Is Being Elite the Same as Living an Easy Life?
This is another long post but relates to work with high SES. Laurin, Engstrom, Alic & Tracy (2024) published “Is Being Elite the Same as Living an Easy Life? Two distinct ways of experiencing subjective socioeconomic status” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Here are some highly edited portions of the article:
Socioeconomic status (SES) predicts a large number of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; here, we build on these findings to try to paint a comprehensive picture of what people who occupy different SES ranks are like. Existing findings attribute a mixed set of psychological patterns to people who consider themselves near the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy; these individuals are variously portrayed as selfish yet generous, entitled yet happy, and narcissistic yet tolerant. . . . We employed a bottom-up, participant-driven approach (total N = 3,338) to identify the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that factor into people’s subjective SES. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that these experiences are best represented by two distinct dimensions—a sense that one belongs to a historical cultural elite (corresponding to SES as early life cultural context) and a sense that one’s life is easy (corresponding, though less conclusively, to SES as current rank). We developed scales to measure each dimension and, using these scales, found that the two dimensions help categorize the known correlates of SES into two separate but internally coherent sets of psychological patterns—one magnanimous and one self-focused.
People who report high subjective SES—as well as those who objectively earn high salaries or have highly educated parents—feel entitled to special treatment and are willing to manipulate others and embellish their accomplishments to get ahead. Likewise, people who report fewer financial difficulties across the lifespan, or higher parental income when they apply for college, are more narcissistic and particularly likely to look at themselves in a mirror. Furthermore, participants with higher subjective SES—and also those with higher parental education, current objective social class, and childhood social class—may report that they are more empathic, but their brains tell a different story: They show a muted neural empathic response to faces expressing pain, compared to individuals lower on these SES metrics. Moreover, this muted response carries through to behavior: Individuals who report high SES struggle to recognize others’ facial expressions. Finally, participants experimentally induced to feel higher, compared to lower, SES are less supportive of redistributive policies that give a leg up to those most in need.
According to the accumulated literature, then, people with high SES, especially those who self-report this high status, are self-focused (“having excessive concern for the self and its needs”; American Psychological Association, n.d.): They are entitled, dishonest to the point of self-deception and inattentive to others in the pursuit of their own self-interest. But they are also magnanimous (“generous and forgiving, especially toward a … less powerful person,” Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, n.d.): tolerant, generous, and mentally and emotionally stable. This juxtaposition warrants further exploration, as it is challenging to imagine a single person who, in a stable and consistent way, embodies both sets of characteristics.
Some existing work has examined how subjective SES might have different material antecedents for different people; for instance, White Americans’ sense of their social standing is more closely tied to their income and education than Black Americans’. People with higher subjective SES also have higher well-being, and this is mediated independently and to different degrees by their sense of general status (e.g., feeling respected by others) and their sense of power (e.g., having control over people and resources). Our general approach also anticipates that SES might be differentially associated with distinct material assets and psychological states, like power or status, but our fundamental aim was to test whether subjective SES itself might exist in (at least) two distinct psychological forms. Moreover, our work is more bottom-up than prior efforts in psychology to study social class, in that we began not with our own necessarily limited ideas about what these states might be but with participants’ unconstrained and spontaneous reports (though scholars in other disciplines have used even more fully exploratory ethnographic approaches; e.g., Lareau, 2002, 2011). In short, we sought to understand the specific participant-generated experiences that constitute people’s sense of their SES.
Study 1 preselected American participants who indicated having either high or low SES. [O]ur goal was to capture experiences that clearly distinguish people with high versus low SES. . . . For instance, several high-SES participants indicated they did not worry about money, and several low-SES participants indicated they worried a great deal about money; these formed a matching pair. Likewise, several high-SES participants indicated that they felt lucky, and several low-SES participants indicated that they felt unlucky; these formed another matching pair. We identified 79 such matching pairs and reasoned that we should retain these, as they had a high chance of distinguishing people with high versus low SES.
Studies 2a and 2b revealed two dimensions of the subjective experience of SES and began to test these dimensions’ associated psychological profiles. These dimensions were moderately intercorrelated and both independently correlated fairly strongly with a broad measure of subjective SES, as one might expect of two facets of this construct. Yet, they were linked with distinct combinations of objective SES markers and psychological patterns: The easy life dimension was associated with current income and with magnanimous and friendly characteristics like agreeableness, emotional stability, and conscientiousness. The elite life dimension was also associated with current income but also with personal and parental education, perhaps suggesting it corresponds to the conceptualization of SES as a cultural privilege, as well as with self-focused characteristics like narcissism and disagreeableness.
Notwithstanding the strong precedent for considering subjective SES as important in its own right, do the elite and easy life dimensions buy any predictive power beyond more objective measures? . . . A preregistered study using a nationally representative U.S. sample replicated the findings of Studies 2a and 2b, further supporting the conclusion that there are two distinct ways of experiencing high SES. First, a person can feel a higher SES based on their sense of belonging to an elite segment of society. People scoring high on this dimension tend to be well-educated high earners with well-educated parents, suggesting that this dimension may align with conceptualizations of SES as culture. Moreover, these individuals tend to be narcissistic, consistent with past research findings that people high in SES tend to be self-focused. Note that, whereas the items we used to capture subjective SES are bipolar, the measure of narcissism (like most of the measures of psychological characteristics we use in this article) is not. Thus, it is accurate to say that people who feel they lead ordinary, modest lives are low in narcissism, but not necessarily high in whatever its opposite might be (selfless, self-sacrificing).
