Maybe because of the continuing increase in economic inequality in the United States, social psychologists are taking a greater interest in social class differences in behavior. I have previously written about studies showing that upper class people are less likely to help a person in need than lower class individuals, and are more likely to engage in unethical behavior—behavior that is potentially harmful to others.
A new article by Pia Dietze and Eric Knowles of New York University suggests an explanation for these differences: Upper class individuals regard others as less motivationally relevant—that is, less “potentially rewarding, threatening or otherwise worth attending to”—than lower class members do. If that is the case, then members of the upper clases should pay less attention to other people they meet in public places.
In the first of three studies, Dietze and Knowles asked 61 college students to take a walk around the streets of Manhattan “testing” the Google Glass, a device that fits over the right eye and records what the person is looking at. Six independent judges watched these videos and measured the participants’ social gazes—the number and duration of their looks at the people they passed. The students were asked to classify themselves as either poor, working class, middle class, upper-middle class or upper class. These five labels were treated as a 5-point continuous scale.
Results showed that the number of social gazes did not differ by social class, perhaps indicating that it is necessary to at least glance at passers-by to successfully navigate the sidewalk. However, as predicted, the higher the self-reported social class of the participants, the longer the time they spent looking at the people they passed.
Is this only because other people are less “motivationally relevant” to upper class participants? After reading this study, I thought about sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of civil inattention. Goffman said that when we pass strangers, we glance at them briefly, but then quickly look away, in order to avoid the appearance of staring at them. Are upper class children more likely to have been taught that it’s not polite to stare? Fortunately, the other two studies the authors report don’t involve face-to-face interaction and are not subject to this alternative explanation.
In the second study, 158 participants were asked to look at several visually diverse street scenes while fitted with an eye-tracking device which measured which part of the scene they were looking at, and for how long. The authors recorded the time spent looking at both people and things (cars, buildings, etc.) in the environment. Time spent looking at things did not differ significantly by social class, but participants who classified themselves in the lower classes spent more time looking at people. This is illustrated in the chart below, which compares working class and upper-middle class participants. (Study 2a involved 41 New York City scenes, while Study 2b added an equal number of scenes from London and San Francisco.)
In the last study, 397 paid internet volunteers participated in a flicker task. On each trial, participants were shown two rapidly alternating slides consisting of pictures of a person’s face and five other objects. On some trials, the two slides were identical, but on others, one of the six pictures—either the person or one of the five things—was different. Participants were asked to press a key as quickly as possible indicating whether the slides were the same or different, and the computer measured how rapidly participants responded. It was expected that lower class participants would be better at detecting changes among the people, but not among the things. This hypothesis was confirmed.
Although the flicker task has no obvious relevance to everyday life, the fact that the lower class participants detected changes in the faces more rapidly than the upper class participants suggests that they were more likely to be looking at the faces, rather than some other part of the slide. The fact that the differences were in milliseconds—a millisecond is a thousandth of a second—suggests that this is an automatic response rather than one that is under conscious control.
The chart above is from an article by Michael Kraus and two colleagues summarizing research on class differences in behavior. The present studies deal with cognition. Lower class people’s cognition is said to be contextual because it is directed at the social environment, probably because their lives are controlled more by outside forces, such as bosses and government policies. Upper class people are more likely to be paying attention to themselves and their own thoughts. It is hypothesized that this explains the differences in prosocial (helpful) behavior among the lower classes vs. selfish behavior among the upper classes that I noted in the opening paragraph. It may also help to explain class differences in political party affiliation and voting behavior, as long as voters are not confused or misled about which policies the candidates actually favor.
You may also be interested in reading: