Dissecting Whiteness: consistencies and differences in the stereotypes of lower- and upper-class White US Americans

ABSTRACT

Economic inequality is increasing in the United States, making categorization and stereotyping based on social class more likely. Yet, social class stereotypes have received relatively little attention. Focusing on spontaneously generated stereotypes of different White lower-class and upper-class groups in the United States, we find consistencies and differences across groups. Lower-class groups were stereotyped as poor, uneducated, dirty, and lacking ability, while upper-class groups were stereotyped as rich, arrogant, and lacking sociability. Stereotypes for all groups were largely negative but there were notable variations in stereotype valence, sociability, morality, ability, and assertiveness as well as perceived attitudes toward the groups within each social class, highlighting the importance of moving beyond a monolithic view of “the rich” and “the poor.”

KEYWORDS:

• Stereotypes
• social class
• White groups
• upper-class
• lower-class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We capitalize White to highlight to combat the view of Whiteness as invisible or as the default to which all other identities are compared, which we believe contributes to obfuscating the power and status in confers to people (see Ewing, 2020).

2. This study was originally part of a set of studies investigating a different research question. However, findings did not replicate across studies and are therefore not reported here.

3. Because this study was originally part of a set of studies investigating a different research question, we included additional items measuring the prototypicality of the group of White people in the United States, the percentage of the group that was White, and how central Whiteness is to the group. Because these questions are unrelated to the current paper and results did not replicate across studies, we do not report the findings here.

4. These scales were originally supposed to be 7-point scales, but due to a programming error, they contained the scale point 5 twice. None of the participants pointed this error out and due to the visual arrangement of the scale, we believe that it is still interpretable in the sense that higher numbers correspond to higher status and more positive attitudes respectively.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/S00274X/1].