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.

What’s missing…is remembering that we all are in this together. There but for (mis)fortune go I. Of course, we must aspire upward; the Dutch even have a name for benign envy, which we should adopt, if we can pronounce it: benijden. And we should also appreciate downward, with compassion toward the less fortunate…

Status hierarchies are inevitable. People compare themselves to each other in every culture. Chimps do it, dogs do it, chickens do it. We will not get away from status divides anytime soon. But we can mitigate the envy and the scorn if we remember that these are our rich people—and especially our poor people, our older people.

Our lives are not just struggles for income and status, and our Presidential preferences are not about who makes more money or too much money. We just want to know who’s on our side, who has our interests at heart. Besides being competent to do the job, the President has to appreciate that we are all in this together, regardless of rank.

—SUSAN T. FISKE is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton University and author of Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us.