Economic mobility and parents' opportunity hoarding

Abstract

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.

Keywords: inequality; opportunity hoarding; parenting; redistributive policy; socioeconomic status.

Fig. 1.

Study 1 interactions between parents’ socioeconomic status and belief in socioeconomic mobility on opportunity hoarding measures. Note. Parents who were one SD above (below) the mean of the measure of socioeconomic mobility beliefs were considered as having high (low) mobility beliefs. Findings indicate that believing in socioeconomic mobility was especially closely linked to high-SES parents being less likely to support redistributive policies and more likely to think that it would be appropriate for them to engage in discrete opportunity hoarding behaviors. SD = Standard Deviation, SES = socioeconomic status.

Fig. 2.

Study 2 effect of the upward mobility condition on parents’ support for redistributive policies by socioeconomic status. Note. Findings indicate that the upward mobility condition decreased high-SES parents’ support for redistributive policy relative to the downward mobility condition. SD = Standard Deviation. SES = socioeconomic status.

Fig. 3.

Study 2 evidence for indirect effects of the upward mobility condition on parents’ approval of opportunity hoarding behaviors through beliefs in socioeconomic mobility among high socioeconomic status parents. Note. Findings suggest an indirect effect of the upward mobility condition on high-SES parents’, but not low-SES parents’, approval of engaging in opportunity hoarding behaviors through increasing their beliefs that socioeconomic mobility is possible in society. SES = Socioeconomic Status. ^**P < 0.010, ^***P < 0.001.