Pursuing social class and death anxiety
Description
Previous research has illustrated many factors that probably drive people to pursue higher social class. In this research, we argued that death anxiety motivated people to pursue higher social class. Two studies provided supportive evidence. Study 1 A total of 1847 adults who had work experiences participated in the present study via Sojump (www.wjx.cn). The survey was administered online. All participants need to sign a consent form before formal survey. During formal survey, participants first reported some demographic information, including gender, age, hukou (rural vs. urban residents), education, and household income. Then, subjective socioeconomic status (SES) was measured with the MacArthur scale (Adler, Epel, Castellazzo, & Ickovics, 2000), in which participants were asked to assess their current SES on a 10-rung ladder with greater number representing a higher SES. To measure individuals’ indirect death-related experience, we asked participants indicate the extent to which they agree on the statement: “I have bereavement experience in the last five years” . Thereafter, participants were asked to choose three out of seven factors that are deemed to be important in considering a job. These seven factors include two social-class relevant ones (income and status) and five social class irrelevant ones (professional counterparts, personal development, job welfare, settling down and working condition). If participants considered other factors beyond these options, they were required to choose “other” and wrote it down. Then participants needed to rank the three chosen factors in terms of their importance. Study 2 A total of 135 adults were used in the study. All participants completed this online experiment during one week. They were asked to sign the informed consent at first, and then reported some demographic information, including gender, age, household income, education level, and current occupation. Next, participants were randomly assigned into death anxiety condition or control condition following a typical protocol of mortality salient manipulation (Burke et al., 2010, Rosenblatt, et al., 1989). Subsequently, participants were introduced into another alleged unrelated study about conception cognitive survey. They were presented two questions about the meaning of top social class: 1) how much household income a top social class family should reach (unit: ten-thousand yuan), and 2) what level of education should a top social-class person reach. In addition, three items were used to measure individual’s motivation on pursuing high social class (adapted from Belmi & Pfeffer, 2016). All items were assessed on a 7-point scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Wei Cai, weicaicc@gmail.com