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Understanding Social Status and Its Impact

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Introduction, the dimensions of social status, the impact of social status on values and beliefs, 2. educational attainment, 3. occupational prestige, 4. subjective perceptions of social class, 1. self-perception, 2. perceptions of others, 3. values and priorities.

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December 8, 2009

The Psychology of Social Status

How the pursuit of status can lead to aggressive and self-defeating behavior

By Adam Waytz

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Nobel Laureate economist, John Harsanyi, said that “apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior.” The more noticeable status disparities are, the more concerned with status people become, and the  differences between the haves and have-nots have been extremely pronounced during the economic recession of recent years.  Barack Obama campaigned directly on the issue of the “dwindling middle class” during his 2008 presidential run and appointed vice-president Joe Biden to lead a middle class task force specifically to bolster this demographic.  Despite some recent economic improvement, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont just two months ago cautioned that “the reality is that the middle class today in this country is in desperate shape and the gap between the very very wealthy and everyone else is going to grow wider.”  Concerns about status likely will not be leaving the public consciousness any time soon.   Of course, status differences are not simply relevant to economic standing, but they appear to be on our minds at all times.  As renowned neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga, has noted, “When you get up in the morning, you do not think about triangles and squares and these similes that psychologists have been using for the past 100 years.  You think about status. You think about where you are in relation to your peers.”  Between CEO and employee, quarterback and wide receiver, husband and wife, status looms large.  Recent work by social scientists has tackled the topic, elucidating behavioral differences between low-status and high-status individuals, and the methods by which those at the bottom of the totem pole are most successful at climbing to the top.   Psychologist PJ Henry at DePaul University recently published an article demonstrating that low-status individuals have higher tendencies toward violent behavior, explaining these differences in terms of low-status compensation theory.  Henry began this work by observing that murder rates were higher in regions with landscapes conducive to herding compared to regions that are conducive to farming, consistent with prior research showing an association between herding-based economies and violence. The traditional explanation for this pattern, popularized by psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett, is that herding cultures have a propensity for maintaining a Culture of Honor . The story goes that because herders from Southern Britain originally settled in the Southern United States (and also established a herding economy on the new land), this left them in an economically precarious position. The possessions of these herdsmen—the most important of which was their livestock—was susceptible to theft, forcing individuals to develop a quick trigger in response to threats, economic or otherwise.  In comparison, the farming economy of the North was far more secure, requiring a less aggressive and protective stance toward one’s personal resources.   Henry took on the traditional Culture of Honor hypothesis to suggest instead that differences between herding and farming cultures in violence actually stem from differences in status.  His theory is based on a considerable psychological literature demonstrating that individuals from low-status groups (e.g. ethnic minorities) tend to engage in more vigilant psychological self-protection than those from high-status groups.  Low-status people are much more sensitive to being socially rejected and are more inclined to monitor their environment for threats.  Because of this vigilance toward protecting their sense of self-worth, low-status individuals are quicker to respond violently to personal threats and insults.   Henry first examined archival data on counties across the American South to show that murder rates from 1972 to 2006 were far higher in counties that were dry and hilly (conducive to herding) than those that were moist and flat (conducive to farming).  Above and beyond the effect of geography, however, the level of status disparities in a particular county explained these increased murder rates.  Even after accounting for the general level of wealth in a given county (wealthier counties tend to have lower murder rates), status disparity still predicted murder rates.  Not content with merely looking at the United States, Henry analyzed data from 92 countries around the world, to find a replication of this pattern.  From Albania to Zimbabwe, greater status disparities predicted greater levels of violence.   To provide evidence that tendencies for psychological self-protection were the crucial critical link between status and violence, Henry assessed survey data from over 1,500 Americans.  In this nationally representative sample, low-socioeconomic status (low-SES) individuals reported far more psychological defensiveness in terms of considering themselves more likely to be taken advantage of and trusting people less.   Finally, in an experiment with both high- and low-SES college students, Henry demonstrated that boosting people’s sense of self-worth diminished aggressive tendencies amongst low-status individuals. Henry asked some students in the experiment to write about a time when they felt important and valuable.  Other students did not receive this assignment, but instead completed a rote task about defining nouns.  In a second portion of the experiment, all participants answered questions about how willing they would be to respond aggressively to threats. Consistent with the general population studies, college students from low-SES backgrounds expressed more willingness to respond aggressively to insults, but this tendency diminished markedly for those who first wrote about themselves as important and valuable.   Although this pattern of low-status compensation is important on its own, it is also unfortunate given a separate body of research on how people actually attain higher status.  This research, recently summarized in an article by psychologists, Cameron Anderson and Gavin J Kilduff, shows that those who are effective in attaining status do so through behaving generously and helpfully to bolster their value to their group.  In other words, low-status individuals’ aggressive and violent behavior is precisely the opposite of what they should be doing to ascend the societal totem pole.   Anderson and Kilduff demonstrated in one study that people in a group math problem-solving task who merely signaled their competence through being more vocal attained higher status and were able to do so regardless of their actual competence on the task.  Research by psychologists Charlie L. Hardy and Mark Van Vugt, and sociologist Robb Willer have shown that generosity is the key to status.  People afford greater status to individuals who donate more of their own money to a communal fund and those who sacrifice their individual interests for the public good.  Demonstrating your value to a group—whether through competence or selflessness—appears to improve status. Anderson and Aiwa Shirako suggest that the amplifier for this effect is the degree to which one has social connections with others.  Their studies involved MBA students engaging in a variety of negotiations tasks.  They showed that individuals who behaved cooperatively attained a more positive reputation, but only if they were socially embedded in the group.  Those who behaved cooperatively, but lacked connections went unnoticed.  Social connectedness had similar effects for uncooperative MBA students.  Those who were selfish and well-connected saw their reputation diminish.   The sum of these findings can begin to explain the troubled circumstances of those lowest in status.  Ongoing efforts to maintain a positive view of oneself despite economic and social hardships can engage psychological defense mechanisms that are ultimately self-defeating.  Instead of ingratiating themselves to those around them – this is the successful strategy for status attainment - low-status individuals may be more prone to bullying and hostile behavior, especially when provoked.  Research identifying factors that lead to successful status-seeking provides some optimism, though.  Individuals capable of signaling their worth to others rather than being preoccupied with signaling their worth to themselves may be able to break the self-defeating cycle of low-status behavior.

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The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour

Antony s. r. manstead.

1 Cardiff University, UK

Drawing on recent research on the psychology of social class, I argue that the material conditions in which people grow up and live have a lasting impact on their personal and social identities and that this influences both the way they think and feel about their social environment and key aspects of their social behaviour. Relative to middle‐class counterparts, lower/working‐class individuals are less likely to define themselves in terms of their socioeconomic status and are more likely to have interdependent self‐concepts; they are also more inclined to explain social events in situational terms, as a result of having a lower sense of personal control. Working‐class people score higher on measures of empathy and are more likely to help others in distress. The widely held view that working‐class individuals are more prejudiced towards immigrants and ethnic minorities is shown to be a function of economic threat, in that highly educated people also express prejudice towards these groups when the latter are described as highly educated and therefore pose an economic threat. The fact that middle‐class norms of independence prevail in universities and prestigious workplaces makes working‐class people less likely to apply for positions in such institutions, less likely to be selected and less likely to stay if selected. In other words, social class differences in identity, cognition, feelings, and behaviour make it less likely that working‐class individuals can benefit from educational and occupational opportunities to improve their material circumstances. This means that redistributive policies are needed to break the cycle of deprivation that limits opportunities and threatens social cohesion.

We are all middle class now. John Prescott, former Labour Deputy Prime Minister, 1997

Class is a Communist concept. It groups people as bundles and sets them against one another. Margaret Thatcher, former Conservative Prime Minister, 1992

One of the ironies of modern Western societies, with their emphasis on meritocratic values that promote the notion that people can achieve what they want if they have enough talent and are prepared to work hard, is that the divisions between social classes are becoming wider, not narrower. In the United Kingdom, for example, figures from the Equality Trust ( 2017 ) show that the top one‐fifth of households have 40% of national income, whereas the bottom one‐fifth have just 8%. These figures are based on 2012 data. Between 1938 and 1979, income inequality in the United Kingdom did reduce to some extent, but in subsequent decades, this process has reversed. Between 1979 and 2009/2010, the top 10% of the population increased its share of national income from 21% to 31%, whereas the share received by the bottom 10% fell from 4% to 1%. Wealth inequality is even starker than income inequality. Figures from the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2014 ) show that in the period 2012–2014, the wealthiest 10% of households in Great Britain owned 45% of household wealth, whereas the least wealthy 50% of households owned <9%. How can these very large divisions in material income and wealth be reconciled with the view that the class structure that used to prevail in the United Kingdom until at least the mid‐20th century is no longer relevant, because the traditional working class has ‘disappeared’, as asserted by John Prescott in one of the opening quotes, and reflected in the thesis of embourgeoisement analysed by Goldthorpe and Lockwood ( 1963 )? More pertinently for the present article, what implications do these changing patterns of wealth and income distribution have for class identity, social cognition, and social behaviour?

The first point to address concerns the supposed disappearance of the class system. As recent sociological research has conclusively shown, the class system in the United Kingdom is very much still in existence, albeit in a way that differs from the more traditional forms that were based primarily on occupation. In one of the more comprehensive recent studies, Savage et al . ( 2013 ) analysed the results of a large survey of social class in the United Kingdom, the BBC's 2011 Great British Class Survey, which involved 161,400 web respondents, along with the results of a nationally representative sample survey. Using latent class analysis, the authors identified seven classes, ranging from an ‘elite’, with an average annual household income of £89,000, to a ‘precariat’ with an average annual household income of £8,000. Among the many interesting results is the fact that the ‘traditional working‐class’ category formed only 14% of the population. This undoubtedly reflects the impact of de‐industrialization and is almost certainly the basis of the widely held view that the ‘old’ class system in the United Kingdom no longer applies. As Savage et al .'s research clearly shows, the old class system has been reconfigured as a result of economic and political developments, but it is patently true that the members of the different classes identified by these researchers inhabit worlds that rarely intersect, let alone overlap. The research by Savage et al . revealed that the differences between the social classes they identified extended beyond differences in financial circumstances. There were also marked differences in social and cultural capital, as indexed by size of social network and extent of engagement with different cultural activities, respectively. From a social psychological perspective, it seems likely that growing up and living under such different social and economic contexts would have a considerable impact on people's thoughts, feelings and behaviours. The central aim of this article was to examine the nature of this impact.

One interesting reflection of the complicated ways in which objective and subjective indicators of social class intersect can be found in an analysis of data from the British Social Attitudes survey (Evans & Mellon, 2016 ). Despite the fact that there has been a dramatic decline in traditional working‐class occupations, large numbers of UK citizens still describe themselves as being ‘working class’. Overall, around 60% of respondents define themselves as working class, and the proportion of people who do so has hardly changed during the past 33 years. One might reasonably ask whether and how much it matters that many people whose occupational status suggests that they are middle class describe themselves as working class. Evans and Mellon ( 2016 ) show quite persuasively that this self‐identification does matter. In all occupational classes other than managerial and professional, whether respondents identified themselves as working class or middle class made a substantial difference to their political attitudes, with those identifying as working class being less likely to be classed as right‐wing. No wonder Margaret Thatcher was keen to dispense with the concept of class, as evidenced by the quotation at the start of this paper. Moreover, self‐identification as working class was significantly associated with social attitudes in all occupational classes. For example, these respondents were more likely to have authoritarian attitudes and less likely to be in favour of immigration, a point I will return to later. It is clear from this research that subjective class identity is linked to quite marked differences in socio‐political attitudes.

A note on terminology

In what follows, I will refer to a set of concepts that are related but by no means interchangeable. As we have already seen, there is a distinction to be drawn between objective and subjective indicators of social class. In Marxist terms, class is defined objectively in terms of one's relationship to the means of production. You either have ownership of the means of production, in which case you belong to the bourgeoisie, or you sell your labour, in which case you belong to the proletariat, and there is a clear qualitative difference between the two classes. This worked well when most people could be classified either as owners or as workers. As we have seen, such an approach has become harder to sustain in an era when traditional occupations have been shrinking or have already disappeared, a sizeable middle‐class of managers and professionals has emerged, and class divisions are based on wealth and social and cultural capital.

