New research provides evidence that individuals with lower socioeconomic status (SES) tend to have negative perceptions about how others see them. The findings, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, suggest that people with low SES are more likely than those with high SES to have inaccurate meta-perceptions. In particular, they believe others see them as colder and less competent.
The researchers behind the new study sought to better understand how people’s social status, specifically their SES, influences their perceptions of how others see them and how it affects their self-regard and self-presentation. Additionally, they aimed to investigate how these perceptions affect people’s reactions to negative feedback.
“Our lab is interested in ways that psychological processes can further entrench structural inequalities. In this case we were interested in if or how people’s expectations for how others see them are linked to stereotypes about their social class groups,” explained study author Kristin Laurin, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia and director of the MAGIC Lab.
The researchers conducted multiple studies involving over 5,800 participants, including direct replications and pre-registered studies. They found that individuals with lower SES tended to believe that others see them more negatively in terms of warmth and competence than those with higher SES.
This pattern was explained by the lower self-regard and weaker expectations of self-presentation held by individuals with lower SES. People with lower SES tended to have a more negative perception of themselves and their worth compared to those with higher SES. They also believed it would be more challenging to convey a good impression of themselves.
Moreover, the study revealed that when people with lower SES were actually perceived as cold or incompetent, they tended to blame themselves for it (e.g. “I wasn’t likable enough,” “I didn’t make enough intelligent comments”). When people with higher SES were actually perceived as cold or incompetent, in contrast, they were more likely to attribute such perceptions to external factors (e.g.”They don’t really get me,” “We had different problem-solving techniques so we probably wouldn’t work well together”).
“Where you are in the socioeconomic hierarchy, relative to others in your society or community, is linked with how you expect others to see you, and how you explain it when your interactions go poorly,” Laurin told PsyPost. “If you are lower down in the hierarchy, you expect to be seen not only as less competent and capable, but also as less warm and friendly. Then when someone does perceive you in these ways, you blame yourself, more so than you would if you were higher up in the hierarchy.”
The researchers also examined different dimensions of SES, including current rank (such as current income) and cultural context (such as childhood income and education). They found that the link between SES and meta-perceptions (perceptions of how others see oneself) was more consistently related to current rank measures and less consistently related to cultural context measures.
“We were surprised that people lower down in the hierarchy expected others to see them as cold and unfriendly, if anything the stereotypes most people have of social class groups would have led us to expect it to be the other way around,” Laurin noted.
But how are people with lower SES actually perceived? The researchers found that regardless of SES, people were perceived as equally warm and competent by others. In other words, how others actually saw individuals did not differ based on their SES.
However, when it came to meta-perceptions, individuals with lower SES had less accurate meta-perceptions compared to those with higher SES. This means that people with lower SES expected others to view them more negatively, but in reality, others saw them just as positively as individuals with higher SES.
The findings of the study have implications for understanding the impact of SES on social cognition and its potential role in perpetuating material inequalities. However, the researchers noted limitations, such as the inability to establish causal relationships between SES and meta-perceptions and the potential influence of confounding variables like self-regard and ethnicity.
“One caveat is that the social class hierarchy has many dimensions; our findings apply more to the hierarchy based on factors like your income, and where you see yourself relative to others, and less on factors like your education level or your family background,” Laurin explained. “In some ways that surprised us too — we might have thought your level of education would be a stronger predictor of whether you expected other people to think you were competent!”
“One question that still needs to be addressed is whether these expectations turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. Another is who benefits most from these biased expectations: Those higher up, who may overestimate how positively others will perceive them, or those lower down, who may underestimate this.”
The study, “Socioeconomic Status and Meta-Perceptions: How Markers of Culture and Rank Predict Beliefs About How Others See Us“, was authored by Holly R. Engstrom, Kristin Laurin, Nick R. Kay, and Lauren J. Human.