ABSTRACT
As a part of understanding the societies that they live in, children and adolescents seek to explain and form judgments about the social inequalities that they experience and encounter. One branch of research in this area draws on the social reasoning developmental (SRD) model, which integrates social domain theory and social identity theory to investigate how children and adolescents make sense of moral issues in intergroup contexts, including contexts that reflect social inequalities. This chapter synthesizes research from the SRD perspective showing that children and adolescents judge social inequalities as moral violations of rights and fairness when they are able to recognize their discriminatory origins, and they are more likely to take action when they recognize that their own interpersonal decisions have the potential to challenge broader social inequalities. Yet children and adolescents face many challenges in becoming aware of the scope and extent of disparities, overcoming concerns for maintaining their own group status, resisting norms that condone inequality, and disproving stereotypes that rationalize social inequalities. This chapter outlines how beliefs about social inequalities change across development and differ across groups and contexts and concludes with research on supporting complex moral reasoning in this area.
