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Aug 12, 2016 · Understanding social class as culture is a relatively recent idea, yet the research conducted thus far illustrates the influence class position can have on people’s behavior and identity. The research also sheds light on how these individual-level processes can feed into macro-level phenomena, such as the growing wealth gap, via social institutions like our colleges and universities.
While ethnicity primarily focuses on cultural heritage, social class primarily revolves around socioeconomic status. However, both ethnicity and social class can significantly influence a person's opportunities, experiences, and social interactions, shaping their identity and shaping the way they are perceived and treated by others.
- Class: A Form of Culture?
- How Class Influences Everyday Thoughts and Behaviours
- Understanding Cultural Context
- Implications of Class-Based Differences
In some ways, class is a form of culture: people from different class backgrounds grow up in environments with particular norms and values, and this shapes their behaviour and sense of identity. For instance, note Michael W. Kraus and colleagues in their 2019 book chapter Social class as culture, for working class individuals the ‘self’ tends to be...
Our ways of viewing the self and the wider of world are of course influenced by all kinds of other individual differences too, and no social class is a homogenous group of people. Nevertheless, in the past couple of decades studies have shown that these overall class-based differences do manifest in our day-to-day psychological processes and behavi...
There are plenty more examples of how class can influence psychological processes. But there’s an important caveat: the vast majority of this work has been carried out in Western countries, particularly the United States, so the findings may not necessarily apply elsewhere. As Yuri Miyamoto from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues no...
Cultural considerations notwithstanding, why do class-based differences in the way we think and behave matter? For one, they may end up reinforcing existing class-based inequalities. Take the paper on overconfidence, for instance. The researchers found that the (unjustified) sense of confidence displayed by people from a relatively high social clas...
Dec 9, 2019 · In such a case, social class refers to the socio-cultural aspects of one's life, namely the traits, behaviors, knowledge, and lifestyle that one is socialized into by one's family. This is why class descriptors like "lower," "working," "upper," or "high" can have social as well as economic implications for how we understand the person described.
Feb 28, 2018 · In a series of four studies, Kraus, Piff, and Keltner 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 ...
- Antony S. R. Manstead
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Oct 13, 2020 · Social class is a rather complex and messy affair (e.g. Argyle, 1994), and how we define and measure social class (indeed, whether or not this actually exists at all in contemporary societies) is the subject of ongoing debate in the social sciences (Bullock & Limbert, 2009). For one, understandings and definitions of social class are not static ...
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Aug 8, 2011 · Objective resources (e.g., income) shape cultural practices and behaviors that signal social class. These signals create cultural identities among upper- and lower-class individuals—identities that are rooted in subjective perceptions of social-class rank vis-à-vis others.
