About this session

Thursday, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Children’s Perceptions of Wealth: Power, Labor, and Geography

By the age of 3 to 4, children begin to recognize societal stereotypes for social status (Mandalaywala, 2020), and by age 10, they have a clearer understanding of their own social standing (Peretz-Lange, 2022). Given this growing awareness, it is crucial to explore how children infer social status from a range of contextual cues.

This symposium examines the development of children’s reasoning regarding social status, focusing on purchasing power, labor, and geography. The first paper investigates how 5-10-year-old children infer others’ purchasing power, i.e. their ability to purchase goods, after being exposed to a wealth cue such as the appearance of a family's house. Findings indicated that children perceived families with more expensive homes as having greater ability to purchase goods. The second paper examines 6-11-year-old children’s judgments of social status and wealth for individuals in jobs with intellectual versus physical labor. The findings revealed that children associated intellectual labor jobs with wealth and higher social status. The final paper studied 4-11-year-old children’s trait associations of those who are wealthy or impoverished in urban and rural settings. The findings indicate wealth to be more salient when both wealth and geography information are presented. However, when wealth information was removed, children associated rural individuals with hard work and urban individuals with intelligence.

Together, these papers offer a comprehensive view of how children construct social and economic hierarchies from various contextual factors. This discussion aims to illuminate how early socioeconomic judgments form, potentially influencing children’s future attitudes toward wealth, work, and inequality.

Paper #1
Title	“I’m not made of money”: Children’s judgements of others’ purchasing power
Presenting author	Adine Ana Maria Deleon, Boston University, United States

Paper #2
Title	Children’s Wealth and Social Status Judgments of Occupations Involving Physical vs. Intellectual Labor
Presenting author	Yuhan Wang, University of Wisconsin Madison, United States

Paper #3
Title	The emergence of wealth- and geography-based associations in childhood
Presenting author	Rachel Ann King, University of Chicago, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Adine Ana Maria Deleon, Boston University, United States

Discussant
Dr. Yarrow C. Dunham, Ed.D., Yale University, United States

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