Social class and identity-based motivation

- People generally aspire to live meaningful lives but attainments often fall short.
- Contexts matter, identity-based motivation theory highlights how.
- Social class is understood through a ladder metaphor.
- The ladder metaphor has implications for identity, meaning-making, and strategies.
- Interventions can leverage identity-based motivation to improve attainments.

Attainments often fall short of aspirations to lead lives of meaning, health, happiness and success. Identity-based motivation theory highlights how social class and cultural contexts affect likelihood of shortfalls: Identities influence the strategies people are willing to use to attain their goals and the meaning people make of experienced ease and difficulty. Though sensitive to experienced ease and difficulty, people are not sensitive to the sources of these experiences. Instead, people make culturally-tuned inferences about what their experiences imply for who they are and could become and what to do about it. American culture highlights personal and shadows structural causes of ease and difficulty, success and failure. As a result, people infer that class-based outcomes are deserved reflections of character.