BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Dev. Psychol.
Sec. Social and Emotional Development
YOUNG CHILDREN'S UNDERSTANDING OF SOCIAL CLASS
Provisionally accepted
- Brigham Young University, Provo, United States
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This study examined 5- to 6-year-old children’s categorizations of and behaviors toward peers from differing social classes. Participants were 193 children (Mage = 5.45 years, SD = .27; 102 boys, 91 girls) recruited from a diverse U.S. metropolitan region. Children completed a matching task using material cues (houses, cars, backpacks) and one-shot, third-party allocation and punishment tasks. Children successfully identified social class groups above chance and showed higher accuracy when identifying rich compared to poor peers. In allocation, children favored rich targets over poor targets, and this bias was associated with higher family income and lower parent education. Children punished both rich and poor peers above chance levels, and greater punishment was associated with higher family income, but not with target class. These findings show that early-school-age children can categorize others by social class using material cues and use these cues to guide their moral behavior towards others.
Keywords: Developmental intergroup theory, Intergroup attitudes, Punishment, Resource Allocation, Social class (SES)
Received: 04 Sep 2025; Accepted: 06 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Busby, Reschke, Fraser, Jasperson and Jaglowski. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Andrea Kinghorn Busby
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