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A Brighter Future: The Effect Of Social Class On Responses To Future Debt, Harrison J. Schmitt, Lucas A. Keefer, Daniel Sullivan, Sheridan Stewart, Isaac F. Young

Faculty Publications

© 2020, PsychOpen. All rights reserved. The present study serves as an exploratory investigation of the role of social class in responses to the threat of future debt. Previous work has shown that individuals of high and low subjective social class differ in the ways that they respond to a broad range of threats and uncertainties about the future. Across three studies, we found that lower social class individuals expect more future debt and suffer greater attendant stress than higher class individuals (Study 1). We found that experimental manipulations of debt salience increased stress for lower class and not for …