Browsing by Subject "Morality"

Examination of the moralized risk discourse that occurs during moral panics can help us better understand how discourse supports neoliberal modes of governance. Using the moral panics about crack babies in the 1980's and illegal immigration in the 2000's to conduct a content analysis of almost 1500 newspaper articles, television transcripts and congressional hearings, I found that discourses of fairness, authority, and purity supported techniques of surveillance and control that contribute to the maintenance of racial and class boundaries in the US.

This dissertation documents African-American girls' musical practices at a Boys and Girls Club in Durham, NC. Hip-hop is the cornerstone of social exchanges at John Avery, and is integrated into virtually all club activities. Detractors point to the misogyny, sexual exploitation and violence predominant in hip-hop's most popular incarnations, suggesting that the music is a corrupting influence on America's youth. Girls are familiar with these arguments, and they appreciate that hip-hop is a contested and sometimes illicit terrain. Yet they also recognize that knowledge about and participation in hip-hop-related activities is crucial to their interactions at the club, at school, and at home. As girls hone their listening skills, they reconcile the contradictions between behavior glorified by hip-hop and the model presented to them by their mentors. This project examines how African-American girls ages 5-13 use their listening practices to claim a space within hip-hop's landscape while still operating within the unambiguous moral framework they have learned from their parents, mentors and peers. Through ethnography and close analysis of vocal utterances, dance moves and social interaction, I consider how individual interactions with mass-mediated music teach girls a black musical aesthetic that allows them to relate to their peers and mentors, and how these interactions highlight the creativity with which they begin to negotiate sexual and racial politics on the margins of society.

This dissertation examines how people’s loyalty to their groups influences their perception of harm. Specifically, people who are loyal (vs. not loyal) to their ingroup perceive negative actions by an outgroup against their group as more harmful. Three studies provided support for this hypothesis. Students loyal to their university’s basketball team perceived greater harm from its rival basketball team than those who were not (Studies 1 and 2). The effect held controlling for related group constructs, such as group identification (Studies 1 and 2), and related moral constructs, such as belief in a just world (Study 1). The association between loyalty and harm perception generalized to a country context by showing that Americans more loyal to the United States were more likely to perceive foreign tariffs as harmful (Study 3). Rather than differences in memory recall or general negative perceptions of the outgroup, this effect appeared to be due to loyalists exaggerating the perceived harm inflicted (Studies 2 and 3). Furthermore, as perceptions of harm increased, desire for punitive actions also increased (Study 3).

This dissertation examines the dynamics of widely shared cultural beliefs and the impact that they have on individual-level cognition. It explores how these cultural structures shape cognitive processes like categorization, how the social learning strategies that agents use to learn these structures from one another affect trajectories of cultural transmission, and how our assumptions about how learning occurs across the life-course have implications for large-scale patterns of cultural change. To examine the first element, I collect survey and reaction time data about moral judgments through Prolific. Using sociological approaches to measuring cultural meaning, I show support for the idea that template matching – a specific type of categorization - underpins the attribution of immorality. I then use computational text analysis to test the external validity of my results. To address the second set of questions, I – along with Tom Wolff – build an agent-based simulation where agents use different social learning strategies and place varying weights on the information retrieved with each of these heuristics. We show that processes of cultural transmission vary considerably according to the combination of strategies that agents use, as well as on the topology of the structures where they are embedded. Further, we highlight that there are important parallels between the social learning literature and sociological work on social influence. Our study puts both lines of work in conversation and shows that this intersection is a prolific site of collaboration, especially for sociologists interested in modeling cultural transmission. Lastly, to explore the third set of questions, I build another agent-based simulation that explicitly varies the functional form that the probability of learning takes across an individual’s life-course. I show that the pace and extent of cultural change are both a function of the interplay between the shape of formative periods and the demographic composition of a population. The implication is that if we take seriously the idea that an agent’s probability of learning varies across the life-course, then understanding when and to what extent individuals are open to novel information becomes crucial for explaining how individual-level updating aggregates to large-scale change. Overall, this dissertation hopes to show the productive dialogue that can be established between research within the sociology of culture and growing interdisciplinary interest in culture, its properties and evolution.