Social Class Shapes Our Beliefs About How Power Works

In a world reeling with crisis upon crisis, there have been plenty of reasons to turn to our leaders for guidance on how to navigate an increasingly confusing and destabilized world. At the same time, public trust in the government is near record lows.

Together with my colleague, Dacher Keltner, I created a survey to measure how people think power is gained and maintained, so that we could study the social forces that influence those beliefs. As it turns out, modern beliefs about how power works can be well summarized by historical accounts. In 350 BCE, the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, wrote that power was derived from competence, social concern, and compassion. In the 16^th century, the Italian diplomat, Machiavelli, wrote that force, manipulation, and coercion were pathways to power. If you find your thoughts aligning more with one of these men than the other, you are not alone—that was the case for our participants as well.

We asked over 1,000 people to report their beliefs about how power is gained and maintained. For example, we asked participants to rate the extent to which they agree that “Often it requires aggression to gain power” and “Gaining power requires collaboration with other individuals.” In general, people tended to endorse one of these perspectives more than the other. If they agreed with statements describing collaboration, they tended to disagree with statements describing coercion, or vice versa.

Self-Perceived Social Rank Mattered

What was even more interesting was that participants’ beliefs about power seemed to be shaped by their social class.

People who reported being higher in socioeconomic status (SES)—having a combination of more money, education, and better jobs—were more likely to endorse Aristotle’s collaborative perspective, while lower SES individuals were more likely to endorse Machiavelli’s coercive perspective on power.

In further studies we tested whether temporarily changing a person’s feeling of being relatively high or low in SES impacted their beliefs about power. We asked people to compare themselves to either a rich person or a poor person—a task that was aimed at making them feel momentarily “low” or “high” in social rank. People who compared themselves to a rich (versus poor) person felt lower status in comparison, and they reported more coercive and fewer collaborative beliefs about how power is gained and maintained.

In short, social class is a kind of lens through which we view society, even when it’s an illusion brought about by simply comparing ourselves to high or low-status others. When we feel relatively high status ourselves, we hold a more benevolent view of the powerful. However, when we feel relatively low status, we view the powerful with suspicion—as manipulative and coercive.

Sharing Machiavelli’s view of power was also associated with decreased trust. After all—how can you trust an institution that you believe was formed and is maintained on the basis of manipulative and coercive tactics? On the other hand, we found that higher self-reported SES was associated with a more collaborative perspective on power, which was associated with increased trust.

In the face of rising inequality, these findings help to explain our current social order. In the US, inequality is rising and inflation woes are likely to widen this gap even further. The top 1% of Americans now own more of the nation’s wealth than the entire middle class combined. Increases in inequality result in a growing group of individuals who feel (and are) low SES, who are likely to see the powerful as malevolent tyrants, unworthy of their trust.

While our research helps to explain the present, it also provides suggestions for improving the future. Our data suggest that increasing inequality is not just unsustainable for the many families struggling to make ends meet, it may also contribute to an unsustainable society—one in which leaders are viewed negatively and trust is scarce.

For Further Reading

ten Brinke, L., & Keltner, D. (2022). Theories of power: Perceived strategies for gaining and maintaining power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(1), 53-72. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000345

Belmi, P., & Laurin, K. (2016). Who wants to get to the top? Class and lay theories about power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(4), 505–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000060

Tan, J. J., & Kraus, M. W. (2018). Judgments of interpersonal warmth predict class differences in political candidate support. Social Cognition, 36(1), 106-133. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2018.36.1.106
 

Leanne ten Brinke is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She studies how trust, affiliation, and influence unfold in social interactions.