Peter Mcmahan
Biographic Data
| ID | 226403 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Mcmahan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcmahan |
| SIGNATURE | MCMAHAN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0996-0465 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Cultural and Symbolic Foundations of Status Hierarchies
Interpretations of high-profile status attributions like NBA awards tend to come from one of two theoretical standpoints. Rational/economic models treat status assessments as socially tainted measurements of objective quality. In contrast, symbolic/cultural models interpret such assessments as culturally situated assertions used in the determination of quality and merit. In this rejoinder to Bigert, Kühhirt, and Van Lanker’s (2026) reply to our 2…
Ambiguous Status Relations and Complex Hierarchy among Adolescents
Informal status hierarchy is a ubiquitous feature of social life, and it is one that drives dynamics of dominance, influence, exclusion, and stratification. Utilizing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, this article shows that friendship nominations among adolescents are sensitive to status distinctions and that this sensitivity can be exploited to infer status relations and the level of ambiguity those relati…
Status Ambiguity and Multiplicity in the Selection of NBA Awards
Sociologists of culture have long noted that contrasting cultural frames can lead to status ambiguity and status multiplicity. We explore these phenomena in the domain of professional sports by first replicating and then extending and challenging recently published findings on selections for the National Basketball Association (NBA) All-Star game. Relying on a large data set that includes more than 10,000 player–years, we show that accounting for…
Creative Destruction
Communication of scientific findings is fundamental to scholarly discourse. In this article, we show that academic review articles, a quintessential form of interpretive scholarly output, perform curatorial work that substantially transforms the research communities they aim to summarize. Using a corpus of millions of journal articles, we analyze the consequences of review articles for the publications they cite, focusing on citation and co-citat…
Local Network Regressions
The authors propose and illustrate an exploratory technique to shed light on the degree to which bivariate relations between individual-level variables themselves vary over a network. The authors discuss limitations and possible extensions
Ambiguity and Engagement
Despite modernity’s love affair with rationality and the precision that supports it, ambiguity persists not only in humor and politics but in all areas of contemporary life including scholarship and science. Here the authors explore how knowledge cultures differ in their precision of expression and the consequences of ambiguity for those cultures. They develop, estimate, and validate a model of ambiguous expression from large-scale publication da…
Like family
Altruism is difficult to explain in an evolutionary context—the mechanisms of selection appear to favor selfishness. Existing scholarly work addressing this puzzle relies on structural and behavioral assumptions that severely limit generalizability. The model presented in this article circumvents the need for such assumptions by incorporating an evolving network component to natural selection. Through a process of coevolution of individual and re…
How stable is the core discussion network
How stable is the core discussion network
Creative Destruction
Communication of scientific findings is fundamental to scholarly discourse. In this article, we show that academic review articles, a quintessential form of interpretive scholarly output, perform curatorial work that substantially transforms the research communities they aim to summarize. Using a corpus of millions of journal articles, we analyze the consequences of review articles for the publications they cite, focusing on citation and co-citat…
Ambiguity and Engagement
Despite modernity’s love affair with rationality and the precision that supports it, ambiguity persists not only in humor and politics but in all areas of contemporary life including scholarship and science. Here the authors explore how knowledge cultures differ in their precision of expression and the consequences of ambiguity for those cultures. They develop, estimate, and validate a model of ambiguous expression from large-scale publication da…
Like family
Altruism is difficult to explain in an evolutionary context—the mechanisms of selection appear to favor selfishness. Existing scholarly work addressing this puzzle relies on structural and behavioral assumptions that severely limit generalizability. The model presented in this article circumvents the need for such assumptions by incorporating an evolving network component to natural selection. Through a process of coevolution of individual and re…
How stable is the core discussion network
Like family
Altruism is difficult to explain in an evolutionary context—the mechanisms of selection appear to favor selfishness. Existing scholarly work addressing this puzzle relies on structural and behavioral assumptions that severely limit generalizability. The model presented in this article circumvents the need for such assumptions by incorporating an evolving network component to natural selection. Through a process of coevolution of individual and re…
Ambiguity and Engagement
Despite modernity’s love affair with rationality and the precision that supports it, ambiguity persists not only in humor and politics but in all areas of contemporary life including scholarship and science. Here the authors explore how knowledge cultures differ in their precision of expression and the consequences of ambiguity for those cultures. They develop, estimate, and validate a model of ambiguous expression from large-scale publication da…
Local Network Regressions
The authors propose and illustrate an exploratory technique to shed light on the degree to which bivariate relations between individual-level variables themselves vary over a network. The authors discuss limitations and possible extensions
Creative Destruction
Communication of scientific findings is fundamental to scholarly discourse. In this article, we show that academic review articles, a quintessential form of interpretive scholarly output, perform curatorial work that substantially transforms the research communities they aim to summarize. Using a corpus of millions of journal articles, we analyze the consequences of review articles for the publications they cite, focusing on citation and co-citat…
Ambiguous Status Relations and Complex Hierarchy among Adolescents
Informal status hierarchy is a ubiquitous feature of social life, and it is one that drives dynamics of dominance, influence, exclusion, and stratification. Utilizing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, this article shows that friendship nominations among adolescents are sensitive to status distinctions and that this sensitivity can be exploited to infer status relations and the level of ambiguity those relati…
Status Ambiguity and Multiplicity in the Selection of NBA Awards
Sociologists of culture have long noted that contrasting cultural frames can lead to status ambiguity and status multiplicity. We explore these phenomena in the domain of professional sports by first replicating and then extending and challenging recently published findings on selections for the National Basketball Association (NBA) All-Star game. Relying on a large data set that includes more than 10,000 player–years, we show that accounting for…
The Cultural and Symbolic Foundations of Status Hierarchies
Interpretations of high-profile status attributions like NBA awards tend to come from one of two theoretical standpoints. Rational/economic models treat status assessments as socially tainted measurements of objective quality. In contrast, symbolic/cultural models interpret such assessments as culturally situated assertions used in the determination of quality and merit. In this rejoinder to Bigert, Kühhirt, and Van Lanker’s (2026) reply to our 2…
Computer Science (6 works) · Political science (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Social Psychology (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Complex Network Analysis Techniques (3 works) · Econometrics (3 works) · Social Psychology (3 works) · Ambiguity (2 works) · Context (archaeology (2 works)