Who is a thinker? With age, higher SES American children increasingly associate social status with divisions in labour
Corresponding Author
Shaylene E. Nancekivell
Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA
Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Correspondence
Shaylene E. Nancekivell, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada.
Email: [email protected]
Contribution: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Supervision, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing
Search for more papers by this authorTatyana Farrow
Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA
Contribution: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft
Search for more papers by this authorBrian A. Maurer
Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA
Contribution: Data curation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing - original draft
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
Shaylene E. Nancekivell
Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA
Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Correspondence
Shaylene E. Nancekivell, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada.
Email: [email protected]
Contribution: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Supervision, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing
Search for more papers by this authorTatyana Farrow
Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA
Contribution: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft
Search for more papers by this authorBrian A. Maurer
Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA
Contribution: Data curation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing - original draft
Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
This exploratory report investigates how children, aged 6- to 12-years, reason about divisions in labour. It focuses on understanding when in development children might associate higher status groups with intellectual as opposed to physical labour. It explores this question by introducing a sample of mostly mid/high-SES American children to a novel factory setting and then asking them who is likely to have one of two jobs: a ‘builder’ (physical labour), or ‘thinker’ (intellectual labour) job. Older children were more likely than younger children to associate an individual's higher social status with intellectual labour work as opposed to physical labour work. Children also explained their reasoning, and with age their explanations focused more on social factors like the role of access to ‘choices’ or opportunities in shaping the nature of others' work.
Open Research
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The majority of the data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF at https://osf.io/5d9qy/?view_only=83c13d06da11442fb39e2e88106c7da1.
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