UC Berkeley

Socioeconomic status (SES), one’s educational and financial status, has an enormous impact on one’s quality of life and how one is perceived in modern America, with those of lower (vs. higher) SES seen negatively along a number of important dimensions, including morality and competence. Research suggests that those who engage in behaviors that benefit others (i.e., prosocial behavior) are rated more positively and are rewarded with interpersonal rewards such as peer acceptance and status. However, this process depends upon observers perceiving the prosocial behavior of low (vs. high) SES individuals as prosocial, rather than perceiving the same behaviors through a different lens and, perhaps, undercutting such actions and perceiving them as less prosocial or even self-serving in some way. Three experiments examined the relation between a target’s perceived SES (low vs. high) and perceptions (positive vs. negative) of prosocial behavior. It was hypothesized that the prosocial behaviors of those perceived to be low (vs. high) SES would be perceived as less prosocial. Specifically, it was predicted that low-SES targets would be rated as having more self-serving intentions for their prosocial behaviors than high-SES targets. Experiment 1 conceptually replicates and extends prior work (Flynn, Reagans, Amanatullah, & Ames, 2006), finding that prosocial actors are not only perceived as higher status, but are also perceived to be of higher SES than their non-prosocial counterparts. Experiment 2 found that observers perceive targets of high SES to engage in prosocial behaviors more frequently than low-SES individuals, despite believing that these behaviors are no costlier to either group. Finally, Experiment 3 found evidence that perceivers are more suspicious of the intentions underlying the prosocial behaviors of low-SES individuals, as compared to high-SES individuals. These findings suggest that observers used perceived SES as a cue to interpret the intentions behind prosocial behavior. This provides further insight into one of the challenges encountered by low-SES individuals in modern America, as their good deeds are interrogated rather than rewarded. There are a number of promising directions for future work.