Intersecting Distinction? Highbrow, Omnivore, and Symbolic Boundaries of Taste

Talk with Professor Mads Meier Jæger, Professor of Sociology, Copenhagen University.

Sociologists routinely claim that individuals use familiarity with legitimate culture to signal status and competence. Yet, we know little about how this taste distinction operates, including what counts as legitimate culture and how tastes shape others’ perceptions of status and competence. To address these fundamental questions, we first collected survey data to map the hierarchy of cultural tastes. Based on this hierarchy, we designed two survey experiments to test if more legitimate, highbrow (vs. lowbrow) and omnivorous (vs. univorous) tastes create favorable perceptions of status and competence. Results for Denmark show that highbrow (vs. lowbrow) tastes lead to favorable perceptions of status, economic competence, and cultural sophistication, while omnivorous (vs. univorous) tastes also lead to favorable perceptions of sociability (e.g., social, fun, and likeable). Together, our results suggest that a taste hierarchy exists that makes tastes powerful signals of status and competence and that highbrow (vs. lowbrow) and omnivorous (vs. univorous) tastes create different types of distinction.