Educational stratification in cultural participation: cognitive competence or status motivation?

Abstract

This article examines educational stratification in highbrow cultural participation. There are two contrasting explanations of why cultural participation is stratified. The status hypothesis predicts that people come to appreciate particular forms of art because it expresses their belonging to a certain social group. The cognitive hypothesis stipulates that cultural participation depends on a person's cognitive abilities, which is why educational stratification in cultural consumption is so evident, especially among consumers of high culture. However, to test these explanations, previous work predominantly relied on an individual's level of education, thus confounding the two mechanisms. We test the status and cognitive hypothesis using data from the International Adult Literacy Survey, covering 18 countries. First, by including an individual's literacy skills, we separate the effect of cognitive ability from that of education. The remaining effect of education can be seen as a better measure of the status-related motives for cultural participation. Second, we examine whether stratification varies across countries. The findings show that the status-related effect of education on cultural participation is smaller in societies with larger educational expansion and intergenerational educational mobility. This is in line with the status explanation, which holds that boundaries N. Notten (&)

Frequency of museum attendance: motivation matters

“…Seaman (2006) maintains that there is often ambiguity in interpretations of the significance of the estimated coefficients of cultural attendance drivers. Notten et al (2013) argue that the significance of education is particularly ambiguous as this variable captures both cognitive ability, which, according to Stigler and Becker (1977), is essential to the enjoyment of cultural consumption, and Bourdieu's (1984) status effect, whereby attending cultural events is mainly a means used by elites to highlight and perpetuate their privileged social status. If a different covariate capturing cognitive skills is introduced, the latter are controlled for so that education captures only the status effect; Notten et al therefore recommend that this be done.…”

“…We follow their suggestion and try to distinguish the two distinct effects; however, we use a different proxy for literacy. Notten et al (2013) use scores on a literacy test, but we could not ask our respondents to recall their marks in similar exams as these tests were introduced in Italy to monitor school performance only in recent years, and individual scores are not revealed to students. On the other hand, the marks on final exams at school/university are not reliable because there is, in Italy, a very high variance between the average marks given in different parts of the country and different types of schools (Checchi 2004).…”

“…This suggests that measuring education is not the same as measuring its effects on cognitive skills and familiarity with the world of ideas. It therefore made sense to follow Notten et al (2013) and consider literacy, here proxied by reading habits, as a measure of cultural capital. As to our variable of interest, we plot the number of museums visited in the previous 12 months in Fig.…”

“…In line with Notten et al (2013), we also control for literacy; we use information on the number of books read as a literacy proxy. We aim to appropriately disentangle the effects of cognitive skills and education, thus distinguishing between a cultural capital effect and a social status effect.…”

Cosmopolitan cultural consumption: Preferences and practices in a heterogenous, urban population in Switzerland

“…As Lamont and Aksartova (2002: 2) (Bourdieu, 1984;Roose and van der Stichele, 2010). Second, education may increase the capacity for processing complex information and thus persons with higher levels of education could have a higher capacity for enjoying cultural goods and services of higher complexity, meaning highbrow culture or culturally exotic and foreign objects (Bourdieu, 1968;Notten et al, 2014;Rössel, 2011a).…”