TY - JOUR
T1 - Children's use of race and gender as cues to social status
AU - Mandalaywala, Tara M.
AU - Tai, Christine
AU - Rhodes, Marjorie
N1 - Funding Information:
The researchers involved in this project were funded under National Institutes of Health grant number: 25-91551-Q1567-F7819, from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development awarded to MR. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2020 Mandalaywala et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2020/6
Y1 - 2020/6
N2 - Social hierarchies are ubiquitous and determine a range of developmental outcomes, yet little is known about when children develop beliefs about status hierarchies in their communities. The present studies (3.5-6.9 years; N = 420) found that children begin to use gender and race as cues to status in early childhood, but that gender and race related to different status dimensions and had different consequences for inter-group attitudes. Children expected boys to hold higher status as defined by access to resources and decision-making power (e.g., having more toys and choosing what other people play with) but did not expect boys to have more wealth overall. Gender-related status beliefs did not relate to gender-related social preferences; instead, children preferred members of their own gender, regardless of their status beliefs. In contrast, children expected White people to be wealthier than Black people, and among some populations of children, the belief that White people were higher status (as defined by access to resources and decision-making power) weakly related to pro-White bias. Children's status-expectations about others were unrelated to beliefs about their own status, suggesting children more readily apply category-based status beliefs to others than to themselves.
AB - Social hierarchies are ubiquitous and determine a range of developmental outcomes, yet little is known about when children develop beliefs about status hierarchies in their communities. The present studies (3.5-6.9 years; N = 420) found that children begin to use gender and race as cues to status in early childhood, but that gender and race related to different status dimensions and had different consequences for inter-group attitudes. Children expected boys to hold higher status as defined by access to resources and decision-making power (e.g., having more toys and choosing what other people play with) but did not expect boys to have more wealth overall. Gender-related status beliefs did not relate to gender-related social preferences; instead, children preferred members of their own gender, regardless of their status beliefs. In contrast, children expected White people to be wealthier than Black people, and among some populations of children, the belief that White people were higher status (as defined by access to resources and decision-making power) weakly related to pro-White bias. Children's status-expectations about others were unrelated to beliefs about their own status, suggesting children more readily apply category-based status beliefs to others than to themselves.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0234398
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0234398
M3 - Article
C2 - 32569267
AN - SCOPUS:85086886252
VL - 15
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
SN - 1932-6203
IS - 6 June
M1 - e0234398
ER -