Punching Down: People Justify More Police Force Against Lower-Than Higher-SES Male Civilians

Understanding socioeconomic status (SES)-based stereotyping and discrimination is imperative but is seldom focal to intergroup relations research in social psychology. In the present work, we examine how people differentially justify police force across civilians’ SES. Across three experiments, we found that perceivers justify more police force to regulate the behavior of lower-SES than higher-SES men. These SES-based biases remain even when holding civilians’ race constant. We also found that stereotypes of lower-SES men as both less sensitive to pain and more physically threatening relate to the belief that they are deserving of more police force than higher-SES men. The final study suggests that physical threat stereotypes may account for the SES-based biases better than pain sensitivity stereotypes. This research contributes to important social psychological theories by increasing understanding of class-based stereotypes and their outcomes and has practical implications for considering how lay impressions of police-civilian interactions could have real consequences.