Tag Archives: social class

The Hidden Injuries of (the) Class(room)

Education, Social psychology,

This is the first of what I expect to be a series of posts on The Hidden Injuries of Class, named for the 1973 book of that title by Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett.

It is obvious that education is one of the primary institutions that reproduces social inequality; that is, it is one of the main reasons there is so little social mobility in the United States. Most commentators attribute this to two reasons.

The current research focuses on a third possibility—class differences that emerge from within the classroom. Since UMC children are more familiar with classroom norms, more “education-ready,” the classroom is not a level playing field, but rather one in which UMC children perform better while WC children appear more withdrawn and less intelligent. One classroom tradition that elicits these class differences in behavior asking students to raise their hands. Hand-raising introduces competition and social comparison into the classroom environment, which can be detrimental to the self-esteem of WC kids.

Sebastien Goudeau and Jean-Claude Croizet conducted three experiments with fith and sixth grade French school children. Children were divided into those with WC and UMC backgrounds according to the status of the parent with the highest occupational level. In the first study, 953 students responded to a reading comprehension test in which 15 questions were read and posted on a screen and the children wrote their answers is a notebook. The number of correct answers was scored. In a randomly determined half of the classes, students were instructed to raise their hands when they thought they knew the answer. In the other classes, this instruction was omitted.

The results showed that hand-raising interfered with the performance of the WC children but had no effect on the UMC kids.

In the other two experiments, the children’s actual social class was not a variable. Instead, the authors attempted to create a cultural advantage for half the children. The students performed a coding task in which they were asked to write down symbols that had been associated with certain letters. Half the students were given fifteen practice trials to become familiar with the coding task, while the others were given only five practice trials. Each class contained a mixture of students who were more or less familiar with the coding task.

As before, in half the classes, the kids were asked to raise their hands when they knew the answer, and in the other half, they were not. The results showed that hand-raising disrupted the performance of the students who were less familiar with the task, but had no effect on those more familiar with it.

Part of the reason social class differences are so discouraging to WC children is their hidden nature, which creates the illusion that there are real differences in ability between WC and UMC children. In the third study, all classes were instructed to raise their hands when they knew the answer, but an additional variable was introduced. Half of the classes were correctly informed that some students had had more opportunity to practice than others, while the other classes were not. When the students who were less familiar with the task were informed that others had this advantage, hand-raising no longer disrupted their performance.

Godeau and Croizet propose that UMC children enter school with more cultural capital than WC children. Parents provide their children with social capital when they teach them the skills and attitudes they need to succeed in school. Certain classroom practices, such as asking children to read aloud in front of the class, will serve to increase these differences. Asking teachers to avoid these activities is unlikely to be successful, and might deny WC kids an opportunity to overcome their deficits. More promising might be a preschool experience in which WC children are familiarized with educational culture. They should  be told often that their unfamiliarity with these behaviors does not mean that they are stupid.

You may also be interested in reading:

Racial Profiling in Preschool

Asian-American Achievement as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

“Here I Am. Do You See Me?”

Cognitive psychology, Social psychology,

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:

Class Act

Me First

Racial Profiling in Preschool

Invisible Inequality

Economics, Health, War and peace, ,

The people who benefit least from American capitalism are mostly likely to be killed or maimed defending it, according to a new paper entitled “Invisible Inequality: The Two Americas of Military Sacrifice” by political scientist Douglas Kriner and law professor Francis Shen. And it wasn’t always that way.

The centerpiece of their investigation is a study of the socioeconomic status of American soldiers killed or wounded in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Of course, the Pentagon does not provide such data, but they do list the home towns of the dead and wounded. The authors determined the median family incomes in the home counties of each casualty. Obviously, this introduces “rounding error” into the data, but it gives valuable information about whether the dead and wounded come from richer or poorer parts of the country. Here are the data for fatalities, with the median incomes adjusted to reflect dollars from the year 2000.

study

Clearly, as the U.S. has come to rely less on the draft and more on other forms of recruitment, what was once shared sacrifice has become more unequal. The results for non-fatal casualties are quite similar.

The authors attribute these results to two processes. The selection mechanism refers to differential selection into the armed forces of young people whose economic opportunities are limited, making them responsive to financial incentives the military offers. The sorting mechanism refers to the assignment of lower socioeconomic status soldiers to higher risk positions in the military, since they lack the education or job skills that would make them more useful away from the front lines.

It has been noted that soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan have a higher survival rate than in previous wars, but return home with more serious injuries. This means that inequality continues long after the war. The authors note several studies showing that social class is an important factor affecting the health outcomes of veterans. Veterans from poorer counties return to communities with fewer resources to help in their readjustment, and their injuries place an additional financial burden on those communities.

Kriner and Shen did a national survey showing that only about half of the public is aware of these inequalities. They asked the following question of a national sample: “Thinking about the American soldiers who have died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, what parts of the United States do you think they are coming from?” The alternatives were more from richer communities, more from poorer communities, or equally from richer and poorer communities. Forty-five percent believed that the sacrifice was shared equally, while 44% realized that poorer communities carried a larger part of the burden.

Finally, they did two web-based experiments measuring how Americans react to correct information about military inequality. In one of these, half the respondents were told that many more of the Iraq and Afghanistan fatalities came from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, while those in the control group were not given this information. Fifty-six percent of those in the control group said the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, compared to 62% given information about inequality of sacrifice. A similar result was obtained in a second study measuring willingness to engage in future wars. As the authors state, “The invisibility of casaulty inequality artificially inflates public support for war and the leaders who wage it.”

We know from attribution theory that if the public believes that people in the armed forces freely chose to serve out of personal motives such as patriotism, rather than being driven by environmental forces such as economic necessity, they are more likely to be held responsible for the outcomes of their decisions. Thus, the invisibility of military inequality may contribute to tendencies to blame these vicitims for their deaths or injuries, since they “freely chose” to enlist.

You may also be interested in reading:

On Obama’s Speech

Whose Opinion Matters?