Peter starts the ball rolling, on- and off-line. Here’s the link to stage 2 of our on-going “tastes/preferences” symposium. More from me after the Affiliates lunch.
Ok, not that much more, since, well, I’m writing something else. I wanted to point to Matt Salganick, PEter Dodds and Duncan Watts’s work on tastes. Basically, they set up an experiment where web listeners were offered previously unheard songs for free download. When listeners were told the popularity of the song first (what the authors call “social influence”) inequality and the unpredictability of success were increased. They introduce a quality measure (I believe the quality of the song was gauged by a control group of listeners who were not exposed to the dread social influence) and find that success was partially, but not entirely or consistently, determined by quality. That is, people chose bad songs all the time, just because other people did.
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Oh, and here’s another thing: tastes are made within the bounds set by culture producers, and culture producers are operating with their own notions of how tastes are reproduced and change. After all…capitalism survives by producing markets. So peep this bit of data from a project I’m working on: This is the statement by a person employed in the music industry:
“Johnny Cash was really popular, and then when his record sales went off and he wanted to be artistically a little different*, he just wanted to do what he wanted to do. That’s a big thing for every artist is they get to the point where they want to do what they want to do, and there’s a label guy telling them no, we need another one of those songs that you did last time. We can’t market that song, because then it would be different, we don’t like different, different is bad, because we know how to make the widget, what if you gave us the wodget? That’s bad. So those people eventually fall out of favor as acts do. There’s hardly an act now that lasts for ten years. If you get an act that lasts for ten years, that’s a big thing.”
*This statement is referencing American Recordings, done in 1994 in his living room with Rick Rubin.
I know I’m not saying anything radical here, and this content is in Peter’s original post, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to join two of today’s projects into one post.
So, do you see a difference between tastes and preferences, and, if so, what? This is a question of some importance to me, as I’m supposed to finish an essay on “the role of preferences in explaining social action” and an issue that has come up is the difference between preferences and tastes.
I have been noting but avoiding that problem (this is what my hyphen says). Sadly, OED uses “preference” to define “taste.”
Upon further inspection, preference is a personal rank ordering while taste assumes a social order. My online OED defines taste as “the sense of what is appropriate, harmonious, or beautiful, esp. discernment and appreciation of the beautiful in nature or art; spec. the faculty of perceiving and enjoying what is excellent in art, literature and the like.” To we few sociologists, this definition of taste screams CLASS. Taste is then not a set of inert preferences, but the cultivated habit of choosing one set of things over another. These things, unsurprisingly, are those traditionally defined by elites as beautiful, cultivated, harmonious, appropriate, etc. We fail to have “taste,” therefore, when we prefer the unharmonious, the ugly, and the inappropriate. By most accounts, this would preclude us from having taste if we like Cindy Sherman, John Cage or Lenny Bruce.
So, imaging the argument you’re crafting, Jeremy, I would think that tastes and preferences might “explain social action” in pretty different ways. In the parlance that Peter and I have been using (and his 2cents on this would be wonderful), taste drives aspirational tastes (ick–we should have used “action” perhaps, or “choices”), while preferences drive popular, curatorial, and self-reinforcing choice.
I think…
It is is a little hard to think since I do not share a preference for the salsa cover of “No stopping me now” that my neighbor is blasting into the house, even as she cleans up from the dance party she threw all night. McFadden and Whitehead are SO psyched, wherever they are. Actually, here they are, right here in my blog:
I don’t know… seems like taste implies a judgment of quality and, by extension, some baseline. Preferences not so much. There is “good taste” and “bad taste.” The term “preferences,” on the other hand, doesn’t imply a baseline. “Good” and “bad” “preferences” don’t trip off the tongue in the same way – maybe because preferences are generally viewed in sort of a neutral light. As the OED hints and JL confirms, the baseline for good taste tends to be what is “harmonious, attractive and beautiful” to one or another elevated social stratum. There are definitely some elevated folks out there who believe John Cage to be all three (I went to college with some of them), so I think identifying the baseline matters quite a bit. Good taste for the compulsively omnivorous snob might require staying one step ahead of whatever baseline those directly behind you are busily drawing. For example several beers I mean hours ago in a hipster bar in Williamsburg, I realized that from a hipster perspective, Willie Nelson is the new Johnny Cash. Which might mean that Waylon Jennings is next. (I’m pretty sure it’s not Kenny Rogers.) This is the kind of observation that thrills non-sociologists to the core when you’re hanging out at a bar. (”And for my next trick…”) Oh well… several beers ago I cared a lot more about my revelation. Right now all I know is my baseline for a certain kind of film is somewhere in between The Stepford Wives (good taste) and The Devil Wears Prada (bad taste) which I just had the misfortune of watching. I’m going to be tasteful and stop there… Budweiser and blog-posting is a dangerous cocktail. (Btw, Budweiser = the new Pabst)
‘the role of preferences in explaining social action’ – this is a really good question, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I’m not so sure that the preferences/taste distinction is going to help answer your question, though. Maybe in my own mind, sociologists are inclined to speak to taste, while economists are inclined towards preferences. The former being something with baselines (per Mike), cultural gatekeepers, relations to class and culture (per Lena [or maybe Bourdieu]), and the like. And the latter being something more like individual-level orientations that direct patterns of actions in intendedly rational fashions (like Becker, or even someone like Cass Sunstein, whose article about how markets won’t stop discrimination includes people with a ‘taste’ for discriminating).
