How and Why the Wealthy Try to Cover Up Their Privileges

People have been paying a lot of attention to economic inequality—some people have more, some people have less—and whether that gap between people has gotten too large. One piece of this conversation points out how the system is rigged—some people not only have more, but this gap between the haves and the have-nots has been growing through unfair means. For example, being connected to a wealthy family member can give one a leg up in college admissions or the labor market. Likewise, inherited wealth gives folks advantages or special treatment in a range of contexts.

What happens when we start to expose this rigged system? It turns out, the better off are quite sensitive to this kind of evidence, and they work hard to cover it up. For instance, in a series of experiments, we asked those benefiting from class privilege (as an example, those from households in the top 10% of incomes) to read newspaper articles or other information about the unfair advantages their wealth gets them: Things like better treatment from doctors and hospitals, or easier access to getting a job, based only on their wealthy or elite status (not their skills or qualifications). Those who read this evidence were more likely to say their lives were hard and they had suffered, compared to similar participants who were not given the evidence. In another experiment, we found that privileged people, when reminded of their privilege, also exaggerated how many hours they work at their jobs.

But why do the wealthy react this way? Our research finds that this defensive reaction is motivated by people wanting to think they are a good person—specifically, a person of high merit. Especially in a society that valorizes the idea of meritocracy, being a good person can become synonymous with being a merited person—someone who works hard for what they have. Thus, when those benefiting from class privileges have to face that privilege directly, they experience dissonance between their sense of being a good, merited person, and evidence that they have had unfair class advantages.

To resolve this tension, the wealthy cover up their advantages by referencing the logic of meritocracy specifically, using symbols like working hours or struggling to try to feel like they are a good person. And they make these claims even though these do not counteract the unfair advantages they are also receiving. For instance, working hard at your job doesn’t mean that nepotism or inherited wealth hasn’t also helped you; and yet, our participants used these hardship claims to try to deny they had benefited from class privilege.

Ultimately, these meritocracy narratives can help cover up the rigged parts of the system. This speaks to an important idea often talked about alongside privilege—the idea that privilege is invisible. But how does privilege become invisible? This isn’t an inherent feature of privilege or even an accident. Our research suggests privilege becomes invisible because people work to cover it up, using those symbols of meritocracy as an invisibility cloak, so to speak.

However, there are ways to break through this defensive reaction. If we help people feel they are a good person first, then they are more willing to recognize their unfair advantages and less likely to try to cover these up when we show them the evidence. In one experiment, we let people reflect on a time they had worked hard to achieve something. In another experiment, we let people reflect on the personal values they hold dear. In both cases, this helps people feel like they are a good person overall, and makes them more open to acknowledging the ways in which the wealth they have may be giving them unfair advantages. As a result, this might help the wealthy be more willing to support actions to reduce those unfair advantages—or unrig the system, so to speak. For instance, they may be more willing to support higher taxation for the wealthy or on inherited wealth, or more willing to ban legacy policies for college admissions.

Even when faced with direct evidence of our own advantages, it can be hard to admit that these have helped us get a leg up over others. One way we can help others and ourselves recognize reality is reminding ourselves that privilege and hard work (talent, merit, effort, etc.) are not either-or: we might have worked hard and benefited from unfair advantages, too. And if we can recognize that fact, the next step to feeling like a good person might be to help unrig the system that gave us those unfair benefits.


For Further Reading

Phillips, L. T., & Lowery, B. S. (2020). I ain’t no fortunate one: On the motivated denial of class privilege. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119(6), 1403–1422. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000240

Knowles, E. D., & Lowery, B. S. (2012). Meritocracy, self-concerns, and Whites' denial of racial inequity. Self and Identity11(2), 202-222. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2010.542015

McCoy, S. K., & Major, B. (2007). Priming meritocracy and the psychological justification of inequality. Journal of experimental social psychology43(3), 341-351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2006.04.009
 

L. Taylor Phillips is an assistant professor of Management & Organizations at New York University Stern School of Business. She studies beliefs about inequity, especially how people think about privilege and advantage.

 

The More You Have, the More You Want?

Victoria Beckham was in trouble.

According to popular media in the UK and elsewhere, the former Spice Girl, now multi-millionaire, applied for approximately 200,000 USD public funds to pay her staff of her fashion label during the COVID-19 lockdown. This news excited fury from the public. How dare a super-rich person with a family fortune of nearly half billion (which enabled her to buy a penthouse worth two million in Miami not long before) seek to profit from the furlough scheme funded by taxpayers aiming to protect jobs and livelihoods of ordinary people across the UK? Even though her application might be legal, people were annoyed. Why can’t the rich be more generous? Do they have to seek even more wealth?

People have long debated whether people who are less wealthy (the “have-nots,” the poor, the lower-class) or those who are relatively affluent (the “haves,” the rich, the upper-class) have a stronger desire for wealth. Intuitively, we might expect that compared to the “haves,” the “have-nots” should be more motivated to seek wealth to compensate for what they are lacking. However, we might also anticipate the opposite if we look at money-loving characters in popular culture. Consider for example Scrooge McDuck in Disney Comics or Mr. Krabs in SpongeBob SquarePants, or greedy CEOs and insatiable Wall Street bankers in the real world.

Captivated by this question, together with Jolanda Jetten and Niklas Steffens at the University of Queensland, I conducted a series of studies to investigate the difference between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in their desire to seek wealth. First, we asked over 1,000 Americans to report their desire for wealth by indicating their agreement with statements such as “I would like to be wealthy” and “I want to have lots of money.” They also indicated their social class and income.

We found that both social class and income were positively associated with people’s desire for wealth. Namely, those who have relatively more wealth (or felt relatively wealthy) also had a stronger interest in seeking more wealth than others. This finding was replicated in a following study using data from the World Values Survey comprising over 150,000 participants across 78 countries and regions.

To find out what was causing what—whether “having more” actually causes a person to “want more”—we then conducted two experiments. Participants were invited to start a new life in a fictitious society, “Bimboola.” They were randomly assigned to either a “wealthy” group or a “less wealthy” group, and they were then asked to choose a house, a car, and a vacation to enjoy their life in Bimboola. To emphasize their imagined position, those assigned to the wealthy group got to choose luxury items such as stately mansions, expensive sports cars, and fancy trips like “a two-week super-luxury Swiss skiing holiday,” whereas those assigned to the less wealthy group only had limited choices of shabby houses, cheap old cars, and inexpensive holidays like “a half-day window-shopping in town.” Afterwards, participants reported their desire for wealth. Indeed, “having more” led to “wanting more”: those in the “wealthy group” reported a greater desire for wealth than those in the “less wealthy group.”

We also examined why “having more” leads to “wanting more.” Compared to those imagining themselves as less wealthy, participants who were imagining themselves as more wealthy agreed more strongly with statements such as “My wealth reflects the kind of person I see myself to be” and “My wealth defines who I am.” In other words, the “haves” were more likely to use “what they have” as a way to define and categorize themselves. Furthermore, this heightened usage of wealth in self-definition among the “haves” in turn drove them to seek even more wealth.

Our work helps to explain what underpins the often-observed greed among the rich: Their sense of self-worth seems to be built upon their riches, and this wealth-dependent self-worth, in turn, urges them to accumulate even more. The words of one super rich person, Donald Trump, sum up this idea: “Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich.”


For Further Reading

Wang, Z., Jetten, J., & Steffens, N. K. (2020). The more you have, the more you want? Higher social class predicts a greater desire for wealth and status. European Journal of Social Psychology, 50, 360-375. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2620

Park, L. E., Ward, D. E., & Naragon-Gainey, K. (2017). It's all about the money (for some): Consequences of financially contingent self-worth. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43, 601–622. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167216689080

 

Zhechen Wang is a former PhD student in the School of Psychology at University of Queensland (Australia) and now a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University (China). His research focuses on the study of social class, economic inequality, and motivation.

Jolanda Jetten is an ARC Laureate Fellowship and Professor in the School of Psychology at University of Queensland (Australia). Her research focuses on the social psychology of inequality, conspiracy beliefs, and identity change.

Niklas Steffens is a DECRA research fellow and Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at University of Queensland (Australia). His research focuses on the social psychology of leadership, group processes, and identity change.

 

Are Poor People Actually More Generous?

Warren Buffett has famously pledged to donate 99% of his sizeable wealth to charity. At the same time, people who regularly struggle to make ends meet may think twice before investing $5.00 in Girl Scout cookies. Many people find this pattern quite reasonable: being generous is easier for rich than for poor people.

Against this background, it was quite surprising when a series of studies reported that poor people might actually be more generous and helpful than rich people. In these studies, each research participant was given a small sum of money that they could divide between themselves and another study participant. People who identified themselves as relatively well-off gave less money to the other person than people who identified themselves as relatively poor. Because this was a somewhat surprising finding, we wanted to see whether this result could be confirmed.

To this end, we conducted two direct replication studies. A direct replication is a study that tries to imitate the original study as closely as possible. So, in collaboration with the journal editor and reviewers, we fine-tuned our studies to make sure that they were as well-designed as possible, then collected our data.

