2025-2028 | FWO
Against the background of growing societal discontent among lower status groups and concerns about the dominance of the higher educated in society, this project aims to achieve a better understanding of the particularities of education-based status processes by systematically comparing it with groups based on more purely economic grounds. To that end, we seek to answer three specific RQ’s that refer to the origins and consequences of education-based status and which cover the cognitive (RQ1), emotional/social (RQ2) and strategic (RQ3) dimensions of social status. RQ1: What does a high/low education signal to others, how does this compare with categories based on income/wealth, and are these characteristics related to social identity and socio-political attitudes? RQ2: Does education-based status lead to a sense of entitlement that can be measured and used in experimental research (RQ2a)? And if so, what effects does the activation of a sense of entitlement have for (political) behaviour (RQ2b)? RQ3: How do dominant groups react when the status quo concerning relations of dominance is openly questioned? To answer these questions we rely both on cross-sectional survey data (RQ1, Q2a & WP3) as well as on population-based experiments (RQ2b & RQ3) that enable us to assess whether the manipulation in terms of (a) category salience or (b) threat of the status quo result in adaptations of thoughts and behaviour.
