Figure 6.1. Jesse Harrington with participant and Max the puppet.
In the fall of 2011, over a thousand demonstrators staged a massive protest in New York City’s Financial District that they hailed as “Occupy Wall Street.” The protesters were infuriated with the growing socioeconomic inequality in the United States and around the world. Within a few days, their numbers had grown into a movement of tens of thousands. But the fervor didn’t stop in New York City. Major protests burst forth in hundreds of other U.S. cities; a month later, the campaign had swept the globe, with protests springing up in Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa.
“We are the 99 percent!” became the movement’s trademark slogan, alluding to the rapidly widening income gap between society’s wealthiest class, the “1 percent,” and everyone else. Median household income growth from 1967 to 2015, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, showed a 101 percent rise in earnings for the nation’s top 5 percent of earners while the lowest-income earners gained a dismal 25 percent. Such statistics pointed to a vast wealth gap as the rich grew significantly richer and the poor stagnated. While the Occupy campaign eventually disbanded into offshoot causes, such as raising the minimum wage and reforming Wall Street, its collective rallying cry can still be heard around the world.
Class divides have become a front-burner political issue. A 2017 Pew Research survey found that almost 60 percent of Americans believe there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and poor, up 12 percent from 2009. Respondents ranked class conflicts ahead of those between the young and the old and city and rural dwellers. This chasm between the haves and have-nots exists around the world. In 2016 in South Africa, the bottom 50 percent of earners took in only 10 percent of the country’s net income, while the highest-earning 10 percent amassed 60 percent of it. In 2015, the “1 percenters” in China owned more than 33 percent of the country’s wealth. Latin America, according to the World Economic Forum, has one of the biggest wealth gaps in the world, with its richest 10 percent holding 71 percent of the region’s total wealth in 2014. Such inequality, social commentators contend, helped drive populist waves that crashed ashore in the 2016 U.S. election, the UK’s Brexit decision, and nationalist movements in Europe. What’s more, we increasingly live in our own echo chambers, with little contact across class lines. Our misconceptions about other social classes grow by the day, often leading us to inaccurate, unfair, and even dangerous conclusions.
These class divisions are as old as civilization itself. In one of the world’s earliest urbanized societies, the region of Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia (circa 4500 BC), social order consisted of an elite class of kings and priests, an upper class of merchants, scribes, military men, and other officials, a lower class of farmers and craftsmen, and, at the lowest level, the slaves. Much like today, people’s status and identity hinged upon their positions in their society’s pecking order. Later, around the second millennium BC, a four-part caste system sprang up in India, while in China, a hierarchical social class structure was developed in 1000 BC during the Zhou Dynasty. Class divisions aren’t even limited to the human species. Capuchin monkeys, baboons, pigeons, goby fish, mice, and even burying beetles have been known to demarcate themselves into clear social hierarchies.
Class divisions have been a perennial focus of philosophers, novelists, and filmmakers. From Plato, Marx, and Tolstoy to Shakespeare, Dickens, and Steinbeck, we see the ways in which the rules, expectations, and complications of class shape the destiny of humankind. The viral popularity of TV series like The Crown and Downton Abbey also reflects our deep-rooted fascination with the tastes, values, and attitudes of the wealthy. In popular films such as City Lights, My Fair Lady, Slumdog Millionaire, Working Girl, Billy Elliot, and Pretty in Pink, lead characters struggle to meet the expectations of their own social class while trying to win acceptance by another.
Yet despite the centrality of social class to the human experience, our understanding of it has generally been limited by categorical depictions: rich versus poor, blue collar versus white collar, urban versus rural, proletariat versus bourgeoisie. These categories are insufficient because they’re derivative. Underlying them are deeper cultural codes. Just as a DNA test tells us more than a blood pressure reading, we need to uncover the cultural programming that defines these communities in a way that goes beyond differences in their bank accounts.
It’s 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning and James and David are each heading off to their respective workplaces. David, a thirty-two-year-old college graduate with a four-year degree from a private liberal arts school, heads off to his job at an accounting firm in Chicago. After arriving at work sometime between 8:30 and 9:00, he begins setting deadlines and priorities for the day. He decides on his schedule and gets down to work, pausing occasionally to check his Facebook feed and respond to incoming emails. At 10:30, he takes a quick coffee break and chats about the weekend with some coworkers. At 1:00 p.m., he heads off to a local restaurant for lunch, then remembers a brief errand he forgot to do over the weekend. He takes an extra half hour to get it done, since he’s in the area anyway. Back at the office, he works off and on for another three hours and heads out the door by 5:30. That evening, he returns to his safe, upper-class neighborhood, where he and his wife own a nice house. He earns enough to sock away a significant amount of savings each year for vacations and college tuition for his kids.
