Adolescents’ conceptions of national wealth distribution: Connections with perceived societal fairness and academic plans.

Abstract

This study examined mostly lower-middle-income Latino (37%) and African American (33%) adolescents' (N = 90, Mage = 15.90) conceptions of how U.S. wealth is and ought to be distributed, and whether these judgments are related to adolescents' views about societal and legal fairness and their immediate academic plans. Individually administered multipart interviews assessed conceptions regarding (a) actual and ideal U.S. wealth distribution and related "Rawlsian" judgments, (b) social system and legal fairness, and (c) adolescents' near-term life goals. Overall, adolescents underestimated actual levels of U.S. wealth inequality while also preferring a more egalitarian distribution than was believed to exist. Adolescents' wealth-related reasoning was mostly unrelated to other societal or personal judgments, whereas societal and legal fairness judgments were related to personal academic plans. Although adolescents had generally negative views of societal and legal fairness, having more positive fairness conceptions was related to a greater emphasis on academic plans. Compared with their younger peers, older adolescents preferred somewhat more wealth inequality for motivational and economic reasons and preferred living in a society with some inequality. (PsycINFO Database Record

How Unequal Is the United States? Adolescents’ Images of Social Stratification

“…Overall, adolescents’ ideal image of society was far more egalitarian than the degree of stratification they perceived to exist in the United States today. These findings echo earlier studies with adults (Norton & Ariely, ) and adolescents (Arsenio & Willems, ) society to be, with girls (supporting H 1 ) as well as those in more educated families choosing a more egalitarian image (supporting H 4 ). Additionally, findings contribute to a novel area of research within the literature examining associations between societal viewpoints (i.e., fairness, institutional responsiveness, and anger toward injustice) in relation to perceptions of social stratification.…”

“…This finding bolsters Eriksson and Simpson's (, ) claims that the “quintile” approach may place high cognitive demands on participants. Notably, the five pictures and descriptions of societies administered via group surveys in the current study may be a simpler means for assessing views of stratification compared to quintiles and pie charts that were individually administered in the Arsenio and Willems’ () study. In particular, the pictorial measure utilized in this study may be better attuned to tapping into the unique associations between perceptions of resource distribution and moral evaluations concerning societal fairness.…”

“…Norton and Ariely () asked a nationally representative sample of more than 5,000 adults in the United States to estimate the percentages of wealth that each of five equal‐sized quintiles (from the richest to poorest 20%) of Americans possess. Arsenio and Willems () adapted this method in their study of 90 Latinx and African American 9th–12th graders from low‐ to middle‐income households. Participants were given two figures: one depicting the U.S. population divided into five equal‐sized quintiles described as richest to poorest and the second a pie chart divided into 24 equal‐sized wedges.…”

“…Notably, neither reference group nor possible selves theory lead to hypotheses about how stratified adolescents think society ought to be. However, when asked about the kind of society they would like to live in, both adolescents and adults choose a far more egalitarian wealth distribution than they believe actually exists in the United States (Arsenio & Willems, ; Norton & Ariely, ). Informed by this work, we might expect that on average, adolescents would choose a more egalitarian image of how U.S. society ought to look.…”

Inequality is a problem of inference: How people solve the social puzzle of unequal outcomes

“…Studies suggest that beliefs about inequality vary with age, income, education, religion, and race, and that such differences are observable already with children 14 years of age [43][44][45][46]. Cross-country research similarly shows patterns of variation between citizens of different nations and regions of the world [6,14,47,48].…”