Building bonds: A pre-registered secondary data analysis examining linear and curvilinear relations between socio-economic status and communal attitudes

Abstract

A large body of research points to differences in the communal orientation of people from a lower and higher socio-economic status (SES) background. However, direct evidence for differences in communal attitudes remains scant. In this pre-registered report, we test the hypothesis that SES impacts the incentive value of cues associated with bonding and social relations, thereby fostering differences in implicit and explicit communal attitudes. We further speculate that for people at the low end of the SES spectrum, the prevalence of discrimination, exclusion, and conflict means that relationships may have less of an incentive value. Thus, we hypothesise that the association between SES and communal attitudes follows a curvilinear trajectory and peaks at medium levels of SES. Testing these predictions in a dataset derived from the Attitudes, Identities, and Individual Differences (AIID) Study (Hussey, Hughes, & Nosek, 2018), we found no evidence supporting a linear or a curvilinear association between SES and communal attitudes. Instead, implicit and explicit communal attitudes did not vary across the SES spectrum. We discuss the implications of these findings and avenues for future research.