A mile away the same morning, James, a thirty-two-year-old high school graduate, heads to his job as a machinist at a factory that makes industrial-grade bolts and screws. When he arrives at work at 7:00 a.m. sharp, his boss tells him his schedule and the tasks that must be completed by day’s end. He heads for his machine on the factory floor after ensuring that any loose clothing is tucked away. He reminds himself to remain focused on the task at hand—getting anything caught in a machine or making a mistake while operating one could be a deadly affair. As he works, the foreman keeps tabs on his progress. At 10:45, an alarm signals a fifteen-minute coffee break. By 11:00, James is back at his machine. Similar bells signal lunch around noon and an additional afternoon break. By 5:30, James’s shift is complete, and he’s headed home to a working-class neighborhood. A warm, close-knit community, it’s nonetheless a lower-income area with a higher crime rate than James would prefer for his family. He earns just enough money from his job to help support his family, so there’s very little left over for savings.
Both David and James are hardworking people who have loving families to support. They live in the same city, just a mile away from each other, yet their lives and experiences are radically different. James is part of the lower class, also referred to as the working class, which includes people who haven’t received a college degree, are employed in blue-collar, low-prestige jobs, and earn low incomes, but are above the poverty line. David is part of the upper class. He isn’t among the top 1 percent—the elite who were the wrath of the Occupy Wall Street movement—but he represents many on the social class ladder who have a college education, occupy professional and prestigious jobs, and enjoy material wealth. While James and David live in the same city, speak the same language, and ride the same subways, they inhabit completely different cultures.
It’s easy to identify the financial situations and educational credentials that distinguish the lower and upper classes. But beneath these statistics lies a distinction that is often invisible to the naked eye: the difference in the levels of threat they experience.
To point to one: The chance of falling into destitution is a constant threat among members of the lower class like James. In her article “The Class Culture Gap,” legal scholar Joan Williams notes that “American working-class families feel themselves on a tightrope where one misstep could lead to a fall into poverty and disorder.” Losing one’s job and any semblance of security is a constant threat for the working class, who often live paycheck to paycheck. Author Joseph Howell similarly notes that slipping into hard living—a term he uses to describe the dregs of poverty—is a relentless preoccupation among the working class that motivates them to vigilantly guard their precarious status. Whereas upper-class individuals experience the world as safe and welcoming, lower-class individuals tend to view it as fraught with extreme danger. And because money can buy second chances, those who have it have a different attitude toward novelty and risk. Upper-class families know that they have a safety net if they run into problems and so they encourage their children to explore and take chances. Because lower-class families lack a safety net to offset the negative effects of careless mistakes and lapses in judgment, they tend to actively discourage this kind of experimentation. The fear of slipping into poverty “anchors working-class culture to stability rather than novelty, to self-discipline rather than self-actualization,” Williams explains.
The threat of hard living isn’t just theory; it resonates with people’s everyday realities. Nicole Bethel, a thirty-one-year-old registered nurse in Dayton, Ohio, told the Huffington Post that she sometimes only has pennies to her name while waiting to be paid. “It’s all you think about,” she said. “It’s constant. You can’t relax or ever really have a day off.” The fragile nature of work and health is a constant concern, according to Karen Wall, a teacher and part-time bartender in Texas. “If I got in a car accident, I’d be homeless,” she said. “If I get laid off from any of my jobs, my kids will end up going hungry.” Slipping into poverty is also a concern for Erlinda Delacruz, a high school graduate interviewed by CNN who had a full-time manufacturing job until the factory closed in 2009. Delacruz, who lives in rural Texas, was working three part-time jobs—clocking in sixty hours a week. “There’s no such thing as a Friday,” says Delacruz. “I live paycheck to paycheck.”
In addition to facing economic uncertainty, the lower class is saddled with serious safety and health threats. Their jobs have much higher odds of injury, dismemberment, and death. Since 1992, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has conducted an annual Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries across jobs in the United States. Individuals working in lower-class occupations—such as construction, manufacturing, and agricultural work—always top this list for fatal and nonfatal work injuries. It is the awareness of the risks intrinsic to these jobs that spawns extensive workplace protocols and safety procedures, and makes for far less employee discretion. Since people like David experience far less threat on the job, they enjoy greater latitude and comparatively little oversight from supervisors.
