Is participation in high-status culture a signal of trustworthiness?

Abstract

Trust is essential for social interactions, cooperation and social order. Research has shown that social status and common group memberships are important determinants of receiving and reciprocating trust. However, social status and group membership can coincide or diverge-with potentially different effects. Our study contributes to the existing literature on the role of status and group membership by testing two separate trust-generating mechanisms against each other. We examine if individuals tend to place trust in high-status groups (irrespective of their own group membership) or, rather, if they tend to trust others with whom they share a common group membership. We assume that status group membership is signalled by cultural (musical) taste. This operationalization follows the theoretical reasoning of Bourdieu who argues that it is, above all, musical taste that classifies persons of different status. By demonstrating their "legitimate" cultural taste, upper-class members distinguish themselves from the middle and lower classes and signal their social status, thereby creating awe, respect and an air of trustworthiness. We report evidence from online experiments with incentivized trust games, which enable us to separate the two trust-generating mechanisms. We find no evidence that persons with "legitimate" tastes are generally trusted more. Instead, our results clearly demonstrate ingroup favouritism towards persons with a similar taste. Participants place more trust in members of their own group and expect them to be more trustworthy. In other words: members of taste-based groups trust each other more than members of different-taste-based groups. Interestingly, this group-based trust is not always justified inasmuch as received trust is not necessarily reciprocated more strongly by own group members. This suggests that ingroup favouritism is, at least in part, driven by false beliefs.

The sound of social class: Do music preferences signal status?

“…In Study 3, we found that people who prefer “lower” and “lower-middle class” music genres tend to show an ingroup bias, overrating the social class of the genre they prefer, whereas “upper-middle” and “upper-class” genres were consensually associated with the upper classes, regardless of personal preference. This is conceptually in line with Aidenberger et al’s (2020) finding that ingroup bias in trust is more pronounced among low-status (preference for folk music) than among high-status (preference for classical music) participants. The greater bias among those who prefer “lower-class” genres may reflect ingroup-protective motivation in line with social identity theorizing (Tajfel & Turner, 1979).…”

“…Looking at the extremes of the social spectrum, rap-hip hop was consistently perceived as typical of the lower class and classical music as typical of the upper class. The consensual association between music taste and social class is in line with the few existing studies, conducted in other countries (Aidenberger et al, 2020; Rentfrow et al, 2009), and confirms the idea that, in the eye of the observer, artistic preferences are markers of social standing, and hence are interpreted as status symbols (Goffman, 1951; Kraus et al, 2017).…”

“…Similarly, British adolescents thought that the ingroup (pupils at their own school) liked positively stereotyped music (e.g., dance, pop, indie) more, and negatively stereotyped music (e.g., classical music, jazz, heavy metal) less, than the outgroup (pupils at a different school; Tarrant et al, 2002, Study 1). Also, Aidenberger et al (2020) found that people placed more trust into others who shared their own music preferences, and this ingroup bias in trust was more pronounced among low-status (preference for folk music) than high-status participants (preference for classical music). However, they did not find any ingroup bias in music–social class associations.…”

“…Also, the need to mark social class through artistic preferences may vary over time as a function of changing levels of economic inequality (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2018). Although a considerable number of studies in the Bourdieusian tradition have investigated actual class differences in music taste, only few have explored how music and social classes are associated in people’s mind (Aidenberger et al, 2020; Reeves et al, 2015; Rentfrow et al, 2009). We argue that, for artistic tastes to become markers of social class, people need to agree on the meaning of cultural expression and endorse consensually held music–class stereotypes.…”

Sacrificial Worship (Qurban) Motivation Determinant Factors of Tuatunu Population in Pangkalpinang City

“…Thus, the higher a person's social status in society, the more privileged his position in society will be (Kim et al, 2020). According to Aidenberger et al (2020), people who have high social status are also connected with noble and trustworthy behavior because of their honesty.…”