Do children expect a gender gap in wages?

In our society, men are frequently paid more than women for doing the same job, a phenomenon known as the gender gap in wages. This phenomenon is striking for two reasons. First, both men and women show strong preferences for equality in laboratory experiments so it is surprising that such a strong pattern of inequality is allowed to persist. Second, when people are asked which gender they prefer, both men and women show preferences for women. While a great deal of work is focused on understanding the gender gap in wages in adults, we know virtually nothing about whether children also expect males and females to be compensated differently for performing the same work.

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An example trial from the gender wage gap study

A recent study in our lab addressed this question. Children 4 to 9 years old participated in a short task in which they were told stories about a boy and a girl character that did a job for their teacher. They were then told that the teacher wanted to reward the characters but had an unequal number of rewards. This meant that one character would receive more than the other. Children were asked to show the experimenter which character they thought received the more desirable reward.

We found that young girls and boys expected the character with their own gender to be rewarded preferentially. However, a different pattern emerged in older children: Older girls expected the boy and girl to receive the better reward roughly half the time, whereas older boys continued to expect the male character to receive the better reward.

We dove deeper into this pattern by asking whether our findings could be explained by differences in boys’ and girls’ preferences for the characters. That is, maybe boys show a stronger preference for their own gender than do girls. However, this is not what we found. Instead, we found that both boys and girls showed a strong own-gender preference in our follow-up task.

Results from this study suggest that boys and girls have different expectations about how males and females should be rewarded. Boys expect males to be rewarded more, while girls expect equality. While this finding does not map directly onto the gender gap in wages observed in adults, it does suggest an interesting and early-emerging gender difference in how children expect others to be compensated for work.

How do children understand social groups?

Research has shown that all of the characteristics we use to describe people and groups can be boiled down to two fundamental dimensions: warmth (e.g., fairness, kindness, compassion) and competence (e.g., intelligence, ability, assertiveness). These dimensions are important for understanding intergroup attitudes, as the types of attitudes and emotions elicited by a group are often determined by how warm and competent that group is perceived. The Stereotype Content Model (SCM) states that groups seen as both warm and competent are generally admired; these groups are often the majority ingroup in a society. Groups seen as cold and competent are generally envied (e.g., Asian Americans). Groups seen as warm but incompetent are generally pitied (e.g., the elderly), while groups seen as cold and incompetent are generally hated (e.g., drug addicts).

In a recent study at our lab, we examined whether children at 5 years and 9 years of age would use the dimensions of warmth and competence to rate a number of social groups the same way that adults would. We wanted to know if children would use these dimensions independently (that is, understand that kindness does not imply intelligence) and if children would use these dimensions to place commonly known social groups in the warmth by competence space as predicted by the SCM.

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Example images depicting different kinds of people

To do this, we created images to depict groups that adults rated as falling into each of the four categories delineated by the SCM. The groups were: Americans and teachers (admired category), scientists and rich people (envied category), blind people and old people (pitied category), and poor people and homeless people (hated category). Then we had children rate the groups’ warmth and competence by asking how nice and how smart they thought the groups were.

We found that in contrast to adults, children do not use these two dimensions independently. Nice and smart ratings for each group were highly correlated, indicating that children consider kindness and intelligence to be similar. When we compared children’s ratings to adults’ ratings, we found that children’s judgments of which groups were smart or not strongly mapped onto adults’ judgments. This indicates that children and adults have similar understandings of what it means to be smart and similar beliefs about which social groups are intelligent. When we examined the warmth ratings, we found that the 5-year-old children’s warmth ratings were not aligned with adults’ ratings but that 9-year-old children’s ratings were. This indicates that children’s understanding of warmth and what it means for a social group to be nice develops slower than their understanding of competence.

Our results suggest that young children have trouble understanding that a social group can be highly competent (and thus high in social status) but not especially warm; they assume that intelligent, powerful groups must be kind as well. These findings hold implications for how children’s intergroup attitudes and beliefs develop and how and when children’s beliefs might differ from adults’ beliefs.

How do children reason about the diverse preferences of others?

We recently conducted studies exploring how young children (3- through 6-year-olds) reason about others on the basis of information about shared likes versus shared dislikes. Specifically, do children make different inferences about individuals who share their feelings regarding a liked food compared with individuals who share their feelings regarding a disliked food? 

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Two puppets expressing their preferences for various foods

At the start of each session, we asked participants to rate different foods. Next, we introduced participants to puppets that expressed opposing opinions about those foods. Finally, we asked participants questions such as which puppet’s favorite food they would rather eat and which puppet’s favorite toy they would rather play with. 

We found that participants viewed individuals who shared their likes and individuals who shared their dislikes as better judges of which foods are tastiest to eat than individuals with opposite preferences. However, shared likes seemed to support broader similarity-based judgments than shared dislikes. For instance, participants viewed individuals who shared their liking for a given food as better judges of toys than individuals who disliked that food, but participants did not view individuals who shared their dislike for a given food as better judges of toys than individuals who liked that food. Our findings suggest that children make rich inferences about others on the basis of shared likes and restricted inferences on the basis of shared dislikes.