Authors: Mark Paul, Sarah E. Gaither, and William Darity, Jr.
Abstract: People’s social class, and the perceptions of their social class are embedded in an institutional context that has important ramifications for one’s life opportunities and outcomes. Research on first impressions has found that people are relatively accurate at judging a variety of traits such as perceived sexual orientation and income, but there is a paucity of research that investigates whether people are also accurate at judging wealth or class. In this article, we first investigate whether people understand the distinction between income and wealth. Then, using a novel dataset, we examine whether people are accurate at identifying the income and wealth levels of individuals across racial and ethnic groups by facial cues alone. We find that participants understand the meaning of income, but not wealth. Additionally, we find that perceivers categorize class more accurately than by sheer chance, using minimal facial cues, but perceivers are particularly inaccurate when categorizing high-income and high-wealth Black and Latinx subjects.
Key Findings
- Participants were able to accurately understand and comprehend the meaning of income, but not of wealth. However, participants could still accurately assess wealth ranges as “high” or “low.”
- On average, participants were able to assess class of the photographed individuals, based on facial cues alone, more accurately than random guessing.
- Asian “target” individuals were categorized correctly most frequently (72%), followed by Latinx targets (64%), White targets (61%) and Black targets (57%).
- However, participants are uniquely inaccurate when determining the class status of high-income / high-wealth Black and Latinx individuals.
- High-income Black and Latinx individuals were correctly identified less than one-third of the time.
