How Cultural Sentiments Are Patterned Along the Social Order, and Why It Matters for Inequality

What is it about?

This research shows that our social position and formative social experiences shape our cultural sentiments, reflected in the meanings we attach to particular identities. I present evidence that members of the same culture with diverse backgrounds have a baseline of consensus in their perceptions of social groups, but also diverge in these perceptions at levels found in earlier cross-cultural comparisons. Diversity in cultural sentiments is largely explained by respondents' race, class, and experiences in close relationships. Cultural differences are not limited to a select group of identities, but carry across diverse social domains. I argue that cultural meanings are a byproduct of one's position within the social order and propose that cultural variegation—the maintenance of tailored systems of social perception among members of a culture with common experiences—is a basic feature of cultures. While there is sufficient cultural consensus to make our interactions sensible, our position in the social world structures our social experiences and provides a vantage point from which we view the universe of identities around us.

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Why is it important?

This work offers a corrective to a significant literature which has argued that cultures are widely shared and that within-culture variations in identity meanings are the result of either idiosyncratic individual experiences or membership in oppositional or deviant subcultures. I show that significant diversity exists within cultures, and that this diversity is patterned, in important ways, along the social order. I present evidence that variations in identity meanings are related to race, class, and formative social experiences, and persist across social domains, with more consensual identity meanings among the socially advantaged—whites, those who have had stable, supportive experiences in their most important social relationships, and those with married, educated, employed, and home-owning parents. The greater meaning consensus I find among the advantaged corresponds with findings from several other sociological literatures, which suggest that (1) cultural sentiments, tastes, and practices are resources that contribute to the reproduction of race and class inequality within society, (2) members of privileged groups have an incentive to consolidate around meanings that maintain the status quo and preserve their advantage, and (3) whites and the wealthy are less likely than other groups in American society to live and form close relationships with those of different race and class backgrounds than themselves, limiting their firsthand exposure to alternative cultural views. Meaning diversity, on the other hand, helps shield the disadvantaged from the consequences of an unequal system. Meaning subcultures insulate members of culturally stigmatized groups from negative sentiments by fostering positive, empowered, and agentic meanings for identities and behaviors important to the self. However, the need to navigate through social institutions steeped in “dominant” culture (e.g., education, medicine, law) and to interact with persons from advantaged groups to access valuable resources provides powerful structural incentives to internalize and strategically use cultural knowledge other than that which one might have acquired through interactions outside of these spaces. People who move through diverse social spaces and interact with those from different backgrounds than their own likely maintain richer, more complex cultural knowledge structures that can be adapted to the setting and situation at hand than those whose interaction partners are more culturally uniform.