Abstract
Little evidence exists to determine whether individual variations in objective income versus subjective social status would more strongly predict cognitive outcomes in adulthood. In the present study, we contrast the predictive validity of objective income against subjective social status on cognitive outcomes using two large-scale, general public samples. In Study 1, we cross-sectionally examined a sample of Singaporean adults (N = 848; 379 males; Mage = 37.19) to determine whether income or subjective social status would predict reasoning ability. In Study 2, we examined a sample of American adults (N = 1476; 694 males; Mage = 53.70) across approximately ten years using latent variable cross-lagged panel modelling to determine whether income or subjective social status would predict long-term episodic memory and executive function after accounting for baselines. Age, gender, education, employment status, and household size were controlled for. Results indicated that objective income predicted all cognitive outcomes in both studies, whereas subjective social status did not. Additionally in Study 2, reverse-causal pathways in which cognitive functioning was specified as a predictor of later income were not supported. Overall, the results suggest replicable, unidirectional links between objective income and multiple indices of cognitive functioning that were not found for subjective social status.
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The society variant of the scale measures a similar construct to the community variant used in the present research, but instead instructs participants to rank their standing in terms of their money, education, and jobs in comparison to their society. Previous work in which both variants of the MacArthur’s ladder were included found that the two variants were positively correlated with reasonably high magnitudes that suggest some overlap (Camelo et al., 2014; Cundiff et al., 2013), and meta-analytic evidence has also found that the two variants independently predicted the same constructs in the same directions with the same magnitudes, suggesting that they are similar, albeit independent constructs (Zell et al., 2018). Indeed, previous research has also utilized the community variant on its own as an indicator of subjective status in contrast to objective indicators such as income (e.g., Curhan et al., 2014; English et al., 2019). As such, the evidence generally suggests that the community variant of the scale can be used as a valid indicator of subjective social status in comparison with income. Nevertheless, we discuss potential limitations to this measure in the 6 section.
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Study 1 was funded by the Humanities and Social Sciences Seed Fund, National University of Singapore (R-581-000-234-646).
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Oh, V.Y.S., Yu, Z. & Tong, E.M.W. Objective Income But Not Subjective Social Status Predicts Short-Term and Long-Term Cognitive Outcomes: Findings Across Two Large Datasets. Soc Indic Res 162, 327–349 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02844-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02844-y