[SOC Seminar] Social Class: From Context to Culture to Cognition
Speaker
Dr. Eric KnowlesLocation
Psych East, 3834Info
[Abstract]
Social classes function as cultural contexts characterized by distinct norms, values, and selfways. Class-based cultures are adaptive, enabling individuals to negotiate markedly different—and largely stable—socioeconomic environments. This adaptationist logic motivates the Material–Social Tradeoff Hypothesis (MSTH), which posits that material scarcity fosters high levels of interdependence in the working class, whereas material abundance promotes greater autonomy in the middle and upper classes. In this talk, I first examine whether material–social tradeoffs arise from individual decision-making or contextual forces, concluding that the tradeoff is primarily a “top-down” contextual phenomenon. I then present empirical evidence showing how class cultures influence social-cognitive functioning in ways consistent with the MSTH. Specifically, working-class contexts foster heightened chronic social attunement compared to middle- and upper-class contexts. Members of the working class, relative to their middle- and upper-class counterparts: (1) attend more to other people, (2) exhibit better memory for human faces, (3) show greater skill in reading emotions and taking others’ perspectives, (4) perform better on deductive-reasoning tasks involving mental-state inference, and (5) display more pronounced neural activity in brain regions associated with “social working memory” (Collier & Meyer, 2020). Together, these findings underscore the powerful role of social class as a cultural force that shapes how we perceive and think about others.
