Tag Archives | Culture

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Are contemporary higher-status tastes inclusive, exclusive, or both? Recent work suggests that the answer likely is both. And yet, little is known concerning how configurations of such tastes are learned, upheld, and expressed without contradiction. We resolve this puzzle by showing the affordances of different levels of culture (i.e., genres and objects) in the expression of tastes. We rely on original survey data to show that people of higher status taste differently at different levels of culture: more inclusively for genres and more exclusively for objects. Inclusivity at the level of genres is fostered through familial socialization, and exclusivity at the level of objects is fostered through formal schooling. Individuals’ taste configurations are mirrored in and presumably reinforce their adult social-structural positions. The results have important implications for understanding the subtle maintenance of status in an increasingly diverse and putatively meritocratic society.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Clayton Childress: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
E-mail: clayton.childress@utoronto.ca

Shyon Baumann: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
E-mail: shyon.baumann@utoronto.ca

Craig M. Rawlings: Department of Sociology, Duke University
E-mail: craig.rawlings@duke.edu

Jean-François Nault: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
E-mail: jf.nault@mail.utoronto.ca

Acknowledgments: All authors contributed equally to this work. Prior versions of this article were presented at the Toronto TheoryWorkshop and at the Sociology of Culture panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. We are grateful to attendees and fellow presenters in both of these venues for their trenchant feedback and comments. In particular, we also thank Jordan Foster, Jennifer Lena, Ann Mullen, Dan Silver, and Omar Lizardo for their time and attention in improving this work. The G7 workshop, per usual, also substantially contributed to the improvement of this work. All mistakes are our own. Direct correspondence to Craig M. Rawlings, Duke University Sociology Department, Reuben-Cooke Building Rm. 270, Durham, NC 27708; craig.rawlings@duke.edu.

Citation: Childress, Clayton, Shyon Baumann, Craig M. Rawlings, and Jean-François Nault. 2021. “Genres, Objects, and the Contemporary Expression of Higher-Status Tastes.” Sociological Science 8: 230-264.
Received: January 9, 2021
Accepted: February 4, 2021
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossmann
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a12

Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition

By Parker Webservices on May 10, 2021 in Articles

Gordon Brett, Andrew Miles

Sociological Science May 10, 2021
10.15195/v8.a6

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Sociologists increasingly use insights from dual-process models to explain how people think and act. These discussions generally emphasize the influence of cultural knowledge mobilized through automatic cognition, or else show how the use of automatic and deliberate processes vary according to the task at hand or the context. Drawing on insights from sociological theory and suggestive research from social and cognitive psychology, we argue that socially structured experiences also shape general, individual-level preferences (or propensities) for automatic and deliberate thinking. Using a meta-analysis of 63 psychological studies (N = 25,074) and a new multivariate analysis of nationally representative data, we test the hypothesis that the use of automatic and deliberate cognitive processes is socially patterned. We find that education consistently predicts preferences for deliberate processing and that gender predicts preferences for both automatic and deliberate processing. We find that age is a significant but likely nonlinear predictor of preferences for automatic and deliberate cognition, and we find weaker evidence for differences by income, marital status, and religion. These results underscore the need to consider group differences in cognitive processing in sociological explanations of culture, action, and inequality.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Gordon Brett: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
E-mail: gordon.brett@utoronto.ca

Andrew Miles: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
E-mail: andrew.miles@utoronto.ca

Acknowledgments: We thank Vanina Leschziner, Martin Lukk, Lance Stewart, and Lawrence Williams for their very helpful feedback on an early draft of this article.