Physical threats also abound in lower-class neighborhoods. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, poorer communities in the United States face more than double the rate of violent crime relative to higher-income communities. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that people living in lower-income areas are far more likely to be victims of gun violence, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, and sexual assault and rape. The lower class also experiences greater health vulnerabilities throughout their lives relative to their upper-class counterparts, showing higher rates of illnesses such as coronary heart disease, stroke, chronic bronchitis, diabetes, and ulcers. In fact, there’s a staggering ten- to fifteen-year difference in the life expectancy rate between the top and bottom 1 percent in the United States.
Beyond threat, there are other important ways that social classes vary. The lower class tends to have less exposure to diversity. For example, we’ve found that lower-class neighborhoods have a much lower percentage of immigrants than upper-class neighborhoods. The lower class also has far fewer opportunities for mobility, making it harder for them to climb the social ladder.
The combination of high threat, low mobility, and low exposure to diversity is a perfect recipe for the evolution of tightness in the lower class. But are they actually tighter than the upper class?
To find out, Jesse Harrington and I surveyed hundreds of lower- and upper-class American adults in 2016. We measured the level of tightness these groups experienced in their childhood homes, workplaces, and life in general. In each setting, they were asked whether there were many rules they had to follow, whether there were strong punishments for violating them, how much they were monitored, and the extent to which they had choices in making decisions.
The results were telling. Lower-class adults were more likely to indicate that they faced stronger rules, harsher punishments, more monitoring, and fewer choices in their childhood home, current workplace, and lives more generally. They also reported that the situations they encounter on a daily basis are much tighter, with fewer behaviors that are deemed acceptable. What’s more, the lower-class participants were more likely to desire a tighter society, as evidenced by their strong agreement with statements like “a functioning society requires strong punishments for wrongdoing.” Put simply, they live in a tighter, circumscribed world, while the upper class experiences considerable looseness.
Just like citizens of tight nations and states, the lower class see the world through a prism of threat: They’re more concerned with paying the rent or mortgage, losing their homes and jobs, obtaining proper medical care, and having enough food to eat. They also live in more dangerous places. We asked our participants to report their zip codes so we could assess the level of safety in their neighborhoods using data from the U.S. Census. Sure enough: Lower-class participants live in places with higher rates of unemployment and poverty, and thus greater vulnerability to economic and financial woes.
The data also revealed something very interesting: People from different social classes have completely different views about rules. The predominant upper-class view of rules is that they’re made to be broken. Just look at popular books about success, like Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s First, Break All the Rules and Angela Copeland’s Breaking the Rules & Getting the Job. These books advise us that if we want to succeed, we’ll need to cast aside established social norms and chart our own path. This advice overlooks the fact that for members of the lower class, rules are critical for survival. In communities where teens may be tempted to turn to drugs and gangs, strict rules laid down by authority figures are essential to keeping kids on track. And for people in low-wage, routinized jobs where creativity is discouraged, rule breaking can lead to getting fired. The upper class faces less threat and, as a result, can afford to break the rules. In fact, when we asked our survey respondents to free-associate from the word rules, upper-class respondents were more likely to write down negative words such as bad, frustrating, and constricting, while lower-class participants consistently wrote down positive words such as good, safe, and structure. Reactions to the phrase following the rules vary by class as well. Words like listen and obey were repeated answers from the lower class, whereas pejoratives like goody-two-shoes or robotic were more common among the upper class. For the lower class, rules are meant to be followed, as they provide moral order in a world of potential turmoil.
Overall, lower- and upper-class respondents showed the same differences in values and attitudes that we saw across tight and loose nations and states. Those in the lower classes were more likely to endorse survey items such as “I like order” and “I enjoy having a clear and structured mode of life” and to report that they “don’t like change” and “prefer to stick with things that [they] know.” They had lower openness to experience, and yearned for the “good old days.” They had a strong distaste for morally ambiguous behaviors, such as euthanasia and drug and alcohol use, and were more likely to view homosexuality as immoral. Similarly, in studies on morality by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, members of the working class express moral condemnation when asked about actions that are disrespectful or disgusting yet objectively harmless, such as wiping a toilet with a flag, or eating an already dead dog for dinner. Their outrage reflects a tight mind-set. Meanwhile, people of higher socioeconomic status are more likely to take a loose, permissive stance, viewing such behaviors as matters of social convention or personal preference.
At what age do tight attitudes start to show up in lower-class children, and loose attitudes in upper-class kids? Since past research has found that children have a grip on social norms by age three, Jesse Harrington and I examined if toddlers vary in their responses to norm violators. We recruited three-year-old kids from the lower and upper classes in the Washington, D.C., area, asking their parents to bring them to our laboratory in exchange for a small payment. Of course, we couldn’t ask three-year-olds to fill out a survey or answer questions about the degree to which violations of social norms make them uncomfortable. But fortunately for us, psychologists Hannes Rakoczy, Felix Warneken, and Michael Tomasello at the Max Planck Institute had previously devised an ingenious behavioral tool that could be used for this purpose: Max, the norm-violating puppet.
