Manipulating Subjective Socioeconomic Status and its Downstream (non) Effects: Two Direct Replications with Extensions

Subjective socioeconomic status (SSES) is someone’s perception of their standing compared to others. Previous work has shown manipulating SSES with false comparative income feedback reduces people’s attitudes toward taxation and makes them more conservative (Brown-Iannuzzi et al., 2014). In two preregistered studies, across 936 American adults, with Study 2 drawn to be nationally representative of the U.S. population in terms of income, we were able to replicate the effect of the false feedback procedure on making people feel they have high SSES. We fail to find empirical support for causal effects on attitudes towards tax-based redistribution, conservatism, prosocial intentions (Study 1), belief in social mobility, sense of control, parents’ approval for opportunistic hoarding behaviors (Study 2). This suggests the correlations between SSES and those constructs are unlikely to be causal. Future research can further tweak the false feedback procedure to explore causality between SSES and other constructs of interest.