Search

Current debates about cultural change question how and how often change in personal culture happens. Is personal culture stable, or under constant revision through interaction with the environment? While recent empirical work finds attitudes are remarkably stable, this paper argues that typifications—how material tokens are classified as a particular mental type by individuals—are more open to transformation as a result of the fundamentally fuzzy nature of classifying. Specifically, this paper investigates the social conditions that lead people to reclassify. How do we move people to see the same thing differently over time? Paying attention to type–token dynamics provides mechanisms for why and under what circumstances personal culture may change. To assess reclassification, the paper analyzes an online survey experiment that asked people to classify refrigerators as owned by "Trump" or "Biden" voters. Those participants who received definitive feedback about the correct answer were more likely to reclassify than are those receiving normative feedback about how "most people" classified the images. Implications for cultural change and persuasion are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As field change is often explained by recourse to agentic efforts of a few or revolutionary turbulence of many, this paper provides a complementary explanation of change grounded in the quotidian dynamics of physical objects and settings. Using the culinary and mountaineering fields, we demonstrate how attending to the materiality of objects and settings offers analytical leverage into the ways fields conflict and change. More specifically, we argue field instability is normal because, at the level of social action, mass and energy are inherently finite. As a result, actors responding to effects from distal fields may nevertheless collide over the objects and settings in which they are compelled to act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current debates about cultural change question how and how often change in personal culture happens. Is personal culture stable, or under constant revision through interaction with the environment? While recent empirical work finds attitudes are remarkably stable, this paper argues that typifications—how material tokens are classified as a particular mental type by individuals—are more open to transformation as a result of the fundamentally fuzzy nature of classifying. Specifically, this paper investigates the social conditions that lead people to reclassify. How do we move people to see the same thing differently over time? Paying attention to type–token dynamics provides mechanisms for why and under what circumstances personal culture may change. To assess reclassification, the paper analyzes an online survey experiment that asked people to classify refrigerators as owned by "Trump" or "Biden" voters. Those participants who received definitive feedback about the correct answer were more likely to reclassify than are those receiving normative feedback about how "most people" classified the images. Implications for cultural change and persuasion are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social norms are the glue that holds society together, yet our knowledge of them remains heavily intellectually siloed. This article provides an interdisciplinary review of the emerging field of norm dynamics by integrating research across the social sciences through a cultural-evolutionary lens. After reviewing key distinctions in theory and method, we discuss research on norm psychology—the neural and cognitive underpinnings of social norm learning and acquisition. We then overview how norms emerge and spread through intergenerational transmission, social networks, and group-level ecological and historical factors. Next, we discuss multilevel factors that lead norms to persist, change, or erode over time. We also consider cultural mismatches that can arise when a changing environment leads once-beneficial norms to become maladaptive. Finally, we discuss potential future research directions and the implications of norm dynamics for theory and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]