As in their study, we paired up each participating child with Max, a hand puppet, who was operated by a research assistant. After playing with the kids to make them feel comfortable, the experimenter then demonstrated to both the participating child and Max the proper and improper way to play each of four made-up games. For example, in the game “daxing,” the experimenter demonstrated that the proper way to “dax” is to push a block off a Styrofoam board with a wooden stick. The improper way is to lift the board so the block slides off the end. Next, the child was given a turn to play the game; after that, it was Max’s turn. At first, Max played the game according to the rules, but then he did something unexpected: He exhibited improper behavior while exclaiming that he was doing it properly. “This is daxing!” he said while lifting the board and letting the blocks slide off. Within minutes, Max the puppet had become Max the norm violator.
Our study’s results suggested that tight and loose attitudes were already deeply ingrained in these youngsters. Lower-class children were more likely to tell Max that he was doing the task wrong. “No! Not like that. Like this!” they might say, or, “That’s not how daxing goes!” One child from a lower-socioeconomic-status family even accused Max of cheating. Children from this group were also quicker to protest Max’s mistake. By contrast, upper-class children appeared to be more understanding and accepting of Max’s norm violation, sometimes even laughing appreciatively. Even by age three, these more privileged kids thought there was nothing wrong with breaking the rules once in a while.
Social class differences in tightness-looseness show up remarkably early in life, our results suggested. But why? It turns out that children in different social classes are exposed to radically different types of socialization. The working class has what psychologists call “strict” or “narrow” socialization, and the upper class has “lenient” or “broad” socialization.
The sociologist Melvin Kohn first documented this difference in his 1969 book Class and Conformity, in which he asked parents about the traits they thought were critical for their children to have. Lower-class parents stressed the importance of conformity, wanting their children to be obedient and neat. Upper-class parents wanted their kids to have self-direction—to be independent. Kohn also found striking contrasts in parental attitudes about punishment of wrongdoing. Lower-class parents punished their children for disobedience and for the negative consequences of their behavior, regardless of whether it was intentional or accidental. By contrast, not only were upper-class parents less likely to punish their children, but they also chose whether and how to punish based on the intent behind their child’s behavior. Five decades later, and consistent with Kohn’s work, our studies showed that lower-class parents more often say that there are firm rules their children have to follow, more often monitor their children’s behavior, and more often mete out punishments to correct poor behavior. A recent Pew Research Center poll appears in line with this, reporting that parents with a high school education or lower are almost three times more likely to spank their children than parents who have an advanced degree.
Just as parents send their children to school with umbrellas after spotting stormy skies on the horizon, they also give their kids the psychological tools that they think they’ll need to be successful adults. Knowing that their children will likely have to navigate a world of social threat—and work at jobs where they have little discretion—lower-class parents emphasize the importance of conformity to try to help them succeed. After all, not following protocol at work can get one fired or badly hurt. “In the working class, people perform jobs in which they are closely supervised and are required to follow orders and instructions,” Alfred Lubrano explains in his book Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, so parents “bring their children up in a home in which conformity, obedience, and intolerance for back talk are the norm—the same characteristics that make for a good factory worker.” In these contexts, self-direction is actually counterproductive, but it’s a necessary trait for those navigating loose worlds and occupations, hence a trait that upper-class parents foster in their children.
It’s not just parental attitudes that help prepare children for their respective tight and loose worlds. Three important factors—the ways households are organized, the unwritten codes that guide conversations, and children’s experiences in the classroom—all reinforce differences in tightness-looseness among the lower and upper classes. In his 1970 book Class, Codes, and Control, British sociologist Basil Bernstein discusses how the structure and rigidity of lower-class life, as compared with the flexibility of upper-class life, can be readily discerned even from the layouts of the classes’ respective households. Lower-class households, he argues, tend to have rooms that are strongly separated and strictly bounded by function—the kitchen is for cooking, the dining room is for eating family meals, and so on. Upper-class households, on the other hand, have more open and flexible floor plans with rooms that have multiple uses. Bernstein also notes that relationships between parents and children are structured and rigid in lower-class households (with parents as authority figures and children as subordinates), whereas in upper-class households authority lines are much more blurred.
