Evaluating Complex Relations Within Social Class and Economic Inequality: A Translational Relational Density Theory Analysis

Classism occurs when behavior differentially favors members of a social class over members of other social classes and can occur along boundaries of social inequality. Relational framing can account for symbolic behavior underlying classism, emphasizing the transformation of social class functions to everyday decisions and economic consumption. The purpose of the present set of translational experiments was to explore the influence of relational behavior within a relational density theory (RDT; Belisle & Dixon, 2020) on symbolic economic classism. In Experiment 1, participants underwent a stimulus pairing observation procedure (SPOP) to establish a symbol as “rich” and another symbol as “poor.” A multidimensional scaling procedure was used to evaluate the relational volume and density of emergent classes that contained stimuli presented in the training and a test set of stimuli. Results revealed clear fractionated relational classes along the social dimensions of rich and poor following the training. In Experiment 2, participants underwent a similar training procedure and selected among various common objects/commodities (e.g., shirt, soda, garage, house) in a paired choice preference assessment, where the commodities contained the symbols denoting economic class. Preference for the commodities containing the “rich” symbol increased across all commodities, including the abstract commodity of “trust.” Taken together, these results support RDT as a theoretical framework to explore the development of social economic classism.