We regularly interact with people across race and class lines, but those conversations sometimes go wrong. Lower-status people fear facing discrimination; higher-status people fear being accused of discrimination; most agree that microaggressions happen but disagree on what defines them.
In a paper published in Psychological Science, Yale psychologist Wendy Berry Mendes observed how more and less affluent people interact. The results reveal a complicated picture of how our minds and bodies manage difference.
Based on the participants’ financial history, the research team assigned each person to the more affluent or less affluent group, then put them into 130 conversational pairs. Some pairs included participants from the same group, and some paired a more affluent person with a less affluent person (although participants weren’t told this). Mendes and her colleagues observed the participants’ nonverbal behavior and monitored their heart rates as they talked.
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The researchers first evaluated whether more affluent people showed discomfort—by fidgeting or mumbling—or attempted to dominate conversations when interacting with less affluent people.
They didn’t. Participants from upper- and lower-class groups appeared comfortable interacting across class lines, although people from both groups were more at ease talking to less affluent partners. Paradoxically, at the end of the exercise, both higher-class and lower-class participants were likelier to say they liked their conversation partner if that person was of the same class. For Mendes, this shows the strength of our instinct to prefer people who are more like us.
But while we might control our fidgeting and believe we feel comfortable in certain interactions, our bodies could tell a different story. “One thing you see as a psychophysiologist is that what people say and how their physiology responds are not always aligned,” Mendes said.
To peer “under the skin,” Mendes and her colleagues monitored the pre-ejection period (PEP) of participants’ heartbeats, which operates entirely outside of our control. If a participant’s PEP changed along with their conversation partner’s, that indicated emotional attunement.
Based on that data, less affluent participants were more attuned to their conversational partners, whatever their class standing. That finding lines up with other research suggesting that lower-status individuals are more alert to their surroundings, likely as a survival mechanism. Mendes’s research on race and attunement has similarly found that people of marginalized races are more attuned to others.
Despite being polite and comfortable, affluent participants showed no attunement with their lower-class conversational partners. They didn’t warm up to their class peers, either.
Can humans move beyond the hardwired preference we have for people like us, in order to get along better in diverse modern societies? While we may not have fully overcome our tribal instincts, Mendes sees hope for us to consciously learn to interact better with people across difference.
“Knowing that your natural inclination is to be more comfortable with people like you can cue you to try harder,” she said.