Second, a person can feel higher SES based on their sense that they have an easy and carefree life. People scoring high on this dimension tend to have high incomes but do not necessarily come from higher class backgrounds. Moreover, their agreeableness, emotional stability, and high self-esteem may underlie the kind of magnanimous behaviors prior research has linked with SES. Note that the Big Five measures we used are also bipolar, so it is accurate to say that people who feel they lead difficult lives also report being disagreeable (the opposite of agreeable) and neurotic (the opposite of emotionally stable).
Study 4 also measured five additional variables not related to the central theme of self-focus. The first of these was self-esteem. . . . The next two were sense of power and belief in a just world. The final two were subjective health and life satisfaction. Our two newly developed subscales appear to tap into two distinct dimensions of SES—one that reflects a person’s sense of leading an elite and special life and one that reflects a person’s sense of leading an easy and stress-free life. People who score high (vs. low) on the elite dimension come from families and institutions of privilege; they also feel entitled to special treatment, believe others should go out of their way to help them, and underperform when reading emotions from others’ facial expressions. These patterns bolster the idea that the elite life is linked with both historical cultural privilege and a cluster of self-focused patterns.
By contrast, people who score high (vs. low) on the easy life dimension feel satisfied with their lives. Thus far, however, it is not clear whether the easy life dimension cleanly corresponds with any preexisting theoretical conceptualization of SES nor have we tested its associations with actual magnanimous behavior. If the easy life dimension is linked with magnanimity, those high in this dimension should demonstrate greater prosociality; if the elite life dimension is linked with self-focus, those high in this dimension should demonstrate lower prosociality.
Two independent samples expanded our understanding of material and psychological differences between the two dimensions: Elite life individuals, in line with the conceptualization of SES as culture, come from wealthy upper-class backgrounds stretching back at least two generations, and their self-interest may motivate them to declare unverifiable prosocial attitudes when doing so comes at no cost. Easy life individuals, perhaps in line with the conceptualization of SES as current rank, have more current wealth (a pattern we confirmed in a third independent sample in the additional study), and their agreeableness and emotional stability may motivate them to take more verifiable prosocial actions.
[I]n nearly every test we ran, the elite life dimension correlated especially strongly with indices more associated with the view that SES is a cultural variable. People who scored high on this dimension consistently reported being educated and having educated parents; moreover, in Study 5, we extended further back into participants’ family trees and found additional evidence that their sense of their SES may reflect long-standing inherited privilege. This is particularly notable given that most scholars conceptualize the ladder as a measure of current (subjective) privilege. Our findings suggest that, when placing themselves on the ladder, people may also consider more historical forms of privilege.
The evidence linking the easy life dimension with the view of SES as the current rank was somewhat more mixed. On the one hand, the easy life dimension was never especially strongly associated with participants’ current income, a variable that, on its face, seems like it should capture something about the current socioeconomic hierarchy. On the other hand, when we measured participants’ net worth, and the amount of cash they would be able to come up with in an emergency, a variety of analyses across three independent samples robustly showed that individuals who scored high on the easy life dimension do have more wealth. Moreover, whereas our wealth measures were open-ended, the highest income bracket our participants could report was a household income of $200,000 per year. This restriction may have obscured important variation between people with relatively high SES: In many of the country’s largest states, over 10% of households would find themselves in that highest bracket (World Population Review, 2022). On the whole, our findings offer greater certainty regarding the connection between the elite life dimension and the view of SES as culture but also suggest that the easy life dimension may reflect the view of SES as the current rank.
Along the way, we considered alternative interpretations of the dimensions we uncovered and their utility. In particular, we noted that the elite life items make reference to respondents’ history, while the easy life items are exclusively focused on the present. This fits with our (historical) cultural privilege/current rank interpretation; however, one might wonder whether this would also fit with the interpretation that an easy life represents upward mobility—that is, greater comfort and ease now than in the past. The additional preregistered study measured perceptions of upward mobility directly; in Study 5, we were also able to index this construct as the difference between participants’ (standardized) current SES and their (standardized) reports of their parents’ SES while they (the participants) were growing up. Easy life is therefore linked with, and may function similarly to, perceived upward mobility, but the two constructs are nonetheless distinct. We therefore retained the elite/easy interpretation.
Together, these findings point to a potential resolution to some debates in the literature, like the one regarding the association between social status and prosociality. Our findings suggest the nature of this relation depends on the dimension of status one measures (as well as the way one assesses prosociality). Our results also offer a possible explanation for empirical inconsistencies in the literature: Existing measures of SES such as the ladder measure conflate the two dimensions and therefore yield unreliable associations with constructs linked with only one of the two. Objective and subjective SES are distinct constructs that each predicts different kinds of psychological, behavioral, and physical outcomes. Objective SES contains distinct facets—people’s income may predict different outcomes than their level of education. The research reported here suggests the same may be true of subjective SES. Two people who say they have high status may mean very different things by this statement, and to the degree they do, they are likely very different people in other ways as well. We should take this into account if we want to advance our understanding of the psychology of SES.
I realize this is an unusual study but it seemed to me that it may be helpful to those who work with higher SES clients.