No abstract

People are quick to form impressions of others’ social class, and likely adjust their behavior accordingly. If social class is linked to prosociality, as literature suggests, then an interaction partner’s class should affect prosocial behavior, especially when costs or investments are low. We test this expectation using social mindfulness (SoMi) and dictator games (DG) as complementary measures of prosociality. We manipulate target class by providing information regarding a target’s (a) position on a social class ladder, and (b) family background. Three studies using laboratory and online approaches ( Noverall = 557) in two nations (the Netherlands [NL], the UK), featuring actual and hypothetical exchanges, reveal that lower class targets are met with greater prosociality than higher class targets, even when based on information about the targets’ parents (Study 3). The effect of target class was partially mediated by compassion (Studies 2 and 3) and perceived deservingness of the target (Study 3). Implications and limitations are discussed.

The applicability of two alternative spectroscopic techniques (i.e., 1 H NMR and NIR) for the quantitative characterization of gasoline was compared in this work. The chemometric approach followed to build the regression models was support vector regression, and two distinct kernel functions were tested: Gaussian and linear. Additionally, a significance test was performed on test set predictions to determine if the difference between the estimations of 1 H NMR and NIR-based models is statistically significant. According to the performance indexes of the developed models, NIR spectroscopy is preferable over 1 H NMR for the prediction of most gasoline physical−chemical properties. Still, for most of the cases, it was also demonstrated that the estimations resulting from both spectroscopic techniques are not significantly different from each other. The accuracy level attained with the support vector regression models is adequate and enables the replacement of the standard methods of analysis for at least 10 different gasoline quality parameters.