Children’s inequality aversion in intergroup contexts: The role of parents’ social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism and moral foundations

Abstract

Although children are overall sensitive to inequality and prefer fair allocation of resources, they also often display ingroup favouritism. Inquiring about the factors that can shape the tension between these two driving forces in children, we focused on the role of parents. Extending the limited literature in this field, the present work examined whether individual differences in 3-to 11-year-old White children’s (N = 154, 78 boys) evaluations of fair versus pro-ingroup behaviours in an intergroup context vary as a function of both mothers’ and fathers’ social dominance orientation (SDO), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and moral foundations. Parents completed a questionnaire. Children were presented with a scenario in which two ingroup members distributed candies to two other children, one White and one Black, either in an egalitarian way or displaying a clear ingroup favouritism. Afterwards, their attitudes towards the two ingroup members who had distributed the candies were assessed through both an Implicit Association Test and explicit questions. Although children displayed on average an explicit preference for the fair over the pro-ingroup target, this preference did not emerge at the implicit level. Most importantly, both children’s explicit and implicit attitudes were related to mothers’ SDO, indicating that at increasing level of mothers’ SDO children’s inequality aversion tended to drop. Overall, these results emphasize the relevance of mothers’ support for social hierarchy in relation to the way in which children balance the two competing drives of equality endorsement and pro-ingroup bias.