A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology proposes that people from working-class backgrounds perform better on measures of achievement when they work together.

Past thinking has suggested that people from low-income households display impaired cognitive development and inferior problem-solving skills, compared to their middle-class counterparts. However, previous studies have often assessed people’s achievement by requiring them to work individually. 

Working independently requires behaviors such as being self-directed and displaying autonomy. These behaviors are associated with an independent model of the self (i.e. understanding the self as separate from others). 

The problem is, independent models are much less common in working-class contexts. Instead, people from these backgrounds tend to be more exposed to interdependent models of the self (i.e. understanding the self as connected to others). 

Therefore people from working-class backgrounds may perform poorer on traditional measures of achievement due to this cultural mismatch. This led the researchers to hypothesize that assessing achievement through teamwork will allow people from working-class backgrounds to perform better.

The researchers performed a series of studies to test their hypothesis. In the first study, they collected course grades and demographic information from 1,577 students at a West Coast university in the United States.

Students were categorized into a working-class group if neither of their parents attained a four-year degree. If at least one parent had a four-year degree, participants were put into the middle-class group. 

The researchers found that students from working-class backgrounds received lower grades when their achievement was assessed through individual work. In contrast, when their assignments required group work, groups with more students from working-class backgrounds earned higher grades compared to groups with less.  

They also found that working together was associated with significantly greater improvement in performance for students from working-class backgrounds – but only when there was at least one other student from a working-class background. 

For the next study, the researchers recruited 403 U.S. adults and instructed them to work on an online problem-solving task. They were assigned to either work individually or work with another participant of the same social class. 

The results of this experiment once again supported the researcher’s hypothesis: participants from a working-class background performed better when they worked together, as opposed to working individually. However, participants from a middle-class background performed similarly in both groups. 

In the last study, the researchers recruited 336 college students from two private universities in the United States. Participants were assigned to work individually on a problem-solving task or work together with a partner of the same social class. 

However, unlike the previous experiment, participants in the teamwork condition worked together in a lab, as opposed to working online. Participants who worked with a partner were filmed while completing the task. 

The results of this experiment revealed that when participants from a working-class background worked together, not only did they perform better than participants from the same social class who worked alone, they also outperformed the middle-class participants who worked together or alone. 

However, it’s important to note that while working together benefitted working-class participants in the previous study, they didn’t outperform the middle-class participants. Since the previous study was conducted online, this may suggest that working together benefits working class participants more significantly when they can work face-to-face. 

The video recording of this study also revealed that while the groups didn’t differ on factors such as information sharing, those from a working-class background took more turns while working together. The researchers suggest that turn-taking may account for their improved performance.

Overall, the researchers provided an alternative explanation for why people from a working-class background display inferior performance on typical measures of achievement. Since these individuals tend to be raised in households that foster social connectedness, they are more likely to experience a cultural mismatch on achievement tests (which often test individual performance).  

From these four studies, the researchers found that working together (versus working individually) allows these individuals to improve their performance and under the right circumstances, outperform their middle-class counterparts.