
Higher Social Classes Have an Exaggerated Belief That They Are More Capable - laurex
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/social-class-exaggerated-belief
======
ve55
Duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19991696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19991696)
(two days ago).

Keep in mind that the paper does clearly state:

>Furthermore, all three forms of social class were positively associated with
actual rank, indicating that those with relatively high social class did
objectively better on the flashcard game relative to their lower-class
counterparts

This is a poor title and article if you take even a brief moment to view the
actual correlations presented in the paper.

~~~
povertyworld
I find this the worst insult of being poor: to be assumed stupid.

But I mean, hey, if they did better on a flashcard game, then an unequal caste
system is justified after all!

~~~
14
Don’t worry not everyone thinks poor people are stupid. I am poor and know
poor people are not stupid. In fact I am so poor I had to learn how to change
so many broken things on my car it is now called Theseus Grand Voyager. I am
so poor I had to learn to bake bread and feed my family from scratch. I am so
poor that instead of buying the wooden building planks they have at Science
World that my kids loved to play with I had my dad teach me how to use his
table and chop saw and I made my own blocks out of scrap wood. I am rich in
knowledge and feel rich to have my necessities for me and my family met. Most
of all I am happy with my life. I just feel that I would not have learned
nearly as much having money and the ability to pay someone else to do things
for me.

------
codethief
This reminds me of the studies by Paul Piff:

[https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research/are-wealthy-more-
narcis...](https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research/are-wealthy-more-narcissistic)

In particular, he demonstrated that in a rigged game of Monopoly, where one
player e.g. starts off with more money than the others, that player will
sooner or later demonstrate signs of feeling entitled and, in some cases, even
attribute their victory at the end not to their initial advantage but to
simply playing better than the other participants:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean](https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean)

~~~
rjf72
I'd again mention the ongoing replication crisis in psychology.

People have specifically attempted to replicate Paul Piff's numerous studies
trying to assign various negative characteristics to those of upper social
class. The results did find some correlations maintained, such as those
between greed and unethical behavior, but Piff's keystone correlation between
social class and unethical behavior was completely unable to be replicated.

I do not think people understand how bad of shape psychology is in right now,
social psychology in particular. Social psychology replication studies tend to
be hitting around 20%. For instance once again the Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology comes up. It's interestingly enough the journal that
published the study that this link is discussing, as well as the journal that
Piff published in. Its current replication rate is 23%. [2]

[1] -
[https://www.collabra.org/article/10.1525/collabra.166/](https://www.collabra.org/article/10.1525/collabra.166/)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates)

~~~
gerbilly
> I do not think people understand how bad of shape psychology is in right
> now, social psychology in particular. Social psychology replication studies
> tend to be hitting around 20%.

Yes I think we do, at least on HN, because anytime any psychology study or
result is mentioned at least two threads popup up citing the replication
crisis.

The thing is, it kind of depends on how you define replication, also some of
these studies were done decades ago, society has changed since then, possibly
affecting the results.

How easy would it be to replicate the bystander apathy studies where people
were in a smoke filled room after 9/11, for example?¹

It definitely should be taken into account, but it's much easier to tear down
than to give a critical appraisal.

I don't mean to criticize your comment in particular, because it was actually
a good appraisal of this particular body of work.

I do think HN has some biases² and the tendency to shout "replication crisis"
in a self satisfied manner is one of the things that bug me the most about
HN.³

1:
[https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1969-03938-001](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1969-03938-001)

2: No politics, but in human affairs, everything is politics.

3: Especially since most of us on here are from the hard sciences, which
ironically are easier because they deal in concrete, measurable phenomena.

~~~
bloaf
One other thing to keep in mind about social psychology:

[http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-
res...](http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-response)

> Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all
> of social psychology. Richard et al (2003) found that fewer than 5% of all
> effects in social psychology exceeded r’s of .50. In contrast, nearly all
> consensual stereotype accuracy correlations and about half of all personal
> stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50.

That is, stereotypes are frequently better predictors of human behavior than
_bona-fide_ research in social psychology.

------
ericmcer
We are just animals, if someone in a low social tier is constantly blocked and
fed negative affirmations, while someone from a higher tier is constantly
granted access and positive affirmations, one is being trained to feel more
confident and capable.

If they dropped me into a town with a bunch of actors who all pretended to be
in awe of my intellect, I would begin to think of myself as some kind of
genius.

