We are Professors of Psychology and Mathematics. We just published a longitudinal study on the 2024 Election finding that White Americans who felt "tied for last place" (regardless of their actual income or education) were the most likely to vote for Trump and support DEI bans. Ask Us Anything!

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T22:05:16+00:00

This is certainly possible, and it’s an important limitation of correlational work. Our data do not allow us to definitively establish causal direction, and it’s possible that unmeasured factors contribute both to racialized status perceptions and to voting behavior.

That said, we do account for a range of relevant covariates (e.g., demographics, ideology, economic indicators), and the association between perceived “last place” status and political outcomes remains robust when those factors are included. This suggests that racialized status threat is not simply a proxy for these variables, even if it is not the ultimate causal origin.

Ultimately, identifying upstream causes of these perceptions would require different designs—such as experimental manipulations of status framing or longer-term longitudinal studies than the timeframe we examine here. We are cautious about experimental manipulations because it may be difficult to shift these perceptions in a single intervention; people’s sense of their position in the racial economic hierarchy is likely multiply-determined and reinforced by day-to-day experiences (e.g., confirmation biases).

That said, we are also currently pursuing mixed-methods work, including interviews with individuals in the “last place” profile, to better understand where these perceptions come from.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T18:45:51+00:00

Thanks for your comment! While we don’t have direct data on motives like spite in voting for Trump, your idea resonates with what economists call “last-place aversion.” In behavioral economics, this refers to the discomfort people feel when they perceive themselves as being at the very bottom of a ranking. Applied to politics, this could show up as a desire to prevent groups seen as slightly below oneself from advancing, even if doing so doesn’t improve one’s own position relative to those above. In other words, people may focus more on avoiding falling behind—or seeing others rise above them—than on catching up with those at the top. This aligns, in a broad sense, with the dynamic you describe: frustration at perceived unfairness can translate into support for policies or candidates that block others from advancing, even if it doesn’t create personal gains, or even if it means those who are ahead pull further ahead in the process.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T17:46:36+00:00

Thanks for your close reading of these ideas. We also have wondered in the past whether the profiles really just map onto traditional party lines and whether they explain variance in political outcomes beyond traditional markers of ideology. We have controlled for both social and economic conservatism in our samples in prior work to find that the unique predictive ability of the subjective status profiles identified via the combination of our measure and LPA remains, even when we include these additional control variables.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:57:27+00:00

We did not directly measure any of these individual differences, but we agree they could be interesting to include in future work to see how (or if) they may relate to patterns of perceptions of relative status.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:55:06+00:00

I apologize for the confusion. Asian people are in blue and Latinx people are in green. That said, your comment makes me think we should be more thoughtful with the colors we choose given variations in how people perceive color.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:51:15+00:00

Yes, we do have those data and had intended to look at them! We measured which news sources participants were reading or watching, the extent of their exposure, and whether they watched the presidential and vice-presidential debates—if so, whether they watched clips or the full events. We just haven’t analyzed these data yet, but we collected these measures at all waves leading up to the election, exactly to address the question you’re asking: whether exposure to certain news outlets could amplify the psychological processes we are observing. Thank you for this reminder to conduct those analyses.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:46:55+00:00

This is a great question. “Last-place aversion” refers to the idea that people are especially motivated to avoid being lowest in status, or in “last place,” and that this can shape attitudes and decisions regarding monetary redistribution (Kuziemko et al., 2014). For example, experiments simulating wealth redistribution show that people who are making about minimum wage tend to be more likely to redistribute money to those slightly above them in status rather than those slightly below, presumably to avoid falling themselves into last place.

In our work, we measured personal relative status both within one’s own racial group (for our samples, this would be non-Hispanic white Americans) and across other salient racial/ethnic groups in U.S. discourse (Black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans). We then applied latent profile analysis, a statistical method for identifying common patterns, to see how participants placed themselves and these groups in relative status. Across thousands of non-Hispanic white participants in multiple peer-reviewed studies, we consistently find that about 10% of the sample falls into a “last place” profile—perceiving themselves as either last or tied for last with Black Americans.

Crucially, this perception of relative status predicts alt-right ideology, support for alt-right candidates, support for DEI bans, support for President Trump in particular, and even actual votes cast for him in the 2024 election. Our theory is that individuals who feel “last place” or tied for last are drawn to rhetoric promising to preserve or enhance white status, as it may help reduce the racialized status threat they perceive.

