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Chilean children's essentialist reasoning about poverty
María Francisca del Río1, Katherine Strasser
1Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. francisca.delrio@mail.udp.cl
The British Journal of Developmental Psychology
|January 5, 2011
Summary
Children essentialize poverty, viewing it as inherent. High-SES children uniquely believe poverty is inherited and immutable, impacting their understanding of social inequality.
Area of Science:
- Child Psychology
- Social Cognition
- Socioeconomic Studies
Background:
- Children's understanding of social categories like poverty is crucial for social development.
- Causal essentialism, the belief that categories have an underlying, unchanging essence, may influence children's poverty concepts.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether children construct representations of poverty based on causal essentialism.
- To explore differences in these representations between children from low and high socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds.
Main Methods:
- Surveyed 120 Chilean kindergartners from low and high SES schools.
- Assessed children's reasoning about poverty, focusing on internal vs. external attributions and beliefs about inheritance and change.
Main Results:
- Children demonstrated essentialist reasoning about poverty, prioritizing internal characteristics.
- Wealth category was a key factor in children's inferences about individuals' attributes.
- High-SES children uniquely exhibited beliefs that poverty is inherited and resistant to change.
Conclusions:
- Children, particularly from high SES backgrounds, may develop essentialist beliefs about poverty.
- These findings suggest socioeconomic factors influence the development of social inequality concepts in children.
- Further research is needed to understand the long-term implications of these essentialist beliefs.
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