Optimistic or Pessimistic? Estimating Social Mobility Beliefs and Related Perceptual Inaccuracy in China

This study focuses on the subjective evaluation of the overall social mobility, namely, mobility beliefs in China. Using a quasi-experimental vignette design in a originally collected Web survey (N=3003), we constructed a “rank-rank correlation” measure of educational and income mobility beliefs and compared them with corresponding objective mobility indicators (rank-rank correlation of intergenerational education/income percentiles extracted from multiple waves of survey data and census data). By such comparison, we try to accurately estimate patterns of perceptual bias on social mobility. The comparison between subjective and objective social mobility reveals the complexity of mobility belief biases in China: (1) Optimistic belief of absolute mobility, where people overestimate the likelihood of upward mobility from lower family background, particularly for education; (2) Optimistic belief of relative educational mobility, where people underestimate the inter-generational persistence of education (parent-child educational rank-rank correlation); (3) Pessimistic belief of relative income mobility, where people overestimate the inter-generational persistence of income (parent-child income rank-rank correlation). Results from the multilevel linear model analysis further show that the aforementioned patterns of perceptual bias do not vary according to respondent characteristics and may therefore be widespread.