{"title":"Using numbers strategically: Proportional reasoning induces wealth in-group bias in an equity task","authors":"Nadia Chernyak , Taylor Ashqar","doi":"10.1016/j.cogdev.2025.101572","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Prior work in cognitive development has shown a strong association between our numerical cognition abilities and our abilities to engage in equity-based social evaluation. At the same time, work in social development has found that children generally prefer wealthier others and prefer in-group members. Integrating these two perspectives, we investigated whether children’s developing proportional reasoning skills might help <em>overcome</em> their in-group preferences, or alternatively, to <em>enact</em> them. In a social evaluation task (modeled after McCrink et al., 2010), 4–8-year-olds viewed a series of characters with different resource constraints (e.g., one character had 2 cookies and another had 6), each of whom then shared a proportion of their resources with a friend (e.g., one character shared 1/2 of his cookies while another shared 2/6). Children were then asked to make a series of social evaluations about the characters. We also assessed children’s proportional reasoning skills, cognitive control, and subjective social status. Children’s proportional reasoning skills prompted them to select their wealth-ingroup members: High-income children were more likely to select the richer participant if they had high proportional reasoning skills, whereas low-income children were more likely to select the poorer participant if they had high proportional reasoning skills. Results suggest that proportional reasoning abilities help enact strategic in-group bias.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51422,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Development","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101572"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8000,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Cognitive Development","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885201425000310","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, DEVELOPMENTAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Prior work in cognitive development has shown a strong association between our numerical cognition abilities and our abilities to engage in equity-based social evaluation. At the same time, work in social development has found that children generally prefer wealthier others and prefer in-group members. Integrating these two perspectives, we investigated whether children’s developing proportional reasoning skills might help overcome their in-group preferences, or alternatively, to enact them. In a social evaluation task (modeled after McCrink et al., 2010), 4–8-year-olds viewed a series of characters with different resource constraints (e.g., one character had 2 cookies and another had 6), each of whom then shared a proportion of their resources with a friend (e.g., one character shared 1/2 of his cookies while another shared 2/6). Children were then asked to make a series of social evaluations about the characters. We also assessed children’s proportional reasoning skills, cognitive control, and subjective social status. Children’s proportional reasoning skills prompted them to select their wealth-ingroup members: High-income children were more likely to select the richer participant if they had high proportional reasoning skills, whereas low-income children were more likely to select the poorer participant if they had high proportional reasoning skills. Results suggest that proportional reasoning abilities help enact strategic in-group bias.
期刊介绍:
Cognitive Development contains the very best empirical and theoretical work on the development of perception, memory, language, concepts, thinking, problem solving, metacognition, and social cognition. Criteria for acceptance of articles will be: significance of the work to issues of current interest, substance of the argument, and clarity of expression. For purposes of publication in Cognitive Development, moral and social development will be considered part of cognitive development when they are related to the development of knowledge or thought processes.