~~~
phkahler
And you might actually become smarter. Ones ability to do some things -
including mental tasks - is affected by their beliefs about their ability.
That's not to say you can do anything you believe you can, just that belief
can influence (not determine) ability.

~~~
corodra
What you’re describing is the amazing benefit of both blind faith and
confidence. There’s jokes about piano teachers teaching kids extremely
difficult classical sheets and the kids nailing it. Then someone says “how do
you get them to play such difficult music?”

“Stfu, don’t tell them it’s difficult.”

The older I get the more I realize most things are not difficult. I make them
more difficult than they are. If you’re in an environment where someone
encourages you that “you can nail this on the first or second try”, you
probably will. Most of my work is me winging it. Especially when others fail.
In things I really don’t have any civilized justifiable reason to even
attempt. But I, I don’t know, just do things. Mostly with research. But yea. I
started to find out, in the past... 5 years? ... that a lot of silver spoons
feel the same way. They just do things. And it works for them because they
don’t have the emotion of difficult or easy.

That’s probably the lesson in all of this. Do things. Don’t worry about easy,
difficult, credentials or sobriety.

~~~
rjf72
Chess is probably the clearest example of this. Chess is not especially
difficulty to become quite strong at - even as an adult. But there is an
important catch there. Your improvement is nonlinear and difficult to predict.
You can spend 6 months working tirelessly at the game and see no improvement.
One extremely typical pattern in it is 'stair stepping.' You don't gradually
increase in proportion to your efforts, you instead go up in spikes. You wake
up and suddenly you're e.g. 100 points stronger than you were than when you
went to bed.

This goes all the way to the top. Magnus Carlsen is currently the world
champion, one of the most dominant we've had in a long time, and arguably the
strongest player to ever live. And he had phenomenal success. He achieved his
grandmaster title at age 13 and was nearly the youngest grandmaster ever. But
here's [1] what's interesting. That's a graph of his rating progress - a much
more readable table is at the bottom. Carlsen was advancing meteorically
rapidly. Looking at his relative rating gains between each period:

\---

10/2001: Baseline (2072)

10/2002: +178

10/2003: +200

10/2004: +131

Then, as always, it happens:

10/2005: -11

\---

A player meteorically rising and spending immense amounts of energy on the
game suddenly manages to achieve nothing but an 11 point loss over more than a
year. Imagine if you, as an adult, were in the position and in spite of all
your efforts over the past year - you did nothing but lose 11 points. I've
coached people in that exact situation. And they tend to rapidly give up. Oh,
they just don't have the IQ for it. Maybe they're too old. Maybe they're doing
something wrong and start engaging in _genuinely_ wrong study habits. And so
on.

These 'plateau' type events happen to literally all chess players. So it leads
to the interesting thing that you'll find most chess players are both humble
and arrogant. Humble as years of sport against much better players (as is
required for improvement) will make you, but arrogant in the sense that they
will never say never - even when things look incredibly grim. In effect you
end up simultaneously humble and arrogant. I would expect that successful
entrepreneurs and successful chess players share many of the exact same
characteristics, as it's the same game in both endeavors.

[1] -
[https://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=1503014](https://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=1503014)

------
DoreenMichele
My son often talks of an animal, a dingo iirc, that wasn't socialized
normally. Maybe it was orphaned and raised by humans?

Dominance behaviors in the species are hard wired biologically, but submissive
behavior was learned behavior, so the animal in question never learned things
like how ho back down from a fight. So the animal stood its ground, even when
outnumbered and so forth. It simply had no other option, having not ever
learned any of the not hard wired behaviors necessary to do something else.

