Having a diverse workforce has numerous benefits to an organization, with recent MIT research highlighting that the most diverse workplaces tend to be the most profitable. A lot of conversations around diversity focus on identity-based factors such as race and gender, but there is a growing appreciation for the importance of thought diversity to a team.
A recent study from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business took this a step further and explored the impact of class diversity to the success of a team.
The study focused particular attention on what the authors refer to as ‘social class transitioners’, who are people that have managed to progress between socioeconomic classes during their life, and it emerged that those who were able to do that brought particular value to the workplace.
“People who transition between classes can learn to relate to people in a more skilled way, and they are incredibly helpful in groups, as they can understand people from all walks of life,” the researchers say. “However, it can also be an exhausting and even isolating experience for that person.”
Over-inflated opinions
The need for a class-diverse workforce is further reinforced by a second study that was recently published by the American Psychological Association, which found that people of higher social class tend to have an exaggerated belief in their abilities, especially compared to their lower-class peers. What’s more, this over-confidence often allows them to bluff their way into positions of power.
“Advantages beget advantages. Those who are born in upper-class echelons are likely to remain in the upper class, and high-earning entrepreneurs disproportionately originate from highly educated, well-to-do families,” the researchers explain. “Our research suggests that social class shapes the attitudes that people hold about their abilities and that, in turn, has important implications for how class hierarchies perpetuate from one generation to the next.”
The researchers conducted a number of experiments that aimed to explore the link between overconfidence and social class, and subsequently how this might influence our perceptions of those people’s ability. One of these involved over 150,000 business owners in Mexico who were applying for a business loan. Their social class was determined via information about their income, level of education and their perceived standing in society. Each participant was also required to complete a psychological assessment that was used as part of the application to determine their credit worthiness.
The actual scores from this test was then compared with the scores the participants thought they would get. Almost universally, those with higher levels of education, income and perceived social class thought they would perform significantly better than their lower-class peers.
Additional experiments achieved a similar result, with those of higher social class universally having undue confidence in their abilities, despite the results of these tests showing that abilities were pretty consistent regardless of the class of participants.
Translating into the workplace
The researchers then attempted to replicate a work situation by again asking participants to complete a trivia-related test, to predict how they performed relative to their peers and complete a survey to ascertain their social class. This time however, they were called back in to undergo a job interview style scenario, with several hundred volunteers then tasked with watching the video of each interview and rating the competence of the ‘interviewee’ from the impressions they gave off during the interview.
As before, the volunteers from a higher social class were more confident in their abilities than was warranted, but crucially, this overconfidence translated into more assured performances during the interview process. This resulted in the judges regarding the candidates as being better than they actually were.
“Individuals with relatively high social class were more overconfident, which in turn was associated with being perceived as more competent and ultimately more hirable, even though, on average, they were no better at the trivia test than their lower-class counterparts,” the researchers explain.
The authors hypothesise that this could be down to the different values and attitudes of the working and middle class volunteers participating in the research. For instance, they suggest that those in the middle classes are socialized to differentiate themselves from their peers. They’re also conditioned to confidently express their views, ideas and opinions, even if they lack the knowledge to do so accurately.
Working class people lack this conditioning, and are instead socialized to act with humility and authenticity, whilst knowing their place in the social hierarchy.
It’s a finding that the authors believe challenges the notion of illusory superiority, which posits that people tend to think of themselves as being better than average in many tasks, despite this being a mathematical impossibility. Instead, this fallacy may be largely the preserve of those in the upper classes of society.
“Our results suggest that finding solutions to mitigate class inequalities may require a focus on subtle and seemingly harmless human tendencies,” the authors conclude. “Although people may be well meaning, these inequalities will continue to perpetuate if people do not correct for their natural human tendency to conflate impressions of confidence with evidence of ability.”
