In the paper linked below, I investigate how uncertainty in meanings is structured on different levels of analysis. I draw an explicit distinction between two forms of uncertainty that operate on two levels of analysis: between-person disagreement in meaning, which has been previously studied; and meaning entropy, or the within-person uncertainty that an individual carries about the meaning of a concept, which had not previously been measured. I present a new method by which to measure meaning entropy in surveys. I use it to establish that within and between-person uncertainty are empirically as well as theoretically distinct, and I investigate how entropy is patterned between respondents and terms.

With a clear conceptual distinction between within and between-person meaning uncertainty and an empirical operationalization of both, the logical next question is, what are their effects? I plan to build upon this work to study topics such as:

• The effects of ambiguity and disagreement on social influence, using agent-based models programmed in my R package bayesactR.
• Persistent miscategorization of and discrimination against people on the boundaries of categories.
• How actors determine, make use of, and change category boundaries—particularly those of emergent categories, such as gender nonbinary.
  
  

Social media spaces in which people interact semi or fully anonymously are one example of a context which facilitates uncertainty in labels and meanings. In these projects, I and my coauthors investigate processes of political influence in such spaces. In the three papers on which I am first or sole author, we use data from experiments in which we paired respondents to talk to each other about politics on mobile messaging apps that I developed for the purpose.

People who inhabit controversial identities handle uncertainty borne out of lack of consistency between how they see themselves and how they believe others see them. In a series of articles using a longitudinal, nationally representative survey of American police officers collected by NORC at the University of Chicago, my coauthors and I study patterns, changes, and wellbeing effects of the identity meanings held by police officers, who have recently been the center of a national discourse about not just systemic racism and inequality in the justice system in general, but the fundamental power and moral worth of their occupational identity specifically. They are therefore a particularly useful case to study in order to better understand changes in and effects of differences between first and third order meanings.