It ended up in charge of the pack.

~~~
mcguire
I believe the same thing happened at IBM in the 90s.

------
candybar
The methodology seems highly questionable. From the actual study
([https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-
pspi0000187.p...](https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-
pspi0000187.pdf))

"Social class was measured in three ways. To indicate subjective social class,
participants saw an image of a ladder that 'represents where people stand in
your country.' and selected the rung on which they felt they stood, relative
to other people in their country"

"However, when difference scores were used (or the alternative joint-testing
procedure), the conclusions were not so straightforward. Here, we found
support for Hypothesis 1 only in the case of subjective social class. The
difference score approach also showed that education and income were
negatively associated with overconfidence, directly contrasting the results
generated by the residual score approach."

So it's not so much that people from a higher social class are overconfident
but that overconfident people appear to be from a higher social class due to
their methodology and downstream assessment confirms their methodological
bias. It's quite incredible this received as much attention as it did. Also
this sample is limited to Mexican small-business owners applying for loans.

~~~
deogeo
> It's quite incredible this received as much attention as it did.

Almost any piece of western media tries to paint higher classes negatively, so
no, it's the opposite of incredible.

------
strken
An exaggerated belief of performance in a flash card game might not indicate
that belief is exaggerated in general. Maybe they have a heuristic like "I'm
good at things" which gives a pretty accurate estimate of their performance on
day-to-day tasks, and flash card games are an edge case that they're not good
at estimating.

~~~
Data_Junkie
Please. Money lies. We all know it. People with money are deferred to,
emotionally coddled, and ALWAYS given the benefit of the doubt. It is
literally the foundation of Western culture. Those who have always had it live
in a very delusional world that has always lied to them about their abilities.
That's how we end up with a " very stable genius" as the "leader" of the
western world.

~~~
imnotlost
But the noble poor man (or the noble savage if we look to the past) never
cheats, lies, steals, etc. And if they do it’s for survival or family or some
other sympathetic cause.

Or we’re all humans with normal human traits and egos to rationalize just
about anything given the right circumstances.

~~~
Data_Junkie
Nobody said they didn't. Point was that people with "old" money who have
always been of a higher social class than most believe falsley that they are
better than they are, for the previously stated reasons. Yes, they are humans,
and that's what happens to humans who are given too much. One of the many
horrid things that happens to normal humans.

------
throw2016
There is a replication crisis [1] in the social sciences and most studies are
not being replicated. [2]

Here is a study that is not able to replicate the most referenced study on
subsaharan and Africa iq [3]. The tests were done on uneducated people,
handicapped people, people in remote areas and in poor conditions ie under
trees which is not the recommended test procedure. Higher scores were also
intentionally dumped in favour of poorer scores for vague reasons with
evidence of data massaging.

This kind of 'science' is extremely damaging especially when cherry picked
results and sweeping conclusions that these kind of studies do not and cannot
support are widely cited outside the scientific context by bigots and racists
to construct a narrative that dehumanize others. The nobel laurette James
Watson expressed 'gloom about Africa' on the basis of these studies.

There are a lot of well known funds like the pioneer fund [1] and volker fund
that have spent tens of decades on 'race' science and that formed a lot of
basis for Charles Murray's bell curve. There are not hundreds of heavily
funded organizations in Africa and Asia trying to prove others are somehow
lower iq or 'inferior'. This effort has been ongoing for over 250 years, first
it was brain size and now its iq and evolutionary psychology. What exactly is
iq measuring, can we measure something that we don't understand?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis)

[2] [https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2018/8/27/17761466/ps...](https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2018/8/27/17761466/psychology-replication-crisis-nature-social-science)

[3]
[http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010....](http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010.pdf)

[4]
[https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund](https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund)

------
rjf72
The paper that this article is discussing was published in The Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology. That's interesting for two reasons. The
first is that it's a rather well regarded journal with a very high impact
rate. The other is because it's one of the journals that's driving the ongoing
replication crisis plaguing psychology. [1]

In particular the journal this was published in was found to have an overall
replication rate of 23%. Another way of putting this is that if you assumed
the exact opposite of everything you read that was published in that journal
(e.g. - what they claim is statistically significant, is not actually
significant) you'd be vastly more informed than a person who took what was
published in the journal at face value.

Of course that does not mean that this study is 'false', but you should take
it with the same degree of credulity that you'd take something published in a
venue when you know 77% of what is published _is_ false. I mention this
largely because I think there's a substantial degree of dissonance between the
crisis in psychology and people continuing to take studies in psychology at
face value. It's illogical.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates)

~~~
nosianu
> _if you assumed the exact opposite of everything you read that was published
> in that journal ... you 'd be vastly more informed_

I don't think the opposite of not knowing is knowing (the opposite fact) :-)

That said, I agree with your main point on an even wider level. I read such
very general headlines and conclusions - and when I read the actual paper
there is a very _specific_ and very limited experiment, with very specific
people in a very specific context. I'm always left wondering how one gets from
such a specific thing to such generalizations, especially when it's about such
a complex subject as human behavior where tiny variations can produce
radically different outcomes.

