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

美国有近4000万人生活在贫困中。攀登社会经济阶梯需要克服许多障碍。这个项目提供了一种新颖的心理障碍分析，这种心理障碍使社会向上流动变得如此困难：因为在社会经济阶梯上处于较低的位置而感到耻辱是有压力的，这种压力破坏了提高一个人的教育、职业和经济地位的能力。在美国，社会经济地位较低的人可能会觉得自己被污名化，而美国是一个信奉“提高自己地位的美国梦”的国家。经历与耻辱相关的压力会引发恶性循环，导致获得更高社会经济地位的障碍。这项工作考察了引导低社会经济地位自我实现本质的原因和后果，并测试了新的目标，以消除所有美国人走向繁荣的障碍。这个项目测试了周期性社会耻辱压力模型的假设，该模型提出，由耻辱感引起的压力会破坏向上社会流动所需要的东西。研究1是一项针对大学生的实验，目的是测试由于社会经济地位低下而感到耻辱是否会导致生理压力，从而破坏教育和经济成功所必需的基本认知过程。研究2是一个实验，测试学生的社会经济地位耻辱如何影响校园归属感和学业相关成果，如学业坚持。这项研究还测试了可以减少耻辱感负面影响的目标。研究3涉及社区参与者，他们每天多次报告他们的日常生活，以确定由于他们的社会经济地位而感到受到虐待是否会导致他们预期未来会有类似的感受，这可能会导致他们改变与他人互动的方式，并避免使用旨在增加社会经济成功的资源。研究1和研究3包括为期1年的随访，以衡量收入、教育和就业的长期变化。该项目还有助于NSF通过对代表性不足的社区大学生的夏季研究计划和对研究生的研究支持来扩大STEM的参与。更广泛地说，该项目引起了人们对限制社会经济发展的障碍的关注，并为制定有针对性的干预策略提供了信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.