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Key takeaways Children show a preference for people with more resources at 14 months. They also display negative evaluations of people with fewer resources. Findings signal that wealth-based biases are more deeply rooted than previously known.
Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. remain near all-time highs.
Analysts say this disparity is a "major issue of our time." Experts have spotlighted deep policy failures fueling the problem and helpful economic fixes to alleviate the suffering. Now researchers say our biases favoring the rich over the poor may take root earlier than was previously believed — perhaps when we are very young toddlers.
A new study led by a UC Berkeley psychologist suggests that biases for those with more resources can be traced to beliefs formed as young as 14 months. However, researchers say a preference for richer people may not necessarily be driven by kids' positive evaluations of them. Instead, it might be caused by a negative assessment of those with less.
Arianne Eason "Taken together, this suggests that somewhere early in this second year of life — 12 to 15 months of age — we're really seeing the development of these wealth-based biases come into play," said Arianne Eason, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of psychology and the paper's lead author. "And once they come in, they are relatively strong." The research findings were published this month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Through a series of seven experiments, the team measured how toddlers demonstrated preferences for people with differing amounts of particular kinds of resources they desired — toys and snacks. Besides a bias toward the more "wealthy" person who had more resources, the children showed dislike and avoidance for those whom researchers labeled in the experiments as the "poorer" individuals. Together, the results point to the deep-seated ways humans form ideas about what to value.
The research was partly inspired by Eason's...
Jason Pohl.
