About Face: Seeing Class and Race

Abstract

People’s social class, and the perceptions of their social class are embedded in an institutional context that has important ramifications for one’s life opportunities and outcomes. Research on first impressions has found that people are relatively accurate at judging a variety of traits such as perceived sexual orientation and income, but there is a paucity of research that investigates whether people are also accurate at judging wealth or class. In this article, we first investigate whether people understand the distinction between income and wealth. Then, using a novel dataset, we examine whether people are accurate at identifying the income and wealth levels of individuals across racial and ethnic groups by facial cues alone. We find that participants understand the meaning of income, but not wealth. Additionally, we find that perceivers categorize class more accurately than by sheer chance, using minimal facial cues, but perceivers are particularly inaccurate when categorizing high-income and high-wealth Black and Latinx subjects.