Middle-Income Groups Perceive Themselves as Belonging to a Higher Social Class When National Income Inequality is Greater

Subjective social class reflects individuals’ beliefs about their position within a social hierarchy and is associated with various important life outcomes. While many studies have investigated the psychological consequences of subjective social class, few have explored its determinants, particularly at the contextual level. This study addresses this gap by examining how individual-level income and contextual-level income inequality interact in predicting subjective social class. The authors used multilevel modeling to analyze repeated cross-national survey data from 50 countries over three decades, including a total of 311,669 participants across 288 country-year units. The preregistered interaction was not observed, but parametric and nonparametric tests provided evidence for a polynomial interaction between income and inequality: as national income inequality increased, middle-income groups perceived themselves as holding a higher social class, while the perceptions of high- and low-income groups remained unchanged. The authors discuss the role of social comparison processes and the economic structure of unequal societies in explaining the inflated social-class perceptions among middle-income groups in times of greater income inequality.