The Class Tier List

what's classy and what's trashy? Survey results

This one’s simple - I gave people a survey with a whole bunch of items - people, traits, activities, aesthetics, etc. - and asked them to rank each one from low to high class.

Then I did factor analysis on this - basically a thing to capture trends in the way questions cluster - and found that there were two main spectrums by which people evaluated class: wealth, and aesthetic taste.

Our perception of class - are you high, low, or middle? - seems to be made primarily out of these two axes. For example, Coachella is associated with high wealth, but low aesthetic taste. Playing chess is associated with low wealth, but high aesthetic taste.

This survey is more casual - I only got roughly around 200 responses per item, and my responders tend to be American, white, ages 25-35, male, and nerdy. I’m not claiming this is perfectly random sample of the globe; think of this more as a snapshot of a certain culture’s read on what signals high vs. low class)

Each thing people rated in the survey is a dot above; the general zones are based on me eyeballing it.

Before you see the results, try to predict where you think where on the graph people placed the following:
Superbowl parties
Tradwives
Trips to Disneyland
Having long acrylic nails
Contributing to Wikipedia
Hardwood
Hiring a high-end escort
Asian people
Doing ayahuasca
Seeing a therapist as a child

The full graph with each labeled item is below: