A growing body of research in sociology uses the concept of cultural schemas to explain how culture influences beliefs and actions. However, this work often relies on belief or attitude measures gleaned from survey data as indicators of schemas, failing to measure the cognitive associations that constitute schemas. In this article, we propose a concept-association-based approach for collecting data about individuals’ schematic associations, and a corresponding method for modeling concept network representations of shared cultural schemas. We use this method to examine differences between liberal and conservative schemas of poverty in the United States, uncovering patterns of associations expected based on previous research. Examining the structure of schematic associations provides novel insights to long-standing empirical questions regarding partisan attitudes toward poverty. Our method yields a clearer picture of what poverty means for liberals and conservatives, revealing how different concepts related to poverty indeed mean fundamentally different things for these two groups. Finally, we show that differences in schema structure are predictive of individuals’ policy preferences.

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Cultural sociologists frequently theorize about choices and decisions, although we tend to shy away from this language, and from concepts that are used by the judgment and decision-making (JDM) sciences. We show that cultural sociology and JDM are compatible and complementary fields by dispelling some common misunderstandings about JDM. We advocate for a strategic assimilation approach in which cultural sociologists are able to translate their work into key JDM terms like beliefs, preferences, and endowments. Learning to speak the JDM language will allow cultural sociologists to make important, and uniquely sociological, contributions to social scientific explanations of choices and decisions. KEYWORDS: theory; cognition; interdisciplinarity HIGHLIGHTS: • Cultural sociologists theorize about choices and decisions • Integrating with other fields who study these phenomena can prove fruitful • Learning the terminology used in these fields will facilitate this intergration

Symbolic valuation is an important but overlooked aspect of gendered processes of inequality in the occupation structure. Prior work has largely focused on the material valuation of gendered work, such as how much predominantly-female versus predominantly-male occupations pay. Less research has examined the symbolic valuation of work, such as how prestigious predominantly-female versus predominantly-male occupations are. What research has examined this question has remained inconclusive at best. Drawing on insights into and techniques from the sociology of culture and cognition, this study examines the role of an occupation’s gender composition in how Americans judge the prestige of jobs, testing key predictions from theories of gender and status. Using 2012 General Social Survey and federal occupation-level data, it finds evidence for a segregation premium: people view gender-segregated occupations as the most symbolically valuable jobs. Both men and women reward gender-segregated occupations with symbolic value, although there is evidence of a gendered in-group bias in which women in particular see women’s work as more prestigious, while men see men’s work as more prestigious.

Given the prestige and compensation of science and math-related occupations, the underrepresentation of women and people of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors (STEM) perpetuates entrenched economic and social inequities. Explanations for this underrepresentation have largely focused on individual characteristics, including uneven academic preparation, as well as institutional factors at the college level. In this article, we focus instead on high schools. We highlight the influence of the intersection between race and gender of female math and science teachers on students' decisions to major in STEM fields. Theoretically, this article extends the political science concept of representative bureaucracy to the issue of women's and disadvantaged minorities' underrepresentation in STEM majors. We analyze longitudinal data from public school students in North Carolina to test whether organizational demography of high school math and science faculty has an association with college major choice and graduation. Using hierarchical probit models with an instrumental-variable approach, we find that young white women are more likely to major in STEM fields and to graduate with STEM degrees when they come from high schools with higher proportions of female math and science teachers, irrespective of the race of the teacher. At the same time, these teachers do not depress young white or African American men's chances of majoring in STEM. Results for African American women are less conclusive, highlighting the limitations of their small sample size.

Prior research on stratification beliefs has investigated individuals' understandings regarding the causes of poverty in America. These past studies have uncovered demographic characteristics associated with individualist and structuralist explanations for poverty. In the current study, we will argue that Americans, like social scientists, envision poverty as a heterogeneous and complex phenomenon. We utilize a cultural cognition theoretical approach to conceptualize these understandings of poverty as schemas. We contend that a schema of poverty contains a set of unique associations regarding both demographic beliefs (who the poor are) and causal attributions (why they are poor). Using original data in a mixed-methods design that incorporates inductive and experimental components, we find that people differentiate between two key types of poverty: intergenerational poverty and downward mobility. People perceive each type of poverty as caused by a different set of factors and as experienced by a different group of people. The type of poverty envisioned is, in most cases, as important as or more important than a respondent's own demographic characteristics in predicting what type of causal attributions he or she makes for poverty. These findings underscore the importance of investigating different schemas of poverty in future stratification beliefs research.The authors wish to thank Mark Chaves, who supervised this project as part of the Logic of Inquiry course at Duke University. This study would not have been possible without his guidance and generous provision of funding. The authors also wish to thank Lynn Smith-Lovin for her support of this research project. Naomi Quinn and Claudia Strauss also provided eminently helpful feedback on this paper. We address this gap in the literature through a two-stage mixed-methods design. First, we inductively assess people's understandings of poverty using structured interviews. Next, we use these interviews to construct a survey that includes new items of poverty beliefs that reflect both interviewees' understandings of poverty and empirical facts about poverty from the current sociological literature on stratification.Finally, we utilize the theoretical concept of cultural schemas to identify the constituent parts of beliefs about poverty. To do so, we rely on the connectionist theory of cognition, which implies that individuals have mental models that are and Tranby 2007), we are, to our knowledge, the first to operationalize and apply the insights of schema theory to beliefs about poverty. In their foundational work on stratification beliefs, Kluegel and Smith (1986, 16) briefly mention schemas and suggest how they may be relevant to beliefs about poverty, but this aspect of their work has remained largely undeveloped. We concretize schemas of poverty as shared mental models of who is poor and why they are poor. We then demonstrate that people's perceptions regarding types of poverty differ in these two key respects, employing a survey-experiment to show that this is t...

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In recent decades, sociologists have generally avoided explicitly discussing the role of culture in processes of social inequality. We argue that the prevailing disciplinary theory of inequality, the framework laid out in Charles Tilly's Durable Inequality, necessarily relies on cognitive processes and cultural concepts. The four primary mechanisms driving inequality—exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation—involve justification, categorization, coordination, and (e)valuation. We survey research on social inequality that illustrates each of these four processes. Our review reveals important empirical patterns about how disparities between groups emerge and endure. We observe that while sociologists often conduct work that implicitly relies on cultural concepts, other social science disciplines are also doing vital work in this area because they engage directly with cultural concepts. We identify key areas where sociologists are well positioned to use cultural concepts to uncover important findings regarding inequality, as well as to propose interventions for mitigating or preventing inequality. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 48 is July 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.