Social Class, Social Interaction, and Social Cognition: An investigation into the relationship between socioeconomic status and sociality

Social class undeniably shapes our worlds: from our health, to our neighborhoods, to our relationships, socioeconomic status (SES) reliably predicts diverging outcomes across a plethora of dimensions. The goal of this article is to ascertain whether SES is also related to our sociality; namely expectations of conversation and social interaction. It is hypothesized that SES is positively related to more optimistic expectations about social interactions, and greater interest in reaching out and connecting with others. In three online survey experiments (N = 789, all preregistered), this relationship is explored by instructing participants to rate their expectations of interactions taking place on a park bench. Across studies, higher SES is modestly correlated with more positive expectations of social engagement, such as greater interest in initiating conversations and less awkwardness anticipated from these interactions. However, the associations between SES and sociality were weak in magnitude and inconsistent across studies. Additionally, they did not appear to be context specific (Experiment 3) nor was optimism unique to social engagement (Experiment 2), highlighting the complexity of this relationship and need for further research to explore these dynamics more deeply.