Dietze and Knowles investigated how attention to others varies by social class. Their findings can inform design decisions and also help explain puzzling design research outcomes, as well as discrepancies between executive and lower level employee perceptions of distractions in workspaces, for example. Dietze and Knowles learned that “people’s [perception of their own] social class affects their appraisals of others’ motivational relevance – the degree to which others are seen as potentially rewarding, threatening or otherwise worth attending to…wearable technology was used to film the visual fields of pedestrians on city streets; higher-class participants looked less at other people than did lower-class participants…[in additional studies] participants’ eye movements were tracked while they viewed street scenes; higher class was associated with reduced attention to people in the images…[and] a change-detection procedure assessed the degree to which human faces spontaneously attract visual attention; faces proved less effective at drawing the attention of high-class than low-class participants, which implies that class affects spontaneous relevance appraisals.”
More details on the final study: people who perceived that they were in a higher social class took longer to notice changes in faces than individuals who categorized themselves as in lower social classes, but social class didn’t influence speed of response to changes in objects.
Pia Dietze and Eric Knowles. “Social Class and the Motivational Relevance of Other Human Beings: Evidence from Visual Attention.” Psychological Science, in press.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.