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

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.