\---

PS: Animats says it's paywalled, but the PDF on the linked page is accessible
and has the data and details? About the N=150,949 part:

> _EFL collected the data from small-business owners at the time they were
> applying for a loan at a microfinance institution (MFI) in Mexico from 2015
> to 2017. As part of the loan application process, a prospective borrower had
> to complete a short psychometric assessment developed by EFL._

That's just what I said, it's very specific.

> _The psychometric assessment that EFL developed consists of many modules,
> one of which is relevant for the purposes of the present investigation: the
> flashcard game. The flashcard game is a cognitive test on memory and
> executive functioning. In the flashcard game, participants are presented
> with an image; after pressing a key, they are shown a second image.
> Participants are then asked to indicate whether the second image matches the
> first. The flashcard game is scored based on whether or not the participant
> correctly identifies a match._

and

> _At the end of the flashcard exercise, participants saw a question that
> asked them to estimate how well they think they did on this particular
> exercise relative to other applicants.... This question was added to the
> psychometric application for the purpose of this study_

I don't know about others, but I have a hard time seeing such tests justifying
the headlines.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_I 'm always left wondering how one gets from such a specific thing to such
generalizations_

In this case, I will suggest that someone is simply marrying general "common
knowledge" to the study specifics.

Classism is very real. I've become very aware of its effects in recent years.

My mother's mother came from a low level noble family that sold the title. I
grew up in a nice suburb, daughter of a retired decorated soldier. I was one
of the top people in my high school, arguably one of the top people in my
state academically, based on placing 3rd in a statewide competition and being
a National Merit Scholarship winner.

In recent years, I've been quite poor and spent several years homeless. My
social experience suggests that my recent poverty completely wipes out the
value of my academic accomplishments etc in the eyes of a great many people.

It's been a huge problem for trying to get my life back. In the eyes of many
people, I'm too poor to be considered competent enough to hire for anything.

~~~
rjf72
I think few people would disagree with you. But this is really the biggest
danger. If you look at the studies that have been let's kindly say 'found to
be less than well supported', you'd also find many that you would intuitively
agree with the outcome of, or at least want to agree with. Psychology, and
social psychology in particular, has a habit of confirming our biases and
making us feel good. This, in turn, takes us off our guard for bad science.
And by "us", I think this is something that's likely even issue within the
field itself. You don't get a 23% replication rate without there being some
very severe problems within a field.

Take for contrast, astrology. We all now know it's obviously fake. It even
relies upon things we know are wrong, such as assuming planets can magically
stop and start going the other way in their orbital trajectory. That
assumption was based on an optical illusion driven by the assumption that
everything revolved around the Earth. But for hundreds of years astrology was
treated as respectable a science as any other. And I think it was for a
similar reason. So compelling and entertaining are the correlations for
astrology that even today you have millions, if not billions, of people that
still partake in it to varying degrees.

The psychology replication crisis is, in my opinion, hurting science as a
whole. We should not indulge bad science even if it happens to tell us what we
want to hear. It's making a mockery of what science is truly about.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_I think few people would disagree with you. But this is really the biggest
danger._

I was merely describing how such happens, not defending the process.

 _Take for contrast, astrology. We all now know it 's obviously fake._

You happen to be speaking to someone who has studied astrology in earnest and
believes it has some merit. Astrology is not immune to the rubric "90% of
everything is crap." "Sun sign" or "popular" astrology is often quite badly
done, but serious astrology is highly mathematical and the practice of marking
retrogrades is a perfectly accurate assessment of where those planets appear
in relation to the earth because it is a geocentric model, having nothing
whatsoever to do with a scientific belief in a geocentric model rather than a
solar system.

Astrology is part of the spiritual beliefs of many people. It wouldn't be okay
to casually suggest that Christians are nutters for believing Jesus rose from
the dead.

