Psychology and the Social Class Worldview

A Narrative-Based Introduction

Anne E. Noonan, William Ming Liu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367322618
• eBook ISBN: 9781000509748
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This unique textbook explores the complex topic of social class, explaining the many psychological nuances of class and classism in people's lives as subjective and phenomenological experiences.

Social class can be a deeply personal, complicated topic that is often frustrating and uncomfortable to discuss, and as such has often been a blind spot in teaching and academic literature. For the first time, Noonan and Liu look to address this in one comprehensive text, using a combination of first-person narratives, academic approaches to class, and psychology's contributions to the subject. Across seven chapters, the book introduces a highly accessible theoretical model of the psychology of social class, Liu's own Social Class Worldview Model. Using vivid autobiographical texts to bring the theoretical model to life, the authors show how our worldviews develop through interactions with our social class and economic environment and provide a unique array of methods and skill sets to help incorporate the model into teaching. Each section of the book guides the reader through core concepts in the area, from socioeconomic factors, social structures, poverty, race, racism, White privilege, and White supremacy.

Featuring activity suggestions, discussion questions, and writing prompts to help apply theory to real-life narratives, this is the ideal resource for students and instructors across psychology, sociology, health economics, and social work, as well as anyone taking courses on examining social class.

1 Social class It’s complicated

DOI: 10.4324/9780429317606-2

Check your comprehension

• Multiple definitions of social class exist, ranging from quite simple ones to more complicated versions that include phenomena such as beliefs and perceptions, boundaries, sense of belonging, status ordering, and culture.
• This book focuses on people’s subjective understandings of social class and their lived experience of social class and classisms.
• We all have social class stories to tell and engaging with stories is an excellent way to understand the many nuances of social class. Thus, this book includes a collection of personal (creative nonfiction) essays from various authors.

What do you think?

1. Without looking anything up, what social class are you in? If it’s easier to think about this in terms of your family of origin, in what social class is your family?
2. Many people answer this first question by saying “it’s complicated.” If social class is complicated for you/your family in any way, write a few sentences about why and how that is true.
3. How many social classes are there? List them, and if you think there’s an order, list them in order.

Engage with a narrative and find social class markers

Instead of the usual nonfiction essays we will share in this book, what follows is an excerpt from the world of fiction: Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel about the Beat Generation, On the Road. Underline, circle, or take notes on every word or phrase that puts the idea of social class into your mind or signals to you that social class is operating. It may help to think of these as “social class markers.” We’ll revisit your work later in the chapter.

Box 1.1: Excerpt – On the Road by Jack Kerouac

The last time I saw him it was under strange and sad circumstances. Henri Cri had arrived in New York after having gone round the world several times in ships. I wanted him to meet and know Neal. They did meet but Neal couldn’t talk any more and said nothing, and Henri turned away. Henri had gotten tickets for the Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera and insisted Joan and I come with him and his girl. Henri was fat and sad but still the eager and formal gentleman and he wanted to do things the right way as he emphasized. So he got his bookie to drive us to the concert in a Cadillac. It was a cold winter night. The Cadillac was parked and ready to go. Neal stood outside the windows with his bags ready to go to Penn Station and on across the land. “Goodbye Neal” I said. “I sure wish I didn’t have to go to the concert.” “D’you think I can ride to 40th St. with you?” he whispered. “Want to be with you as much as possible, m’boy and besides it’s so durned cold in this here New Yawk …” I whispered to Henri. No, he wouldn’t have it, he liked me but he didn’t like my friends. I wasn’t going to start all over again ruining his planned evenings as I had done at Alfred’s in San Francisco in 1947 with Allan Temko. “Absolutely out of the question Jack!” Poor Henri, he had a special necktie made for this evening; on it was painted a replica of the concert tickets, and the names Jack and Joan and Henri and Vicki, the girl, together with a series of sad jokes and some of his favorite sayings such as “You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune.” So Neal couldn’t ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave at him. The bookie at the wheel also wanted nothing to do with Neal. Neal, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of 7th Ave., eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. Poor little Joan my wife to whom I’d told everything about Neal began almost to cry. “Oh we shouldn’t let him go like this. What’ll we do?” Old Neal’s gone I thought, and out loud I said, “He’ll be all right.”

Into which social class do I fit?

This chapter has the word “complicated” in the title, and you’ll recall that in the introductory chapter, we shared four different definitions of social class with you. Considering that scholars (even those in the same discipline) don’t always agree on what social class is or how to define it, you may have had some difficulty answering the questions at the beginning of this chapter. In our university classrooms, when we share this initial complexity with students, they sometimes ask in frustration, “If it’s that complicated, how can I ever know what social class I’m in?” And we have to admit it: fair point.

So, let’s start where most people begin thinking about social class: money. Look back at the definition of social class that you wrote while reading the introductory chapter. Did money make an appearance, or did the word “financial,” or “economic,” or “resources”? Those words probably did. In fact, we can’t imagine thinking about social class without the inclusion of some of those words, and you’ll notice they appear in some form in all of the definitions we shared.

But an interesting aspect of theories and definitions of social class is an agreement that while money or economic/financial resources matter, social class is about a whole lot more than money. And even if social class really was just about money, as Will points out in previous work (Liu, 2011), the idea of “money” is itself fairly complicated. “Money” might mean annual salaries, hourly wages from employment, or income from other sources. The word also might refer to inherited wealth or accumulated wealth, with wealth defined simply as what one owns minus what one owes. Each of these different interpretations of money can impact the way we see ourselves and how we relate to other people, and this impact becomes even more profound when we take a person’s race and ethnicity into account. Money can also be treated more symbolically, especially as our society increasingly relies upon electronic means of receiving, transferring, or exchanging funds. And what about financial anxiety, credit card debt, and student loans? Where do those fit into our ideas about money?