Bernstein also found a fascinating connection between social class and the way that people use language. The working class uses what he calls a “restricted code” form of speech defined by simpler and more concrete grammatical constructions with fewer counterfactual statements (like what if). Meanwhile, the middle class has an “elaborated code” of speech that is more abstract and complex and more flexible. As Bernstein explains, language forms in part from how we see the world, so it’s not surprising that the language used by working-class people reflects a social world that is lacking in flexibility and higher in structure. By contrast, the language of the middle class matches the complexity and comparatively unstructured experiences they encounter in their daily lives.
Children also encounter these structural differences in school. Metaphorically speaking, schools with a predominantly lower-class population are more likely to resemble the military, with their strong emphasis on rules and obedience, whereas schools with upper-class populations resemble universities, with their comparable freedom. In the latter, teachers cultivate a loose mind-set: They encourage students to ask questions, express their individuality, and move freely. In her comparison of schools in northern New Jersey, educator Jean Anyon noted that in suburban schools, which generally have upper-class populations, teachers encourage children to engage in creative writing every day and to use craft projects, murals, and graphs to represent what they learn.
By contrast, lower-class city-district schools prep children for a tight mind-set. They have comparatively less latitude and engage in more structured activities. In these schools, children are assigned rote tasks such as copying notes and completing standardized math problems—all geared toward assessing their knowledge of a subject, rather than their creative interpretation of school materials. Schools, in effect, reproduce the tight and loose norms of their corresponding social classes.
From a very young age, the lives of the children of the lower and upper classes begin to diverge—from the values their parents enforce, to the language they speak, to the structure of their households and schools, even to how they react to Max, the norm-violating puppet. These cultural differences have a profound impact on how these children behave as adults.
Imagine you’re out walking and someone approaches you about taking a short survey. After completing it, you’re presented with five pens to choose from as a thank-you gift. Four of the pens are green, and the fifth is orange. Which pen would you choose?
Choosing a pen based on its color may seem like a decision of little import, but it actually says quite a lot about you: namely, whether you prefer to conform or stand out. In a clever study where individuals were given a pen as compensation for participating, psychologists Nicole Stephens, Hazel Markus, and Sarah Townsend found that 72 percent of lower-class participants chose a pen that was in the majority color, whereas only 44 percent of upper-class participants did. When given the opportunity to conform or stand out, lower-class individuals, this study showed, prefer to blend in whereas upper-class individuals prefer to be unique.
Just as tight nations have stronger preferences for uniformity, members of the lower class prefer making choices that others like to make, too. In another study by these researchers, participants were asked to imagine that they bought a new car, only to learn that their friend bought the same car the next day. Members of the lower class were more likely to say things like “I’d feel good about it” or “I would be delighted,” whereas those from the upper class tended to respond, “I would feel slightly irritated” or “I’d probably be upset.” From a tight-loose perspective, these differences make a whole lot of sense. When you experience a lot of threat in life, being in sync with others feels safe.
People who are lower on the social ladder are also more easily influenced by the opinions of others. In one study, some people were asked to recall a time when they felt someone else had control over them. Other people were asked to recall a time when they had control over someone else. The former situation is much more common in the lives of the lower class, who tend to feel less of a sense of personal control. They then completed a very tedious and boring sentence-formation task. Before people rated how much they enjoyed the task, the experimenters showed them glowing reviews of the task from prior participants. On a scale from one to eleven, most had answered between nine and eleven, meaning they enjoyed the task “very much.” These were, of course, fake reviews. Those who’d been primed to feel a sense of greater control ignored the fact that other people supposedly had fun during the task and gave the task low scores. But those primed to feel less control shifted their ratings to match those they’d just read.
Members of the upper class may resist social pressure, but they also can be much more lackadaisical about the need to comply with social norms—a loose trait. That’s what researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found when they hid on the side of a busy California intersection and watched the cars go by. They noted the make of the car and its corresponding social class: the nicer the car, the higher the class (think Mercedes-Benz versus Toyota). Their results were astonishing: People with nicer cars were far more likely to cut off other cars in an intersection with four-way stop signs than were owners of more run-of-the-mill cars—30 percent of the time versus 8 percent of the time, to be exact. In fact, owners of nicer vehicles were also more likely to cut off pedestrians who were waiting to cross the street, an illegal act in California. Drivers of the cars that ranked lowest on luxury cut off people on foot 0 percent of the time, while drivers in the nicest cars cut people off a whopping 46 percent of the time. Clearly, people of higher social status are less concerned about yielding to pedestrians (and following the law!).
