UMN Sociology Workshop Series: Taste and Its Categories: How Categories Mediate Taste Across Educational Attainment Levels

Speaker Bio:

Omar Lizardo (He/Him) is the LeRoy Neiman Term Chair Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studies Culture, Cognition, Networks, Consumption, Institutions, Organization, and Social Theory. His work has appeared in such journals as American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Sociological Theory, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Poetics, and Social Networks. He is the co-editor of the Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, published by Springer, and co-author of the books Measuring Culture, published by Columbia University Press, and Orienting to Chance, published by the University of Chicago Press. He is currently one of the co-editors of the journal Sociological Theory, a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for the journal Science, an Associate Editor for the journal Theory & Social Inquiry, the current chair of the ASA's section on Mathematical Sociology, and a former chair of the ASA's Section on the Sociology of Culture. His recent publications have focused on developing a theory of the microfoundations of institutions, conceptualizing diversity as a dominant social value, tracing the spread of "categorical tolerance" in musical tastes, and developing techniques for analyzing two-mode network data.

Abstract:

This talk examines the omnivore thesis—the claim that people with higher educational attainment and socioeconomic status have broader tastes—one of the most-studied and best-established phenomena in the sociology of culture. Using a traditional survey design, we find, as many others do, evidence for the omnivore thesis when respondents are asked abstractly about genre categories. Yet, leveraging original music production and survey experiments, we show that when asked to listen to actual music, category mediation is crucial. Without category-mediation, the differences among educational categories are negligible. Category-mediation, however, gave rise to salient differences: Participants with high cultural capital were more omnivorous when primed to think about genre categories but didn’t know what they listened to, but more critical when first primed by categories, and then given the genre of the musical exemplar they listened to—strongly supporting a connoisseur-like theory of category-mediated omnivorous taste. Moreover, we find that category mediation strongly affected evaluations for people with less education, but in the opposite direction—something no current theory predicts. Thus, we isolate a category-mediation effect across levels of education. Taste remains anchored in external category systems, but the way this anchoring works differs across social classes.