CAREER: The development of, and reasoning about, inequality and its rectification

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This project investigates the origins of our understanding of fairness and inequality. The first part of the project investigates how our cognitive skills shape our understanding of equity; the second aim then focuses on the specific features of inequality that young children attend to. Finally, the last aim investigates how social factors, such as experiences with systemic disadvantage, shape the development of our reasoning about inequality. This research will help pinpoint the specific stumbling blocks that children – and by extension, adults – face when reasoning about and actively rectifying inequality. Broader impacts include dissemination of the work to the local community and to scholars focused on poverty and education; cross-training a group of researchers from traditionally under-represented groups in research, technical skills, and community outreach; and collaborations with local communities to conduct this work. One of the most pervasive problems of our society is the perpetuation of unequal distribution of resources. While people recognize the pernicious effects of inequality, they face a series of biases that dictate its perpetuation, rather than its rectification. Through a series of experimental developmental studies, the research in this proposal focuses on why people have trouble rectifying inequality by investigating a) how our understanding of inequality develops in early childhood, b) the cognitive mechanisms that shape our understanding of early inequality, and c) how our social experiences and social contexts contribute to our abilities to recognize (un)fairness. The results of this work will shed light on the origins, developmental trajectories, and cognitive underpinnings of our abilities to think about inequitable resource distribution.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.