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This chapter discusses how differences in social class affect a variety of psychological processes and outcomes. In particular, it discusses how relatively higher class individuals are more likely to focus on the self—that is, emphasizing personal goals, feelings, and interests—compared to working-class individuals, who pay greater attention to the social context and their relationships with close others. In support of this claim, it discusses evidence of social class differences in values, neural processes, and higher level reasoning. It also explores the dynamic nature of the social class construct, looking at the difficulties people encounter when shifting to a relatively higher class and the historical trends that suggest global shifts in social class structure within societies. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of understanding social class when looking at various psychological outcomes. At the same time, they challenge researchers to consider the complexity of social class when studying its effects.

How do intraindividual changes in wisdom-related characteristics of cognitive broadening—open-minded reflection on challenging situations, consideration of change, and epistemic humility—relate to subjective well-being over time? To test this relationship, we performed cross-lagged panel analyses from three waves of the national U.S. sample taken across 20 years, utilizing a cross-validation approach: (i) conduct exploratory analyses on a random subset of data, (ii) preregister hypotheses and methods, and (iii) cross-validate preregistered hypotheses on the other random subset of the data. We found that broadening attitudes predicted greater affect balance and life satisfaction in later years, but not vice-versa. The effect was robust when controlling for trait-level broadening well-being associations, as well as sociodemographic characteristics, openness, and general cognitive abilities. The direction of the positive longitudinal relationship between broadening attitudes and subjective well-being has implications for major existing theories of adult development and subjective well-being.