Shifting perceptions of social class: Race-based shifts in class-related occupations

ABSTRACT

Based on social expectations associating White and Black racial categories with higher and lower ends of the social hierarchy, respectively, the criteria used in interpersonal judgments of social class categorizations should differ between White and Black targets, with Black targets needing objectively lower criteria than White targets to achieve a particular subjective level of social class. In an analysis of the occupations assigned to Working- and Middle-Class targets, respondents assigned occupations of higher financial and educational attainment, higher social status, more influence, and greater desirability to a White target than to a comparably described Black target. Despite this pattern, however, respondents judged the occupations assigned to a Black target as lower in prestige than those they assigned to a White target. The results are discussed in the context of interracial perceptions of social standing and motivations for societal change.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• social class
• implicit cognition
• shifting standards

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Katrina Cymerman for her assistance in experiment preparation and data collection. I would also like to thank Emily Watkins, Layth Al-Hindi, and Annie Nottingham for helpful comments and assistance in drafting the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicts of interest to declare.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/uhjps/.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/uhjps/.

Notes

1. This exclusion strategy was slightly more liberal than specified in our preregistered strategy. In preregistration, we specified that any participant who took less than fine seconds to select two or more occupations (out of 6 selections) would be excluded. This resulted in a final n = 180. Using the slightly more liberal strategy of removing those who took less than fine seconds to select three or more allowed us to retain a slightly larger sample and reach our sample size target. This modest change in the exclusion criteria resulted in no appreciable difference in the results for any measure, including no differences in significant effects.

2. In only 3% of instances did a participant select the same occupation more than once. Consistent with the pre-registration, in these instances, responses were calculated using only the five unique occupations. In no instance did a participant repeat more than one occupation or repeat an occupation more than once.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Weeks

Matthew Weeks is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rhodes College (Memphis, TN).  His research examines issues related to the intersection of racial and social hierarchy categories.