New paper out in the journal "Social Networks"

Aidan Combs from our group published a new paper, together with colleagues from the Ohio State University, the University of Georgia, and Duke University:

Aidan Combs, Gabriel Varela, Dawn T. Robinson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, Stephen Vaisey. Deviations from cultural consensus about occupations: The duality of occupation meanings and Americans’ meaning communities. Social Networks 2025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2025.04.003

The authors study how people think about the connotations of occupations, measured on three affective dimensions that are central to meaning: how good the occupation is, how powerful it is, and how active it is. Using data on Americans’ ratings of the connotations of all 642 civilian occupations identified by the U.S. Census, they consider how individuals deviate from cultural consensus about occupation meaning. These deviations are often assumed to only reflect measurement error and are discarded when studying affective connotations. However, using an approach inspired by Breiger’s (1974) work on duality, they show that deviations can be used to find (1) subgroups of people who share specific views of occupations and (2) groups of occupations that “move together” in peoples’ minds. The results show that the ways in which people deviate from consensus encode additional information on how views of social categories are structured.