An alternative approach is one that focuses on quantitative differences in socioeconomic status (SES), which is generally defined in terms of an individual's economic position and educational attainment, relative to others, as well as his or her occupation. As will be shown below, when people are asked about their identities, they think more readily in terms of SES than in terms of social class. This is probably because they have a reasonable sense of where they stand, relative to others, in terms of economic factors and educational attainment, and perhaps recognize that traditional boundaries between social classes have become less distinct. For these reasons, much of the social psychological literature on social class has focused on SES as indexed by income and educational attainment, and/or on subjective social class, rather than social class defined in terms of relationship to the means of production. For present purposes, the terms ‘working class’, which tends to be used more by European researchers, and ‘lower class’, which tends to be used by US researchers, are used interchangeably. Similarly, the terms ‘middle class’ and ‘upper class’ will be used interchangeably, despite the different connotations of the latter term in the United States and in Europe, where it tends to be reserved for members of the land‐owning aristocracy. A final point about terminology concerns ‘ideology’, which will here be used to refer to a set of beliefs, norms and values, examples being the meritocratic ideology that pervades most education systems and the (related) ideology of social mobility that is prominent in the United States.

Socioeconomic status and identity

Social psychological analyses of identity have traditionally not paid much attention to social class or SES as a component of identity. Instead, the focus has been on categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and age. Easterbrook, Kuppens, and Manstead ( 2018 ) analysed data from two large, representative samples of British adults and showed that respondents placed high subjective importance on their identities that are indicative of SES. Indeed, they attached at least as much importance to their SES identities as they did to identities (such as ethnicity or gender) more commonly studied by self and identity researchers. Easterbrook and colleagues also showed that objective indicators of a person's SES were robust and powerful predictors of the importance they placed on different types of identities within their self‐concepts: Those with higher SES attached more importance to identities that are indicative of their SES position, but less importance on identities that are rooted in basic demographics or related to their sociocultural orientation (and vice versa).

To arrive at these conclusions, Easterbook and colleagues analysed data from two large British surveys: The Citizenship Survey (CS; Department for Communities and Local Government, 2012 ); and Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Study (USS; Buck & McFall, 2012 ). The CS is a (now discontinued) biannual survey of a regionally representative sample of around 10,000 adults in England and Wales, with an ethnic minority boost sample of around 5,000. The researchers analysed the most recent data, collected via interviews in 2010–2011. The USS is an annual longitudinal household panel survey that began in 2009. Easterbrook and colleagues analysed Wave 5 (2013–2014), the more recent of the two waves in which the majority of respondents answered questions relevant to class and other social identities.

Both the CS and the USS included a question about the extent to which respondents incorporated different identities into their sense of self. Respondents were asked how important these identities were ‘to your sense of who you are’. The CS included a broad range of identities, including profession, ethnic background, family, gender, age/life stage, income and education. The USS included a shorter list of identities, including profession, education, ethnic background, family, gender and age/life stage. When the responses to these questions were factor analysed, Easterbrook and colleagues found three factors that were common to the two datasets: SES‐based identities (e.g., income), basic‐demographic identities (e.g., age), and identities based on sociocultural orientation (e.g., ethnic background). In both datasets, the importance of each of these three identities was systematically related to objective indicators of the respondents’ SES: As the respondent's SES increased, the subjective importance of SES‐related identities increased, whereas the importance of basic‐demographic and (to a lesser extent) sociocultural identities decreased. Interestingly, these findings echo those of a qualitative, interview‐based study conducted with American college students: Aries and Seider ( 2007 ) found that affluent respondents were more likely than their less affluent counterparts to acknowledge the importance of social class in shaping their identities. As the researchers put it, ‘The affluent students were well aware of the educational benefits that had accrued from their economically privileged status and of the opportunities that they had to travel and pursue their interests. The lower‐income students were more likely to downplay class in their conception of their own identities than were the affluent students’ (p. 151).

Thus, despite SES receiving relatively scant attention from self and identity researchers, there is converging quantitative and qualitative evidence that SES plays an important role in structuring the self‐concept.

Contexts that shape self‐construal: Home, school, and work

Stephens, Markus, and Phillips ( 2014 ) have analysed the ways in which social class shapes the self‐concept through the ‘gateway contexts’ of home, school, and work. With a focus on the United States, but with broader implications, they argue that social class gives rise to culture‐specific selves and patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. One type of self they label ‘hard interdependence.’ This, they argue, is characteristic of those who grow up in low‐income, working‐class environments. As the authors put it, ‘With higher levels of material constraints and fewer opportunities for influence, choice, and control, working‐class contexts tend to afford an understanding of the self and behavior as interdependent with others and the social context’ (p. 615). The ‘hard’ aspect of this self derives from the resilience that is needed to cope with adversity. The other type of self the authors identify is ‘expressive independence’, which is argued to be typical of those who grow up in affluent, middle‐class contexts. By comparison with working‐class people, those who grow up in middle‐class households ‘need to worry far less about making ends meet or overcoming persistent threats … Instead, middle‐class contexts enable people to act in ways that reflect and further reinforce the independent cultural ideal – expressing their personal preferences, influencing their social contexts, standing out from others, and developing and exploring their own interests’ (p. 615). Stephens and colleagues review a wide range of work on socialization that supports their argument that the contexts of home, school and workplace foster these different self‐conceptions. They also argue that middle‐class schools and workplaces use expressive independence as a standard for measuring success, and thereby create institutional barriers to upward social mobility.

The idea that schools are contexts in which social class inequalities are reinforced may initially seem puzzling, given that schools are supposed to be meritocratic environments in which achievement is shaped by ability and effort, rather than by any advantage conferred by class background. However, as Bourdieu and Passeron ( 1990 ) have argued, the school system reproduces social inequalities by promoting norms and values that are more familiar to children from middle‐class backgrounds. To the extent that this helps middle‐class children to outperform their working‐class peers, the ‘meritocratic’ belief that such performance differences are due to differences in ability and/or effort will serve to ‘explain’ and legitimate unequal performance. Consistent with this argument, Darnon, Wiederkehr, Dompnier, and Martinot ( 2018 ) primed the concept of merit in French fifth‐grade schoolchildren and found that this led to lower scores on language and mathematics tests – but that this only applied to low‐SES children. Moreover, the effect of the merit prime on test performance was mediated by the extent to which the children endorsed meritocratic beliefs. Here, then, is evidence that the ideology of meritocracy helps to reproduce social class differences in school settings.

Subjective social class

Stephens et al .’s ( 2014 ) conceptualization of culture‐specific selves that vary as a function of social class is compatible with the ‘subjective social rank’ argument advanced by Kraus, Piff, and Keltner ( 2011 ). The latter authors argue that the differences in material resources available to working‐ and middle‐class people create cultural identities that are based on subjective perceptions of social rank in relation to others. These perceptions are based on distinctive patterns of observable behaviour arising from differences in wealth, education, and occupation. ‘To the extent that these patterns of behavior are both observable and reliably associated with individual wealth, occupational prestige, and education, they become potential signals to others of a person's social class’ (Kraus et al ., 2011 , p. 246). Among the signals of social class is non‐verbal behaviour. Kraus and Keltner ( 2009 ) studied non‐verbal behaviour in pairs of people from different social class backgrounds and found that whereas upper‐class individuals were more disengaged non‐verbally, lower‐class individuals exhibited more socially engaged eye contact, head nods, and laughter. Furthermore, when naïve observers were shown 60‐s excerpts of these interactions, they used these disengaged versus engaged non‐verbal behavioural styles to make judgements of the educational and income backgrounds of the people they had seen with above‐chance accuracy. In other words, social class differences are reflected in social signals, and these signals can be used by individuals to assess their subjective social rank. By comparing their wealth, education, occupation, aesthetic tastes, and behaviour with those of others, individuals can determine where they stand in the social hierarchy, and this subjective social rank then shapes other aspects of their social behaviour. More recent research has confirmed these findings. Becker, Kraus, and Rheinschmidt‐Same ( 2017 ) found that people's social class could be judged with above‐chance accuracy from uploaded Facebook photographs, while Kraus, Park, and Tan ( 2017 ) found that when Americans were asked to judge a speaker's social class from just seven spoken words, the accuracy of their judgments was again above chance.

The fact that there are behavioural signals of social class also opens up the potential for others to hold prejudiced attitudes and to engage in discriminatory behaviour towards those from a lower social class, although Kraus et al . ( 2011 ) focus is on how the social comparison process affects the self‐perception of social rank, and how this in turn affects other aspects of social behaviour. These authors argue that subjective social rank ‘exerts broad influences on thought, emotion, and social behavior independently of the substance of objective social class’ (p. 248). The relation between objective and subjective social class is an interesting issue in its own right. Objective social class is generally operationalized in terms of wealth and income, educational attainment, and occupation. These are the three ‘gateway contexts’ identified by Stephens et al . ( 2014 ). As argued by them, these contexts have a powerful influence on individual cognition and behaviour who operate within them, but they do not fully determine how individuals developing and living in these contexts think, feel, and act. Likewise, there will be circumstances in which individuals who objectively are, say, middle‐class construe themselves as having low subjective social rank as a result of the context in which they live.

There is evidence from health psychology that measures of objective and subjective social class have independent effects on health outcomes, with subjective social class explaining variation in health outcomes over and above what can be accounted for in terms of objective social class (Adler, Epel, Castellazzo, & Ickovics, 2000 ; Cohen et al ., 2008 ). For example, in the prospective study by Cohen et al . ( 2008 ), 193 volunteers were exposed to a cold or influenza virus and monitored in quarantine for objective and subjective signs of illness. Higher subjective class was associated with less risk of becoming ill as a result of virus exposure, and this relation was independent of objective social class. Additional analyses suggested that the impact of subjective social class on likelihood of becoming ill was due in part to differences in sleep quantity and quality. The most plausible explanation for such findings is that low subjective social class is associated with greater stress. It may be that seeing oneself as being low in subjective class is itself a source of stress, or that it increases vulnerability to the effects of stress.

Below I organize the social psychological literature on social class in terms of the impact of class on three types of outcome: thought , encompassing social cognition and attitudes; emotion , with a focus on moral emotions and prosocial behaviour; and behaviour in high‐prestige educational and workplace settings. I will show that these impacts of social class are consistent with the view that the different construals of the self that are fostered by growing up in low versus high social class contexts have lasting psychological consequences.

Social cognition and attitudes

The ways in which these differences in self‐construal shape social cognition have been synthesized into a theoretical model by Kraus, Piff, Mendoza‐Denton, Rheinschmidt, and Keltner ( 2012 ). This model is shown in Figure  1 . They characterize the way lower‐class individuals think about the social environment as ‘contextualism’, meaning a psychological orientation that is motivated by the need to deal with external constraints and threats; and the way that upper‐class people think about the social environment as ‘solipsism’, meaning an orientation that is motivated by internal states such as emotion and by personal goals. One way in which these different orientations manifest themselves is in differences in responses to threat. The premise here is that lower‐class contexts are objectively characterized by greater levels of threat, as reflected in less security in employment, housing, personal safety, and health. These chronic threats foster the development of a ‘threat detection system’, with the result that people who grow up in such environments have a heightened vigilance to threat.

Model of the way in which middle‐ and working‐class contexts shape social cognition, as proposed by Kraus et al . ( 2012 ). From Kraus et al . ( 2012 ), published by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.

Another important difference between the contextualist lower‐class orientation and the solipsistic upper‐class one, according to Kraus et al . ( 2012 ), is in perceived control. Perceived control is closely related to other key psychological constructs, such as attributions. The evidence shows very clearly that those with lower subjective social class are also lower in their sense of personal control, and it also suggests that this reduced sense of control is related to a preference for situational (rather than dispositional) attributions for a range of social phenomena, including social inequality. The logic connecting social class to perceptions of control is straightforward: Those who grow up in middle‐ or upper‐class environments are likely to have more material and psychological resources available to them, and as a result have stronger beliefs about the extent to which they can shape their own social outcomes; by contrast, those who grow up in lower‐class environments are likely to have fewer resources available to them, and as a result have weaker beliefs about their ability to control their outcomes. There is good empirical support for these linkages. In a series of four studies, Kraus, Piff, and Keltner ( 2009 ) found that, by comparison with their higher subjective social class counterparts, lower subjective social class individuals (1) reported lower perceived control and (2) were more likely to explain various phenomena, ranging from income inequality to broader social outcomes like getting into medical school, contracting HIV, or being obese, as caused by external factors, ones that are beyond the control of the individual. Moreover, consistent with the authors’ reasoning, there was a significant indirect effect of subjective social class on the tendency to see phenomena as caused by external factors, via perceived control.

