Economic mobility and parents' opportunity hoarding

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Silverman, David M.; Hernandez, Ivan A.; Schneider, Marlis; Ryan, Rebecca M.; Kalil, Ariel; Destin, Mesmin; Fiske, Susan
• 署名单位: Northwestern University; California State University System; California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo; Norwegian School of Economics (NHH); Georgetown University; University of Chicago; Northwestern University; Northwestern University
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-8585
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2407230121
• 发表日期: 2024-09-10
• 关键词: socioeconomic-status; perceptions; INEQUALITY; hierarchy; attitudes; support; threat

摘要

Creating opportunities for people to achieve socioeconomic mobility is a widely shared societal goal. Paradoxically, however, achieving this goal can pose a threat to high- socioeconomic- status (SES) people as they look to maintain their privileged positions in society for both them and their children. Two studies evaluate whether this threat manifests as opportunity hoarding in which high-SES parents adopt attitudes and behaviors aimed at shoring up their families' access to valuable educational and economic resources. The current paper provides converging evidence for this hypothesis across two studies conducted with 2,557 American parents. An initial correlational study demonstrated that believing that socioeconomic mobility is possible was associated with high-SES parents being more inclined to attempt to secure valuable educational and economic resources for their children, even when doing so came at the cost of low-SES families. Specifically, high-SES parents with stronger beliefs in socioeconomic mobility exhibited decreased support for redistributive policies and viewed engaging in discrete behaviors that would unfairly advantage their children (e.g., allowing them to misrepresent their identities on school and job applications) as more acceptable relative to both low-SES parents with similar beliefs and high-SES parents who were less optimistic about socioeconomic mobility. A subsequent experimental study established these relationships causally by comparing parents' responses to different types of socioeconomic mobility. Together, the current findings merge insights across psychology and economics to deepen understandings of the processes through which societal inequities emerge and persist, especially during times of apparently abundant opportunity.