SBP: Collaborative Research: Testing the Stress-related Cyclical Nature of Socioeconomic Status Stigma

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Nearly 40 million people live in poverty in the United States. Climbing the socioeconomic ladder requires overcoming many barriers. This project offers a novel analysis of psychological barriers that make upward social mobility so difficult: feeling stigmatized for being lower on the socioeconomic ladder is stressful, and that stress undermines the ability to improve one's educational, occupational, and financial standing. People who are low on the socioeconomic ladder risk feeling stigmatized in the US, a country that embraces the American Dream of improving one's standing. Experiencing stigma-related stress sets into motion a vicious cycle that leads to barriers for achieving higher socioeconomic status. This work examines causes and consequences that guide the self-fulfilling nature of low socioeconomic status, and it tests new targets to remove roadblocks to prosperity for all Americans.This project tests hypotheses from the Cyclical Social Stigma Stress model, which proposes that stress induced by feeling stigmatized disrupts the very things needed for upward social mobility. Study 1 is an experiment with college students testing whether feeling stigmatized because of low socioeconomic status causes physiological stress, which then undermines basic cognitive processes that are necessary for educational and financial success. Study 2 is an experiment that tests how socioeconomic status stigma among students impacts a sense of campus belonging and academic-related outcomes, such as academic persistence. This study also tests targets that could reduce the negative impact of stigma. Study 3 involves community participants who report on their daily lives multiple times a day, to determine whether feeling mistreated due to their socioeconomic status causes them to anticipate similar feelings in the future, which may cause them to change how they interact with others and avoid resources designed to increase socioeconomic success. Studies 1 and 3 include a 1-year follow-up to measure longer-term changes in income, education, and employment. This project also contributes to NSF's efforts to broaden participation in STEM through a summer research program for underrepresented community college students and research support for graduate students. More broadly, this project brings attention to barriers that contribute to limited socioeconomic advancement and provides information for developing targeted intervention strategies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.