On introspection biases: For minor things, I wouldn't be surprised if I make errors in judging why I do them, because it can take a bit of rigor to do this well. But if something is important, I can use meta-cognition and ask myself a series of questions (carefully worded - this is a skill I have practiced), seeing how I feel after each, to determine why I am doing something. I carefully word them to prevent myself from taking them as suggestions. Instead, I make sure I interpret them as yes or no questions. For instance: "Does class make me feel attracted?" instead of "Should I feel attracted to class?" - it's an important distinction to make, especially for certain topics like fears. "Am I afraid of spiders because I assume they're poisonous?" will get a totally different reaction (assuming I am not afraid of them) than "Would I be afraid of spiders if I thought they are all poisonous?"

It takes a little concentration to get it right during introspection.

So we'll start with class for example. I ask myself "Do I find class attractive?" and I can ask myself things like "Imagine a guy with lots of money asks me out. How do I feel?" and "Imagine a guy who has things in common with me asks me out, how do I feel?" If you ask enough questions for compare and contrast, you can get pretty good answers this way.

To make sure I'm not just having random reactions based on how I want to feel, I come up with real examples from my recent past. In the last year or so, I have been asked out by or dated a lot of different people with varying amounts of income. There were a lot of guys who are making 6 figures - this is because I tend to attract well paid IT guys. I liked some of them but didn't like all of them. Some of the guys making 6 figures didn't attract me whatsoever. So income doesn't make me like a guy all by itself.

I can ask "Does having a high income make me like them more?"

The two top attractions of all time, for me, were to an underpaid writer and a college student.

I can ask "Does availability of men with lots of money have anything to do with it?"

After dating something like five or ten guys who make around 6 figures over the last year and someodd, the one I liked best actually makes a moderate income. There is another guy that does make a large income that I liked quite a bit. But if the fact that guys who make 6 figures are available was going to interfere, it wouldn't make sense that I'd have liked the guy with a moderate income so much.

So, there are ways to determine what your real motivations are - but it takes skill, and requires more rigor that the quick answers these people are giving in the studies, for sure.

My social hierarchy view:

Imagine a picture of a bunch of people. As you're looking at it, a ring jumps out at you. Your brain is recognizing a pattern, in a sea of heads. So, you take a crayon and you draw a circle over the picture, connecting all the little heads like little dots - in a circle. You say "It's a social circle." In fact, the people in the picture do not know each other at all. The circle is irrelevant.

That's how I see social hierarchy. I'll explain more specifically:

Nearby, there's a gigantic technology company, (well, Seattle has several of them), tens of thousands of employees each, a lot of them making 6 figures. These guys are near the top of the social hierarchy, right?

Well, not too far away, I bet there are a bunch of poor people who pick food for a living. They're barely getting paid. Who has the power?

The IT workers can buy whatever they want. But they need the poor workers to survive.

The poor people can't buy whatever they want, but they don't need the IT workers to survive.

If all of the IT workers decided to quit, what would happen to the poor workers? They'd still pick food, and they'd be fine.

If all the poor workers stopped picking food, what would happen? It will spoil, and the IT people won't eat.

Another example:

You're in France, it's 1789, you're rich and privileged, you're part of the bourgeois. Well the rest of the population decides they're not having it. Goodbye!

Who had the power?

The rich and privileged thought THEY had the power, but the people had it all along.

So, first of all, this view that the rich people are somehow at the top of a structure is inaccurate. The structure is really more of a system, there is no top or bottom.

Another problem, two examples: Random person wins the lottery. They are upper class now, no? Not too long after, the money is gone. (This is common, from what I have read.) What class are they? A greedy woman finds herself a rich man and marries him. She has his credit cards, she can spend what she wants to. Is she upper class now, or is she just a prostitute? If class and status are not inherent to the person, it's improper to attribute these qualities to people as if they were.

Choosing based on class is a hasty generalization that probably makes you somewhat more likely to choose somebody who is going to survive and be able to help pay for offspring, somewhat more likely to choose somebody functional over somebody dysfunctional, but it isn't rational. The qualities that determine whether somebody is going to survive, be functional and help with offspring are a lot more complicated than that.

It would really make more sense to assess the overall situation when choosing a mate, not use some oversimplified model of a system that's far more complicated than the word "hierarchy" implies. That's why I'm seeing this as irrelevant pattern recognition - we're seeing triangles in noise, thinking we're seeing something useful.