In contrast to the original findings, we did not find that poorer people were more generous than wealthy ones. For example, although participants in one of our studies shared about 30% of the money we gave them with the other person, poorer participants did not share more money than wealthy ones did.

Does this mean that affluence isn’t related to the tendency to help other people? Not necessarily.

Even when two studies are very similar, a variety of small differences could explain why they obtained different results. Our studies were conducted at a different time and place than the original studies, and our sample of participants necessarily differed as well. It is impossible to rule out all these factors and to say why exactly we did not replicate the original findings.

 In addition, measuring how altruistic, generous, or helpful people behave is challenging.  Several measures has been developed to measure these kinds of prosocial behaviors, including the method we used in which people share money between themselves and another person. But more research is needed to evaluate and improve the measurement tools we use before drawing strong conclusions about the relationship between affluence and altruism.

So, at present, people should be careful when drawing conclusions about the relationship between economic affluence and generosity. We simply do not have good evidence to assume that wealthy people are more selfish than poor people. Until we have stronger support for this assumption, perhaps we should put it on the list of things that we know that we don’t know.  


For Further Reading

Piff, P. K., Kraus, M. W., Coˆte´, S., Cheng, B. H., & Keltner, D. (2010). Having less, giving more: The influence of social class on prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 771–784.

Stamos A., Lange F., Szu-chi H. & Dewitte S. (2020). Having less, giving more? Two preregistered studies of the relationship between social class and prosocial behavior. Journal of Research in Personality, 84, 103902.


Angelos Stamos is a postdoctoral researcher in the BEE - Behavioral Engineering Group at KU Leuven (Belgium), specializing in topics such as resource scarcity and self-control.

Florian Lange is a postdoctoral researcher in the BEE - Behavioral Engineering Group at KU Leuven, where he focuses on the study of pro-environmental behavior.

Siegfried Dewitte is a professor of consumer behavior in the BEE - Behavioral Engineering Group at KU Leuven, specializing in understanding and engineering self-control, altruism, and pro-environmental behavior.

Martin Day

Martin Day is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Previously he held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University as part of the College Fellows program and at Princeton University in a psychology-public policy program. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Waterloo, and his B.Sc. in psychology from Dalhousie University in his hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

What led you to decide that personality and social psychology was the path for you?

I was convinced to pursue this career by the social psychology course I took in undergrad. The research seemed meaningful, challenging and fun to do. I also enjoyed the textbook and lectures. In one memorable class on relationship processes, the instructor asked for a student volunteer to come to the front to help him role-play dating initiations. After the demonstration, the instructor asked the student how things went and she seemed impressed with his charm. Then, to the shock of the class, they started passionately making out. After the roars died down, the instructor re-introduced the “student” as his wife. (I have yet to try this demo in my own social psychology course).

What led to your interest in Inequality, and what are your current research interests?

I have had a longstanding interest in justice-related issues and was intrigued by Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s book, The Spirit Level. I thought they cogently linked higher economic inequality with a variety of worse health and social outcomes. I was curious how people understand and seem to be impacted by the gap between the rich and the poor. I was also interested in why the public does little in response to it, and how society could become more equal. 

Most of the current projects in my lab relate to these lines of questioning in some way. I have started to describe this research as falling under the umbrella of “societal cognition,” that is, how people are affected by, respond to, and make sense of societal conditions. For instance, we examine social mobility beliefs (e.g., the chance of moving up in society), including how holding these beliefs can help people rationalize inequality and the status quo. We also study status-related concerns and how such factors may explain, in part, the link between inequality and negative consequences for individuals. Broadly, we also explore psychological factors that may affect support for inequality-related policies, programs and movements (e.g., that alter low or high pay, redistribute wealth). Inequality is a problem with plenty of research opportunities.

What is your most memorable SPSP Convention experience?

As a newcomer to the research scene in 2007 I experienced a “wow” effect when I attended my first convention in Memphis. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just the tasty Memphis ribs or the floor-to-ceiling carpets of Graceland. Being exposed to so much interesting and relevant research was incredibly exciting and motivating for me. Admittedly, when I prepare for my SPSP travels these days, I sometimes catch myself questioning the lengthy trip. However, the joy I feel when connecting with current and new colleagues keeps me coming back.

What’s the best professional advice you ever received?

I feel grateful to have learned from many experienced and talented social psychologists who have shaped my career. Although it is hard to sum up, through the mentoring process I’ve been imbued with helpful reminders and advice ranging from “aim to conduct high-quality research” and “try to find the truth,” to “don’t take oneself too seriously.”

Outside of psychology, how do you like to spend your free time?

Beyond hanging out with friends and family, I enjoy traveling and seeing how other people live. After undergrad, I went to Japan to teach English for 8 months, and ended up staying for two years because it was so fascinating and fun. I also photograph basic things—whatever catches my eye—and enjoy ultimate Frisbee, meditating, films, hiking along the beautiful coasts of Newfoundland, and combining craft beer with some of the above.


To learn more about Martin and his current projects, visit https://www.societalcognitionlab.com or @SocietalCogLab

Money and Status Fever in an Unequal World

We are often told that the world is becoming increasingly unequal. This is largely true. Today, the wealthiest 1% own nearly twice as much wealth as the rest, while over 820 million people still suffer from hunger. It is no wonder that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres lamented the situation, stating that "billionaires joyriding to space while millions go hungry on Earth."

So, how does the gap between the rich and the poor affect people's psychology? Do people in an unequal society become more envious of the conspicuously affluent lifestyle of the rich, driving them to seek wealth and status more frantically? Or do they feel that this gap is too large to cross, leaving them without hope to attain wealth and status?

A crucial factor to consider here is people's position on the social ladder. This is because when the wealth gap is large, then it is possible that people from lower social class backgrounds (the poor) might feel more anxious since they have fewer resources to buffer the negative consequences of inequality. In contrast, people from higher social class backgrounds (the rich) might feel relatively secure due to their abundant resources, allowing them to avoid most inconveniences caused by inequality. As a result, the desire for wealth and status among the poor (rather than the rich) might increase to a greater extent in the face of higher inequality.

However, it is also possible that in an unequal society, the poor might feel futile in their struggle for a better life, leading them to give up their pursuit of wealth and status, whereas the rich might recognize the importance of wealth and status to their identity and well-being and feel the fear of falling from their privileged position. If this were true, then it should be the rich (rather than the poor) to have a greater desire for wealth and status in the context of elevated levels of economic inequality.

Intrigued by these questions, together with Jolanda Jetten and Niklas Steffens from The University of Queensland, I conducted studies to investigate the impact of economic inequality on people's desire for wealth and status. First, we devised a study where we manipulated people's perceived inequality. Participants were invited to start a new life in a fictitious society named "Bimboola," consisting of three income groups. Some participants were in the high-inequality condition, where the income differences between the three groups were large, meaning the low-, middle-, and high-income groups earned 3,000, 40,000, and 77,000 dollars a year. In contrast, in the low-inequality condition there were only modest income differences of 30,000, 40,000, and 50,000 dollars a year in the three income groups. Notably, in both conditions, participants were assigned to the middle-income group earning the same 40,000 dollars a year. Participants then completed tasks (i.e., choosing a house, a car, and a vacation) aiming to strengthen their experience of high (or low) inequality. Namely, participants were asked to choose a house to live in, a means of transport, and a vacation destination and they were allowed to choose items only that their group (that is, the middle-income group) could afford. In both conditions, the choices for the middle-income group were identical (ordinary houses, cars, and vacation options). However, in the high-inequality condition, the choices for the high-income group were significantly superior (palace-like mansions, luxurious sports cars, and expensive vacations), whereas the choices for the low-income group were significantly inferior (run-down shelters, rusty bicycles, and no vacation). In contrast, in the low-inequality condition, compared with choices for the middle-income group, choices for the high-income group were only slightly better, and choices for the low-income group were only slightly worse.

Afterwards, participants answered questions about their desire for wealth and status. We found that participants in the high-inequality condition had a heightened desire for wealth and status compared to those in the low-inequality condition.

To extend these findings, we then analyzed data from the real world—the World Values Survey dataset comprising over 141,000 participants across 73 countries and regions. Consistent with the findings from the first study, we found that in societies with a higher Gini coefficient (an objective index of economic inequality), people reported a greater desire for wealth and status. Moreover, this "higher inequality–heightened desire" link was stronger among people from lower than higher social class backgrounds.

To further examine how people's desire for wealth and status was related to social class in the context of economic inequality, in our next study we simultaneously manipulated both perceived inequality and social class. Participants were invited to start a new life in a fictitious world consisting of six countries, each with three groups differing in wealth. Participants were assigned to either the most unequal or the most equal country and then to either the wealthiest or the poorest group within that country. We also tried to distinguish the nature of people's desire for wealth and status, namely, whether they sought wealth and status by acquiring (a) "more than I have" or (b) "more than other people." We found that the effect of inequality on desire for "personal" wealth and status ("more than I have") was stronger among the lower class, whereas the effect on desire for "social" wealth and status ("more than other people") was stronger among the upper class.

In a world with rising inequality, our research helps explain people's concerns about material means and their anxieties about status. We believe that higher inequality creates an environment of restlessness in which both the poor and the rich feel compelled to seek more wealth and status, but for different reasons. For the poor, their heightened desire for wealth and status by acquiring "more than I have" indicates self-improvement and pragmatic concerns, such as to avoid "going hungry." However, for the rich, their heightened desire for wealth and status by acquiring "more than other people" reflects social comparison and showing-off concerns, such as to afford "joyriding to space." Overall, higher inequality triggers a money and status fever in everyone, leading to psychological consequences, such as prioritizing wealth and status over other aspects like family and leisure time, and also physical stress, such as working overtime to accumulate wealth and status.


For Further Reading

Wang, Z., Jetten, J., & Steffens, N. K. (2023). Restless in an unequal world: Economic inequality fuels the desire for wealth and status. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin49(6), 871–890. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221083747

Wang, Z., Jetten, J., & Steffens, N. K. (2020). The more you have, the more you want? Higher social class predicts a greater desire for wealth and status. European Journal of Social Psychology, 50, 360-375. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2620

Walasek, L., & Brown, G. D. A. (2019). Income inequality and social status: The social rank and material rank hypotheses. In The Social Psychology of Inequality (pp. 235–248). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28856-3_15
 

Zhechen Wang is an Associate Research Fellow in the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University (China). His research focuses on the study of social class, economic inequality, and motivation.

Jolanda Jetten is an ARC Laureate Fellowship and Professor in the School of Psychology at University of Queensland (Australia). Her research focuses on the social psychology of inequality, conspiracy beliefs, and identity change.

Niklas Steffens is a DECRA research fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at University of Queensland (Australia). His research focuses on the social psychology of leadership, group processes, and identity change.

Dressing Up

Imagine you are walking down the street and see a man with a cardboard sign and a paper cup asking for money. You can probably conjure some image of what this man looks like and, specifically, what he is wearing. Now, imagine he has neatly slicked-back hair and is wearing a suit. Would this make you more or less likely to drop some money into his cup?

The answer perhaps seems obvious. Someone who can afford a suit is unlikely to need your money—and you would be less likely to part with your hard-earned cash. However, when my colleagues and I took to the streets of New York and Chicago and put unsuspecting people in this situation, we found that they donated more than twice as much to a panhandler dressed in a suit than one dressed in shabbier clothing. This field experiment, we argue, may teach us about whom we feel compassion for and whom we see as "deserving" of help.

To conduct the experiment, I spent about 8 hours, in total, standing on busy sidewalks with a cardboard sign and a cup for collecting donations. Half the time, I was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and for the rest of the time, a suit. All other aspects of the situation (e.g., location, time of day, day of the week) were kept as similar as possible. Two assistants, discreetly located across the street, counted how many people walked by, logged any interactions passersby had with me, and tallied up how much money I made at the end of each session.

I earned 2.55 times as much money—$54.11 versus $21.15—and received all donations of $5 or more when dressed in a suit rather than a T-shirt. Ironically, people gave more and were more likely to give big when they encountered a panhandler who appeared to be higher in social standing. Importantly, pedestrians were no more likely to interact with me in ways unrelated to donating (for example, striking up a conversation) when I was dressed up, suggesting that differences in donating cannot simply be chalked up to people being drawn to the novelty of a panhandler in a suit.

I also followed a standard set of instructions throughout, which included not initiating interactions with passersby and maintaining a neutral facial expression and tone of voice. I also occasionally said "collecting money to help the homeless" to draw attention from passersby. Ethically, we could not intentionally mislead individuals into thinking that I was unhoused and that the funds would go to me. However, this set of words still left open this possibility while being truthful (we did eventually donate the money to homeless shelters).

Given that I appeared, by all outward signs, to be a panhandler and the majority of interactions were brief (thus, it was unlikely that people were listening closely to what I was saying), we assumed that most pedestrians would approach the situation as they would a typical panhandler. The limited interactions I did have with passersby also support this assumption. For instance, one who donated remarked that they do not usually give to panhandlers, but that I seemed like a "nice guy." Another, who did not donate, remarked that they would like to help me but could not because they were "homeless too."

Importantly, we cannot conclude that wearing a suit made people more generous or compassionate towards me, specifically. Some number of them may have correctly assumed I was donating the money to charity. However, we can conclude that our experiment impacted compassionate behaviors—donating to help those suffering from homelessness, either directly or indirectly—and to inclinations to help me in some way or another, whether they thought they were donating to me directly or helping me in my efforts to raise money for others.

Regardless of what people assumed, they were clearly more likely to entrust their money to a complete stranger dressed in a suit rather than casual clothing—despite any guarantees that their money would go towards a good cause. Perhaps they asked themselves: Will this person use the money for essential needs, like food or shelter, or for purposes one might not approve of, such as drugs or alcohol?  

A follow-up study, which involved showing a separate group of people pictures of me panhandling in the same clothing, sheds light on this question. Those who saw me dressed in a T-shirt judged me as less trustworthy and honest, less intelligent and dependable, and even less human—associating me more with words like "wild" and "untamed" and less with words like "citizen" or "person." Those who saw me in a suit judged me to be more trustworthy, more similar to themselves, and, presumably, more likely to use the money in productive ways. Indeed, those in our field study were more likely to donate in amounts that could reasonably purchase something like a meal and one person even dropped a business card into my cup. 

Whether you realize it or not, this basic process occurs for everyone, whenever they go out into the world. A person's accent, the way they dress, and their interests and hobbies are all clues about economic circumstances and social status that others pick up on quickly and effortlessly: Did this person go to college? Do they make enough money to afford nice clothes? Can they tell a Bordeaux from a Beaujolais?

Our research suggests that seeming even just a bit higher in social standing can change how others answer these questions, and, in the process, buy at least some benefit of the doubt—if not outright kindness. In an increasingly unequal society, something as superficial as clothing can distort even the most generous impulses—and lead to more inequality. And whereas adopting these types of status symbols may make one seem worthier of others' compassion or effort to help, those who need help the most are precisely those who lack access to them in the first place. Thus, this study also suggests that individual generosity is a flawed instrument for addressing problems such as poverty and homelessness, which call for large-scale structural and policy interventions.   


For Further Reading

Callaghan, B., Delgadillo, Q., & Kraus, M. W. (2022). The influence of signs of social class on compassionate responses to people in need. Frontiers in Psychology, 13: 936170. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.936170

Kraus, M. W., Park, J. W., & Tan, J. J. X. (2017). Signs of social class: The experience of economic inequality in everyday life. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(3), 422–435. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616673192


Bennett Callaghan is an Associated Researcher at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). He studies the psychology of social class and inequality.

Does Your Social Class Affect Your Ability to Read Others’ Emotions?

Research is finding that people who report being lower in social class tend to be better at reading others' emotions than people who report being higher in social class. As for why, some researchers have suggested that lower social class people have less control over their lives and are more dependent on others for reaching their goals. In turn, they are more likely to pay attention to what others are thinking and feeling.

It's also well known that women tend to be better than men at reading others' emotions. We aren't exactly sure why this is the case, but one can think of both biological and social factors. For example, girls are usually taught from a young age to be more sensitive to others' emotions than boys. It may also be the case that parts of the brain associated with emotion recognition are different in men and women.

Looking at Gender and Social Class Together

What do we learn when looking at both social class and gender in relation to emotion recognition skills?  

In our first study, we measured social class by asking participants where they felt they belonged on the social hierarchy compared to everyone else in the United States. To measure their emotion recognition skills, they saw black and white pictures of people's eyes, and had to indicate which of four emotions best represented what the person was feeling. We asked them to do the same thing for short-moving clips of faces in color.

In line with previous research, we found that lower social class people tended to score higher on emotion recognition than higher social class people. However, when we looked at the results separately for men and women, we found that this was only true for men. In other words, lower social class men tended to be better at emotion recognition than higher social class men, but women tended to have similar scores regardless of their social class. Additionally, women were only better at emotion recognition than men when they were higher in social class. There were no differences between men and women at lower levels of social class.

We confirmed these findings in a separate study that used the same measures as our original study. Again, the negative association between social class and emotion recognition skills only applied to men, and women only outperformed men at higher levels of social class.

Why Is the Effect of Social Class Different for Men and Women?

So why is social class related to emotion recognition in men but not women? We have a few ideas. Other researchers have suggested that people who report being higher in social class have more control over their life outcomes and can freely pursue their goals without depending on others. In turn, this increased independence makes them less likely to pay attention to others' emotions. We think it could be the case that this is not always true for women. In other words, being higher in social class may not lead to increased control and independence in women the same way it does in men. It may also be the case that women have evolved to be attuned to other peoples' thoughts and emotions as a way of protecting themselves and their children. In other words, being attentive to others' emotions is important for women regardless of what social class they belong to. We need to conduct more research to find out which of these explanations is more likely.

While we don't have all the answers, this research does tell us one thing: factors like gender and social class don't necessarily shape social abilities on their own. Instead, we should be thinking about how different parts of one's identity intersect to influence accuracy in reading others' emotions.


