Perceptions of Economic Inequality Are Related to Children's Judgments About Access to Opportunities

This study examined how children's perceptions of economic inequalities impacted their moral judgments about access to opportunities. The sample included ethnically diverse 8- to 14-year-olds (N = 267; M = 11.61 years, SD = 1.88) of middle- to upper-middle-income backgrounds. The larger the economic inequality in access to opportunities children perceived, the more negatively they evaluated granting access to a specific opportunity (an educational summer camp) to high-wealth peers alone, and the more they reasoned about the importance of fair access to learning. Further, children were more supportive of admitting low-wealth peers when they knew they had been excluded from the opportunity in the past, and children who chose to admit low-wealth peers reasoned about the implications of broader economic inequalities. Finally, most children preferred to take an active role in determining who should receive access to this special opportunity rather than leaving the decision to chance. These findings provide evidence for how perceptions of both broad and context specific intergroup relations contribute to moral judgments in childhood.