How social status shapes U.S. children’s beliefs about social mobility

Abstract

Children grow up within social hierarchies that shape their everyday lives. Social mobility is a core mechanism through which societies either challenge or maintain existing inequalities. The present study examined how U.S. children’s social status—both experimentally manipulated and measured at the neighborhood level—shapes their beliefs about social mobility for themselves and their high- and low-status peers. Children ( N = 130; 3–8 years; 70 girls, 59 boys, 1 non-binary; 12.3% Asian, 6.9% Black, 11.6% Latine, 20.7% Multiracial, and 48.5% White) were randomly assigned to either experimentally advantaged or disadvantaged groups. They were then assessed on their (1) general expectations about social mobility, (2) effort-contingent expectations for mobility, and (3) post-hoc explanations for upward and downward mobility. We found that compared to experimentally-disadvantaged children, experimentally-advantaged children were more likely to have higher expectations for themselves and high-status peers, but lower expectations for low-status peers. With age, disadvantaged children (experimental and neighborhood) exhibited higher expectations for themselves and lower expectations for high-status peers, whereas advantaged children’s expectations remained stable. Older children were more likely to believe working hard leads to upward mobility and attribute upward/downward mobility to individual effort. This tendency was especially pronounced for their own upward (vs. downward) mobility, but less so when evaluating the upward mobility of high-status peers (vs. themselves). These results suggest that children’s beliefs about social mobility develop throughout childhood, differ by target, and are shaped by their own social status.