2024-02-06
9 分钟Welcome to Extra IQ,
a shorter style of LSE IQ where you'll hear parts of compelling interviews which didn't make the original podcast just
because we didn't have the space to include them.
I'm Sue Windybank from the IQ team and in this episode you'll hear me talking to Professor Sam Friedman,
a sociologist of class and inequality at LSE.
He spoke to me for an episode which asked, how does class define us?
Originally released in November 2022.
Here's Sam explaining to me the conundrum of why a significant minority of middle class people in the UK mistakenly think of themselves as working class.
I wondered if this was a phenomenon unique to the UK.
One of the things we found in our research is that when you ask people about their subjective class identities,
most people around the world tend to see themselves as middle class even when they're actually fairly disadvantaged and we really go against the grain and there's this enduring popularity of working class identities.
As you say,
even one in four of those from solidly middle class backgrounds in solidly middle class jobs here see themselves as working class.
What we found in the research looking,
using interviews to dig into this is that largely what people explained in these scenarios,
and this is only a quarter of people, most people tend to match their background to the same way sociologists would.
But this significant minority who didn't often,
interesting when we asked them about what you'd tell us about your background,
they wouldn't tell us about their upbringing, they would reach back further into these extended family histories.
And you know, if you go back two or three generations in most families in this country,