The End of Symbolic Exclusion? The Rise of “Categorical Tolerance” in the Musical Tastes of Americans: 1993–2012

In this article, we aim to contribute to recent work in the sociology of taste on the role of cultural dislikes as resources for symbolic exclusion and identity construction. We merge a new data set that replicates musical taste (patterns of likes and dislikes) items from the 1993 GSS with a new data source, resulting in the first repeated cross-section on patterns of likes and dislikes in the U.S. population. Our key finding is that there has been a dramatic shift in the way that people from the United States use cultural dislikes for purposes of symbolic exclusion: namely, the rise of a significant segment of the population that refuses to use culture for this purpose. To shed further light on this pattern, we deploy a statistical model that allows us to distinguish respondents who could have expressed dislikes but did not from those who were predisposed to not dislike any cultural form from the very beginning. The results show that the main drivers of the shift towards “refusing to dislike” are very likely cohort replacement and the increasing “browning” of the American population.

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