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.