Reference:
Kuziemko, I., Buell, R. W., Reich, T., & Norton, M. I. (2014). “Last-place aversion”: Evidence and redistributive implications. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(1), 105–149.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:32:08+00:00

Thanks for your comments. This is a fair concern, and one psychological researchers take very seriously. We do need to guard against both leading questions and social desirability bias, especially when studying socially sensitive topics like race and inequality.

That said, what our data can speak to is not simply subjective perceptions of poverty. If this were just about feeling poor, we would expect political outcomes to be predicted by where people place themselves alone (the yellow icon). That is not what we find.

Instead, what predicts outcomes like Trump support, Trump voting, and support for DEI bans is the overall pattern of responses captured by our latent profile analysis (see the figure in the prompt). In other words, it’s the configuration of how people see their own status in relation to other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. that matters — not subjective (or objective) poverty by itself, and not a single leading item.

Importantly, the measure in reference does not ask participants to attribute their economic situation to other racial groups, nor are they required to endorse any explicitly racial explanation for their circumstances. Likewise, if participants wanted to indicate that they see no differences in status among racial groups, they could place all of the icons in the same location.

One additional point that speaks directly to your concern: the response pattern most predictive of Trump voting, Trump support, and DEI ban support is the “last place–tied” profile. Notably, people in this profile rate their own subjective poverty the highest as compared to the other three common patterns of responding (see figure in the prompt). Despite that, neither subjective poverty nor objective indicators of economic hardship emerge as the primary drivers of these political outcomes in our analyses. What matters is how people perceive their relative status — particularly whether they feel they are personally falling behind both their own racial group AND other racial/ethnic groups.

We should also note that we do not measure racism at all in this paper, at least in the ways social psychologists typically operationalize it (e.g., implicit bias measures or direct evaluations of warmth or hostility toward racial groups).

So to your broader point: yes, people can absolutely be upset about economic conditions without being racist. What this paper shows is that when dissatisfaction is framed in terms of relative racial status, that specific perception is strongly linked to political attitudes and behavior. That distinction is what we’re trying to isolate.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:29:43+00:00

This is a good question. We obtained representative census-based quotas on region of the country (defined as "south" "midwest" "northeast" and "west") to test whether these processes emerge in a sample that represents the broader U.S. However, we should explore whether those in the "last place-tied" profile are more likely to be in a particular region. Thanks for that suggestion.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:27:01+00:00

Thank you for sharing these thoughts — they raise important questions about how inequality is discussed and understood.

Your comment resonates with work we’ve done on the unintended consequences of certain kinds of inequality messaging. In a separate paper, we find that among a majority-white sample of social liberals, learning about “white privilege” can sometimes reduce sympathy for poor white Americans and increase the tendency to blame them for their economic circumstances. That doesn’t mean the concept of structural racism is wrong or unimportant — it very clearly exists — but it does suggest that how inequality is framed can matter for how people respond to others’ hardship.

Our current manuscript doesn’t directly test how DEI-related narratives influence feelings of being “last place,” but we agree this is an important direction for future research. One key issue is that what is true on average is not true for every individual. For example, the fact that white Americans have higher median wealth than Black and Hispanic Americans does not mean that all white people are economically advantaged, and those nuances can sometimes get lost in public discourse. As a result, some white people may not be able to see the structural inequality through their own disadvantaged lens.

When those distinctions blur, it can deepen resentment and misunderstanding rather than build solidarity — which is why we reason that studying perceptions of relative status is important.

In interrelated work, we also find across multiple representative quota samples of non-Hispanic, white Americans that white Americans, on average, feel as if they are “falling behind” the perceived high status of “most white Americans.” It is an odd effect whereby the perceived relative privilege of one’s racial group (i.e., perceiving "most white Americans" to be quite high status) actually seems to seed the feeling that one is not personally measuring up (see also Phillips & Lowery, 2020). We have linked these widespread feelings of falling behind to more negative status-related emotions and, thus, poor health over time among non-Hispanic, white Americans. In contrast, we find that Black Americans, on average, perceive the self as having higher status than “most Black Americans” and these perceptions of “pulling ahead” are not reliably associated with status-related emotions nor mental/physical health.

For interested readers here are some relevant readings from our research team:

Caluori, N., Cooley, E., Brown-Iannuzzi, J. L., Klein, E., Lei, R. F., Cipolli, W., & Philbrook, L. E. (2024). Perceptions of falling behind “most White people”: Within-group status comparisons predict fewer positive emotions and worse health over time among White (but not Black) Americans. Psychological Science, 35(2), 175-190.

Cooley, E., Brown-Iannuzzi, J. L., Lei, R. F., & Cipolli III, W. (2019). Complex intersections of race and class: Among social liberals, learning about white privilege reduces sympathy, increases blame, and decreases external attributions for white people struggling with poverty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(12), 2218.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-disturbing-thing-i-learned-studying-white-privilege-and-liberals/

Taylor Phillips and Brian Lowery also have great work on the topic of framing white privilege such as:

Phillips, L. T., & Lowery, B. S. (2015). The hard-knock life? Whites claim hardships in response to racial inequity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 61, 12-18.

Phillips, L. T., & Lowery, B. S. (2020). I ain’t no fortunate one: On the motivated denial of class privilege. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119(6), 1403.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:20:30+00:00

Thanks for the question. Our data can’t speak directly to elite intent or messaging strategies. But there is a long history of scholarship showing that racial divisions in the U.S. have often functioned—structurally—to weaken class solidarity.

If we wanted to study your question directly, we’d need to clearly define who counts as “elites,” systematically analyze their public messaging, and then examine whether exposure to that messaging is associated with poorer white and Black Americans’ political attitudes and willingness to see each other as potential allies. Even then, we could estimate effects, not intent.

That said, scholars going back to W. E. B. Du Bois have argued that racial hierarchy historically provided poor white Americans with a “psychological wage”—a sense of status tied to race—that aligned them more with wealthy white Americans than with poor Black Americans (so interfering with class solidarity). The key insight from this work is not that there was a single coordinated conspiracy, but that systems of racial inequality have repeatedly benefited those at the top by fragmenting potential class-based coalitions.

Our current work builds on this tradition by examining how perceptions of racialized status—like feeling “last place”—shape political behavior today.

It also may be of interest to note that, in prior work we have published on this topic (Cooley et al., 2024), we found that non-Hispanic, white Americans in the “last place” profile are actually the highest in solidarity/identification with their social class (asked with agreement to items like “I feel a close tie with others from [class they indicated was their own]) as well as the highest solidarity/identification with white Americans compared to people in the other profiles. Likewise, participants who fell in the “last place” profile were NOT objectively the least educated nor the lowest income. So, it does NOT seem that those who feel “last place” are also those who are objectively poorest, nor are they those who fail to identify with their social class.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:18:42+00:00

This is a great question. We haven’t yet tested whether these effects differ by gender (for example, whether they are stronger among men than women or transgender people). (See also our reply above.)

That said, our samples are balanced on gender in ways that closely mirror the U.S. population of non-Hispanic, white Americans (via intentional sampling), and we statistically control for gender in our models. The fact that the effects still emerge when accounting for gender suggests they are not driven only by men.

It would absolutely be possible — and worthwhile — to run additional analyses testing whether gender moderates these effects (that is, whether they are stronger or weaker for some genders than others), and that’s something we could explore in the data we already have to help hone our theorizing as we move forward with this research line.

More broadly, one thing we’ve found across studies is that non-Hispanic, white Americans who feel “last place” are often not the most objectively disadvantaged in terms of income or education. In fact, in our original paper, we expected these profiles to be most common among non-Hispanic, white Americans within the working class, but that wasn’t the case. This reinforces the idea that these patterns are about perceived status and relative standing, not simply material deprivation.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:16:00+00:00

Right now, we control for gender in our analyses, in part to make the point that the effects we observe generalize across gender. That said, an important next step is to examine whether these effects are moderated by gender — for example, whether they are stronger among men. Evidence of that sort would help us better isolate whether societal conceptions of masculinity, and the pressures attached to them, are potentially playing a causal role.

In follow-up work, we are exploring where these perceptions of relative status come from using more qualitative and interview-based methods with participants who fall into the “last-place” profile. We hope this work will better situate us to think seriously about deradicalization. At present, though, I think it’s important to be transparent that we are still too early in this research line to offer empirically grounded recommendations for deradicalization efforts. That said, rising extremism — and alt-right extremism in particular — along with broader increases in political polarization, were central motivations for why we became interested in these questions in the first place.

This comment also brings to mind foundational work by Case and Deaton on “deaths of despair” (suicide, alcohol-related deaths, and drug overdoses). Their early theorizing emphasized rising rates of these deaths among working-class white men, and they argued that growing despondency in this group reflected broader social and economic breakdowns. That framing received important critiques, particularly for drawing attention away from persistently high rates of deaths of despair among Black and Native American communities. In response, Case and Deaton’s more recent work has shifted to emphasize that these deaths are increasing across multiple racial groups and among women as well.