Beyond their more reckless driving behavior, people higher in social class take more liberty in violating conversational etiquette. In one study, researchers recruited participants and videotaped them interacting with a stranger for a five-minute time period. Some people made great eye contact and responded to their partners with laughs and nods, while other participants were ill-mannered conversationalists. They doodled on their notebooks, fidgeted with nearby objects, and were generally more disengaged. Can you guess how these behaviors broke down along class lines? That’s right: The lower-class participants were more likely to follow conventional etiquette and norms during these short interactions; upper-class participants were more likely to dismiss them.
The loose behavior of upper-class individuals can even make them less ethical. Studies have shown that they’re far more likely to say they’d engage in unethical actions ranging from cheating on a test, to stealing software, to keeping extra change from a cashier. In our surveys of hundreds of people, working-class individuals were less likely to endorse unscrupulous actions like stealing supplies at work or cheating on tests. Other research has found similar results: In one lab study, participants were told that a higher dice role would get them more money. When they had to report the results of their dice roles, those from a higher socioeconomic background were more likely to lie about the numbers rolled. In another study, people who felt they were in a higher social class were more likely to take candy that they knew was supposed to be for children participating in a lab study next door!
Take sixty seconds to list as many uses as you can possibly think of for a paper clip. Now do the same for a brick. In one of our studies, Jesse Harrington and I had people from different social classes complete this classic creativity task. We found that upper-class participants provided far more creative responses for how these objects could be used. Some of their novel suggestions for a brick included cracking open walnuts, building an artistic sculpture, and making an ochre paint by grinding the brick up. Other uses they gave for a paper clip included using it to hang a Christmas ornament or replace a broken zipper.
We’ve seen that the lower class tends to be tighter—more conforming, norm-abiding, and cooperative—while the upper class is looser—more deviant, less cooperative, and even a bit more unethical. Yet being unleashed from constraints also has its upsides: Like the typical inhabitant of a loose nation or state, people from the upper class are much more innovative, as our results show. In other studies where people were primed to feel either powerful or powerless—conditions that mirror the power differential between the upper and lower classes—researchers found similar effects. When asked to plan a new menu for a restaurant or to generate three new names for types of pasta, radioactive elements, and pain-relief medicines, people who felt powerful were more creative than low-power participants.
Psychologist Murray Straus found discrepancies in creativity are inculcated early. He worked with families from different socioeconomic backgrounds and asked them to complete problem-solving tasks while an observer took detailed notes on their ideas. Among the sixty-four American families participating, those with higher socioeconomic status attempted many more creative solutions to the tasks than did families from lower-class backgrounds. The same results were found in India and Puerto Rico. In short, members of the lower class, while more likely to abide by rules and norms and even be more ethical, are less likely to think outside of the box.
This leads us to the final element of the tight-loose trade-off: openness to those who are different. In loose nations and states, there’s a high degree of openness and tolerance of individuals who are different, including immigrants, while in tight nations and states, people react more negatively to those who threaten the social order. Remarkably, the same tight-loose signature applies to social class: Studies show that, in general, members of the lower class report more negative attitudes toward homeless people, homosexuals, Muslims, the disabled, and even people with tattoos. Across many countries, lower-class individuals also harbor more negative attitudes toward immigrants, believing they’re detrimental to their nation.
In sum, class distinctions reflect deep cultural differences that have evolved to adapt to specific ecological and historical challenges. Of course, while the basic tight-loose contrast between classes is well established, there are also important exceptions. Just as there are loose cities in tight states, it’s not difficult to find individuals in lower socioeconomic groups with loose mind-sets and vice versa. Outside the United States, class barriers can look quite different. Nevertheless, focusing on income differences misses the critical role culture plays in forming and sustaining class divides around the world.
The tight-loose distinction is also useful for understanding other group differences beyond socioeconomic status, including gender and race. The term white privilege has become a political hot potato, but a noncontroversial principle underlies the concept: Groups that have greater power—those that control important resources—have far more latitude to deviate from rules. In many societies, whites, males, and heterosexuals, regardless of class, tend to have greater power. They live in looser worlds. By contrast, women, minorities, and homosexuals have less power and less latitude, and are subjected to stronger punishments, even for the same norm violations. They, in short, live in much tighter worlds.
In one study demonstrating this, managers that I surveyed read about someone breaking workplace rules, including going against a boss’s decision, stealing from a coworker, covering up mistakes, sabotaging company equipment or merchandise, or lying about hours worked. Crucially, we manipulated the gender and the race of the person who had broken the rules by using names pre-validated to signal race and gender: Participants read about either a white man (Greg), a white woman (Kristen), a black man (Jamal), or a black woman (Latoya). They were then asked to rate how serious the violation described was and to indicate whether the person should be punished. The results were telling. When women and minorities were said to engage in these behaviors, managers thought they were much more serious and warranted more punishment than when the same behaviors were done by majority males. Similarly, a study looking at the financial advisor industry found that although misconduct is more frequent among male employees, women are more likely to be punished, and more severely so.
