Colloquium Series: Steve Vaisey, Duke University

Cultural Fragmentation 
or 
Acquired Dispositions? 
An Analytic Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change

This talk outlines two ideal-typical models of cultural internalization – the cultural fragmentation (CF) model and the acquired dispositions (AD) model and considers the predictions each makes in regard to processes of long-term cultural change. The CF model implies that the contemporaneous effects of external cultural forces should matter for shaping behavioral and attitudinal dispositions, while the AD model implies a sort of “imprinting” effect such that contemporaneous responses are primarily a function of previous exposure in early life.
Accordingly, CF models predict that social change processes are driven primarily by period effects and AD models predicting that social change processes are driven primarily by cohort effects. To evaluate these hypotheses, Mr. Vaisey uses a novel, yet simple, method to analyze age/period/cohort effects for 163 time-series variables from the 1972-2014 General Social Surveys. 

The results indicate that in the majority of cases, the predictions of the AD model are better supported, suggesting that cultural change happens via the slow enculturation of persons early in life and not via contemporaneous exposure to external cultural influences. Mr. Vaisey outlines the implications of our results for current understandings of the sources and mechanisms of cultural change.