For Further Reading

Brener, S. A., Frankenhuis, W. E., Young, E. S., & Ellis, B. J. (2023). Social class, sex, and the ability to recognize emotions: The main effect is in the interaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672231159775

Dietze, P., & Knowles, E. D. (2021). Social class predicts emotion perception and perspective-taking performance in adults. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin47(1), 42-56. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220914116

Fendinger, N. J., Dietze, P., & Knowles, E. D. (2023). Beyond cognitive deficits: how social class shapes social cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences27(6), 528-538. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2023.03.004


Susan Brener is a PhD student in developmental psychology at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on how various types of stress are related to social cognition.

Toddlers’ Socioeconomic Status Influences Others’ Perceptions of Their Pain

A kid stubs their toe while playing on the playground. Does how much pain they're believed to feel depend on how much money their parents make? This may sound like a crazy idea, but in earlier research, we found that people believed that adults with lower socioeconomic status felt less pain and required less pain treatment than adults with higher socioeconomic status. Now we asked, do people similarly judge children with lower socioeconomic status as feeling less pain than children with higher socioeconomic status?

In our research, participants viewed school profiles depicting male children with low and high socioeconomic status and judged how much pain each child would feel following various injuries (for example, he gets an injection in his arm or he knocks his head on the corner of a piece of furniture). Each school profile conveyed some basic information like the child's name and birthdate, as well as some socioeconomic information like household income and the type of school they attended (public or private). Every time, we found that children with lower socioeconomic status were the ones expected to feel less pain. This view was prevalent in judgments of older 6-8 year old children and even extended to children as young as 3-4 years old. Why might this be?

The Relationship Between Perceived Hardship and Pain Insensitivity

Why would people assume children from lower social class backgrounds feel less pain than others? Our earlier work and work from researchers at the University of Virginia found that when adults are perceived to have lived a harder life, they are also assumed to feel less pain. In other words, people seem to strongly endorse the age-old adage that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

We were interested in whether the belief that hardship toughens may also apply to children. This time, participants rated children on how hard they thought their life had been and how much adversity they thought they had overcome before rating the children's pain sensitivity. Indeed, people perceived young children with lower social class as having lived harder lives and therefore as feeling less pain. Thus, beliefs about the toughening effects of poverty appear to be pervasive and influence perceptions of how much pain young children feel.

Consequences for Pain Treatment

People believed children as young as 3-4 years old felt relatively less pain if they were from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds, but do these beliefs actually impact responses to children's pain? In a final experiment, participants judged how much pain treatment children with lower and higher socioeconomic status would require following different injuries. Pain treatment could be no pain treatment at all, up to strong opioid (for example, morphine) treatments. Participants believed children with lower socioeconomic status would require less intensive pain treatment than children with higher socioeconomic status, and this pain treatment bias was accounted for by perceptions of pain sensitivity. In other words, children with lower social class were seen as feeling less pain and therefore as needing less intensive pain treatment than children with higher social class following the same injuries.

Beyond Pain

Although the implications for pain treatment are clear, these beliefs may extend across many contexts. For example, teachers may offer shorter extensions to students with lower socioeconomic status who get injured, caretakers may be less worried about lower socioeconomic status children's pain and thus may not seek care, or coaches may be harsher to or overplay child athletes from lower-class backgrounds.

There is still much to learn, but these findings help shed light on just how pervasive class-based pain stereotypes may be. Given that young children may often rely on others around them to seek care and advocate for them, understanding that perceivers may apply class-based pain stereotypes in judgments of children is imperative.


For Further Reading

Summers, K. M., Paganini, G. A., & Lloyd, E. P. (2022). Poor toddlers feel less pain? Application of class-based pain stereotypes in judgments of children. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 19485506221094087. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506221094087

Summers, K. M., Deska, J. C., Almaraz, S. M., Hugenberg, K., & Lloyd, E. P. (2021). Poverty and pain: Low-SES people are believed to be insensitive to pain. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 95, 104116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104116


Kevin M. Summers is a graduate student of psychology at the University of Denver in the Affect, Social, and Cognitive area. Kevin's research examines the mechanisms underlying group-based biases in person perception and the downstream consequences for differential treatment in a variety of contexts.

Social Class Shapes Our Beliefs About How Power Works

In a world reeling with crisis upon crisis, there have been plenty of reasons to turn to our leaders for guidance on how to navigate an increasingly confusing and destabilized world. At the same time, public trust in the government is near record lows.

Together with my colleague, Dacher Keltner, I created a survey to measure how people think power is gained and maintained, so that we could study the social forces that influence those beliefs. As it turns out, modern beliefs about how power works can be well summarized by historical accounts. In 350 BCE, the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, wrote that power was derived from competence, social concern, and compassion. In the 16th century, the Italian diplomat, Machiavelli, wrote that force, manipulation, and coercion were pathways to power. If you find your thoughts aligning more with one of these men than the other, you are not alone—that was the case for our participants as well.

We asked over 1,000 people to report their beliefs about how power is gained and maintained. For example, we asked participants to rate the extent to which they agree that “Often it requires aggression to gain power” and “Gaining power requires collaboration with other individuals.” In general, people tended to endorse one of these perspectives more than the other. If they agreed with statements describing collaboration, they tended to disagree with statements describing coercion, or vice versa.

Self-Perceived Social Rank Mattered

What was even more interesting was that participants’ beliefs about power seemed to be shaped by their social class.

People who reported being higher in socioeconomic status (SES)—having a combination of more money, education, and better jobs—were more likely to endorse Aristotle’s collaborative perspective, while lower SES individuals were more likely to endorse Machiavelli’s coercive perspective on power.

In further studies we tested whether temporarily changing a person’s feeling of being relatively high or low in SES impacted their beliefs about power. We asked people to compare themselves to either a rich person or a poor person—a task that was aimed at making them feel momentarily “low” or “high” in social rank. People who compared themselves to a rich (versus poor) person felt lower status in comparison, and they reported more coercive and fewer collaborative beliefs about how power is gained and maintained.

In short, social class is a kind of lens through which we view society, even when it’s an illusion brought about by simply comparing ourselves to high or low-status others. When we feel relatively high status ourselves, we hold a more benevolent view of the powerful. However, when we feel relatively low status, we view the powerful with suspicion—as manipulative and coercive.

Sharing Machiavelli’s view of power was also associated with decreased trust. After all—how can you trust an institution that you believe was formed and is maintained on the basis of manipulative and coercive tactics? On the other hand, we found that higher self-reported SES was associated with a more collaborative perspective on power, which was associated with increased trust.

In the face of rising inequality, these findings help to explain our current social order. In the US, inequality is rising and inflation woes are likely to widen this gap even further. The top 1% of Americans now own more of the nation’s wealth than the entire middle class combined. Increases in inequality result in a growing group of individuals who feel (and are) low SES, who are likely to see the powerful as malevolent tyrants, unworthy of their trust.

While our research helps to explain the present, it also provides suggestions for improving the future. Our data suggest that increasing inequality is not just unsustainable for the many families struggling to make ends meet, it may also contribute to an unsustainable society—one in which leaders are viewed negatively and trust is scarce.


For Further Reading

ten Brinke, L., & Keltner, D. (2022). Theories of power: Perceived strategies for gaining and maintaining power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(1), 53-72. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000345

Belmi, P., & Laurin, K. (2016). Who wants to get to the top? Class and lay theories about power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(4), 505–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000060

Tan, J. J., & Kraus, M. W. (2018). Judgments of interpersonal warmth predict class differences in political candidate support. Social Cognition36(1), 106-133. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2018.36.1.106
 

Leanne ten Brinke is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She studies how trust, affiliation, and influence unfold in social interactions.

Top Character & Context Posts in 2018

Here's a recap of our most visited blog posts in 2018. If there's one thing to learn from this list, it's that they are all worth a read.

12. Hidden Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Class, by Sébastien Goudeau, 2017

11. The Psychology of Social Class by Tony Manstead , 2018

10. How Do We Make Moral Judgements? by Joseph Tennant, 2015

9. The Relationship Implications of Rejecting a Partner for Sex Kindly vs Having Sex Reluctently by James Kim, 2018

8. When Political Ideology Undermines Logical Reasoning by Anup Gampa, 2016

7. Are Stereotypes Accurate? A Viewpoint from the Cognitive Science of Concepts by Lin Bian and Andrei Cimpian, 2016

6. The Effect of Money on Your Emotions, 2015

5. Prediction in Psychology by Alex Danvers, 2016

4. Knowing Who You Are Matters in Relationships by Lydia Emery, 2018

3. Stereotype Accuracy is One of the Largest and Most Replicable Effects in All of Social Psychology  by Lee Jusim, 2016

2. Anxious-Avoidant Duos: Walking on Thin Ice in Relationships and Physical Health by Jana Lembke, Fiona Ge, Paula Pietromonaco, and Sally Powers, 2015

1. The Consequences of Dishonesty by Scott Wiltermuth, David Newman, and Medha Raj, 2015