American universities are increasingly opening their doors to first-generation college students—students whose parents do not have a 4-year degree. Once admitted, however, these students tend to struggle academically compared to continuing-generation students—students who have at least one parent with a four-year degree. We propose a cultural mismatch theory that identifies one important source of this social class achievement gap. Four studies test the hypothesis that first-generation students underperform because the interdependent norms from their mostly working-class backgrounds constitute a mismatch with the middle-class independent norms prevalent in universities. First, to assess university cultural norms, surveys of university administrators revealed that American universities focus primarily on norms of independence. Second, to identify the hypothesized cultural mismatch, a longitudinal survey revealed that universities’ focus on independence does not match first-generation students' relatively interdependent motives for attending college, and further, that this cultural mismatch is associated with lower grades. Finally, two experiments at both private and public universities created a match or mismatch for first-generation students and examined the performance consequences. Together these studies revealed that representing the university culture in terms of independence (i.e., paving one’s own paths) rendered academic tasks difficult and thereby undermined first-generation students’ performance. Conversely, representing the university culture in terms of interdependence (i.e., being part of a community) reduced this sense of difficulty and eliminated the performance gap without adverse consequences for continuing-generation students. These studies address the urgent need to recognize cultural obstacles that contribute to the social class achievement gap and to develop interventions to address them.

Social class is one important source of models of agency—normative guidelines for how to be a “good” person. Using choice as a prototypically agentic action, five studies test the hypotheses that models of agency prevalent in working class (WK) contexts reflect a normative preference for similarity to others, whereas models prevalent in middle class (MD) contexts reflect a preference for difference from others. Focusing on participants’ choices, we found that participants from WK relative to MD contexts more often chose pens that appeared similar to, rather than different from, other pens in the choice set, and more often chose the same images as another participant. Focusing on participants’ responses to others’ choices, we found that participants from WK relative to MD contexts liked their chosen pens more when a confederate chose similarly, and responded more positively when a friend chose the same car in a hypothetical scenario. Finally, we found that car advertisements targeting WK rather than MD consumers more often emphasized connection to, rather than differentiation from, others, suggesting that models of agency are reflected in pervasive cultural products.