Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Dunham, Yarrow

Abstract

Children are born into a social world with a dizzying array of groups. These groups are often hierarchically structured in the society, leading to social inequalities. For example, children interact with and are also members of social groups like the wealthy and the poor, males and females, and different national and ethnic groups. This dissertation consists of three bodies of work that contribute to our broader scientific understanding of how children reason about social groups and inequalities. Specifically, I show that children imbue randomly assigned, meaningless groups with rich affiliative meanings, develop complex conceptualizations of wealth, poverty, and inequality, and are motivated to justify and perpetuate inequalities even when they are merely randomly assigned to a rich novel group. Together this work reveals that children are sophisticated social actors ready to affiliate with surrounding social groups and take both stances and actions (e.g., developing their own beliefs and behaviors) in the face of group inequalities.

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