Children's Perceptions of Inequality

In this talk I will describe work on social evaluation in young children. First, I discuss our work on children's perceptions of social inequality including how children use others' socioeconomic status to inform their judgments. I will detail studies showing that surprisingly early in development young children are aware of the social inequalities around them and judge people based on their relative place in society. Then I will focus on a second case of social evaluation--how children think about their own identity. In particular, I'll focus on the unusual case of transgender children--children whose gender identity clashes with the gender identity others around them assume them to have.