dimensions.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Arianne Eason for her help with the GEE statistical analyses. Thank you also to Elizabeth Abel, Jadrien Gonzalez, Claire Grossman, Yejee Jeong, Annelise Loveless, Matt Murray, Silvia Navarro Hernandez, Teresa Nguyon Ngo, Natalie Revollas, Val Unger, and Cossette Woo for helping to collect and enter data. We are grateful to all the parents and children who participated in the studies. Thank you to the Social Cognitive Development Lab and the first author’s dissertation committee at the University of Washington for their insights on these studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.

Notes

¹ Additionally, we originally pre-registered that we would run n = 24 3-year-olds. However, upon recruiting 3-year-olds, we found that many of them could not complete the study. Of the first 13 3-year-olds we recruited, we had to drop 5 (38%), so we deemed the task too difficult for 3-year-olds and decided to stop recruitment of this age group. However, we returned to including 3-year-olds in a simplified design in Study 5.

² See supplement with our original pre-registered analyses correlating age in months with children’s identification of high-status people broken down by each of the four status dimensions. Only in the wealth dimension was age in months significantly correlated with identifying high-status people. The other three dimensions did not show significant correlations with age.

³ Using an ANOVA, as seen in the Supplement, there was not a significant order effect (p =.08). This was one of the few differences between the ANOVA and GEE analyses.

⁴ Given the high number of children who were excluded, we also analyzed the data inclusive of all children when there was data available. Importantly, we did not pre-register this approach, but were concerned about excluding so many participants. Our findings do not differ if all of these participants are included.

⁵ We pre-registered that we would run 48 participants. We accidently ran two extra participants (both 5-year-olds girls). All analyses were computed with all 50 participants and with only the first 48 participants. The results reported in the main manuscript include all 50 participants for maximum power. The pattern of results did not change with the first n = 48 participants with the exception of one pre-registered analysis reported in the results.

⁶ We accidently ran one extra 3-year-old participant in the preference condition. For maximal power, we include their data in the manuscript, but results do not change if the extra participant is excluded.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation [Grant SMA-1837857]; Earl Buz Hunt and Mary Lou Hunt Endowed Psychology Graduate Fellowship; The University of Washington Bolles Funding Award. Additionally, we would like to thank the funding sources for these studies including the Waterman Award to Kristina Olson (1837857), The University of Washington Bolles Funding award to Elizabeth Enright, and the Earl Buz Hunt and Mary Lou Hunt Endowed Psychology Graduate Fellowship to Elizabeth Enright.