This project will examine how people's opinions influenced by their assessment of what other people think. The study contributes to a classic literature in the sociology of culture and applies it to a contemporary case study involving art appreciation. The project employs experimental methods. Specifically, a survey of 2,250 adult respondents requests their opinion of a particular painting twice, once before and once after receiving information about the opinions expressed by members of a hypothetical reference group. Variation in how such information changes the respondents' own opinions will enable us to assess the degree to which our aesthetic taste and opinions reflect efforts to engage in what is known as "symbolic boundary work." A central hypothesis is that respondents' taste expressions will be a function not only of their own social position, as has been demonstrated in numerous other studies, but also of attempts to draw symbolic boundaries between or around themselves and others, and that knowledge of others? tastes will be a significant predictor of such boundary work.
Broader impacts: The project is designed to examine the connection between culture and inequality by investigating how people's opinions of art objects reflect larger social stratification dynamics. Findings from this study may be of interest not only to scholars, but to public and non-governmental organizations involved in art production and conservation. Findings may also influence art education programs and related forms of community outreach. Data from this project will be made publically available.
One goal of this study was to discover how people use their expressions of taste in cultural objects to either connect with or dissociate from others. I gave online respondents the opportunity to give their opinion twice about a painting, once before and once after learning other people’s opinion of the same painting. I found that individuals without college degrees were much more likely to change their opinions of the painting than were individuals with college degrees. If we accept the interpretations from previous studies that a person’s expressions of tastes are one method by which they express their identities, my finding suggests that those with lower education are more willing to alter their own opinions in order to make identity claims that give them the opportunity to associate with others, and especially with others who have college degrees. In addition, all individuals were more likely to change their opinion so that it differed from the others whose opinion of the painting they learned about if those others did not have a college degree. This is not a surprising finding in the case of individuals with college degrees. Previous studies have found that individuals will change or abandon their tastes when identity claims are at stake, meaning that individuals who find that their taste expressions cause or could cause them to be associated with people who are different than them will abandon those tastes in order to avoid being seen as like this others from whom they are different. However, my finding that people without college degrees are also more likely to change their opinions about the painting in order to distance themselves from others without college degrees (as opposed to others with college degrees) indicates that taste expressions can be used to state claims of difference from those with meaningful similarities as well as differences. Another goal of this study was to determine how individuals make decisions about who does and who does not belong in their "in-groups." That is, how do people do decide who is like them, and who is not like them? I asked study participants to decide if they felt similar (or not) to a group of other people about whom they had been given some information (education level, occupation, and taste in a painting). Then, after asking them this similarity question, I asked them what information they used to make this decision. I found that differences in taste (when respondents had differences in opinion about the painting than the others in question) were stronger predictors of finding dissimilarity with others than were differences in education and occupation. This suggests that individuals who share tastes but not social standing (as defined by educational attainment and occupation) are likely to form a connection, but the same is not true for those who share social standing but not tastes. Said another way, shared taste between two people has the ability to compensate for status differences between them. On the flip side, however, this finding suggests that differences in taste might be difficult to overcome in the process of relationship formation, which speaks to the powerful role that the expression of tastes can play in systems of stratification. That is, while differences between people on factors such as education, income, occupation, gender and race certainly have the capacity to separate people from each other, potentially resulting in the loss of privilege or opportunity, such differences are observable and quantifiable, and are therefore oftentimes challenged. Differences in aesthetic tastes and other cultural characteristics are more difficult to challenge, or even to observe, which is precisely what gives them their social power. Although the dozens of attempts to rectify social inequalities through policies and programs that were designed to provide opportunities for various resources across gender, race, income, and other social lines, re-shuffling social space is challenging due to the strong but invisible stratifying power of cultural characteristics, such as patterns in aesthetic taste.