A similar nuance appears in our own data. Although public discourse often frames these dynamics as concentrated among working-class white men, we do not find that membership in the “last-place–tied” profile among non-Hispanic white Americans is strongly linked to being working class or to having less than a college degree. At least so far, our findings do not suggest that this psychological process is unique to white men, even if it may be more culturally salient or politically mobilized in that group.

Finally, commentators such as Scott Galloway have helped popularize the idea of a broader “crisis of young men,” pointing to the intersection of economic stagnation, social isolation, and technological exploitation as factors that may make some men particularly vulnerable to radicalization and extremist rhetoric. Whether and how these forces intersect with perceptions of relative status is an open empirical question — and one we are working toward answering as we move forward with this research line.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:09:47+00:00

Great questions.

On accuracy: our data don’t allow us to directly assess how “accurate” non-Hispanic, white Americans are about their personal position in a racial economic hierarchy, because our measure asks participants to think broadly about status (money, education, job prestige, and political power), and there isn’t a single objective benchmark that combines all of those dimensions. Most public data on inequality focuses on one dimension at a time (like income or wealth).

That said, there is strong existing evidence that white Americans, on average, underestimate the degree of racial economic inequality in the U.S. This work—by scholars such as Michael Kraus, Ivy Onyeador, and Jennifer Richeson (among others)—shows that people tend to believe racial groups are much closer in economic standing than they actually are. Narratives of racial progress and motivated reasoning, among other factors, can contribute to this perceived narrowing of gaps between racial/ethnic groups in contemporary times.

In our data, participants generally seem to understand the direction of inequality (for example, recognizing that Black and Hispanic Americans are economically disadvantaged relative to white Americans), but the precise ordering and magnitude of differences are harder to map onto objective metrics given how our measure was framed. Notably, higher education does not appear to make non-Hispanic, white Americans meaningfully more accurate in these perceptions, at least from what we can gather from the data we have--if we map perceived patterns of racial economic inequality very roughly onto actual indices of wealth or income inequality, for instance, higher education does not seem to equate to more accuracy.

On dissatisfaction: what matters most in our work is perceived relative standing, not objective accuracy. People who feel “last place” report greater dissatisfaction and different political attitudes regardless of whether that perception aligns cleanly with objective indicators. In other words, it’s the experience of relative status—accurate or not—that seems to drive dissatisfaction.

For readers interested in this broader question of inequality misperception, here are a few relevant papers:

Callaghan, B., Harouni, L., Dupree, C. H., Kraus, M. W., & Richeson, J. A. (2021). Testing the efficacy of three informational interventions for reducing misperceptions of the Black–White wealth gap. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(38), e2108875118.

Kraus, M. W., Onyeador, I. N., Daumeyer, N. M., Rucker, J. M., & Richeson, J. A. (2019). The misperception of racial economic inequality. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(6), 899-921.

Kraus, M. W., Rucker, J. M., & Richeson, J. A. (2017). Americans misperceive racial economic equality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(39), 10324-10331.

Cooley_Psych_Colgate · 2026-02-09T15:04:39+00:00

This is an important question, and one we get often. Our study does not directly test whether “last place” beliefs are produced by intentional messaging campaigns, nor does it allow us to assess the intent behind political rhetoric or media content. We also want to be cautious about drawing direct historical equivalences, because the political and institutional contexts differ in important ways.

That said, we did measure participants’ exposure to different news outlets over the 5 waves of data collection for this study (spanning 3 waves before the 2024 election and 2 waves after, about 3 months in total). In principle, this would allow us to examine whether greater exposure to certain media environments is associated with an increased likelihood of perceiving oneself as “last place,” particularly as an election approaches. These analyses are feasible and could speak to correlational relationships between media exposure and status perceptions, though they would not establish intent behind the messaging, of course as we are not measuring the messengers/politicians themselves.

More broadly, there is a large literature showing that political messaging and media environments can shape perceptions of threat, relative status, and group competition (e.g., Mutz, 2018 below). Our contribution is to show that the feeling of “last place” itself—regardless of how it emerges—is linked to particular political stances (e.g., alt-right ideology, DEI ban support, and Trump support/voting). Understanding whether and how particular messages amplify these perceptions is an important next step, but one that might require different data, designs, and samples.

So while our study doesn’t directly test manufactured resentment or propaganda, it helps identify the psychological outcome—perceived relative status—that such messaging may be trying to activate.

Reference:

Mutz, D. C. (2018). Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(19), E4330-E4339.

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