Another important social cognition measure in relation to social class is prejudice. There are two aspects of prejudice in this context. One is prejudice against people of a different class than one's own and especially attitudes towards those who are poor or unemployed; the other is the degree to which people's prejudiced attitudes about other social groups are associated with their own social class. Regarding attitudes to people who belong to a different social class, the UK evidence clearly shows that attitudes to poverty have changed over the last three decades, in that there is a rising trend for people to believe that those who live in need do so because of a lack of willpower, or because of laziness, accompanied by a corresponding decline in the belief that people live in need because of societal injustice (Clery, Lee, & Kunz, 2013 ). Interestingly, in their analysis of British Social Attitudes data over a period of 28 years, Clery et al . conclude that ‘there are no clear patterns of change in the views of different social classes, suggesting changing economic circumstances exert an impact on attitudes to poverty across society, not just among those most likely to be affected by them’ (p. 18). Given the changing attitudes to poverty, it is unsurprising to find that public attitudes to welfare spending and to redistributive taxation have also changed in a way that reflects less sympathy for those living in poverty. For example, attitudes to benefits for the unemployed have changed sharply in the United Kingdom since 1997, when a majority of respondents still believed that benefits were too low. By 2008, an overwhelming majority of respondents believed that these benefits were too high (Taylor‐Gooby, 2013 ). The way in which economic austerity has affected attitudes to these issues was the subject of qualitative research conducted by Valentine ( 2014 ). Interviews with 90 people in northern England, drawn from a range of social and ethnic backgrounds, showed that many respondents believed that unemployment is due to personal, rather than structural, failings, and that it is a ‘lifestyle choice’, leading interviewees to blame the unemployed for their lack of work and to have negative attitudes to welfare provision. Valentine ( 2014 , p. 2) observed that ‘a moralised sense of poverty as the result of individual choice, rather than structural disadvantage and inequality, was in evidence across the majority of respondents’, and that ‘Negative attitudes to welfare provision were identified across a variety of social positions and were not exclusively reserved to individuals from either working class or middle class backgrounds’.

Turning to the attitudes to broader social issues held by members of different social classes, there is a long tradition in social science of arguing that working‐class people are more prejudiced on a number of issues, especially with respect to ethnic minorities and immigrants (e.g., Lipset, 1959 ). Indeed, there is no shortage of evidence showing that working‐class white people do express more negative attitudes towards these groups. One explanation for this association is that working‐class people tend to be more authoritarian – a view that can be traced back to the early research on the authoritarian personality (Adorno, Frenkel‐Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950 ). Recent research providing evidence in favour of this view is reported by Carvacho et al . ( 2013 ). Using a combination of cross‐sectional surveys and longitudinal studies conducted in Europe and Chile, these authors focused on the role of ideological attitudes, in the shape of right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA; Altemeyer, 1998 ) and social dominance orientation (SDO; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999 ), as mediators of the relation between social class and prejudice. To test their predictions, the researchers analysed four public opinion datasets: one based on eight representative samples in Germany; a second based on representative samples from four European countries (France, Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands); a third based on longitudinal research in Germany; and a fourth based on longitudinal research in Chile. Consistent with previous research, the researchers found that income and education, the two indices of social class that they used, predicted higher scores on a range of measures of prejudice, such that lower income and education were associated with greater prejudice – although education proved to be a more consistently significant predictor of prejudice than income did. RWA and SDO were negatively associated with income and education, such that higher scores on income and education predicted lower scores on RWA and SDO. Finally, there was also evidence consistent with the mediation hypothesis: The associations between income and education, on the one hand, and measures of prejudice, on the other, were often (but not always) mediated by SDO and (more consistently) RWA. Carvacho and colleagues concluded that ‘the working class seems to develop and reproduce an ideological configuration that is generally well suited for legitimating the social system’ (p. 283).

Indeed, a theme that emerges from research on social class and attitudes is that ideological factors have a powerful influence on attitudes. The neoliberal ideology that has dominated political discourse in most Western, industrialized societies in the past three decades has influenced attitudes to such an extent that even supporters of left‐of‐centre political parties, such as the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, regard poverty as arising from individual factors and tend to hold negative beliefs about the level of welfare benefits for the unemployed. Such attitudes are shared to a perhaps surprising extent by working‐class people (Clery et al ., 2013 ) and, as we have seen, the research by Carvacho et al . ( 2013 ) suggests that working‐class people endorse ideologies that endorse and preserve a social system that materially disadvantages them.

The notion that people who are disadvantaged by a social system are especially likely to support it is known as the ‘system justification hypothesis’, which holds that ‘people who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it’ (Jost, Pelham, Sheldon, & Sullivan, 2003 , p. 13). The rationale for this prediction derives in part from cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957 ), the idea being that it is psychologically inconsistent to experience oppression but not to protest against the system that causes it. One way to reduce the resulting dissonance is to support the system even more strongly, in the same way that those who have to go through an unpleasant initiation rite in order to join a group or organization become more strongly committed to it.

Two large‐scale studies of survey data (Brandt, 2013 ; Caricati, 2017 ) have cast considerable doubt on the validity of this hypothesis, showing that any tendency for people who are at the bottom of a social system to be more likely to support the system than are their advantaged counterparts is, at best, far from robust. Moreover, it has been argued that there is in any case a basic theoretical inconsistency between system justification theory and cognitive dissonance theory (Owuamalam, Rubin, & Spears, 2016 ). However, the fact that working‐class people may not be more supportive of the capitalist system than their middle‐ and upper‐class counterparts does not mean that they do not support the system. Thus, the importance of Carvacho et al .'s ( 2013 ) findings is not necessarily undermined by the results reported by Brandt ( 2013 ) and Caricati ( 2017 ). Being willing to legitimate the system is not the same thing as having a stronger tendency to do this than people who derive greater advantages from the system.

The finding that there is an association between social class and prejudice has also been explained in terms of economic threat. The idea here is that members of ethnic minorities and immigrants also tend to be low in social status and are therefore more likely to be competing with working‐class people than with middle‐class people for jobs, housing, and other services. A strong way to test the economic threat explanation would be to assess whether higher‐class people are prejudiced when confronted with immigrants who are highly educated and likely to be competing with them for access to employment and housing. Such a test was conducted by Kuppens, Spears, Manstead, and Tausch ( 2018 ). These researchers examined whether more highly educated participants would express negative attitudes towards highly educated immigrants, especially when threat to the respondents’ own jobs was made salient, either by drawing attention to the negative economic outlook or by subtly implying that the respondents’ own qualifications might be insufficient in the current job market. Consistent with the economic threat hypothesis, a series of experimental studies with student participants in different European countries showed that attitudes to immigrants were most negative when the immigrants also had a university education.

The same researchers also combined US census data with American National Election Study survey data to examine whether symbolic racism was higher in areas where there was a higher number of Blacks with a similar education to that of the White participants. In areas where Blacks were on average less educated, a higher number Blacks was associated with more symbolic racism among Whites who had less education, but in areas where Blacks were on average highly educated, a higher number of Blacks was associated with more symbolic racism on the part of highly educated White people. Again, these findings are consistent with the view that prejudice arises from economic threat.

Research reported by Jetten, Mols, Healy, and Spears ( 2017 ) is also relevant to this issue. These authors examined how economic instability affects low‐SES and high‐SES people. Unsurprisingly, they found that collective angst was higher among low‐SES participants. However, they also found that high‐SES participants expressed anxiety when they were presented with information suggesting that there was high economic instability, that is, that the ‘economic bubble’ might be about to burst. Moreover, they were more likely to oppose immigration when economic instability was said to be high, rather than low. These results reflect the fact that high‐SES people have a lot to lose in times of economic crisis, and that this ‘fear of falling’ is associated with opposition to immigration.

Together, these results provide good support for an explanation of the association between social class and prejudice in terms of differential threat to the group (see also Brandt & Henry, 2012 ; Brandt & Van Tongeren, 2017 ). Ethnic minorities and immigrants typically pose most threat to the economic well‐being of working‐class people who have low educational qualifications, and this provides the basis for the observation that working‐class people are more likely to be prejudiced. The fact that higher‐educated and high‐SES people express negative views towards ethnic minorities and immigrants when their economic well‐being is threatened shows that it is perceived threat to one's group's interests that underpins this prejudice. It is also worth noting that the perception of threat to a group's economic interests is likely to be greater during times of economic recession.

Emotion and prosocial behaviour

A strong theme emerging from research investigating the relation between social class and emotion is that lower‐class individuals score more highly on measures of empathy. The rationale for expecting such a link is that because lower‐class individuals are more inclined to explain events in terms of external factors, they should be more sensitive to the ways in which external events shape the emotions of others, and therefore better at judging other people's emotions. A complementary rationale is that the tendency for lower social class individuals to be more socially engaged and to have more interdependent social relationships should result in greater awareness of the emotions experienced by others. This reasoning was tested in three studies reported by Kraus, Côté, and Keltner ( 2010 ).

In the first of these studies, the authors examined the relation between educational attainment (a proxy for social class) and scores on the emotion recognition subscale of the Mayer‐Salovey‐Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002 ). High‐school‐educated participants attained a higher score than did their college‐educated counterparts. In a second study, pairs of participants took part in a hypothetical job interview in which an experimenter asked each of them a set of standard questions. This interaction provided the basis for the measure of empathic accuracy, in that each participant was asked to rate both their own emotions and their partner's emotions during the interview. Subjective social class was again related to empathic accuracy, with lower‐class participants achieving a higher score. Moreover, lower‐class participants were more inclined to explain decisions they made in terms of situational rather than dispositional factors, and the relation between subjective social class and empathy was found to be mediated by this tendency to explain decisions in terms of situational factors. The researchers conducted a third study in which they manipulated subjective social class. This time they assessed empathic accuracy using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Baron‐Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001 ). Participants who were temporarily induced to experience lower social class were better at recognizing emotions from the subtle cues available from the eye region of the face.

These findings are compatible with the view that lower social class individuals are more sensitive to contextual variation and more inclined to explain events in situational terms. However, some aspects of the results are quite surprising. For example, there seems to be no compelling reason to predict that greater sensitivity to contextual variation would be helpful in judging static facial expressions, which were the stimuli in Studies 1 and 3 of Kraus et al .'s ( 2010 ) research. Thus, the relation between social class and emotion recognition in these studies would seem to depend on the notion that the greater interdependence that is characteristic of lower‐class social environments fosters greater experience with, and therefore knowledge of, the relation between facial movement and subjective emotion, although it still seems surprising that a temporary induction of lower subjective social class, as used in Study 3, should elicit the same effect as extensive real‐life experience of inhabiting lower‐class environments.

If lower‐class individuals are more empathic than their higher‐class counterparts, and are therefore better at recognizing the distress or need of others, this is likely to influence their behaviour in settings where people are distressed and/or in need. This, indeed, is what the evidence suggests. In a series of four studies, Piff, Kraus, Côté, Cheng, and Keltner ( 2010 ) found a consistent tendency for higher‐class individuals to be less inclined to help others than were their lower‐class counterparts. In Study 1, participants low in subjective social class made larger allocations in a dictator game (a game where you are free to allocate as much or as little of a resource to another person as you want) played with an anonymous other than did participants high in subjective social class. In Study 2, subjective social class was manipulated by asking participants to compare themselves to people either at the very top or very bottom of the status hierarchy ladder, the idea being that subjective social class should be lower for those making upward comparisons and higher for those making downward comparisons. Prosocial behaviour was measured by asking participants to indicate the percentage of income that people should spend on a variety of goods and services, one of which was charitable donations. Participants who were induced to experience lower subjective social class indicated that a greater percentage of people's annual salary should be spent on charitable donations compared to participants who were induced to experience higher subjective social class. In Study 3, the researchers used a combination of educational attainment and household income to assess social class and used social value orientation (Van Lange, De Bruin, Otten, & Joireman, 1997 ) as a measure of egalitarian values. These two variables were used to predict behaviour in a trust game. Consistent with predictions, lower‐class participants showed greater trust in their anonymous partner than did their higher‐class counterparts, and this relation was mediated by egalitarian values. In their final study, the researchers manipulated compassion by asking participants in the compassion condition to view a 46‐s video about child poverty. Higher‐ and lower‐class participants were then given the chance to help someone in need. The researchers predicted that helping would only be moderated by compassion among higher‐class participants, on the grounds that lower‐class participants would already be disposed to help, and the results were consistent with this prediction. Overall, these four studies are consistent in showing that, relative to higher‐class people, lower‐class people are more generous, support charity to a greater extent, are more trusting towards a stranger, and more likely to help a person in distress.

The reliability of this finding has been called into question by Korndörfer, Egloff, and Schmukle ( 2015 ), who found contrary evidence in a series of studies. One way to resolve these apparently discrepant findings is to argue, as Kraus and Callaghan ( 2016 ) did, that the relation between social class and prosocial behaviour is moderated by a number of factors, including whether the context is a public or private one. To test this idea, Kraus and Callaghan ( 2016 ) conducted a series of studies in which they manipulated whether donations made to an anonymous other in a dictator game were made in a private or public context. In the private context, the donor remained anonymous. In the public context, the donor's name and city of residence were announced, along with the donation. Lower‐class participants were more generous in private than in public, whereas the reverse was true for higher‐class participants. Interestingly, higher‐class participants were more likely to expect to feel proud about acting prosocially, and this difference in anticipated pride mediated the effect of social class on the difference between public and private donations.

The fact that lower‐class people have been found to hold more egalitarian values and to be more likely to help regardless of compassion level suggests that it is the greater resources of higher‐class participants that makes them more selfish and therefore less likely to help others. This ‘selfishness’ account of the social class effect on prosocial behaviour is supported by another series of studies reported by Piff, Stancato, Côté, Mendoza‐Denton, and Keltner ( 2012 ), who found that, relative to lower‐class individuals, higher‐class people were more likely to show unethical decision‐making tendencies, to take valued goods from others, to lie in a negotiation, to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize and to endorse unethical behaviour at work. There was also evidence that these unethical tendencies were partly accounted for by more favourable attitudes towards greed among higher‐class people. Later research shows that the relation between social class and unethical behaviour is moderated by whether the behaviour benefits the self or others. Dubois, Rucker, and Galinsky ( 2015 ) varied who benefited from unethical behaviour and showed that the previously reported tendency for higher‐class people to make more unethical decisions was only observed when the outcome was beneficial to the self. These findings are consistent with the view that the greater resources enjoyed by higher‐class individuals result in a stronger focus on the self and a reduced concern for the welfare of others.

Interestingly, this stronger self‐focus and lesser concern for others’ welfare on the part of higher‐class people are more evident in contexts characterized by high economic inequality. This was shown by Côté, House, and Willer ( 2015 ), who analysed results from a nationally representative US survey and showed that higher‐income respondents were only less generous in the offers they made to an anonymous other in a dictator game than their lower‐income counterparts in areas that were high in economic inequality, as reflected in the Gini coefficient. Indeed, in low inequality areas, there was evidence that higher‐income respondents were more generous than their lower‐income counterparts. To test the causality of this differential association between income and generosity in high and low inequality areas, the authors conducted an experiment in which participants were led to believe that their home state was characterized by high or low degree of economic inequality and then played a dictator game with an anonymous other. High‐income participants were less generous than their low‐income counterparts in the high inequality condition but not in the low inequality condition.

A possible issue with Côté et al . ( 2015 ) research in the current context is that it focuses on income rather than class. Although these variables are clearly connected, class is generally thought to be indexed by more than income. The research nevertheless suggests that economic inequality plays a key role in shaping the attitudes and behaviours of higher‐class individuals. There are at least three (not mutually exclusive) explanations for this influence of inequality. One is that inequality increases the sense of entitlement in higher‐class people, because they engage more often in downward social comparisons. Another is that higher‐class people may be more concerned about losing their privileged position in society if they perceive a large gap between the rich and the poor. A final explanation is that higher‐class people may be more highly motivated to justify their privileged position in society when the gap between rich and poor is a large one. Whichever of these explanations is correct – and they may all be to some extent – the fact that prosocial behaviour on the part of higher‐class individuals decreases under conditions of high economic inequality is important, given that the United States is one of the most economically unequal societies in the industrialized world. In unequal societies, then, it seems safe to conclude that on average, higher‐class individuals are less likely than their lower‐class counterparts to behave prosocially, especially where the prosocial behaviour is not public in nature.

Universities and workplaces

The selective nature of higher education (HE), involving economic and/or qualification requirements to gain entry, makes a university a high‐status context. Working‐class people seeking to attain university‐level qualifications are therefore faced with working in an environment in which they may feel out of place. Highly selective universities such as Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom, or Harvard, Stanford, and Yale in the United States, are especially likely to appear to be high in status and therefore out of reach. Indeed, the proportion of working‐class students at Oxford and Cambridge is strikingly low. According to the UK's Higher Education Statistics Agency , the percentage of students at Oxford and Cambridge who were from routine/manual occupational backgrounds was 11.5 and 12.6, respectively, in the academic year 2008/9. This compares with an ONS figure of 37% of all people aged between 16 and 63 in the United Kingdom being classified with such backgrounds. The figures for Oxford and Cambridge are extreme, but they illustrate a more general phenomenon, both in the United Kingdom and internationally: students at elite, research‐led universities are more likely to come from middle‐ and upper‐class backgrounds than from working‐class backgrounds (Jerrim, 2013 ).

The reasons for the very low representation of working‐class students at these elite institutions are complex (Chowdry, Crawford, Dearden, Goodman, & Vignoles, 2013 ), but at least one factor is that many working‐class students do not consider applying because they do not see themselves as feeling at home there. They see a mismatch between the identity conferred by their social backgrounds and the identity they associate with being a student at an elite university. This is evident from ethnographic research. For example, Reay, Crozier, and Clayton ( 2010 ) interviewed students from working‐class backgrounds who were attending one of four HE institutions, including an elite university (named Southern in the report). A student at Southern said this about her mother's reaction to her attending this elite university: ‘I don't think my mother really approves of me going to Southern. It's not what her daughter should be doing so I don't really mention it when I go home. It's kind of uncomfortable to talk about it’ (p. 116). In a separate paper, Reay, Crozier, and Clayton ( 2009 ) focus on the nine students attending Southern, examining whether these students felt like ‘fish out of water’. Indeed, there was evidence of difficulty in adjusting to the new environment, both socially and academically. One student said, ‘I wasn't keen on Southern as a place and all my preconceptions were “Oh, it's full of posh boarding school types”. And it was all true … it was a bit of a culture shock’ (p. 1111), while another said, ‘If you were the best at your secondary school … you're certainly not going to be the best here’ (p. 1112). A similar picture emerges from research in Canada by Lehmann ( 2009 , 2013 ), who interviewed working‐class students attending a research‐intensive university, and found that the students experienced uncomfortable conflicts between their new identities as university students and the ties they had with family members and non‐student friends.

Such is the reputation of elite, research‐intensive universities that working‐class high‐school students are unlikely to imagine themselves attending such institutions, even if they are academically able. Perceptions of these universities as elitist are likely to deter such students from applying. Evidence of this deterrence comes from research conducted by Nieuwenhuis, Easterbrook, and Manstead ( 2018 ). They report two studies in which 16‐ to 18‐year‐old secondary school students in the United Kingdom were asked about the universities they intended to apply to. The studies were designed to test the theoretical model shown in Figure  2 , which was influenced by prior work on the role of identity compatibility conducted by Jetten, Iyer, Tsivrikos, and Young ( 2008 ). According to the model in Figure  2 , SES influences university choice partly through its impact on perceived identity compatibility and anticipated acceptance at low‐ and high‐status universities.

Theoretical model of the way in which the socioeconomic status ( SES ) influences application to high‐status universities as a result of social identity factors and academic achievement, as proposed by Nieuwenhuis et al . ( 2018 ).

In the first study conducted by Nieuwenhuis and colleagues, students who were 6 months away from making their university applications responded to questions about their perceptions of two universities, one a research‐intensive, selective university (SU), the other a less selective university (LSU). Both universities were located in the same geographical region, not far from the schools where the participants were recruited. In the second study, students who were 6 weeks away from making their university applications responded to similar questions, but this time about three universities in the region, two of which were the same as those in Study 1, while the third was a highly selective institution (HSU). The questions put to respondents measured their perceptions of identity compatibility (e.g., consistency between family background and decision to go to university) and anticipated acceptance (e.g., anticipated identification with students at the university in question). Measures of parental education and academic achievement in previous examinations were taken, as well as the three universities to which they would most like to apply, which were scored in accordance with a published national league table.

In both studies, it was found that relatively disadvantaged students (whose parents had low levels of educational attainment) scored lower on identity compatibility and that low scores on identity compatibility were associated with lower anticipated acceptance at the SU (Study 1) or at the HSU (Study 2). These anticipated acceptance scores, in turn, predicted the type of university to which participants wanted to apply, with those who anticipated feeling accepted at more selective universities being more likely to apply to higher status universities. All of these relations were significant while controlling for academic achievement. Together, the results of these studies show that perceptions of acceptance at different types of university are associated with HE choices independently of students’ academic ability. This helps to explain why highly able students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to settle for less prestigious universities.

Alternatively, working‐class students may opt out of HE altogether. Hutchings and Archer ( 2001 ) interviewed young working‐class people who were not participating in HE and found that a key reason for their non‐participation was a perception that the kinds of HE institutions that were realistically available to them were second‐rate: ‘[O]ur respondents constructed two very different pictures of HE. One was of Oxbridge and campus universities, pleasant environments in which middle‐class students … can look forward to achieving prestigious degrees and careers. The second construction was of rather unattractive buildings in which “skint” working‐class students … have to work hard under considerable pressure, combining study with a job and having little time for social life. This second picture was the sort of HE that our respondents generally talked about as available to them, and they saw it as inferior to ‘real’ HE’ (p. 87).

Despite the deterrent effect of perceived identity incompatibility and lack of psychological fit, some working‐class students do gain entry to high‐status universities. Once there, they are confronted with the same issues of fit. Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, Johnson, and Covarrubias ( 2012 ) describe this as ‘cultural mismatch’, arguing that the interdependent norms that characterize the working‐class backgrounds of most first‐generation college students in the United States do not match the middle‐class independent norms that prevail in universities offering 4‐year degrees and that this mismatch leads to greater discomfort and poorer academic performance. Their cultural mismatch model is summarized in Figure  3 .

Model of cultural mismatch proposed by Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, et al . ( 2012 ). The mismatch is between first‐generation college students’ norms, which are more interdependent than those of continuing‐generation students, and the norms of independence that prevail in universities. From Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, et al . ( 2012 ), published by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.

To test this model, Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, et al . ( 2012 ) surveyed university administrators at the top 50 national universities and the top 25 liberal arts colleges. The majority of the 261 respondents were deans. They were asked to respond to items expressing interdependent (e.g., learn to work together with others) or independent (e.g., learn to express oneself) norms, selecting those that characterized their institution's culture or choosing statements reflecting what was more often emphasized by the institution. More than 70% of the respondents chose items reflecting a greater emphasis on independence than on interdependence. Similar results were found in a follow‐up study involving 50 administrators at second‐tier universities and liberal arts colleges, showing that this stronger focus on independence was not only true of elite institutions. Moreover, a longitudinal study of first‐generation students found that this focus on independence did not match the students’ interdependent motives for going to college, in that first‐generation students selected fewer independent motives (e.g., become an independent thinker) and twice as many interdependent motives (e.g., give back to the community), compared to their continuing‐generation counterparts, and that this greater focus on interdependent motives was associated with lower grades in the first 2 years of study, even after controlling for race and SAT scores.

As Stephens and her colleagues have shown elsewhere (e.g., Stephens, Brannon, Markus, & Nelson, 2015 ), there are steps that can be taken to reduce working‐class students’ perception that they do not fit with their university environment. These authors argue that ‘a key goal of interventions should be to fortify and to elaborate school‐relevant selves – the understanding that getting a college degree is central to “who I am”, “who I hope to become”, and “the future I envision for myself”’ (p. 3). Among the interventions that they advocate as ways of creating a more inclusive culture at university are: providing working‐class role models; diversifying the way in which university experience is represented, so that university culture also provides ways of achieving interdependent goals that may be more compatible with working‐class students’ values; and ensuring that working‐class students have a voice, for example, by providing forums in which they can express shared interests and concerns.

Although there is a less well‐developed line of work on the ways in which high‐status places of work affect the aspirations and behaviours of working‐class employees, there is good reason to assume that the effects and processes identified in research on universities as places to study generalize to prestigious employment organizations as places to work (Côté, 2011 ). To the extent that many workplaces are dominated by middle‐class values and practices, working‐class employees are likely to feel out of place (Ridgway & Fisk, 2012 ). This applies both to gaining entry to the workplace, by negotiating the application and selection process (Rivera, 2012 ), and (if successful) to the daily interactions between employees in the workplace. In the view of Stephens, Fryberg, and Markus ( 2012 ), many workplaces are characterized by cultures of expressive independence, where working‐class employees are less likely to feel at home. As Stephens et al . ( 2014 , p. 626) argue, ‘This mismatch between working‐class employees and their middle‐class colleagues and institutions could also reduce employees’ job security and satisfaction, continuing the cycle of disadvantage for working‐class employees.’

Towards an integrative model

The work reviewed here provides the basis for an integrative model of how social class affects thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. The model is shown in Figure  4 and builds on the work of others, especially that of Nicole Stephens and colleagues and that of Michael Kraus and colleagues. At the base of the model are differences in the material circumstances of working‐class and middle‐class people. These differences in income and wealth are associated with differences in social capital, in the form of friendship networks, and cultural capital, in the form of tacit knowledge about how systems work, that have a profound effect on the ways in which individuals who grow up in these different contexts construe themselves and their social environments. For example, if you have family members or friends who have university degrees and/or professional qualifications, you are more likely to entertain these as possible futures than if you do not have these networks; and if through these networks you have been exposed to libraries, museums, interviews, and so on, you are more likely to know how these cultural institutions work, less likely to be intimidated by them, and more likely to make use of them. In sum, a middle‐class upbringing is more likely to promote the perception that the environment is one full of challenges that can be met rather than threats that need to be avoided. These differences in self‐construal and models of interpersonal relations translate into differences in social emotions and behaviours that are noticeable to self and others, creating the opportunity for people to rank themselves and others, and for differences in norms and values to emerge. To the extent that high‐status institutions in society, such as elite universities and prestigious employers, are characterized by norms and values that are different from those that are familiar to working‐class people, the latter will feel uncomfortable in such institutions and will perform below their true potential.

Integrative model of how differences in material conditions generate social class differences and differences in social cognition, emotion, and behaviour.

Also depicted in Figure  4 is the way in which ideology moderates the relations between social class, on the one hand, and social cognition and social behaviour, on the other, and the ways in which economic inequality and threat moderate the relations between psychological dispositions and social behaviour. Although there is good evidence for many of the proposed relations depicted in the model, there is relatively little hard evidence concerning the moderating roles of ideology and economic inequality and threat. There is evidence that economic threat is associated with prejudice (e.g., Billiet, Meuleman, & De Witte, 2014 ), and that this also applies to higher‐educated people (e.g., Kuppens et al ., 2018 ). There is also evidence that high economic inequality increases the tendency for high‐income people to be less generous to others (Côté et al ., 2015 ), but these are influences that need further examination. Likewise, there is evidence of the moderating impact of ideology on the translation from social class to social cognition and behaviour (e.g., Wiederkehr, Bonnot, Krauth‐Gruber, & Darnon, 2015 ), but this, too, is an influence that merits additional investigation. A further point worth making is that much of the work on which this integrative model is based was conducted in the United States, which raises the question of the extent to which it is applicable to other contexts. There are some differences between the United States and other Western, industrialized countries that are relevant to the model. For example, the United States is more economically unequal than virtually every other industrialized country (Piketty & Saez, 2014 ). At the same time, the perceived degree of social mobility is greater in the United States than in other countries (Isaacs, 2008 ) – although the reality is that social mobility is lower in the United States (and indeed in the United Kingdom; see Social Mobility Commission, 2017 ) than in many other industrialized counties (Isaacs, 2008 ). These differences in economic inequality and ideology mean that the moderating roles played by these factors may vary from one country to another. For example, there is evidence that those in Europe who are poor or on the left of the political spectrum are more concerned with and unhappy about inequality than are their American counterparts, which may be related to different beliefs about social mobility (Alesina, Di Tella, & MacCulloch, 2004 ). Although there seems to be no good reason to question the generalizability of the other relations posited in the model, there is an obvious need to expand the research base on which the model is founded.

Prospects for social change

The cycle of disadvantage that starts with poor material conditions and ends with lower chances of entering and succeeding in the very contexts (universities and high‐status workplaces) that could increase social mobility is not going to be changed in the absence of substantial pressure for social change. It is therefore interesting that when people are asked about social inequality, they generally say that they are in favour of greater equality.

Norton and Ariely ( 2011 ) asked a nationally representative sample of more than 5,500 Americans to estimate the (then) current wealth distribution in the United States and also to express their preferences for how wealth should be distributed. The key findings from this research were (1) that respondents greatly underestimated the degree of wealth inequality in the United States, believing that the wealthiest 20% of the population owned 59% of the wealth, where the actual figure is 84% and (2) that their preferred distribution of wealth among citizens was closer to equality than even their own incorrect estimations of the distribution (e.g., they expressed a preference that the top 20% should own 32% of the nation's wealth). This also held for wealthy respondents and Republican voters – albeit to a lesser extent than their poorer and Democrat counterparts. Similar results for Australian respondents were reported by Norton, Neal, Govan, Ariely, and Holland ( 2014 ).

These studies have been criticized on the grounds that the ‘quintile’ methodology they use provides respondents with an anchor (20%) from which they adjust upwards or downwards. However, when Eriksson and Simpson ( 2012 ) used a different methodology, they found that although American respondents’ preferences for wealth distribution were more unequal than those found using the quintile methodology, they were still much more egalitarian than the actual distribution. Similar conclusions were reached in a study of American adolescents conducted by Flanagan and Kornbluh ( 2017 ), where participants expressed a strong preference for a much more egalitarian society than the degree of stratification they perceived to exist in the United States. It is also worth noting that similar findings have been reported in a study of preferences for income inequality (Kiatpongsan & Norton, 2014 ), where it was found that American respondents underestimated the actual difference in income between CEOs and unskilled workers (354:1), and that their preferences regarding this difference (7:1) were more egalitarian than were their estimates (30:1).

Given the evidence that citizens consistently express a preference for less wealth and income inequality than what currently prevails in many societies, it is worth considering why there is not greater support for redistributive policies. It is known that one factor that weakens support for such policies is a belief in social mobility. American participants have been found to overestimate the degree of social mobility in the United States (Davidai & Gilovich, 2015 ; Kraus & Tan, 2015 ), and Shariff, Wiwad, and Aknin ( 2016 ) have shown, using a combination of survey and experimental methods, that higher perceived mobility leads to greater acceptance of income inequality. These authors also showed that the effect of their manipulation of perceived income mobility on tolerance for inequality was mediated by two factors: the expectation that respondents’ children would be upwardly mobile; and perceptions of the degree to which someone's economic standing was the result of effort, rather than luck. This suggests that people's attitudes to income inequality – and therefore their support for steps to reduce it – are shaped by their perceptions that (1) higher incomes are possible to achieve, at least for their children, and (2) when these higher incomes are achieved, they are deserved. It follows that any intervention that reduces the tendency to overestimate income mobility should increase support for redistributive policies.

Another factor that helps to account for lack of support for redistribution is people's perceptions of their own social standing or rank. Brown‐Iannuzzi, Lundberg, Kay, and Payne ( 2015 ) have shown that subjective status is correlated with support for redistributive policies, and that experimentally altering subjective status leads to changes in such support. In both cases, lower subjective status was associated with stronger support for redistribution, even when actual resources and self‐interest were held constant. So one's perception of one's own relative social rank influences support for redistribution. This points to the importance of social comparisons and suggests that those who compare themselves with others who have a lower social standing are less likely to be supportive of redistribution.

Evidence that people's attitudes to inequality and to policies that would reduce it can be influenced by quite straightforward interventions comes from research reported by McCall, Burk, Laperrière, and Richeson ( 2017 ). In three studies, these researchers show that exposing American participants to information about the rising economic inequality, compared to control information, led to stronger perceptions that economic success is due to structural factors rather than individual effort. In the largest of the three studies, involving a representative sample of American adults, it was also found that information about rising inequality led to greater endorsement of policies that could be implemented by government and by business to reduce inequality. This research shows that, under the right conditions, even those living in a society that is traditionally opposed to government intervention would support government policies to reduce inequality.

Also relevant to the likelihood of people taking social action on this issue is how descriptions of inequality are framed. Bruckmüller, Reese, and Martiny ( 2017 ) have shown that relatively subtle variations in such framing, such as whether an advantaged group is described as having more or a disadvantaged group is described as having less, influence perceptions of the legitimacy of these differences; larger differences between groups were evaluated as less legitimate when the disadvantaged group was described as having less. Perceptions of the illegitimacy of inequality in group outcomes are likely to evoke group‐based anger, which in turn is known to be one of the predictors of collective action (Van Zomeren, Spears, Fischer, & Leach, 2004 ).

There is solid evidence that the material circumstances in which people develop and live their lives have a profound influence on the ways in which they construe themselves and their social environments. The resulting differences in the ways that working‐class and middle‐ and upper‐class people think and act serve to reinforce these influences of social class background, making it harder for working‐class individuals to benefit from the kinds of educational and employment opportunities that would increase social mobility and thereby improve their material circumstances. At a time when economic inequality is increasing in many countries, this lack of mobility puts a strain on social cohesion. Most people believe that economic inequality is undesirable and, when presented with the evidence of growing inequality, say that they would support government policies designed to reduce it. Given that the social class differences reviewed here have their origins in economic inequality, it follows that redistributive (or ‘predistributive’; Taylor‐Gooby, 2013 ) policies are urgently needed to create greater equality.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Colin Foad, Matt Easterbrook, Russell Spears and John Drury for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.

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By Michelle Maiese

Originally published, September 2004. Current Implications added by Heidi Burgess in June, 2017.  

Current Implications

Social status and power conflicts are at the heart of the current political conflict roiling in the United States. Although there are many explanations for the surprising election results in the fall of 2016, most people agree that a large part of the story was the anger felt by low-income, non-college-educated white voters. More...

The Importance of Status

Social status can be understood as the degree of honor or prestige attached to one's position in society. Social stratification is associated with the ability of individuals to live up to some set of ideals or principles regarded as important by the society or some social group within it. [1] Although there are a few societies around the world that ascribe everyone (at least adults) equal status, most societies do have some form of social hierarchy with some people in stronger, more dominant positions, and other people in weaker, lower positions. Often this inequity is built into the social system itself through various forms of structural components and institutions. Social and economic roles are distinguished and accorded differential status according to what a particular society or culture deems valuable.

In some cases, the inequality in resources and authority may be so great that those dominated go along with it with little self-awareness. [2] But where resistance arises, social conflict results. Domination conflicts are conflicts about who is on top (and bottom) of the social, economic, and/or political hierarchy.Such conflicts may occur between individual people (for example, between siblings, schoolmates, or co-workers), between groups (for instance between different racial or ethnic groups), or between nations.

Occupying a high status due to a characteristic that one possesses means that on the basis of that difference, an individual acquires more power and privilege. That person's opinions, ways of thinking, values, needs, and feelings are thought to have more value. There is a heightened sense of an entitlement to society's resources, including health care, education, and attractive employment. Often these benefits are derived simply from having a particular skin color, being of a particular gender, being dressed in a particular way, or having a particular profession or degree. [3]

Indeed, various characteristics can be at play in determining one's social status. These include, but are not limited to, an individual's race, ethnicity, gender, age, skin color, economic class, caste, religious sect, and regional grouping. In stratified social systems, one group is materially and/or politically dominant over another group or groups. Which characteristics are regarded as superior depends on the norms and fashions prevailing in a particular time and place. Individuals tend to evaluate others according to a particular set of values, and to rank people in terms of these evaluations. [4]

Status Conflicts

Social Dominance Theory suggests that most forms of group conflict and oppression (e.g., racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, nationalism, classism, regionalism) can be regarded as different manifestations of the same basic human predisposition to form group-based social hierarchies.Examples of 20 th century conflicts resulting at least in part from social stratification include the Holocaust, massacres of East Timorese in the late 1990s, the Khmer Rouge terror of the late 1970s, and massacres of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda in the late 1990s. In all of these violent situations, there were relationships of domination and subordination at work. Various groups were struggling to maintain or advance their social status. [5]

Ironically, stratification systems have been used by some societies to try to reduce overt conflict over the distribution of valued goods and services in a society. For a time, this distribution of awards may not be contested and the power of those at the top will not be challenged. But eventually, conflicts of interest may very well rise to the surface. While those on top of the social hierarchy tend to get what they want, those on the bottom tend to have less access to material awards, freedom, recognition, services from others, etc. [6]

In addition, once a group gains dominance, it will monopolize resources in an attempt to maintain and perpetuate its privileged status. Because the ability to attain one's goals is deeply connected to one's social status, those of lesser status may find it in their interest to challenge the status quo that assigns them a low position. Especially in cases where there are not enough resources to go around, parties are likely to engage in intense competition for positions of social status and privilege.

These social status struggles often are not just about who gets what. Status conflicts also tend to involve subjective assessments of an individual's or group's "goodness" or "social worth." For example, identity conflicts tend to involve issues surrounding the distribution of scarce resources as well as struggles for social status and privilege. In many cases, groups believe they deserve higher status in virtue of their supposed moral superiority. Many theorists point out that humans have an instinct for self-preservation that motivates them to fight for a place in social relations and to ensure that their ideas and opinions are taken into account. [7] Those with lower rank in a social hierarchy may feel their social status to be a form of injustice or discrimination that they must struggle to overcome. Thus, many domination conflicts are a matter of parties fighting for more room for their respective values .

Because nobody wants to be on the bottom of the social hierarchy and few are willing to share the top, such conflicts tend to be very difficult to resolve. Invariably, the people on the bottom want to reverse the relationship, while the people on the top want to maintain it.This leads people to want to dominate others and to compete with others for position. The result is that parties feel threatened and sense a need to retaliate in order to defend themselves. As the struggle continues, the conflict tends to escalate , and may even become violent , as the examples of genocide cited earlier demonstrate. Unless the top people are willing to share their top position with everyone else (thus eliminating many of the benefits of being on the top), the conflict will most likely continue. Moreover, even if those on the bottom are able to reverse the situation and become the leadership group, a new conflict is likely to arise as those now on the bottom begin their attempt to climb to the top. Thus, the social system itself is not altered as people struggle for social status. It is only people's roles that are reversed.

A closely-related topic is oppression.  BI has a series of seven articles on oppression contributed by an expert on the topic, Morton Deutsch. 

Social status and power conflicts are at the heart of the current political conflict roiling in the United States. Although there are many explanations for the surprising election results in the fall of 2016, most people agree that a large part of the story was the anger felt by low-income, non-college-educated white voters. This group chaffed at the disdain and lack of attention they had suffered at the hands of the political left, which was embodied by Hillary Clinton’s referring to them as “the deplorables.” Consequently, they voted heavily for Donald Trump, and remain largely in support of him in May of 2017, even after his policies are clearly hurting their interests.

Unfortunately, even after November, 2016, when the Democratic Party lost not only the presidency, but both houses of Congress, many Party leaders still regard lower-class whites as inferior people, undeserving of respect or support. The opposite is also true: Trump supporters and conservatives in general consider liberals as naïve, idealistic and selfish people with little regard for American values, as they see them. Consequently, they, too, treat liberals with deep disrespect. As a result, the divide between the parties is continuing to increase, rather than diminish and status conflicts remain at the center of much of this discontent.

Heidi Burgess, June 5, 2017

Back to Essay Top

References:

[1] Harold Kerbo, Social Stratification and Inequality: Class Conflict in the United States , (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1983), 113.

[2] Louis Kriesberg, Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution, 2 nd edition, (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 15.

[3] Pat Patfoort, Uprooting Violence, Building Nonviolence: From Nonviolent Upbringing to a Nonviolent Society, (Freeport, Maine: Cobblesmith, 1995), 20.

[4] Kerbo, 113.

[5] For more on Social Dominance Theory, see Jim Sidaneus and Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression , (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[6] Kerbo, 150.

[7] Patfoort, 24.

Social media image information: Social Status pie chart obtained at:  https:// upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Social_Status_in_Great_Henny%2C_1831.png .  Attribution: By Vision of Britain [CC BY-SA 4.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 )], via Wikimedia Commons.

Use the following to cite this article: Maiese, Michelle. "Social Status." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: September 2004 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/social-status >.

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5.1 Social Structure: The Building Blocks of Social Life

Learning objectives.

• Describe the difference between a status and a role.
• Understand the difference between an ascribed status, an achieved status, and a master status.
• List the major social institutions.

Social life is composed of many levels of building blocks, from the very micro to the very macro. These building blocks combine to form the social structure . As Chapter 1 “Sociology and the Sociological Perspective” explained, social structure refers to the social patterns through which a society is organized and can be horizontal or vertical. To recall, horizontal social structure refers to the social relationships and the social and physical characteristics of communities to which individuals belong, while vertical social structure , more commonly called social inequality , refers to ways in which a society or group ranks people in a hierarchy. This chapter’s discussion of social structure focuses primarily on horizontal social structure, while Chapter 8 “Social Stratification” through Chapter 12 “Aging and the Elderly” , as well as much material in other chapters, examine dimensions of social inequality. The (horizontal) social structure comprises several components, to which we now turn, starting with the most micro and ending with the most macro. Our discussion of social interaction in the second half of this chapter incorporates several of these components.

Status has many meanings in the dictionary and also within sociology, but for now we will define it as the position that someone occupies in society. This position is often a job title, but many other types of positions exist: student, parent, sibling, relative, friend, and so forth. It should be clear that status as used in this way conveys nothing about the prestige of the position, to use a common synonym for status. A physician’s job is a status with much prestige, but a shoeshiner’s job is a status with no prestige.

Any one individual often occupies several different statuses at the same time, and someone can simultaneously be a banker, Girl Scout troop leader, mother, school board member, volunteer at a homeless shelter, and spouse. This someone would be very busy! We call all the positions an individual occupies that person’s status set (see Figure 5.1 “Example of a Status Set” ).

Figure 5.1 Example of a Status Set

Sociologists usually speak of three types of statuses. The first type is ascribed status , which is the status that someone is born with and has no control over. There are relatively few ascribed statuses; the most common ones are our biological sex, race, parents’ social class and religious affiliation, and biological relationships (child, grandchild, sibling, and so forth).

Status refers to the position an individual occupies. Used in this way, a person’s status is not related to the prestige of that status. The jobs of physician and shoeshiner are both statuses, even though one of these jobs is much more prestigious than the other job.

Public Domain Images – CC0 public domain.

The second kind of status is called achieved status , which, as the name implies, is a status you achieve, at some point after birth, sometimes through your own efforts and sometimes because good or bad luck befalls you. The status of student is an achieved status, as is the status of restaurant server or romantic partner, to cite just two of the many achieved statuses that exist.

Two things about achieved statuses should be kept in mind. First, our ascribed statuses, and in particular our sex, race and ethnicity, and social class, often affect our ability to acquire and maintain many achieved statuses (such as college graduate). Second, achieved statuses can be viewed positively or negatively. Our society usually views achieved statuses such as physician, professor, or college student positively, but it certainly views achieved statuses such as burglar, prostitute, and pimp negatively.

The third type of status is called a master status . This is a status that is so important that it overrides other statuses you may hold. In terms of people’s reactions, master statuses can be either positive or negative for an individual depending on the particular master status they hold. Barack Obama now holds the positive master status of president of the United States: his status as president overrides all the other statuses he holds (husband, father, and so forth), and millions of Americans respect him, whether or not they voted for him or now favor his policies, because of this status. Many other positive master statuses exist in the political and entertainment worlds and in other spheres of life.

Some master statuses have negative consequences. To recall the medical student and nursing home news story that began this chapter, a physical disability often becomes such a master status. If you are bound to a wheelchair, for example, this fact becomes more important than the other statuses you have and may prompt people to perceive and interact with you negatively. In particular, they perceive you more in terms of your master status (someone bound to a wheelchair) than as the “person beneath” the master status, to cite Matt’s words. For similar reasons, gender, race, and sexual orientation may also be considered master statuses, as these statuses often subject women, people of color, and gays and lesbians, respectively, to discrimination and other problems, no matter what other statuses they may have.

Whatever status we occupy, certain objects signify any particular status. These objects are called status symbols . In popular terms, status symbol usually means something like a Rolls-Royce or BMW that shows off someone’s wealth or success, and many status symbols of this type exist. But sociologists use the term more generally than that. For example, the wheelchair that Matt the medical student rode for 12 days was a status symbol that signified his master status of someone with a (feigned) disability. If someone is pushing a stroller, the stroller is a status symbol that signifies that the person pushing it is a parent or caretaker of a young child.

Whatever its type, every status is accompanied by a role , which is the behavior expected of someone—and in fact everyone —with a certain status. You and most other people reading this book are students. Despite all the other differences among you, you have at least this one status in common. As such, there is a role expected of you as a student (at least by your professors); this role includes coming to class regularly, doing all the reading assigned from this textbook, and studying the best you can for exams. Roles for given statuses existed long before we were born, and they will continue long after we are no longer alive. A major dimension of socialization is learning the roles our society has and then behaving in the way a particular role demands.

Roles help us interact because we are familiar with the behavior associated with roles. Because shoppers and cashiers know what to expect of each other, their social interaction is possible.

David Tan – Cashier – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Because roles are the behavior expected of people in various statuses, they help us interact because we are familiar with the roles in the first place, a point to which the second half of this chapter returns. Suppose you are shopping in a department store. Your status is a shopper, and the role expected of you as a shopper—and of all shoppers—involves looking quietly at various items in the store, taking the ones you want to purchase to a checkout line, and paying for them. The person who takes your money is occupying another status in the store that we often call a cashier. The role expected of that cashier—and of all cashiers not only in that store but in every other store—is to accept your payment in a businesslike way and put your items in a bag. Because shoppers and cashiers all have these mutual expectations, their social interaction is possible.

Social Networks

Modern life seems increasingly characterized by social networks. A social network is the totality of relationships that link us to other people and groups and through them to still other people and groups. As Facebook and other social media show so clearly, social networks can be incredibly extensive. Social networks can be so large, of course, that an individual in a network may know little or nothing of another individual in the network (e.g., a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend). But these “friends of friends” can sometimes be an important source of practical advice and other kinds of help. They can “open doors” in the job market, they can introduce you to a potential romantic partner, they can pass through some tickets to the next big basketball game. As a key building block of social structure, social networks receive a fuller discussion in Chapter 6 “Groups and Organizations” .

Groups and Organizations

Groups and organizations are the next component of social structure. Because Chapter 6 “Groups and Organizations” discusses groups and organizations extensively, here we will simply define them and say one or two things about them.

A social group (hereafter just group ) consists of two or more people who regularly interact on the basis of mutual expectations and who share a common identity. To paraphrase John Donne, the 17th-century English poet, no one is an island; almost all people are members of many groups, including families, groups of friends, and groups of coworkers in a workplace. Sociology is sometimes called the study of group life, and it is difficult to imagine a modern society without many types of groups and a small, traditional society without at least some groups.

In terms of size, emotional bonding, and other characteristics, many types of groups exist, as Chapter 6 “Groups and Organizations” explains. But one of the most important types is the formal organization (also just organization ), which is a large group that follows explicit rules and procedures to achieve specific goals and tasks. For better and for worse, organizations are an essential feature of modern societies. Our banks, our hospitals, our schools, and so many other examples are all organizations, even if they differ from one another in many respects. In terms of their goals and other characteristics, several types of organizations exist, as Chapter 6 “Groups and Organizations” will again discuss.

Social Institutions

Yet another component of social structure is the social institution , or patterns of beliefs and behavior that help a society meet its basic needs. Modern society is filled with many social institutions that all help society meet its needs and achieve other goals and thus have a profound impact not only on the society as a whole but also on virtually every individual in a society. Examples of social institutions include the family, the economy, the polity (government), education, religion, and medicine. Chapter 13 “Work and the Economy” through Chapter 18 “Health and Medicine” examine each of these social institutions separately.

As those chapters will show, these social institutions all help the United States meet its basic needs, but they also have failings that prevent the United States from meeting all its needs. A particular problem is social inequality, to recall the vertical dimension of social structure, as our social institutions often fail many people because of their social class, race, ethnicity, gender, or all four. These chapters will also indicate that American society could better fulfill its needs if it followed certain practices and policies of other democracies that often help their societies “work” better than our own.

The largest component of social structure is, of course, society itself. Chapter 1 “Sociology and the Sociological Perspective” defined society as a group of people who live within a defined territory and who share a culture. Societies certainly differ in many ways; some are larger in population and some are smaller, some are modern and some are less modern. Since the origins of sociology during the 19th century, sociologists have tried to understand how and why modern, industrial society developed. Part of this understanding involves determining the differences between industrial societies and traditional ones.

One of the key differences between traditional and industrial societies is the emphasis placed on the community versus the emphasis placed on the individual. In traditional societies, community feeling and group commitment are usually the cornerstones of social life. In contrast, industrial society is more individualistic and impersonal. Whereas the people in traditional societies have close daily ties, those in industrial societies have many relationships in which one person barely knows the other person. Commitment to the group and community become less important in industrial societies, and individualism becomes more important.

Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1887/1963) long ago characterized these key characteristics of traditional and industrial societies with the German words Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft . Gemeinschaft means human community, and Tönnies said that a sense of community characterizes traditional societies, where family, kin, and community ties are quite strong. As societies grew and industrialized and as people moved to cities, Tönnies said, social ties weakened and became more impersonal. Tönnies called this situation Gesellschaft and found it dismaying. Chapter 5 “Social Structure and Social Interaction” , Section 5.2 “The Development of Modern Society” discusses the development of societies in more detail.

Key Takeaways

• The major components of social structure are statuses, roles, social networks, groups and organizations, social institutions, and society.
• Specific types of statuses include the ascribed status, achieved status, and master status. Depending on the type of master status, an individual may be viewed positively or negatively because of a master status.

For Your Review

• Take a moment and list every status that you now occupy. Next to each status, indicate whether it is an ascribed status, achieved status, or master status.
• Take a moment and list every group to which you belong. Write a brief essay in which you comment on which of the groups are more meaningful to you and which are less meaningful to you.

Tönnies, F. (1963). Community and society . New York, NY: Harper and Row. (Original work published 1887).

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

The Sociology Place

Max weber’s theory of class, status, and power.

Sociologists love to cite and discuss Max Weber.  Weber wrote a famous essay called, “ Class, Status, and Party .” Weber designed the essay to set him apart from Karl Marx, who had a unidimensional view of classes, inequality, and society . Max Weber had a multidimensional view of classes, inequality, and society.

Two main differences between Weber and Marx:

• Weber read Marx and sought to elaborate on some of his ideas.  Weber had many ideas of his own, though.
• Weber attributed social change much more to changes in the ideological superstructure. Many of Weber’s theories have an ideological conception of history.

Related: Choosing Concepts: An Application of Gerring’s Typology to Max Weber’s Class, Status, and Party

Weber’s multidimensional view of stratification

Marx conceived of stratification in a unidimensional way: as based on economic resources, and especially, the means of production.

Weber argued that not only should we redefine Marx’s conception of class, but that we should consider status and power as useful dimensions of stratification in their own right.

Weber: Social Class

Social class, according to Weber , is a grouping in which… 

• “A number of people have in common a specific causal component of their life chances,
• Insofar as this component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income,
• And is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor market.”

What does this mean?

• Class position has an economic basis for determining, a la Marx.
• However, Weber’s class Includes position in the labor market , unlike Marx.
• Weber argues that property are both your material goods AND your labor skills.  So, like Marx, Weber believes that class position is dependent on ownership and control of “property.”  
• Class position is determined by position in the occupational structure and the property structure.

Weber: Social Status

Social status is the degree of deference (respect) accorded to an individual or group.

Weber thought of status as “social honor”:

• Your status situation is related to your class position, but is not a necessary condition.
• Both the propertied and the non-propertied may enjoy a similar status situation.  For example, both high professional basketball players and nuclear physicists have high prestige, yet they are in different class positions (see Weber’s definition of class).
• Status inconsistency is when your class position is not in-line with your status position.  For instance, when you have a lot of money but are not treated as a “member” of the upper class by the upper class. Or, you are African American middle class and are discriminated against by realty companies and subtly barred from buying a home in a white neighborhood.
• Status position may preclude entry into a class position. 

Weber: Party, which are organizations within the Halls of Power

Power is the probability a person or a group has to realize their will despite the resistance of others.

See: What is Power? What is a Power Structure?

Weber discusses parties because parties are social groups that share similar power capacities.

• To Weber, parties represent the interests of those with similar class and/or status situations.
• Parties act to acquire more power or influence the actions of others.
• Parties, then, live within the “Halls of Power”

This may be hard to grasp. Here’s a couple of examples:

When business professionals in a capitalist society vote for certain political parties in a certain way, they constitute a “party.”  

When parents in a middle class suburb argue that creationism and evolution should be taught in high school biology classes, they constitute a “party.”

Deeper into Power: Legitimation of Authority 

Let’s go deeper into Weber’s conception of power by discussing the legitimation of authority.

Power is the ability to make decisions.  Sometimes the capacity for power stops an act of power by the opposition.  The capacity for power fosters a “non-decision” on those who would challenge the person with power.  In a sense, they go along with the program.  Weber referred to this as “domination.” Authority is domination.

Weber’s Three Ideal Types of Authority

Weber argued that there are three ideal types of authority.  In other words, the following legitimates authority:

Authority entirely comes from the fact authority has always rested in that person or position.  The kingly ruler is a perfect example.  Heredity.

Charismatic

Contrasted with traditional authority.  The authority of charismatics resides entirely in their personal attributes.  Weber argues that these are people who present themselves as people who possess “special gifts,” almost or exactly supernatural.  Prophets and cult leaders.  King Solomon of the Old Testament, Jesus Christ of the New Testament.  In modern times, Hitler and Ghandi.  A charismatic person’s position is based on the continuing proof of their “special powers.” 

Rational-Legal

Authority by codified law.  Whomever holds the position is entitled to authority and carries with them the capacity for power.  Usually held in bureaucracies.

Max Weber thought that Karl Marx was right in that economic resources are important for society. But, Max Weber believed that there are more and other aspects that divide society. Weber put these ideas into an essay called Class, Status, and Party.

Class is about occupations and position in the labor market. Status is the degree of deference one gets from others. Parties are organizations that wield power. A main source of that power is legitimation of authority.

Joshua K. Dubrow is a PhD from The Ohio State University and a Professor of Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

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Social status refers to an individual’s or group’s standing within a societal hierarchy, often determined by factors like wealth, education, or occupation. Essays on this topic could explore how social status affects individuals’ life opportunities, social interactions, and overall well-being. Discussions might also delve into the societal structures that reinforce status hierarchies and the implications for social mobility and equality. We have collected a large number of free essay examples about Social Status you can find in Papersowl database. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

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Social Class Status Differences Essay

Social class is the status of the society in which individuals are classified on basis of political, economic and cultural perspectives. Wealth, income and occupation are the major aspects of economic social classification.

Political social class is characterized by Status and power, while the cultural group is determined by peoples’ lifestyle, education, values and beliefs (Bernstein 126). The economic, political and social classes can further be categorized in to subcategories of upper, middle, working and lower classes depending on one’s position in society.

It is quite essential for each individual in the society to understand the social position in which one belongs to (Bronfenbrenner 412). This will not only help in addressing the different issues that arise in life but also help in building a strong understanding of the societal needs.

Proper understanding of one’s class helps individuals to get fully prepared in facing challenges that come along in tackling daily activities. People who discern their social environment at an early stage in life constantly keep rising from one class to another.

It’s quite clear that social classes bring about inequalities in resources and life expectations. For instance, individuals with power have direct access to material resources compared to their followers.

Such differences cause economic gap between the different groups and may lead to the low group engaging in unethical means such as theft and corruption in order to bridge the gap (Bernstein 127). On the other hand, individuals endorsed with power may also look for alternatives of fighting in order to remain in power as a means of maintaining their status quo.

In understanding the social classes’ one should be keen in noting that; people in the lower social classes are involved in risky, lowly paid jobs which do not have any form of security unlike their counterparts in upper classes who enjoy better paid, secured jobs with access to medical cover (Bronfenbrenne 411).

In most instances, people in the lower class categories provide labor to the upper class; they do so by working as gardeners’ cleaners or any other odd jobs.

Low class individuals in the society lack adequate opportunities to exploit their talents. However, highly motivated individuals can rise to the other classes although they do so with a lot of difficulties (Davis 60).

Education is one way of shifting from one social class to another; children from upper classes have access to good schools and education and as result are able to maintain their class later in life. An educated individual is able to secure a well paying job, accumulate wealth and use the resources he has to gain political power.

The social class also determines the society’s demographics. Many low income earners are likely to stay in proximity to industries (Marshal 30). They reside in poorly constructed houses within noisy environment since they cannot afford better lifestyles (Bronfenbrenne 412).

On the other hand, upper social class individuals prefer to live in private, cool and sparsely populated areas. In addition, people from the low class are more prone to high crime related risks as a result of lack of opportunities and over population. This happens because many of them are unemployed hence hopelessly engage into alcohol and drugs.

Social class also has a very big impact on health status of an individual. Good medical care is only accessed by those who are willing to spend big. The lower class people suffer most because of their inability to access good medical care because of inadequate funds (Krieger 79).

Poor health contributes to low productivity of workers hence poor employment. However, the wealthy and rich are likely to suffer from conditions like obesity and cancer because of the kind of lifestyles they lead. Stress due to low pays, divorce and or conflicts may lead to death.

Differences in cultures, education levels, wealth, income and other aspects of social class in most instances cause discrimination (Marshall 30). For instance, one may be denied an opportunity as a result of being associated to a certain social class. This has given rise to massive corruption in the society and consequent moral degradation.

In social classes, informal and formal groups arise. The groups are mostly created to cultivate value in their groups and work in cooperation to maintain their status (Dahrendorf 12).

The groups also educate members on the opportunities and threats in the environment in addition to providing financial support to each other. Examples of these groups include Sacco’s which arise in the economic class, political parties and cultural groups.

In conclusion, social class differences create competition among different members in the society. Individuals within the lowest social class always work hard to maneuver their way to the next level. Individuals within the highest social classes have a feeling of having made it in life.

It would be crucial for anyone teaching on social classes to keenly study the economic, political and cultural backgrounds of the learners (Bronfenbrenner 420). This is a very sensitive area which needs serious research in order to avoid creating differences among the learners.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Benim. “A sociolinguistic approach to socialization: With some reference to educability.” Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication. 12.6(1972):125-126.

Bronfenbrenner, Uenice. “Socialization and social class through time and space.” Readings in 12.5(1958):400-425. Print

Dahrendorf, Real. Class and class conflict in industrial society .Stanford: Stanford University Press Stanford, 1959. Print.

Davis, Alvis. “Social-class influences upon learning.” social psychology 15.8(1948):56 89. Print.

Krieger, Rowley. “Racism, sexism, and social class: implications for studies of health, disease, and well-being.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 78.7(1993):67-90. Print.

Marshall, Timao. “ Citizenship and social class.” Cambridge 12.2(1950):28-29. Print.

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Guest Essay

China’s Dead-End Economy Is Bad News for Everyone

By Anne Stevenson-Yang

Ms. Stevenson-Yang is a co-founder of J Capital Research and the author of “Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy.”

On separate visits to Beijing last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen bore a common message : Chinese manufacturing overcapacity is flooding global markets with cheap Chinese exports, distorting world trade and leaving American businesses and workers struggling to compete.

Not surprisingly, China’s leaders did not like what they heard, and they didn’t budge. They can’t. Years of erratic and irresponsible policies, excessive Communist Party control and undelivered promises of reform have created a dead-end Chinese economy of weak domestic consumer demand and slowing growth. The only way that China’s leaders can see to pull themselves out of this hole is to fall back on pumping out exports.

That means a number of things are likely to happen, none of them good. The tide of Chinese exports will continue, tensions with the United States and other trading partners will grow, China’s people will become increasingly unhappy with their gloomy economic prospects and anxious Communist Party leaders will respond with more repression.

The root of the problem is the Communist Party’s excessive control of the economy, but that’s not going to change. It is baked into China’s political system and has only worsened during President Xi Jinping’s decade in power. New strategies for fixing the economy always rely on counterproductive mandates set by the government: Create new companies, build more industrial capacity. The strategy that most economists actually recommend to drive growth — freeing up the private sector and empowering Chinese consumers to spend more — would mean overhauling the way the government works, and that is unacceptable.

The party had a golden opportunity to change in 1989, when the Tiananmen Square protests revealed that the economic reforms that had begun a decade earlier had given rise to a growing private sector and a desire for new freedoms. But to liberalize government institutions in response would have undermined the party’s power. Instead, China’s leaders chose to shoot the protesters, further tighten party control and get hooked on government investment to fuel the economy.

For a long time, no one minded. When economic or social threats reared their heads, like global financial crises in 1997 and 2007, Chinese authorities poured money into industry and the real estate sector to pacify the people. The investment-driven growth felt good, but it was much more than the country could digest and left China’s landscape scarred with empty cities and industrial parks, unfinished bridges to nowhere, abandoned highways and amusement parks, and airports with few flights.

