Social class in the mind’s eye: Mental representations, egalitarianism, and discrimination
Motivation: Recent declines in explicit bias have, unfortunately, not been accompanied by substantial reductions in group-based inequality. This suggests that implicit biases—relatively unconscious, automatic judgments—may play powerful roles in reinforcing existing social inequalities. The current work examines implicit biases through the lens of social dominance theory, which posits that mechanisms underlying the expression of bias are motivated by preferences for (anti)egalitarian resource distributions. We illustrate the social class-based mental representations held by egalitarians and anti-egalitarians, specifically testing how (mis)aligned these representations are with explicit bias and isolate key objective and subjective features of these representations relevant for coalition-building.
Method: We employed a reverse correlation procedure across three studies. In Study 1, participants (N = 626) selected faces (300 forced-choice trials) that they believed best represented people from low/high social classes. The faces were a White male facemorph superimposed with randomized visual noise. They then reported group-level explicit attitudes. In Studies 2-3 (N’s = 394, 348), participants were shown aggregations of selected faces from Study 1 corresponding to each combination of social class (high, low) and generator egalitarianism (egalitarian, anti-egalitarian) condition. Participants evaluated these faces on fundamental perceptions (e.g., competence; Study 2), and group-relevant attitudes (e.g., laziness; Study 3).
Results: Mental representations generated for each social class across generator egalitarianism showed a consistent pattern both objectively (via pixel-based correlation) and subjectively (via independent ratings in Studies 2-3). Mental representations of higher-class people were generally favored by our raters over mental representations of lower-class people, while mental representations held by egalitarians were preferred on the perception of health, competence, and Whiteness.. We also observed interactions between rater’s egalitarianism and target social class in predicting perceptions, attitudes, and behavior tendencies to the target such that anti-egalitarians tended to view lower-class mental representations more negatively (and higher-class mental representations more positively) than egalitarians.
Conclusion: Although egalitarianism shapes explicit attitudes and behavioral intentions, egalitarians and anti-egalitarians share nearly identical mental representations towards people from lower social classes. While egalitarianism did not predict the types of mental representations people hold towards poor people, it does predict how people respond to these mental representations: anti-egalitarians evaluated lower-class individuals more negatively than egalitarians do, both when class information was present (Study 1) or absent (Studies 2-3). Our results shed light on the information processes underlying egalitarian impression formation and set the groundwork for understanding the disconnect between egalitarians’ positive attitudes and negative mental representations of people from lower-class backgrounds.