Citation: Brett, Gordon, and Andrew Miles. 2021. “Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition.” Sociological Science 8: 96-118.
Received: February 10, 2021
Accepted: March 10, 2021
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a6

Concept Class Analysis: A Method for Identifying Cultural Schemas in Texts

By Parker Webservices on November 9, 2020 in Articles

Marshall A. Taylor, Dustin S. Stoltz

Sociological Science November 9, 2020
10.15195/v7.a23

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Recent methodological work at the intersection of culture, cognition, and computational methods has drawn attention to how cultural schemas can be “recovered” from social survey data. Defining cultural schemas as slowly learned, implicit, and unevenly distributed relational memory structures, researchers show how schemas—or rather, the downstream consequences of people drawing upon them—can be operationalized and measured from domain-specific survey modules. Respondents can then be sorted into “classes” on the basis of the schema to which their survey response patterns best align. In this article, we extend this “schematic class analysis” method to text data. We introduce concept class analysis (CoCA): a hybrid model that combines word embeddings and correlational class analysis to group documents across a corpus by the similarity of schemas recovered from them. We introduce the CoCA model, illustrate its validity and utility using simulations, and conclude with considerations for future research and applications.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Marshall A. Taylor: Department of Sociology, New Mexico State University
E-mail: mtaylor2@nmsu.edu

Dustin S. Stoltz: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Lehigh University
E-mail: dss219@lehigh.edu

Acknowledgments: A replication repository for this article can be found at: https://github.com/Marshall-Soc/CoCA. We thank Jesper Sørensen, the deputy editor, and the consulting editor for their thoughtful comments on this article.

Citation: Taylor, Marshall A., and Dustin S. Stoltz. 2020. “Concept Class Analysis: A Method for Identifying Cultural Schemas in Texts.” Sociological Science 7:544-569.
Received: July 31, 2020
Accepted: October 4, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a23

Hegemonic Gender Norms and the Gender Gap in Achievement: The Case of Asian Americans

By Parker Webservices on December 3, 2018 in Articles

Amy Hsin

Sociological Science, December 3, 2018
10.15195/v5.a32

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Many argue that hegemonic gender norms depress boys’ performance and account for the gender gap in achievement. I describe differences in the emergence of the gender gap in academic achievement between white and Asian American youth and explore how the immigrant experience and cultural differences in gender expectations might account for observed differences. For white students, boys are already underperforming girls in kindergarten, with the male disadvantage growing into high school. For Asian Americans, boys perform as well as girls throughout elementary school but begin underperforming relative to girls at the transition to adolescence. Additionally, I show that the Asian American gender gap is larger in schools with stronger male-centric sports cultures and where boys’ underachievement is normalized. I speculate that model-minority stereotypes, the immigrant experience, and standards of masculinity that promote pro-school behaviors in boys act as protective factors in early childhood but wane at the transition to adolescence during a period when the dominant peer culture plays a larger role in shaping gender identities. The study offers evidence that the gender gap in achievement is not an inevitable fact of biology but is shaped by social environment.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Amy Hsin: Department of Sociology, Queens College, City University of New York
E-mail: amy.hsin@qc.cuny.edu

Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank Yu Xie, Kate Choi, Sophia Catsambis, and Lizandra Friedland for commenting on earlier versions of this work. All remaining errors are strictly the responsibility of the author.

Citation: Hsin, Amy. 2018. “Hegemonic Gender Norms and the Gender Gap in Achievement: The Case of Asian Americans.” Sociological Science 5: 752-774.
Received: July 22, 2018
Accepted: October 23, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a32

Like Bees to a Flower: Attractiveness, Risk, and Collective Sexual Life in an AIDS Epidemic

By Parker Webservices on September 26, 2018 in Articles

Margaret Frye, Nina Gheihman

Sociological Science, September 26, 2018
10.15195/v5.a25

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We examine how men’s shared understandings of women’s physical attractiveness are influenced by concerns about risk in the context of a generalized AIDS epidemic. Using 180 conversational journals—descriptions of informal conversations about sex occurring in Malawi between 1999 and 2011—we show that men deploy discourses of risk to question and undermine the status advantages enjoyed by attractive women. Men simultaneously portray attractive women as irresistibly appealing and as destructive to men. Men engage in two types of collective responses: First, men work to discipline themselves and each other, reframing attractiveness as illusory and unworthy of pursuit; and second, men endeavor to discipline attractive women themselves, portraying them as evil temptresses that must be suppressed and reasserting their masculine dominance through harassment and violence. These findings reveal how men’s classifications of women as sexual objects operate as forms of symbolic violence, legitimating and naturalizing their gendered domination over women.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Margaret Frye: Department of Sociology, University of Michigan
E-mail: mtfrye@umich.edu

