Toddlers Treat Rich People Better Than Poor People

We live in a world with rampant social inequality. The abyss between the super-rich and the very poor has been increasing year after year. And this wealth difference infiltrates many areas of our life.

A new study traces the origins of this attitude. The shocking findings suggest that one-and-a-half-year-old toddlers already show a preference for people they recognize as rich. They are also more likely to help richer individuals.

What the Study Found

The study compared 11- to 13-month-old and 14- to 18-month-old toddlers on both a helping task and an evaluation task. While the younger age group (around one year) did not show any preference either in evaluation or in the helping task, the slightly older age group (which included toddlers as young as 14 months old) systematically preferred rich people.

The comparison with the younger age group also gives us some clues about whether this effect is driven by a positive attitude towards rich people or a dislike of poor people. It seems that it's the latter.

The one-and-a-half-year-olds were not more helpful towards, or more positive about, rich people than they were half a year ago. But they were less helpful and less positive when it came to poor people. So a more accurate take-home message of these studies might be that one-and-a-half-year-olds already show a bias against poor people.

Where Do These Attitudes Come From?

One big question that is not addressed in this study—and that is much more difficult to address—is about the origins of this shockingly early negativity towards the poor. One depressing take would be that this anti-poor bias is somehow innate—and no doubt some pop science venues will report the studies this way. But this is far from being the only or even the most convincing way of reading the results.

Here, it is crucially important to note that toddlers start to differentiate between rich and poor between 14 and 18 months, which is exactly the age when social cognition abilities start to develop. So a much more plausible way of tracing the origins of this differential attitude towards the rich and the poor is that toddlers are heavily influenced by how their caregivers react to rich and poor people. One-year-olds are much less sensitive to how their caregivers treat and react to others than one-and-a-half-year-olds.

To put it very simply, it's likely that 18-month-olds behave differently toward the poor because they pay more attention to how their caregivers behave toward the poor. A lot has been written about how people's class and socioeconomic status influence our behavior in subtle ways—often in ways we are not even aware of.

Takeaway: Toddlers Notice How We Treat Others

We may not always have full control over how we act when meeting rich or poor people. But our children are incredibly sensitive to even the subtlest clues. This study could be seen as a warning sign about just how much our children learn from us—and not everything they learn is something we should be proud of.