Taste Boundaries and Friendship Preferences: Three Hypotheses

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 12. Intimate Ties

Abstract

I investigate how the meanings people use to define the relational category of friend are connected to their cultural tastes. Performing OLS regression on 1993 General Social Survey data, I examine the criteria that individuals use to evaluate others’ fitness for friendship and identify “parallelisms” between tastes and definitions of friendship across three analytical dimensions of taste. First, respondents whose preferred genres are less popular in the aggregate value intelligence as important criteria for friendship-worthiness. Second, culturally omnivorous respondents disproportionately recognize creativity and being “cultured” as important criteria for friendship-worthiness and dismiss the importance of “fun-loving” as an important criterion for friendship-worthiness. Third, more intense expressions of preference and aversion are associated with greater use of a variety of moral-aesthetic boundaries in definitions of friendship. Drawing upon insights from field theory, I argue these “parallelisms” exist when individuals retrieve position-contingent sets of boundaries in the global organization of cultural tastes and translate these boundaries into subjective heuristics regarding who is and who is not an appropriate friend.

Author

• Kyle Puetz, University of Arizona