When it comes to criminal justice, the results also show that some groups disproportionally receive harsher punishments for the same violations. For example, African American criminals are punished more harshly and sentenced to more time behind bars than white criminals with comparable histories. In the United States, African Americans are imprisoned at a rate that is five times the imprisonment rate of whites. African Americans are also far more likely to be targeted, brutalized, and killed by police, a phenomenon that prompted the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. In Ferguson, Missouri, for example, one in two African Americans was pulled over for traffic stops that year, as compared to one in eight whites.
The pattern is clear: People with different levels of status and power—whether that status and power are based on income, race, gender, sexual orientation, or another individual characteristic—live in different cultural worlds.
While you might expect an American moving to Japan or a German moving to New Zealand to experience culture shock, it may be less evident that someone moving between classes might have just as much trouble adapting. This is particularly the case for members of the working class, who are typically ill-prepared to cross into upper-class schools and workplaces that have been effectively designed to promote looseness. Though it’s often not obvious, the working class is inadvertently put at a cultural disadvantage in these spaces.
We view college as a stepping stone to greater economic opportunity and mobility, but this stepping stone looms like a mountain to some. The loose norms and openness of many college campuses are comfortable for upper-class students, but they can be disorienting and alienating to students from working-class backgrounds. In 2012, psychologist Nicole Stephens and her collaborators surveyed over 260 high-level college administrators at the top fifty U.S. universities and the top twenty-five liberal arts colleges to determine the schools’ prevailing cultural norms. They were given a list of traits, and asked to choose which traits were most important for their students. The vast majority said that their universities expected students to develop personal opinions rather than simply appreciating the opinions of others, to pave their own innovative pathways rather than following in others’ footsteps, and to challenge rather than accept established rules.
In other words, the schools’ norms were designed to reward nonconformity and independence. No small wonder, then, that upper-class children, who are more likely to have grown up in loose cultures where individuality and creativity are fostered, tend to flourish in university environments. Meanwhile, lower-class children, who have grown up in tight environments that emphasize conformity over independence, structure over creativity, and obedience over deviance, are more likely to struggle. For them, attending college, even one close to home, can feel like traveling to a foreign country.
A recent study of over 145,000 students at six large public universities found startling evidence of this cultural mismatch. Working-class students reported less of a sense of belonging, less satisfaction with their educational experiences, and more stress and depression than their upper-class peers. Financially strapped, they often had to juggle their coursework with other jobs, and they had less time for other collaborative and academic activities on campus.
I witnessed these realities firsthand on my own campus. Jesse Harrington and I surveyed first-year students throughout the 2016–2017 year. By the end of their first semester, lower-class students felt less academically prepared, less successful at making friends, and more stressed out. These students were overwhelmed by the complexity of college life, and yearned for clarity and simplicity. They also felt a greater rift with their loved ones back home. They found themselves straddling two cultures and feeling isolated from both.
Lower-class students’ alienation on campus translates to a higher likelihood of dropping out. According to studies done by the National Center for Education Statistics, students from high-income families are more than twice as likely to earn their bachelor’s degree within six years after starting college compared with those from low-income families. Our system of higher education, touted as a “great equalizer,” is falling far short of this lofty goal.
Just as cross-cultural training programs help people to adjust when they travel abroad, educational institutions need to take steps to reduce the culture shock experienced by lower-class individuals who are transitioning from tight to loose cultures. Harvard, Brown, and Arizona State have developed programs in which fellow students mentor first-generation students to help them transition to university life. Other universities have created web pages featuring the stories of first-generation students to help them feel like they belong. These programs can make a big difference. An ingenious study led by Nicole Stephens found that lower-class students who attended panel sessions wherein students from diverse backgrounds discussed how their social class shaped their college experiences were subsequently much more likely to seek out resources on campus and attained higher GPAs.
Providing more structure in university settings also helps to bridge tight-loose gaps. Take, for example, an innovative intervention developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by Sarah Eddy and Kelly Hogan. In some classrooms, students were given more preparatory homework each week, provided with guided-reading questions to structure their time, and assigned more in-class small-group activities to foster a collaborative working environment. Compared with a control group that had no structure changes, this intervention improved performance for all students, the researchers found—and students from the lower class improved the most.
Young people from tight lower-class backgrounds don’t only need help adjusting to the looseness of college life. People who don’t graduate from college, which in the United States constitutes about two-thirds of adults, according to a 2017 Census Bureau report, need help attaining the skills required to succeed in an increasingly globalized economy. The looseness of American culture may be keeping them from meeting this goal.
