Aligning or Misaligning? the Interplay of Subjective and Objective Social Status in Ten High Income Countries over Two Decades

Subjective social status has attracted a renewed interest in recent sociological research, tapping a dimension of social stratification that was overlooked for decades. However, its relationship with objective social status remains understudied. We offer a novel way to examine this relationship by interpreting one’s subjective position as an individual adjustment mechanism to material inequalities. We address a fundamental research question: Upon what factors—individual characteristics, country, and period—do subjective social status and its (mis)alignment with objective status depend?

We mobilize 143,000 observations in the ISSP in ten countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the US) over twenty years (2002-2021) to analyze the interplay between a 10-step subjective social status scale and ISEI scores. We find that, overall, subjective status is slightly inflated and more narrowly distributed around its mean than the objective measure. At the individual level, the alignment of the two measures occurs among respondents in the socioeconomic middle, as well as among the middle-aged and people living in urban areas. Symbolically weaker groups (women and divorcees) also more accurately align their self-perception to their objective position because they tend not to inflate their subjective status.

At the macro level, alignment increases cyclically when unemployment grows and GDP growth declines, with people less likely to inflate their subjective position around 2008 and 2020. While these cycles are similar across countries, between-country differences in alignment persist over time, with respondents in East Asia and France consistently holding more accurate status perceptions than Americans, who tend to overestimate theirs. These between-country disparities cannot be explained by differences in levels of absolute social mobility, suggesting the presence of unobserved cultural mechanisms legitimizing the status quo beyond the social stratification system. Overall, we contend that subjective status inflation particularly reinforces the acceptance of higher levels of inequality.