I am a cultural, political, and organizational sociologist whose work uses a range of quantitative and computational methods and diverse data sources to answer questions in sociological theory. My research develops and applies theories from the sociology of culture and cognition, the life course perspective, and organizational science to questions of politics, religion, public opinion, and social change. A central contribution of my work is an elaboration of how human cognition interacts with the “cultural scaffold” of groups and organizations to better understand the conditions that produce stability, inconsistency, and durable change in attitudes, beliefs, values, and behavior. Alongside this substantive focus, my research develops methods for measuring change and stability in opinions and attitudes with applicability beyond politics.
A central component of my research, published in the American Sociological Review (open access version here), adjudicates between two competing models of individual change that are implicit in societal-level studies of cultural change. Testing these models on more than 180 questions from the General Social Survey, I find that people tend to stop making durable changes in adulthood. These results suggest that we need a greater focus on adolescence and early adulthood if we want to understand why individuals hold specific views. An extension of this work was published in Sociological Science. With scholars in the digital humanities, I used computational text analysis to explore whether changes in literary culture were principally driven by cohort replacement or by authors updating their writing styles, again finding most aggregate change came through cohort replacement, also published in Sociological Science 2022.
A recent project develops an approach to quantify how much cultural difference can be attributed to intrapersonal change during adulthood. This paper harmonizes previously discordant findings, suggests change rarely explains a large portion of difference, and allows for comparative study of the conditions that produce change and stability.
My dissertation work focuses on the recurrent finding that people are frequently inconsistent opinion holders. The central project from this work develops a model of “scaffolded” cultural cognition where stable opinions principally reflect cultural and organizational environments that provide clear signals about what belief and attitudes should be held. Using nationally representative panel data on adolescents embedded in religious cultures as they transition to adulthood, I find that inconsistent beliefs about religion, morality, and family and gender roles are strongly predicted by whether respondents are embedded in culturally heterogeneous social contexts, and that these associations persist even when I control for more proximate sources of influence, such as family and friendship networks. A second project adjudicates the role of institutions in stabilizing political opinions, finding that “alternative” combinations of opinions (e.g., “economically liberal and socially conservative”) are highly unstable, and it is extremely rare to find members of the public who durably hold these combinations of opinion. A third project draws on theories of how people internalize elements of culture to posit people are “predictably unpredictable,” inconsistent opinion holders in general, but predictable in how and where this inconsistency manifests.
A third line of work focuses on group-level cultural and political consensus. The first project uses computational text analysis to track the rise of deviant language in a sexist and misogynistic online forum, tracing the emergence of “conversational schema” – a consensus model of how to deploy topics in response to other topics – which explains the rise in deviant language over time. A second project (forthcoming in Poetics) clarifies the relationship between commonly used group labels and cultural similarity, finding that ascribed statuses like race and gender show little cultural homogeneity. A final project uses similar measures to quantify intersectional group agreement on the occupational status order, finding that highly educated individuals demonstrate remarkable similarity on ratings while other groups show disorganization.