Is cultural change driven by your peers or, in effect, your death and theirs?

Stephen Vaisey, Omar Lizardo, Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change, Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, First Published October 10, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023116669726.

Abstract

The authors argue that cultural fragmentation models predict that cultural change is driven primarily by period effects, whereas acquired dispositions models predict that cultural change is driven by cohort effects. To ascertain which model is on the right track, the authors develop a novel method to measure “cultural durability,” namely, the share of over-time variance that is due to either period or cohort effects for 164 variables from the 1972–2014 General Social Surveys. The authors find fairly strong levels of cultural durability across most items, especially those connected to values and morality, but less so for attitudes toward legal and political institutions.

After quite a bit of this and that, including some empirical work:

Summary of the Argument and Results

Motivated by the main lines of theoretical debate in cultural sociology today, our goal in this article was to assess the relative empirical merits of the cultural fragmentation and acquired dispositions models for understanding patterns of cultural and social change in the United States for the past four decades. We argue that the cultural fragmentation model, with its emphasis on common knowledge, public meaning, and externalized cultural influences, leads to the empirical implication that period effects should be primarily responsible for cultural change (Swidler 2001b). The acquired dispositions model, on the other hand, because of its emphasis on the past in the present in the form of the “imprinting” effect of early socialization, leads to the hypothesis that cohort effects should be a stronger predictor. The results are fairly clear in revealing that cohort-based processes are dominant in relation to period-based mechanisms in accounting for cultural change across a wide variety of attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Put another way, if we want to make our best guess (net of age) about what a person thinks or what kinds of practices he or she engages in, we would be better off knowing what year the person was born than what year we are observing them.

Implications for Cultural Analysis

We take this pattern of results as evidence that, despite the failings and limitations of the postwar classical socialization model, sociologists after the “cultural turn” of the 1980s and 1990s might have be too hasty in rejecting the importance of cultural internalization in favor of external structuration by public forms of culture (Patterson 2014; Quinn 2016; Strauss and Quinn 1997). An acquired dispositions account that retains a notion of durable cultural internalization but rejects the cognitively implausible Freudian mechanisms proposed in classical socialization models thus emerges as the most defensible alternative.

Durable cultural internalization can be theorized from an acquired dispositions perspective using empirically specifiable processes of cognitive internalization characterized by early dispositional learning with lock-in and conservation (Bargh and Morsella 2008; Bourdieu 1990; Cohen and Leung 2009). Although it would certainly be an exaggeration to say that culture matters primarily via the classical socialization mechanism of deep internalization, people do appear to acquire durable dispositions in their formative years. These dispositions, in their turn, make them more likely to display certain beliefs and engage in certain practices over their entire life course, in partial independence from contemporaneous cultural influences (Marquis and Tilcsik 2013).

These findings are difficult to square with the predictions of cultural fragmentation–style models prioritizing the causal influence of contemporaneous conditions. It does not matter whether this external structuration is produced by “context,” changing institutional conditions, cultural codes, or framing effects (DiMaggio 1997; Swidler 2001b). If external structuration were the most important mechanism influencing (say) judgments, we would not expect period effects to be less relevant than cohort effects across such a wide range of cultural outcomes. In this respect, both the scope conditions and the range of explanatory phenomena that cultural fragmentation models are equipped to handle need to be better specified (Lizardo and Strand 2010; Patterson 2014; Vaisey and Lizardo 2010). One thing that is surely the case is that the cultural fragmentation model cannot serve as an overarching organizing framework in cultural analysis but must be supplemented by theoretical frameworks that allow the coherent conceptualization of the structuring effects of durably incorporated dispositions at the personal level (cf. Strauss and Quinn 1997).

Implications for Understanding the Role of Culture in Social Change

It is vital to note here, however, that the public mechanisms emphasized by cultural fragmentation theorists likely play a key role in some kinds of “punctuated” social change, even though they may (on average) exert little influence on the type of cultural change that is tracked by aggregate changes in attitudes and practices. Although the distribution of personal opinions may be changing slowly and steadily as the result of cohort replacement, public rituals and displays are essential for the generation of “common knowledge” (Chwe 2001:6–9) allowing “everyone [to] see that everyone else has seen that things have changed” (Swidler 2001b:87).

Nevertheless, although cultural fragmentation theorists such as Sewell (1996) and Swidler (2001a, 2001b) tend to emphasize “public enactment[s]” as both the cause and the signal of social change, we would argue that public rituals matter primarily because they signal a tipping point in new consolidated (and thus potentially durable) dispositions. As Pierson (2004:83) argued, a relatively “slow moving” causal processes (in our case the gradual shift in acquired dispositions in the population) does not have to result in a “gradual” change outcome; instead, through a threshold mechanism, acquired dispositions processes may combine with cultural fragmentation externalization and public knowledge mechanisms to generate punctuated patterns of social change. For instance, public rituals may allow already developed dispositions to become “public opinion,” changing norms, public accounts, and styles of justification and legitimation while creating opportunities for coordination among the like-minded (Chwe 2001). The GSS data used here do not permit disentangling perceptions of others’ attitudes—so-called third-order inference (Correll et al. 2012)—from one’s own attitudes, but it is likely that perceptions of others attitudes (or the “generalized attitude”) would exhibit much stronger period effects than the first-order attitudes themselves.