I am a cultural, political, and organizational sociologist with interests in quantitative and computational methods. My research develops and applies theories of culture and cognition, the life course perspective, and organizational theory to questions of politics, public opinion, and social change. In this work I frequently focus on the interaction between human cognition and the social “scaffold” of groups and organizations to better understand the social conditions that produce stability, inconsistency, and durable change in attitudes, beliefs, values, self-assessments, 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. My first project on this topic outlines a cultural-cognitive theory of ambivalence – inconsistent opinions driven by largely unstructured internalization of competing considerations – and suggests that “scaffolding” from organizations and institutions that provide consistent signals enable stable opinion holding. 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. 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 clarifies the relationship between commonly used group labels and cultural similarity, finding that ascribed statuses like race and gender show little cultural homogeneity. A related project uses homogeneity measures to adjudicate whether American political parties organize around the same issues or different issues.