Social-Class background influences attentional processing: social class and self-construals predict field-dependence
Résumé
Social class, like other forms of cultural contexts, impacts both cognitive functioning and behavioral
tendencies. Growing up in a working-class (vs. middle-class) environment tends to foster the
development of more interdependent (vs. independent) self-construals (e.g., Piff, Kraus, & Keltner,
2018). Interdependent self-construals are thought to promote holistic modes of processing,
including visuo-spatial aspects such as field dependence (i.e., reliance on external cues). Consistent
with this view, working-class individuals have been found to devote more attention to surrounding
social stimuli than middle-class individuals (Dietze & Knowles, 2016). The current work aimed to
demonstrate that class-based differences in perceptual processing extend to non-social stimuli.
Using a Portable Rod-and-Frame Test (PRFT), on which a poorer performance is diagnostic of fielddependence, we successfully demonstrated that working-class (Study 1, N = 203) and
interdependence-primed individuals (Study 2, N = 200) tend to be more field-dependent than their
respective middle-class and independence- primed counterparts. Moreover, manipulating the
intellectual diagnosticity of the PRFT did not modulate the effect of social-class on performance
(Study 3, N = 240), ruling out the possibility that the lower performance of working-class individuals
was due to self-integrity threat. Our results suggest that working-class (vs. middle-class) individuals,
who hold more interdependent self-construals (e.g., Stephens et al., 2007), tend to process their
surrounding visuospatial environment in a more context-dependent (context independent) manner,
even when the environment is free from social stimuli.