The present study examined 6 to 11-year-old British children's ability to identify and reason about the causes of a teacher's and mother's differential treatment based on a story character's class background. Children rated the fairness of such treatment and reasons about why a teacher or a mother selected a child for a coveted role. Children also completed measures of implicit class bias. Children rated differential treatment as more unfair when a working-class rather than an upper-class child received a negative decision in both vignettes. Older children rated decisions as unfair more than younger children did when a teacher was the perpetrator. Parents' educational level and implicit bias did not predict their ratings of unfairness. Older children attributed discrimination as the most likely cause of differential treatment in the teacher vignette. In contrast, younger children were as likely to attribute the cause of discrimination to being better or putting in more effort. For the teacher vignette, children were more likely to invoke discrimination than other reasons when a working-class child was not selected. The findings are discussed in relation to practical and theoretical implications.
Antonoplis, S. (2023). Studying socioeconomic status: Conceptual problems and an alternative path forward. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(2), 275–292. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221093615
Baron, A. S., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). The development of implicit attitudes: Evidence of race evaluations from ages 6 and 10 and adulthood. Psychological Science, 17(1), 53–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467‐9280.2005.01664.x
Barrett, M., & Buchanan‐Barrow, E. (2004). Children's understanding of society. Psychology Press.
Betz, T., & Kayser, L. B. (2017). Children and society: Children's knowledge about inequalities, meritocracy, and the interdependency of academic achievement, poverty, and wealth. American Behavioral Scientist, 61(2), 186–203.
Bourdieu, P. (2011). The forms of capital (1986). In Cultural theory: An anthology (Vol. 1, p. 949). Greenwood.
Brown, C. S. (2006). Bias at school: Perceptions of racial/ethnic discrimination among Latino and European American children. Cognitive Development, 21(4), 401–419. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2006.06.006
Brown, C. S., & Bigler, R. S. (2004). Children's perceptions of gender discrimination. Developmental Psychology, 40(5), 714–726. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012‐1649.40.5.714
Brown, C., & Bigler, R. S. (2005). Children's perceptions of discrimination: A developmental model. Child Development, 76(3), 533–553. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467‐8624.2005.00862.x
Dickinson, J., Leman, P. J., & Easterbrook, M. J. (2023). Children's developing understanding of economic inequality and their place within it. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 41(2), 81–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjdp.12446
Doyle, L., Easterbrook, M. J., & Harris, P. R. (2023). Roles of socioeconomic status, ethnicity and teacher beliefs in academic grading. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 93(1), 91–112. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12541
Elenbaas, L., Luken Raz, K., Ackerman, A., & Kneeskern, E. (2022). “This kid looks like he has everything”: 3‐to 11‐year‐old children's concerns for fairness and social preferences when peers differ in social class and race. Child Development, 93(5), 1527–1539. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13024
Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A.‐G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G* power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 175–191. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03193146
Jones, O. (2012). Chavs: The demonization of the working class. Verso Books.
Liu, W. M. (2013). Introduction to social class and classism in counseling psychology. Oxford University Press.
Mistry, R. S., Brown, C. S., White, E. S., Chow, K. A., & Gillen‐O'Neel, C. (2015). Elementary school children's reasoning about social class: A mixed‐methods study. Child Development, 86, 1653–1671. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12407
Mistry, R. S., Elenbaas, L., Griffin, K. M., Nenadal, L., & Yassine, A. (2021). Advancing developmental intergroup perspectives on social class. Child Development Perspectives, 15(4), 213–219. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12431
Møller, S. J., & Tenenbaum, H. R. (2011). Danish majority Children's reasoning about exclusion based on gender and ethnicity. Child Development, 82, 520–532. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467‐8624.2010.01568.x
Nick, T. G., & Campbell, K. M. (2007). Logistic regression. In W. T. Ambrosius (Ed.), Topics in biostatistics. Methods in molecular biology. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978‐1‐59745‐530‐5_14
Nosek, B. A., Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (2007). The implicit association test at age 7: A methodological and conceptual review. In J. A. Bargh (Ed.), Automatic processes in social thinking and behavior (pp. 265–292). Psychology Press.
Pickett, K. E., & Wilkinson, R. G. (2015). Income inequality and health: A causal review. Social Science & Medicine, 128, 316–326. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.12.031
Sharma, D., Levon, E., & Ye, Y. (2022). 50 years of British accent bias: Stability and lifespan change in attitudes to accents. English World‐Wide, 43(2), 135–166. https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.20010.sha
Sriram, N., & Greenwald, A. G. (2009). The brief implicit association test. Experimental psychology, 56(4), 283–294. https://doi.org/10.1027/1618‐3169.56.4.283
Sutton, L. (2009). ‘They'd only call you a scally if you are poor’: The impact of socio‐economic status on children's identities. Children's Geographies, 7(3), 277–290. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733280903024449
Swim, J. K., & Cohen, L. L. (1997). Overt, covert, and subtle sexism: A comparison between the attitudes toward women and modern sexism scales. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21(1), 103–118. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471‐6402.1997.tb00103.x
Tenenbaum, H. R., Leman, P. J., Aznar, A., Duthie, R., & Killen, M. (2018). Young people's reasoning about exclusion in novel groups. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 175, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.05.014
Varnum, M. E., Na, J., Murata, A., & Kitayama, S. (2012). Social class differences in N400 indicate differences in spontaneous trait inference. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 518.
Williams, A., & Steele, J. R. (2016). The reliability of child‐friendly race‐attitude implicit association tests. Frontiers in psychology, 7, 1576. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01576
