The effect of social class on agency and communion: Reconciling rank-based and identity-based perspectives

How does social class affect people’s goals in social interactions? A rank-based perspective suggests actorsfrom higher social classes (compared to lower social classes) have more agentic and less communal goals when interacting with same-class or unspecified others. Focusing on targets’social class, an identity-based perspective suggests the reverse: Actors should more strongly endorse communal (agentic) goals towards illegitimately lower-class (higher-class) compared to higher-class (lower-class) targets, regardless of actors’ own social class. Three preregistered experiments (N= 2,023) manipulated actor’s social class and the nature of the target (illegitimately higher/lower class, same class, unspecified), and measured participants’ goals in imagined interactions using the Circumplex Scales of Intergroup Goals. The identity-based perspective received strong support: Across studies, actors expressed stronger agentic (communal) goals towards higher-class (lower-class) targets. The rank-based perspective received limited support, with relatively low (vs. high) class actors expressing stronger communal goals towards same-class targets