An Experimental Test of What Socioeconomic Status is: It’s (almost) (mostly) all about the money

Socioeconomic status is thought to be a combination of education, income, and occupational prestige. At extremes, it may be easy to determine high or low SES, but the reality is much more nuanced as people with advanced degrees can earn much less than people with lesser education, such as a therapist with a master’s degree making $50,000/year and a nuclear power reactor operator with a general equivalency diploma making $100,000/year. A total of 284 participants were recruited via Prolific and by direct invitation from a curated list of published authors on topics in SES. A conjoint design was used to compare randomized side-by-side combinations of the three indicators, participants were asked to decide which person had the higher SES. Here we show, as predicted, income held the most weight for lay and expert participants, followed by education and then occupational prestige. We found that all academic participants, not just economists, favored income the most and academics valued education significantly more than non-academics. No differences were noted in the prioritization of income between academic and non-academic participants and no evidence was found that people tend to favor the SES traits they hold. Income is by far the most important predictor of someone’s SES, once experimentally divorced from education level and occupational prestige. We argue future research should either measures SES only using income, or a weighting scheme where 75% of a formative indicator is taken up by income, 20% by education levels, and 5% by occupational prestige. Theoretical implications for measurement, cross-cultural psychology, and the theoretical status of SES are discussed.