Socioeconomic status differences in agentic and communal self-concepts: Insights from 6 million people across 133 nations.

Abstract

Do people of different socioeconomic status (SES) differ in how they see themselves on the Big Two self-concept dimensions of agency and communion? Existent research relevant to this theoretically and socially important question has generally been indirect: It has relied on distant proxies for agentic and communal self-concepts, narrow operationalizations of SES, comparatively small samples, and data from few nations/world regions. By contrast, the present research directly examines the associations between SES and agentic and communal self-concepts, relies on well-validated measures of agency and communion, examines three complementary measures of SES, and uses data from 6 million people (years of age: M = 26.12, SD = 11.50) across 133 nations. Overall, people of higher status saw themselves as somewhat more agentic and as slightly less (or negligibly less) communal. Crucially, those associations varied considerably across nations. We sought to explain that variation with 11 national characteristics and found only three of them to be robustly relevant: National religiosity and pathogen load curbed status differences in agentic self-concepts, and income inequality amplified status differences in communal self-concepts. Our discussion develops theory to explain the importance of national religiosity, pathogen load, and income inequality for socioeconomic status differences in agentic and communal self-concepts and it also describes the substantial societal implications of those differences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).