For decades, the social sciences have categorized people into different social classes via a construct with which you may be familiar: socioeconomic status (SES). This construct includes the idea of money, but as Diemer and colleagues (2013) remind us, it also extends to “relatively objective indicators of power, prestige, and control over resources, such as income, wealth, educational level, and occupational prestige” (Diemer et al., 2013, p. 79). Notice the word objective in Diemer et al.’s definition, a term which suggests that the components of SES are quantifiable and easily categorized.

Quantification in the realm of social class simply means that more of some quantity can be represented as higher in some index or category. But what does “higher” actually mean when it comes to someone’s job? To answer that question, researchers have created prestige indices for occupations – that is, a hierarchy of jobs based on whether people see that job as prestigious (such as a banker) or less prestigious¹ (such as a plumber). These measures typically are based on what people, in general, think about traditional types of occupations and the education levels and skills required for them. It should be noted here that these hierarchies tend to be developed from the opinions, perceptions, and experiences of people in prestigious jobs, and therefore not everyone gets to participate in ranking these jobs.

Ironically, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the original meaning of prestige (from French and Latin) refers to an illusion or trick, and antonyms included esteem, honor, and respectability.

Another problem, of course, is that these prestige measures may not be able to keep up with the rapidly expanding digital nature of our culture. For instance, consider a social media influencer who is paid – sometimes in the millions of dollars – according to the number of followers they attract on a given platform rather than on the basis of educational level or their ability to create a product. How would the occupation of influencer be rated using traditional measures of prestige? Similarly, researchers may be showing a built-in bias when they assume that all people want higher levels of education, more money, and more upward mobility, but as will be discussed later, this is not always the case.

Scholars have pointed to additional ways that the SES construct fails to capture all the psychological complexity of social class. For example, Lott (2012) tells us that the idea of “class” certainly includes the components of SES but also transcends SES, incorporating phenomena such as “status, expectations, location, and power, as defined by access to resources” (p. 650). Further, as Will pointed out in previous work, “Once you categorize someone [into a social class group], there is no discussion of how the person entered the group, exists in that group, and stays in that group” (Liu, 2011, p. 13). Given these additional considerations of phenomena, such as status and power, a focus solely on SES may obscure the powerful ways that social class intersects with race, gender, and other forms of social identities/social constructs, a topic to which we’ll repeatedly turn in subsequent chapters.²

Throughout the book, we use the phrase social identities/social constructs to refer to the interrelated matters of identifying ourselves, how we are identified by others, and the ways that the culture assigns meaning to identity (social constructs).

Objective measures of SES also cannot help us understand the web of belief systems that we develop with regard to matters such as fairness, effort, and meritocracy. For example, people might think that the distribution (i.e., the spread) of economic social classes reflects how much effort we put into work, school, or saving money. Meritocracy can be seen as a kind of social agreement that people should be rewarded for hard work, effort, and good financial decisions, and people should not cheat the system, “cut in line,” or change the rules. Stated more simply, meritocracy suggests that people are in the social class they’re in because they deserve to be, and anyone dissatisfied with their current social class can certainly find a better job or pursue a higher level of education. (Will discusses meritocracy in more depth in Chapter 6.)

In addition to describing objective measures of social class, Diemer and colleagues (2013) also point to more subjective ways of examining social class, and they highlight two main approaches: the Social Class Worldview Model-Revised (SCWM-R; the subject of this book) and the Subjective Social Status approach developed by psychologist Nancy Adler and colleagues (Adler et al., 2000). Subjective Social Status is assessed by having research participants engage with an image of a ladder bearing ten rungs (Figure 1.1). Read the instructions provided and see how you would mark up the ladder.

How easy or difficult was it for you to find the “correct” rung for you or your family? Anne once shared the ladder tool in a presentation at her former workplace, a research center of a prestigious liberal arts college in Massachusetts. The presentation was for the center’s Board of Directors, whom one might assume would occupy the upper rungs of the ladder and be able to complete the task easily. But Anne heard actual groaning as people tried to find the correct rung on the ladder. The reason for this difficulty, which you may have already discovered on your own, is that one might be on a high rung in terms of income but on a lower rung in terms of occupation or a middle rung in terms of education level. So how does one average those out and come up with the correct rung? And how does one take race into account when working with the ladder tool? We agree that it’s complicated, and we’ll return to this tool in Chapter 3.

How many social classes are there?

One of the “What Do You Think?” questions at the beginning of this chapter asked you to name some different social classes, and we’re confident that you were able to list more than one. You may also have put those groupings or classes into some sort of order, with groups ranking higher or lower. Indeed, most formulations of social class involve such layers or strata. Stuber (2016) explains that a typical model of social class assumes a pyramid shape of various layers, with a pattern of more people near or at the bottom of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the power of story
• 1 Social class: it’s complicated
• 2 What does a psychology of social class look like?: internalizing the structural
• 3 Economic cultures and capital demands: component 1 of the SCWM-R
• 4 Development of the Social Class Worldview (lessons, levels, and lenses): component 2 of the SCWM-R
• 5 Classism means more than you might think: component 3 of the SCWM-R
• 6 Social class, race, and intersectionality: a final look before we go
• Appendix A
• Index