When my ECONS102 class covers inequality, one point I make is that inequality may be a problem if it is associated with spatial segregation - that is, richer people living in richer areas, and poorer people liver in poorer areas. That is a problem because it may lead to fewer interactions between class groups, leading to lower sympathy for lower-class groups among upper-class groups, making those with power more accepting of increased inequality. That argument is based on research cited in the Max Rashbrooke book Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis. However, that research was (as far as I am aware) all based on adults.
In contrast, this new article by Kelly Kirkland (University of Melbourne), Jolanda Jetten (University of Queensland), Matti Wilks (Yale University), and Mark Nielsen (University of Queensland), published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online, but there is a non-technical summary available on The Conversation), uses a cool experiment to test children's (aged 4-9 years) reactions to inequality. In the experiment:
Children played a series of games with puppets, where each accrued points over time, resulting in a context characterized by high or low inequality.
Children were asked whether they wished to donate some of their 14 sticker rewards to an unknown poor child. The current study revealed that older children donated more stickers compared with younger children. This finding is consistent with prior research suggesting that children generally become more altruistic with age... In addition, and contrary to the first hypothesis, children donated similar amounts of stickers regardless of which inequality condition they were in.
On the latter finding, children gave the same amount of stickers regardless of whether the game resulted in more, or less, inequality between the players. However, children's neighbourhood environment also mattered:
Notably, the inequality in children’s home suburb was linked to their donation behavior; children who lived in more unequal areas donated fewer stickers. This provides evidence that persistent real-world inequality may influence children’s prosocial behavior.
This finding accords with the research cited in Rashbrooke's book, but clearly needs replication beyond a single study of 120 children in Australia.
After the altruism task, the children also engaged in:
...a resource division task where they were given six extra points to divide among the puppets. Consistent with the second prediction, older children tended to give more to the poorer puppets compared with younger children. This aligns with previous work suggesting an increase in equitable resource division as children age... In addition, children were more likely to give the resources to poorer puppets after experiencing high inequality than after experiencing low inequality, and this effect was contrary to predictions.
It's not clear to me why that finding would be contrary to what you expected. If children have aversion to inequality, then you would expect a greater aversion to higher inequality. An interesting point was this:
...children’s justification for their resource division behavior revealed marked age shifts in their reasoning. Older children justified their behavior substantially more by referring to the ways in which the points were divided (e.g., ‘‘They were the ones that got the least amount of points”). On the other hand, younger children were much more likely to divide resources based on factors other than the point division (e.g., ‘‘I like that animal,” ‘‘That animal is cute”). Indeed, the effect of older children being more likely to give to the poor puppets was fully mediated by their tendency to refer to the point division.
So, inequality becomes more salient as children get older, and they also perceive it as "less ok". Anyway, the neighbourhood-level effects were most interesting to me. It would be interesting to see how those interact with household socio-economic status (which was included in the analysis, but provided not to be statistically significant on its own). For instance, is the effect of inequality on pro-social behaviour different between slightly richer children living in poorer areas and slightly poorer children living in richer areas? It is also interesting because it raises a question about how early in our lives our views on, and reactions to, inequality are formed, and how much they change over time and are shaped by our environment. More research like this is needed, but at this stage it seems to support the point that inequality may be a problem because of spatial segregation.
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