University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Ideological differences in the use of social class categories to organize and understand society

Ondish, Peter

Content Files
ONDISH-DISSERTATION-2019.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/105168

Description

Title
Ideological differences in the use of social class categories to organize and understand society
Author(s)
Ondish, Peter
Issue Date
2019-04-12
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Stern, Chadly
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Stern, Chadly
Committee Member(s)
  • Cohen, Dov
  • Albarracín, Dolores
  • Fraley, Chris
  • Cheng, Joey
  • Baillargeon, Renée
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Date of Ingest
2019-08-23T20:44:40Z
Keyword(s)
  • political ideology
  • social class
  • policy attitudes
  • motivation
Abstract
Why do liberals and conservatives often fail to see eye-to-eye on social policies that seek to reduce economic inequality in the United States? I integrate a historical/cultural perspective with contemporary research on liberals’ and conservatives’ motivations to show that social policy disagreements result in part from a fundamental difference between how liberals and conservatives attempt to organize and understand a complex and ambiguous social world with social class categories. Specifically, I first investigated whether liberals and conservatives differ in their beliefs of social class as an organizing principle (SCOP) through which they understand the world (Study 1). In Study 2, I investigated whether liberals and conservatives differ in their SCOP beliefs because of differences in automatic or controlled cognitive processes. I found that liberals and conservative experience similar category activation of social class categories, but differ in how they deliberately use social class descriptors to describe social others. I then tested whether liberals’ and conservatives’ motivations explained ideological differences in SCOP beliefs (Study 3). In Study 4, I further investigated whether liberal-conservative differences in SCOP beliefs are motivationally driven by experimentally manipulating the relevance of the system in question. Finally, Study 5 investigated whether SCOP beliefs explained ideological differences in social policy attitudes that address inequality (Study 5). Overall, the present research suggests that liberals and conservatives may differ in their social policy attitudes because they construct different understandings of society based on social class.
Graduation Semester
2019-05
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105168
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2019 Peter Ondish

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