On the relation between social class and prejudice: The roles of education. income and ideological attitudes

By Héctor Carvacho, A. Zick, A. Haye, Roberto González, J. Manzi, Caroline Kocik, Melanie Bertl. 2013

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Prejudice is more prevalent among members of the working class than among members of the middle or upper class. It is still a matter of discussion whether education works to suppress prejudice among upper class members or, on the contrary, to enhance genuinely tolerant attitudes. We propose that (i) two indicators of social class—income and education—independently predict prejudice toward multiple targets as follows: lower levels of income and education are associated with higher levels of prejudice. (ii) The connection between social class and prejudice is explained by the endorsement of system-legitimating ideological attitudes, namely right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). We tested these hypotheses in four studies using cross-sectional surveys in Europe (Studies 1 and 2, Ns = 11 330 and 2640) and longitudinal data from Germany and Chile (Studies 3 and 4, Ns = 343 and 388). Results show that education and income exert independent negative effects on prejudice. The effect of education is stronger than the effect of income, which is not stable across countries. The relationships between income and prejudice and education and prejudice are mediated by RWA and SDO. We conclude that people of the working class generally endorse an ideological configuration that is well suited for legitimating the social system. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c4055c50a79e250a92e0359125f43e90ea33306

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Political Science and International Relations

Russell Spears

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Educationism and the irony of meritocracy: negative attitudes of higher educated people towards the less educated (2017, background): “There is indeed evidence that higher educated people are more tolerant of some minority or low-status groups (Carvacho et al., 2013; Easterbrook et al., 2016; Wagner & Zick, 1995).”
The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour (2018, result): “Such attitudes are shared to a perhaps surprising extent by workingclass people (Clery et al., 2013) and, as we have seen, the research by Carvacho et al. (2013) suggests that working-class people endorse ideologies that endorse and preserve a social system that materially disadvantages them.”