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Racial disparities arise across many vital areas of American life, including employment, health, and interpersonal treatment. For example, one in three Black children lives in poverty (versus one in nine white children), and, on average, Black Americans live four fewer years compared with white Americans. Which disparity is more likely to spark reduction efforts? We find that highlighting disparities in health-related (versus economic) outcomes spurs greater social media engagement and support for disparity-mitigating policy. Further, reading about racial health disparities elicits greater support for action (e.g., protesting) compared with economic- or belonging-based disparities. This occurs in part because people view health disparities as violating morally sacred values, which enhances perceived injustice. This work elucidates which manifestations of racial inequality are most likely to prompt Americans to action. 

“Theory of Mind” (ToM; people’s ability to infer and use information about others’ mental states) varies across cultures. In four studies ( N = 881), including two preregistered replications, we show that social class predicts performance on ToM tasks. In Studies 1A and 1B, we provide new evidence for a relationship between social class and emotion perception: Higher-class individuals performed more poorly than their lower-class counterparts on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, which has participants infer the emotional states of targets from images of their eyes. In Studies 2A and 2B, we provide the first evidence that social class predicts visual perspective taking: Higher-class individuals made more errors than lower-class individuals in the Director Task, which requires participants to assume the visual perspective of another person. Potential mechanisms linking social class to performance in different ToM domains, as well as implications for deficiency-centered perspectives on low social class, are discussed.