Children can represent complex social status hierarchies: Evidence from Indonesia

Abstract

Children's ethnicity‐status associations are often studied in societies where one ethnic group possesses status across multiple dimensions, such as political influence and wealth. This study examined children's (6–12 years) and adults' representations of more complex hierarchies in Indonesia (N = 341; 38% Native Indonesian, 33% Chinese Indonesian, and 27% other ethnicities; 55% female, 36% male; 2021–2022), a society where ethnic groups hold distinct forms of status (on average, Native Indonesians have political influence; Chinese Indonesians have wealth). By 6.5 years, children associated Native Indonesians with political influence and Chinese Indonesians with wealth. Intersectional analyses indicated that ethnicity‐status associations were stronger for male than female targets. Children of all ethnicities preferred Chinese Indonesians and preferences were predicted by wealth judgments.

The impact of sufferers’ wealth status on pain perceptions: Its development and relation to allocation of healthcare resources

“…Past work on early reasoning about wealth status has focused primarily on Western contexts (e.g., Shutts et al, 2016). A few exceptions investigated children's sensitivity to wealth-related cues (Olson et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2021) or their preference for rich people (Ahl et al, 2019;Amemiya et al, 2023). Our findings revealed cross-cultural similarities and variations in children's wealth-based pain perceptions: both US and Chinese children tended to attribute more pain to the poor (vs. the rich), though Chinese children showed this tendency earlier than US children.…”