The investment in industrial capacity also generated an explosion in exports as China captured industries previously dominated by foreign manufacturers — mobile phones, television sets, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and electric vehicles. Much of the Chinese economic “miracle” was powered by American, European and Japanese companies that willingly transferred their technical know-how to their Chinese partners in exchange for what they thought would be access to a permanently growing China market. This decimated manufacturing in the West, even as China protected its own markets. But the West let it slide: The cheap products emanating from China kept U.S. inflation at bay for a generation, and the West clung to the hope that China’s economic expansion would eventually lead to a political liberalization that never came.

To raise money for the government investment binge, Beijing allowed local authorities to collateralize land — all of which is ultimately owned or controlled by the state — and borrow money against it. This was like a drug: Local governments borrowed like crazy, but with no real plan for paying the money back. Now many are so deep in debt that they have been forced to cut basic services like heating, health care for senior citizens and bus routes . Teachers aren’t being paid on time, and salaries for civil servants have been lowered in recent years. Millions of people all over China are paying mortgages on apartments that may never be finished . Start-ups are folding , and few people, it seems, can find jobs.

To boost employment, the party over the past couple of years has been telling local governments to push the establishment of new private businesses, with predictable consequences: In one county in northern China, a village secretary eager to comply with Beijing’s wishes reportedly asked relatives and friends to open fake companies. One villager opened three tofu shops in a week; another person applied for 20 new business licenses.

When mandates like that fail to create jobs, the party monkeys with the employment numbers. When monthly government data revealed last year that 21 percent of Chinese youth in urban areas were unemployed, authorities stopped publishing the figures. It resumed early this year, but with a new methodology for defining unemployment . Presto! The number dropped to 15 percent.

But Mr. Xi’s policy options are dwindling.

With the real estate market imploding, the government can no longer risk goosing the property sector. It has begun touting a revival in domestic consumption , but many Chinese are merely hunkering down and hoarding assets such as gold against an uncertain future. So the government is again falling back on manufacturing, pouring money into industrial capacity in hopes of pushing out more products to keep the economy going. With domestic demand anemic, many of those products have to be exported.

But the era when China was able to take over whole industries without foreign pushback is over. Many countries are now taking steps to protect their markets from Chinese-made goods. Under U.S. pressure, Mexico’s government last month reportedly decided it would not award subsidies to Chinese electric vehicle makers seeking to manufacture in Mexico for export to the U.S. market; the European Union is considering action to prevent Chinese electric vehicles from swamping its market; and the Biden administration has moved to encourage semiconductor manufacturing in the United States and limit Chinese access to chip technologies, and has promised more actions to thwart China.

China won’t be able to innovate its way out of this. Its economic model still largely focuses on cheaply replicating existing technologies, not on the long-term research that results in industry-leading commercial breakthroughs. All that leaves is manufacturing in volume.

China’s leaders will face rising economic pressure to lower the value of the renminbi, which will make Chinese-made goods even cheaper in U.S. dollar terms, further boosting export volume and upsetting trading partners even more. But a devaluation will also make imports of foreign products and raw materials more expensive, squeezing Chinese consumers and businesses while encouraging wealthier people to get their money out of China. The government can’t turn to economic stimulus measures to revive growth — pouring more renminbi into the economy would risk crushing the currency’s value.

All of this means that the “reform and opening” era, which has transformed China and captivated the world since it began in the late 1970s, has ended with a whimper.

Mao Zedong once said that in an uncertain world, the Chinese must “Dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere and never seek hegemony.” That sort of siege mentality is coming back.

Anne Stevenson-Yang ( @doumenzi ) is a co-founder and the research director of J Capital Research, a stock analysis firm. She spent 25 years in China as an entrepreneur, analyst and trade advocate.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget

Analysis of the 2024 medicare trustees' report.

The Social Security and Medicare Trustees released their annual reports detailing the current and future financial status of the trust funds. Our analysis of the Social Security Trustees report can be found here .

The Medicare Trustees report that the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund will be insolvent in 2036 with a 75-year shortfall of 0.35 to 1.17 percent of payroll. All parts of Medicare will grow over the coming decades, and reforms are needed to slow that growth and increase revenue into the trust fund.

The latest report finds:

• The HI Trust Fund will run out of reserves in 12 years , with a projected insolvency date of 2036. That’s when today’s 53-year-olds will first be eligible for benefits and today’s youngest beneficiaries turn 77.
• The HI trust fund faces a large shortfall , totaling 0.35 percent of payroll (0.15 percent of GDP) over 75 years and peaking at 0.60 percent of payroll (0.27 percent of GDP) in 2044.
• Total Medicare costs will grow rapidly. Total gross Medicare costs have increased from 2.19 percent of GDP in 2000 to a projected 3.90 percent of GDP in 2025 and are projected to grow further to 5.86 percent of GDP by 2050 and 6.20 percent of GDP by 2098.
• Medicare’s financial outlook has largely improved since last year, with the insolvency date now five years later, the 75-year HI shortfall 44 percent smaller, and gross program costs in 2050 15 percent of GDP lower. However, Part B and D costs are projected to be higher after 2060 and gross costs higher after 2080.
• Medicare’s situation might be far worse than official projections. Under an alternative scenario created by the Chief Actuary, Medicare spending will rise to 8.38 percent of GDP in 2098 rather than 6.20 percent. The HI shortfall in this scenario would be 1.19 percent of payroll instead of 0.35 percent of payroll.

Despite some improvements to the overall outlook, the Medicare program remains costly and is projected to grow unsustainably.

Fortunately, policymakers have numerous options available to lower health costs broadly and ensure adequate funding is available for the Medicare program. They should act sooner rather than later to secure the Medicare trust fund and slow the growth of the Medicare program.

The Hospital Trust Fund will be Insolvent in 2036

The Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund finances inpatient hospital care under Medicare Part A, paid for primarily from the Medicare payroll tax. The trust fund currently holds over $200 billion in reserves, and its trust fund is growing as it is projected to run modest surpluses through 2028. As the population continues to age and health care costs grow, however, costs are slated to rise and ultimately draw down the program’s trust fund reserves.

HI deficits are projected to grow rapidly in the 2030s, depleting the HI trust fund by 2036. At that point, the law requires an immediate 11 percent cut in payments. These cuts would likely lead to significant disruptions in health care services for older individuals and those with disabilities.

In the first year of insolvency, the HI program will face an annual deficit of 0.48 percent of payroll or 0.22 percent of GDP. That deficit will grow to 0.60 percent of payroll or 0.27 percent of GDP by 2043 and then gradually disappear by 2098.

The gap results from spending growth exceeding revenue growth. Costs for HI have grown from 2.63 percent of payroll in 2000 to 3.30 percent of payroll in 2024. The Trustees project they will rise to 4.25 percent in 2036, peak at 4.69 percent in 2078, then slowly decline to 4.51 percent by 2098. Revenue has also grown since 2000 – from 3.11 to 3.43 percent of payroll – but will grow more slowly to 4.37 percent in 2076 and 4.52 percent by 2098.

Over the full 75 years, the HI trust fund faces a 0.35 percent of payroll (0.15 percent of GDP) funding gap, which means restoring solvency would require boosting the payroll tax rate by 12 percent or reducing spending by 8 percent. Under the Chief Actuary’s alterative scenario, the gap totals 1.17 percent of payroll so the necessary adjustments would require raising the HI payroll tax by 40 percent or reducing expenditures by 22 percent.

Medicare Costs are High and Growing

The total gross cost of Medicare has grown from 2.19 percent of GDP in 2000 to 3.83 percent in 2024. The Trustees project costs will rise further to 5.30 percent of GDP in 2035 and 6.20 percent by 2098.

Medicare Part B – which mainly funds outpatient physician services – explains most of this growth. Its costs are projected to rise from 1.85 percent of GDP in 2024 to 2.82 percent in 2035 and 3.61 percent in 2098. The cost of Medicare Part A is projected to rise from 1.46 percent of GDP in 2024 to 2.02 percent of GDP in 2045 and then slowly decline to 1.90 percent of GDP in 2098 due to the slow growth in provider payments. The cost of the Medicare Part D prescription drug program is projected to rise from 0.52 percent of GDP in 2024 to 0.69 percent of GDP by 2098.

A key contributor to the growth of all parts of Medicare comes from the Medicare Advantage (MA) program. The MA program provides Medicare benefits through a private option for beneficiaries. It now covers around half of all Medicare enrollees, up from only under a third of beneficiaries in 2010; by 2033, it is projected to cover nearly three-fifths of beneficiaries. MA costs the federal government significantly more per person than traditional Medicare , and MA spending is projected to grow from 1.76 percent of GDP in 2024 to 2.68 percent of GDP by 2033.

Lawmakers could address the rising cost of Medicare by utilizing some of our Health Savers Initiative proposed policies, including implementing equalizing payments regardless of site of care, reducing Medicare Advantage overpayments , correcting flaws in the MA quality bonus system, and policies to further reduce the cost of prescription drugs .

The Medicare Outlook has Improved Modestly from Last Year

The financial outlook of the Medicare HI trust fund has improved significantly since last year’s report ; the outlook for Medicare Parts B and D has improved over the next four decades, but worsened over the very long run.

The projected HI trust fund insolvency date is now five years later – 2036 as opposed to 2031. Additionally, the 75-year shortfall is 0.35 percent of payroll instead of 0.62 percent. The near-term improvement is due to a combination of higher revenue and lower spending, while the long-term improvement is driven mainly by lower spending.

In particular, the Trustees expect significantly lower spending on the HI portion of Medicare Advantage due to a change in how reimbursements are calculated. They project additional improvements based on lower actual spending and higher actual revenue collection in 2023.

While the Trustees’ HI projections have improved, the outlook for Parts B and D is relatively similar – better for the first half the projection window and worse in the second half. For example, the Trustees project these programs will cost a combined 2.44 percent of GDP in 2025, down from 2.56 percent in their previous projections. But they project the programs will cost 4.29 percent of GDP by 2097, up from 4.16 percent in previous projections.

Changes to Parts B and D are driven by lower projected home health and outpatient hospital spending, changes to the assumed pace of growth in prescription drug purchases, higher enrollment in Medicare Part D, and revisions to projected economic output.

Overall, gross Medicare costs are now projected to be lower as a share of GDP than in last year’s projections through 2080 and higher thereafter. For example, the Trustees expect costs to total 3.90 percent of GDP in 2025 as opposed to 4.13 percent. By 2097, they project costs to total 6.20 percent of GDP as opposed to 6.12 percent.

The Outlook is Far Worse Under the Trustees’ Alternative Scenario

The projections and estimates in the Medicare Trustees’ report are based on current law. However, it is not clear if current-law provider payment levels will be adequate to ensure beneficiary access to providers over time – especially as both inpatient and outpatient physician reimbursements are scheduled to grow more slowly than underlying medical costs.

The Chief Actuary produces an alternative scenario in which provider payments grow faster than current law, with annual updates gradually transitioning to rates more reflective of the growth in underlying health care costs.

Under this alternative scenario, Medicare spending broadly would increase at a faster rate than their official projections and the HI funding gap would be significantly larger.

Gross Medicare costs would grow from 3.83 percent of GDP in 2024 to 6.36 percent in 2050 and 8.38 percent in 2098, compared to 5.86 and 6.20 percent under official projections. Medicare Part A (HI) costs would grow from 1.46 percent of GDP in 2024 to 2.89 percent in 2098, compared to 1.90 percent under official projections. Part B costs would grow from 1.85 percent of GDP in 2024 to 4.80 percent in 2098, compared to 3.61 percent under official projections.

As a result of the higher Medicare Part A spending, the HI funding gap would more than triple from 0.35 percent of payroll under current law to 1.17 percent of payroll. And whereas the official projections show HI spending and revenue to be in balance by 2098, the HI program would run about a 2.28 percent of payroll deficit under these alternative projections.

Conclusion 

The Medicare Trustees’ report shows that the HI trust fund will be insolvent in just 12 years and Medicare spending will rise rapidly over the next few decades.

Without action from Congress, Medicare beneficiaries will face huge disruptions in their benefits and Medicare Parts B and D will continue to worsen deficits and crowd out other important government programs. 

Lawmakers should consider both spending and revenue changes to shore up Medicare’s finances but should focus especially on reforms to lower overall health care costs. Such changes could improve value for current seniors while reducing the fiscal burden on younger generations. 

What's Next

Event Recap: The Trustees' Reports on the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds

Social Security and Medicare Trustees Confirm Trust Funds Need Saving

Social Security and Medicare Trustees Release 2024 Reports