Social Class

Editor's Note: Hazel Rose Markus is the co-editor of RSF's volume Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction. At the 2012 Being Human conference, she discussed the psychology of social class. We include video of her lecture as part of our forum on social class in America. Her presentation begins at 27:20.

Being Human: Individual + Society & Morals + Culture from Being Human on FORA.tv

Editor's Note: Susan T. Fiske is the co-editor of RSF's volume Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction. As part of our forum on social class in America, she discusses class hierarchies and resentment below.

Whoever thought it would come down to whether $750K versus $42 million is too much income to be the President? This election season, we are hearing more than we want to know about the income of the two major candidates. Every election, we pit Main Street against Wall Street, and both against Skid Row. It’s as if we think there are only three kinds of people: the haves, the have-nots, and the have-lots.

As I wrote in the Washington Post last year:

What divides the country is what we should do with the low-income have-nots (poor people, old people: deny them?) and the high-income have-lots (rich people: tax them?), from the perspective of the rest of us in the middle, the haves. As a social psychologist, I find this process a perfect example of how status always divides us from each other.

When we, the haves, look up at the have-a-lots, we envy them and aspire to their success, so we do not apparently want to clip their wings by taxing them, because maybe someday we will be rich too…

Looking down from our middle ground to the have-nots, we hardly seem to bother ourselves about them. Although Americans are big-hearted and donate more generously to charity than most places, we begrudge the old and the poor much in the way of government entitlements. We seem to scorn them as unworthy of our attention. In my lab, we find that people do not even want to consider the personal experience of homeless people; we deny them a mind, making it easier to neglect them.

Editor's Note: Diana T. Sanchez and Julie A. Garcia are contributors to RSF's volume Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction. As part of our forum on social class in America, they discuss their research below on the interaction between socioeconomic status and racial categorization.

The recent "Occupy Movement" has fueled the debate about economic inequalities in America. A popular slogan of this movement, "We are the 99%," highlights that wealth in America remains largely concentrated among the top 1% of income earners. This reality runs counter to the "bootstrap myth" that many Americans embrace; achievement, economic or otherwise, can be a reality for anyone that works hard. Rather, the "Occupy Movement" aims to shed light on how the powerful effects of corruption and greed have created a seemingly insurmountable schism between the "haves" and the "have-nots." While economic disparities have been brought to the fore, some correlates of economic markers remain largely unexplored. Namely, little attention has been given to the interplay between socioeconomic status (SES) and race.

THE FLUID PERCEPTION OF RACE

Our work, and others, demonstrates that class and racial identification remain inextricably linked, such that class informs perceptions of race. In other words, SES plays a pivotal role in both racial self-categorization and categorization by others. People higher in SES are more likely to be categorized, and categorize themselves, in higher status racial groups (e.g., White) compared to lower status racial groups (e.g., Black). Stated differently, a person is more likely to categorize another as Black if he or she perceives that person as lower in SES. Also, someone who has a higher SES is more likely to self-categorize herself as White than Black.