A 32‐society investigation of the influence of perceived economic inequality on social class stereotyping (original) (raw)
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Socioeconomic Status and Class Perception
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Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 2005
African American and European American 4th, 6th, and 8th graders rated the competence of rich and poor children in academics (i.e., math, science, reading, writing, school grades, smartness), sports, and music. In contrast to middle school students, 4th graders favored the rich in all 3 domains. Youth of both races reported that the rich were more competent in academics than the poor; these beliefs were especially pronounced among Black youth. White, older, and more affluent students favored the poor in sports, whereas their counterparts either favored the rich or were egalitarian. No interactions were found between grade and race or grade and family income. The implications of these beliefs for policy and identity development theory are discussed.
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Why does economic inequality continue to rise despite being disfavored and harmful to individuals and society? To better understand this inequality paradox, we advance an inequality maintenance model of social class. We detail a set of five propositions to encapsulate the psychological processes that perpetuate class division in societydisparities between the rich and the poor-and we review recent supporting data. With respect to the structural processes that define social class, we show that classdifferentiated experiences of threat, scarcity, and access to valued networks enhance economic inequality by compounding (dis)advantage in education, work, and relationships. With respect to social perceptual processes, we outline how social class is signaled and perceived during social interactions, triggering class-based stereotypes and patterns of distancing that reinforce inequality. With respect to ideological processes, we discuss how ideologies of merit legitimize economic inequality and bolster class division. With respect to moral-relational processes, we examine how class-based patterns of compassion, helping, and power seeking exacerbate economic inequality by concentrating resources among the upper class and constraining advancement among the lower class. Finally, with respect to intergroup processes, we posit that social class group identities catalyze difficulties in cross-class affiliation, asymmetric resource sharing, and class conflict, strengthening class division in society. We conclude with a discussion of new research and future directions that can address class disparities and, ultimately, help foster a more equal society. People are loath to talk about social class. Discussing wealth, income, educational attainment, or occupational prestige can be perceived as rude Psychological Roots of Inequality and Social Class
Nations' income inequality predicts ambivalence in stereotype content: How societies mind the gap.
Income inequality undermines societies: the more inequality, the more health problems, social tensions, and the lower social mobility, trust, life expectancy. Given people’s tendency to legitimate existing social arrangements, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) argues that ambivalence―perceiving many groups as either warm or competent, but not both―may help maintain socio-economic disparities. The association between stereotype ambivalence and income inequality in 37 cross-national samples from Europe, the Americas, Oceania, Asia, and Africa investigates how groups’ overall warmth-competence, status-competence, and competition-warmth correlations vary across societies, and whether these variations associate with income inequality (Gini index). More unequal societies report more ambivalent stereotypes, while more equal ones dislike competitive groups and do not necessarily respect them as competent. Unequal societies may need ambivalence for system stability: income inequality compensates groups with partially positive social images.
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Stereotypes are ideological and justify the existing social structure. Although stereotypes persist, they can change when the context changes. Communism’s rise in Eastern Europe and Asia in the 20th century provides a natural experiment examining social-structural effects on social class stereotypes. Nine samples from postcommunist countries ( N = 2,241), compared with 38 capitalist countries ( N = 4,344), support the historical, sociocultural rootedness of stereotypes. More positive stereotypes of the working class appear in postcommunist countries, both compared with other social groups in the country and compared with working-class stereotypes in capitalist countries; postcommunist countries also show more negative stereotypes of the upper class. We further explore whether communism’s ideological legacy reflects how societies infer groups’ stereotypic competence and warmth from structural status and competition. Postcommunist societies show weaker status–competence relations and ...
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This paper aims to capture the relationship between the social class and social inequalities, using a subjective positioning, namely a respondent's perspective upon its own position in society, using data collected on a national dataset. A subjective approach offers a glance into the manner in which social inequalities are constructed and applied by and on different categories, also creating the context for a discussion related to the reasons and implications of these perceived societal positions. I guide my analysis on two assumptions: 1. that different individuals, belonging to different social classes – measured in an objective way – discern and comprehend in multiple forms the structure of the Romanian society; 2. these individuals self-position themselves according to their perception and to their objective position in the stratification order. The results did not support the first assumption because a large proportion of the individuals from our sample describe and understand the Romanian society as one characterized by important inequalities between people. However, I found evidence for the second, related assumption, as all classes seem to aspire to be part of the middle class and to report that they are closer to that middle class than the objective measures would suggest.
Racial Assumptions Color the Mental Representation of Social Class
Frontiers in Psychology, 2017
We investigated the racial content of perceivers' mental images of different socioeconomic categories. We selected participants who were either high or low in prejudice toward the poor. These participants saw 400 pairs of visually noisy face images. Depending on condition, participants chose the face that looked like a poor person, a middle income person, or a rich person. We averaged the faces selected to create composite images of each social class. A second group of participants rated the stereotypical Blackness of these images. They also rated the face images on a variety of psychological traits. Participants high in economic prejudice produced strongly classdifferentiated mental images. They imagined the poor to be Blacker than middle income and wealthy people. They also imagined them to have less positive psychological characteristics. Participants low in economic prejudice also possessed images of the wealthy that were relatively White, but they represented poor and middle class people in a less racially differentiated way. We discuss implications for understanding the intersections of race and class in social perception.
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Supplemental material, Grigoryan_OnlineAppendix for Stereotypes as Historical Accidents: Images of Social Class in Postcommunist Versus Capitalist Societies by Lusine Grigoryan, Xuechunzi Bai, Federica Durante, Susan T. Fiske, Marharyta Fabrykant, Anna Hakobjanyan, Nino Javakhishvili, Kamoliddin Kadirov, Marina Kotova, Ana Makashvili, Edona Maloku, Olga Morozova-Larina, Nozima Mullabaeva, Adil Samekin, Volha Verbilovich and Illia Yahiiaiev in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin