Social Psychology Investigation Lab (SPIL)

The objective of this research project is to examine whether the framing of social class as being an either a controllable or uncontrollable social identity affect how people from different social class backgrounds are perceived. We predict that framing social class as a controllable identity (vs. an uncontrollable identity) results in more negative attitudes towards those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Our group has published a survey on Amazon's Mechanical Turk; with our survey we ask participants to either write about how people can control their social class (controllable identity condition) or how social class is out of the person's control (uncontrollable identity condition). Next in our survey, we ask participants to note their attitudes and feelings towards others from different social class backgrounds. This study will help us understand the attitudes and biases that people may have towards others from different social class backgrounds, and how those attitudes can be affected by whether social class is seen as a controllable identity or not.