Take Germany, a generally tight culture, where the government provides the nation’s youth with a wide range of career options that don’t require a college degree. For example, Germany has many vocational programs where you can earn a nationally recognized certificate. The government works with employers, educators, and union representatives to develop these standardized occupational tracks, ensuring that apprentices are learning the skills they need to meet the qualifications of their future employers. As Tamar Jacoby in the Atlantic writes, “Every young machinist training anywhere in Germany learns the same skills in the same order on the same timetable as every other machinist. This is good for apprentices: It guarantees high-quality programs where trainees learn more than one company’s methods, making it possible for those who wish to switch jobs later on.” But in the United States, a generally loose culture, there are no such uniform standards, which means that the skills taught at one company may not be valuable or needed at other companies. This can make it difficult for people to change jobs, which places a large burden on the working class. Given rapid changes across many industries, as well as the increasing threat of globalization to lower-class jobs, looser economies like America’s would benefit from developing practices that tight cultures have honed to give working-class laborers more structure as they launch their careers.
Class differences are deeply cultural, and the world urgently needs greater cultural empathy across class lines. Arguably, we need this now more than ever. People from different social classes are increasingly isolated from one another, as seen in the growing urban-rural divides around the globe. We tend to further compartmentalize ourselves on social media and follow different media outlets (e.g., Fox News versus MSNBC) as well. As a result, we are left with little understanding of each other’s cultures, which can lead us to form negative stereotypes about one another.
Many of the differences between the lower and upper classes have an underlying logic. Lower-class occupations, including plumbers, butchers, factory workers, janitors, and prison guards, require sophisticated technical and physical skills. They also require the ability to be dependable and follow rules. A tight mind-set is critical for success in these contexts. Meanwhile, upper-class jobs, such as those in law, engineering, medicine, academia, and management, among other white-collar professions, are built on alternative strengths, such as creativity, vision, independence, and even breaking from tradition. These strengths necessitate a looser mind-set. Neither set of strengths should be viewed as superior. Cultivating mutual respect for our different strengths will go a long way toward bridging today’s social class divisions and conflicts.
This is becoming more and more important in our rapidly globalizing world. As technological advances jeopardize the already dwindling availability of lower-class jobs, the threat of permanent poverty is a real fear within these communities. McKinsey & Company found that a whopping 78 percent of predictable physical work, such as packaging and assembly line welding, could be automated by rapidly spreading technology. By contrast, jobs that require managing others, using specialized knowledge to create products or services, or making executive decisions and plans—that is, upper-class jobs—are the least likely to be affected. The difference is stark: For those in the lower class, globalization is a looming threat; for those in the upper class, it’s an opportunity.
It is no small wonder, then, that the tight-loose fault line plays such a key role in world affairs, especially in the realm of politics. As globalization increases, this fault line is dividing groups around the world, with relatively well-off loose cultures that embrace innovation, change, and diversity on one side, and lower-class tight cultures that are financially threatened and seek stability, tradition, and rules on the other. For American voters who couldn’t find work after a layoff, the decision to vote for Trump in 2016 came down to a desire to avoid destitution. “I never anticipated being in this situation,” Californian Anthony Miskulin, who lost a well-paying job in the 2008 Great Recession, told the Los Angeles Times soon after the 2016 election. “My vote for Donald Trump, it wasn’t out of bigotry. It wasn’t out of hatred. It was about survival.” In England, the fear of immigrants taking working-class jobs became a driving force behind many people’s votes to leave the European Union during the 2016 referendum.
Perceptions of threat have led some in the working class to prefer populist leaders who promise to dismantle the social structures that have left them behind and restore traditional order. These leaders run on promises of delivering more tightness. Trump vowed to “restore law and order” to the American political system, tighten borders, keep out immigrants, and crack down on crime. France’s Marine Le Pen promised to “restore order” in France in five years. And the Polish populist party, named Law and Justice, ran on a platform of returning to traditional Polish values. Such rhetoric can be highly appealing to the increasingly threatened working class.
By viewing the culture of each social class through a tight-loose lens, we can develop greater respect for people across class lines and prevent harmful misunderstandings. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many members of the working class craved the law and order promised by Donald Trump because they believed it would help them ward off the very real threat of poverty. Some Clinton supporters were economically comfortable enough not to fear this threat, nor the threat of immigrants taking away their jobs. The two worlds of the upper class and the lower class have separate norms and preoccupations that have evolved based on their own ecologies. While we may never agree with others’ voting choices, once we know that they stem from our cultural codes, we can at least begin to understand them.