Nina Gheihman: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
E-mail: nina.gheihman@fas.harvard.edu

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Asad L. Asad, Bart Bonikowski, Larissa Buchholz, Caitlin Daniels, Paul DiMaggio, Mitchell Dunier, Pablo Gastón, Michele Lamont, YaWen Lei, Omar Lizardo, Terence McDonnell, Orlando Patterson, Ann Swidler, Lorne Tepperman, and Jocelyn Viterna for their feedback and suggestions for revision. Previous versions of this were presented at Notre Dame’s Sociology Departmental Colloquium and African Studies Workshop, Princeton University’s Notestein Seminar Series (through the Office of Population Research), Harvard University’s Culture and Social Analysis Workshop, the Sociology of Development Conference at Brown University, and the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting.

Citation: Frye, Margaret, and Nina Gheihman. 2018. “Like Bees to a Flower: Attractiveness, Risk, and Collective Sexual Life in an AIDS Epidemic.” Sociological Science 5: 596-627.
Received: July 23, 2018
Accepted: August 21, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a25

The Labor Market Value of Taste: An Experimental Study of Class Bias in U.S. Employment

By Parker Webservices on September 12, 2018 in Articles

Kyla Thomas

Sociological Science, September 12, 2018
10.15195/v5.a24

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This article investigates cultural forms of class bias in the middle-income U.S. labor market. Results from an audit study of employment discrimination in four U.S. cities reveal that cultural signals of class, when included in résumés, have a systematic effect on the callback rates of women applying to customer-facing jobs. For these women, displays of highbrow taste—the cultural signals of a higher-class background—generate significantly higher rates of employer callback than displays of lowbrow taste—the cultural signals of a lower-class background. Meanwhile, cultural signals of class have no systematic effect on the callback rates of male and/or non–customer-facing job applicants. Results from a survey-experimental study of 1,428 U.S. hiring managers suggest that these differing patterns of employer callback may be explained by the positive effect of higher-class cultural signals on perceptions of polish and competence and their negative effect on perceptions of warmth.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kyla Thomas: Center for Economic and Social Research, University of Southern California
E-mail: kylathom@usc.edu

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Paul DiMaggio for his intellectual guidance and support as well as Viviana Zelizer, Devah Pager, Susan Fiske, David Pedulla, Patrick Ishizuka, René Flores, and participants of the University of Michigan’s Inequality and Family Working Group for their valuable insights and feedback. This research was supported by the Fahs-Beck Fund for Research and Experimentation, Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Social Organization, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Citation: Thomas, Kyla. 2018. “The Labor Market Value of Taste: An Experimental Study of Class Bias in U.S. Employment.” Sociological Science 5: 562-595.
Received: November 17, 2017
Accepted: July 15, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a24

Fast or Slow: Sociological Implications of Measuring Dual-Process Cognition

By Parker Webservices on February 27, 2017 in Articles

Rick Moore

Sociological Science, February 27, 2017
DOI 10.15195/v4.a9

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Dual-process theories of cognition within sociology have received increasing attention from both supporters and critics. One limitation in this debate, however, is the common absence of empirical evidence to back dual-process claims. Here, I provide such evidence for dual-process cognition using measures of response latency in formal data collected in conjunction with an ethnographic study of atheists and evangelicals. I use timed responses to help make sense of evangelicals’ language that frames “religion” as negative but “Christ-following” as positive. The data suggests that despite these Christians expressing a concept of the self that rejects “religion,” deep dispositions remain associating religion as a positive entity, not a negative one. I further argue that the significance of dual-process theories to sociology is in untangling such complex webs of identity discourse by distinguishing between immediate responses primarily due to fast cognition and those that are further mediated by slower, more deliberate cognition.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rick Moore: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
Email: rickmoore@uchicago.edu

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank John Levi Martin, Terry McDonnell, Gabe Ignatow, and the editors of Sociological Science for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (Award number SES-1333672).