Class identity—whether a person identifies as upper, middle, or lower class—shapes how we behave, who we interact with, and many other fundamental life choices. But despite its ubiquity, the formation of class identity is not well understood.
“We know a lot about consequences of class identity,” explained Stephen Antonoplis, a social personality psychologist at the University of California, Riverside. Previous studies have shown that class identity permeates much of our lives: Identifying with a higher class is linked with better physical and mental health outcomes (Cundiff & Matthews, 2017; Tan et al., 2020) and favoring more conservative policies (Brown-Iannuzzi et al., 2015). Other research has shown it’s possible to briefly manipulate someone’s class identity and change how a person views themselves (Antonoplis & Chen, 2021; Tan & Tai, 2025).
But how this identity morphs over a longer period of time, and how it’s influenced by historic events, remained a mystery. The Great Recession, a period of global market decline spanning from late 2007 to 2009, provided an opportunity to study this unanswered question. “It’s a rare external event that would likely affect most people’s class identity,” Antonoplis said.
In a recent paper in Psychological Science , Antonoplis and his colleagues found that the recession not only affected many people financially, but it altered the social and economic class that people identified with.
The new research used four longitudinal datasets with class-identity data on American citizens, stretching from the mid 1950s to the early 2020s. These included the American National Election Studies , the General Social Survey , the World Values Survey , and the Health and Retirement Study , all of which are publicly available and most are funded by U.S. federal science agencies. For each dataset, the researchers used an analysis called an interrupted time-series model, which allowed them to examine how class identity changed before the recession, during the recession, and in the years following.
“We consistently found that class identity decreased on average following the recession,” Antonoplis said. In other words, the study found that Americans perceived themselves as a lower class after the recession than they did prior to this cataclysmic event. Even many years after, class-identity perception failed to rebound to prerecession levels, Antonoplis added. People still thought of themselves as a lower class, with more individuals saying they are part of the working and middle class more than 10 years after the market crash.
This confirms a theory that had long been posited: that class identity is not just a static psychological phenomenon—it is a flexible entity that is affected by large societal events. This was an idea that “just hadn’t really been tested yet,” Antonoplis said, so these findings are “a win for our theories of how people form their class identity socially.”
This study also “joins the chorus of other research on the ways larger social structures and historical events can shape the psychology of individual people,” Antonoplis added. It suggests that social structures can change and those changes can affect “how people think about themselves and how they make sense of the world.”
The next step for researchers, the study emphasized, is to dig into the mechanisms and consequences of these class-identity shifts. The Great Recession was a period of enormous change, where many Americans lost money , homes, and jobs, as well as a time of cultural movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, which reshaped how we thought about the world. All of these events likely affected how people thought about their class identity.
New social and political movements also arose after the recession, and it’s important to know how shifts in class identity may have played a role in motivating people to join these movements, Antonoplis said. The researchers noted that it’s important see if the trends in the United States replicate in other countries that underwent the Great Recession, such as Canada or Japan.
“[Social] structures do, in fact, matter to the constructs that we typically care about in psychology,” Antonoplis said. “Hopefully the paper encourages other psychologists to study these kinds of things and ask these kinds of questions.”
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Cundiff, J. M., & Matthews, K. A. (2017). Is subjective social status a unique correlate of physical health? A meta-analysis. Health Psychology , 36 (12), 1109–1125.
Tan, J. J. X., Kraus, M. W., Carpenter, N. C., & Adler, N. E. (2020). The association between objective and subjective socioeconomic status and subjective well-being: A meta-analytic review . Psychological Bulletin , 146 (11), 970–1020.
Brown-Iannuzzi, J. L., Lundberg, K. B., Kay, A. C., & Payne, B. K. (2015). Subjective status shapes political preferences . Psychological Science , 26 (1), 15–26.
Antonoplis, S., & Chen, S. (2021). Time and class: How socioeconomic status shapes conceptions of the future self . Self and Identity , 20 (8), 961–981.
Tan, J. J. X., & Tai, A. Y. E. (2025). Perception of socioeconomic status: A meta-analysis of manipulations . Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin .
Antonoplis, S., Garcia-Cardenas, J. E., Graham, E. K., & Mroczek, D. K. (2026). The 2008 Great Recession lowered Americans’ class identity . Psychological Science , 37 (1), 18–29.
Psychological Science
The 2008 Great Recession Lowered Americans’ Class Identity
19-Dec-2025