The Cultural-Cognitive Mapping of Scientific Professions
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4522683 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gordon Gauchat (0000-0002-6258-5900, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, corresponding author), Kenneth T Andrews (0000-0003-4871-7353, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 83 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 567-595 |
| Publication date | 2018-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Sociological Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-1224 • E-ISSN: 1939-8271 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0003122418773353 |
| OpenAlex | W2804790329 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 41 |
| References cited | 75 |
Even with widespread interest, public perceptions of science remain understudied and poorly theorized by social scientists. A central issue has been the persistent assumption that publics require a base of scientific knowledge for science to have broad cultural meaning. Yet, recent advances in cultural and cognitive sociology point to alternative research programs seeking to identify how publics come to understand complex and uncertain issues, when information is incomplete and asymmetric. We use this approach to analyze data on public perceptions of how scientific different fields are from the 2006 and 2012 National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Survey. Our multivariate analyses allow us to approximate how mass publics map the social space of scientific professions, while accounting for individuals' social location and cultural identity (e.g., race, class, gender, age, scientific sophistication, and political ideology). We then focus our attention on public perceptions of sociology and economics. Overall, we find that public perceptions, rather than being disorganized, map onto recognizable dimensions indicating how publics distinguish between scientific professions
Epistemology · Ideology · Meaning (existential · Perception · Political science · Politics · Public awareness of science · Public opinion · Public relations · Publics · Science communication · Science education · Social science · Sociology · Sophistication · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Law · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics · Social Psychology
Reimagining public understanding
Sciences perceived as precise and consensual are more trusted
Rethinking Scientific Habitus
A Technological Construction of Society
“Do what that expert says – until you know better”
Consistent effects of science and scientist characteristics on public trust across political regimes
Political beliefs, views about technocracy, and energy and climate policy preferences
The credibility of scientific communication sources regarding climate change
Public perceptions of who counts as a scientist for controversial science
Public responses to scientific research
Religion for Realists
Anti-Scientific Americans
Partisan Polarization and Public Trust in Vaccine Science
Attitudes Towards Members of Religious Groups
Exposure to the Views of Opposing Others with Latent Cognitive Differences Results in Social Influence—But Only When Those Differences Remain Obscured
Public perception of scientific advisory bodies
Entre santé et science
Quasi-universal acceptance of basic science in the United States
Toward an organic policy sociology
Polarized Scientists? Exploring Political Differences about Religion and Science among U.S. Biologists and Physicists 1
The Heterarchy of Occupational Status
Wrong versus Right(eous)
Invisibilizing politics
Campo Científico, Reconhecimento e Motivação Profissional em Programas de Pós-Graduação do Sul do Brasil
Rejecting education as the basis of the social prestige of occupations
Comprendre la méfiance vis-à-vis des vaccins
Boxed In
Does Democracy Affect Income Distribution? Preliminary Evidence for OECD Countries
Love is in the soul, math is in the brain
Sociology and Its (Limited) Publics
Don't Tell Me What I Don't Want to Hear! Politicization and Ideological Conflict Explain Why Citizens Have Lower Trust in Climate Scientists and Economists Than in Other Natural Scientists
Economic inequality and political democracy reconsidered
Connective and Tactfully Tactical
Status and Subfield
Scientific Disciplines and the Admissibility of Expert Evidence in Courts
Confidence in Science
Biblical Literalism Influences Perceptions of History as a Scientific Discipline
Advice Not Safely Ignored
Following Your Gut' or 'Questioning the Scientific Evidence
The Legitimacy of Science
The Sociology of Interpretation
Toward a rational society
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
American Public Opinion, Advocacy, and Policy in Congress
Interaction Effects in Multiple Regression
Public Understanding of Science
Estimation of a Model with Multiple Indicators and Multiple Causes of a Single Latent Variable
Science as a Vocation
Latent variable structural equation modeling with categorical data
Theoretical sociology
Occupations and social status
Frame analysis
Scientific authority in policy contexts
The cultural authority of science
Measuring science or religion? A measurement analysis of the National Science Foundation sponsored science literacy scale 2006–2010
A Theory of Fields
The measurement of civic scientific literacy
Public Understanding of, and Attitudes toward, Scientific Research
Science in Society
The Evolution of Public Understanding of Science—Discourse and Comparative Evidence
For Public Sociology
The Political Context of Science in the United States
The Logic of Practice
For Public Sociology
Can Cultural Worldviews Influence Network Composition
Consensus, Polarization, and Alignment in the Economics Profession
Improving the Measurement of Shared Cultural Schemas with Correlational Class Analysis
Political Position and Social Knowledge
The Dominant View of Popularization
The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu's Habitus
Distortions in cognitive maps
Robert K. Merton
The nature of belief systems in mass publics (1964)
A Broken Public? Americans’ Responses to the Great Recession
The Explanation of Social Action
The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology
Social Theory and Social Structure
Climate‐Science Communication and the Measurement Problem
What can we learn from 25 years of PUS survey research? Liberating and expanding the agenda
Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Economists and Societies
Misunderstood misunderstanding
Not Just Neoliberalism
Sociology in America
Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science
Public Knowledge of and Attitudes to Science
A Position with a View
Can Power from Below Change the World
The New Politics of Community
Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere
The Structure of Deference
The field of cultural production, or
The Superiority of Economists
It's Better Being an Economist (But Don't Tell Anyone)
The Measure of American Religion
Beyond World Images
A Theory of the Public Sphere
Bootstrapping Goodness-of-Fit Measures in Structural Equation Models
The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences
Framing Processes and Social Movements
Culture and Cognition
Making Sense of Culture
Fact-Totems and the Statistical Imagination
Mapping Shared Understandings Using Relational Class Analysis
Motivation and Justification
The Institutional Logic of Occupational Prestige Ranking
What Is Field Theory
Power, Authority, and the Constraint of Belief Systems
A Theory of Structure
Field theory in comparative context
| Unique citing works | 41 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 5,86 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2026 (8) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 38 |