Papers
In a paper published in Social Networks, we 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, we 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, we 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. Our results show that the ways in which people deviate from consensus encode additional information on how views of social categories are structured.
In a paper published in Heliyon, we used a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of law enforcement officers to show that perceptions of the affective meanings of occupational identities are related to health and wellbeing. Specifically, officers who report seeing their occupational identities as more good, powerful, and active also report better outcomes across 11 of the 13 indices of physical and mental health we tested.
In a paper published in Scientific Reports, we found that manipulating gender labels in conversations between Democrats about the candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary affected participants’ influence. We found that mislabeling a woman’s gender decreased her influence and increased her propensity to be influenced, even though she did not know her gender was mislabeled–an indication of the complexity of the impacts of gender identity and expression on interaction.
