I'm extremely excited to share that our paper on Cultural Appropriation, with @YaelBerda and @amirgoldb has been accepted at @ASR_Journal !. In it we explore why some acts of cultural boundary crossing are repudiated as "appropriation" while others are seen as legitimate.

RT @peteaceves: So excited to share that my new paper with @profjamesevans, “Human languages with greater information density have higher c….

RT @amirgoldb: Our new paper on cultural appropriation is out @ASR_Journal!.We show that people object to cultural boundary-crossing by hig….

Outstanding work here by Doug and @solenedelecourt !.

This tracks with my intuition for sure.

RT @ewzucker: Very excited re new published paper, w my amazing coauthors Jaekyung Ha & Stine Grodal. Theory has implications for questions….

RT @DzGuilbeault: New paper in Management Science w. @AustinVanLoon Katharina Lix @amirgoldb & Sameer Srivastava: “Exposure to the Views….

@amirgoldb @YaelBerda One more thing, you can find the preprint here:.

There is a lot more interesting detail in the paper, but I will wrap it up here. It was a labor of love with @amirgoldb and @YaelBerda, and we're happy it's finally out. If you've ever wondered about cultural appropriation, I'm sure it will have some answers for you!.

Other interesting results:. Surprisingly, we DON'T find that members of the target group are particularly more reactive than others. And we find that the most reactive individuals are members of socioeconomically successful ethnic minorities.

In terms of moderators, a crucial factor we find is disenchantment about group-based social mobility. This, along with our other findings leads us to conclude that cultural tariffing is a form of symbolic redistribution.

We find that perceptions of disrespect and exploitation mediate feelings of upsetness and inappropriateness, where upsetness is relatively more driven by perceptions of exploitation, whereas feelings of inappropriateness are more driven by perceptions of disrespect.

Here we break out effects by hypothesis and scenario, where grayed coefficients are insignificant.

We find strong support for our hypotheses. The figure below shows the effect of being in the transgressive condition (relative to the permissible condition) on respondents’ reactions (pooling all scenarios and measures of disapproval).

We test this theory in a between-subjects vignette experiment (n ~= 3000), where we gauge the reactions of respondents to multiple, varied boundary crossing scenarios (16 different scenarios, one for each hypothesis, where each respondent saw 4).

These factors matter because ppl view such acts as reproducing inequality, through devaluation and exploitation. Thus, they disapprove more when the adopter's connection to the target culture is superficial or when the adopter derives much value relative to the target group.

We refer to this mental accounting as "cultural tariffing". Tariffing is performed based on info about the adopter’s & target’s social identities:. Ppl disapprove when the adopter's group has greater status than the target's, or when the adopter is high status within their group.

Consequently, cultural boundary-crossing came to be understood through the prism of ownership and value. People assess its legitimacy by weighing the costs and benefits accruing to the parties involved. And only approve when the adopter captures less value than the target.

First, it made (usually marginalized) cultural practices, once only seen as valuable within their respective cultural traditions, desirable objects of consumption. Second, it made cultural boundary-crossing a form of cultural capital in and of itself.

As we know, however, accusations of appropriation tend to be most commonly directed at high-status individuals. We attribute this to the rise of cultural omnivorousness as a dominant form of high-status cultural consumption, which had two important effects:.

The discourse around cultural appropriation is especially interesting because classical theories, such as Bourdieu’s theory of cultural distinction, maintain that groups who benefit from the status quo are those most motivated to protect the symbolic boundaries that sustain it.