The impetus for our conversation was that preferences are assumed to be so fixed, but the content of those preferences might matter a lot. Theoretically, can I today have a preference for Chinese food, and tomorrow a preference for Italian food? Or do my preferences have to be fixed and fixated on one or the other? And if I have a preference for heterogeneity (this was the issue – that Amazon always assumes I’m going to continue to want/be more of what I already have/am), how might the preference->action link look differently?
These might all be settled issues, and maybe Jeremy would know – or maybe you can call these preferences or tastes and it doesn’t matter much..
This is an enlightening discussion Jeremy, and you’re welcome for doing your conceptual work for you. Let us know how it turns out.
This Andrew fellow has made a nice contribution to the discussion, which isn’t “naturally” linking to these comments..so here is my “unnatural” intervention:
http://unionstreet.wordpress.com/2007/12/12/taste-for-taste/
Hey, thanks for starting this discussion and for linking to my unfortunately rather garbled post. I’m not sure myself whether it makes a lot of difference to call preferences tastes or tastes preferences…trying to obtain a sociologically useful distinction between the two for a concept of social action, no less, strikes me as tricky, but I’m out of my element.
Just a summary of my take, which actually changes every time I think about the two concepts…I just had a feeling that there’s a kind of first-order/second-order differentiation between preferences and tastes. Not to say that preferences aren’t ’socially constructed,’ but out of a concept of taste we can generate (using familiar distinctions such as good/bad, strong/weak, refined/unrefined, idiosyncratic/usual, etc.) certain kinds second-order descriptions of social behavior that we can’t do as readily with preferences. Perhaps, glibly, preferences lend themselves to aggregation and tastes to evaluation and discrimination? In any event, tastes seemed to me a kind of stylization of preferences, a linking of preferences into patterns or as JLena says cultivated habits, in ways that allow choices to become socially-recognizable statements of a kind: my preferences express who I am, but don’t determine the whole of me (since any combination of links is contingent). That allows us to find one another appealing/disgusting, intriguing/boring, surprising/ordinary. Maybe we can still arrive at these kinds of feelings and attitudes with the concept of preferences, but it still seems easier to reach at them through a concept of taste.
Now that I’ve had some time to think and re-read, I’m struck first by how unanimous our opinions on the matter are (despite lots of hedging and allusions to impressionistic understandings) and second, by your notion, Andrew, of aggregating preferences and evaluating tastes. Is it saying the same thing to claim that the study of tastes drives us to think about cultural capital & habitus (again, in a Bourdieuan mode) while the study of preferences drives us to think about individual action in the context of measurable, if numerous, environmental conditions? Wait, are those two approaches so different?
I think if we were to produce a summary “measure” of the fixity of tastes v.s. preferences (in the relevant sociological and economic literatures), we’d find tastes are treated as more fixed than preferences, because tastes can be reduced to social class/aspirational class, while preferences are highly sensitive to context and available paths of action. No?
Is it saying the same thing to claim that the study of tastes drives us to think about cultural capital & habitus (again, in a Bourdieuan mode) while the study of preferences drives us to think about individual action in the context of measurable, if numerous, environmental conditions?
I think that’s right, and perhaps they are not so different. I think there’s something to be found in the fact that taste tends to emerge with respect to cultural choices – taste in food, art, literature, music, fashion, dress, architecture, and perhaps people (friendship and sexual partners). It’s still easy to evaluate, and hence moralize, tastes though I don’t think we put much stock on basing morality on a ‘faculty’ of taste. With respect to preferences, these are connected to a broader range of situations involving social choice, not just cultural ones. A preference simply implies that we have the capacity to observe ourselves making meaningful choices for not entirely arbitrary reasons.
I’m a little resistant – though perhaps for no good reason – to think of tastes as fixed and preferences as flexible, though I understand the argument. How do we account for changes and shifts in tastes, which I do think happen? Of course, acknowledging shifting or changing tastes doesn’t necessarily sever the connection between taste and social class since, as in the case of fashion, one of the markers of ‘appropriate’ behavior for certain groups is not to stick with your tastes for too long lest you be seen as passe, out of touch. Still, if we think of changes in taste as a driving motor for changes in preferences at point-of-sale (e.g., as when we buy music), we’d need to account for how taste contributes to contingency and fixity at the same time rather than making tastes more fixed and preferences more contingent. What I want today is not necessarily what I wanted yesterday, and this isn’t because I’m just willy-nilly inconsistent, but because I’ve developed ‘better’ or ‘different’ tastes. Taste allows you to claim a ‘learning process’ for your preferences, perhaps – whereas preferences, because they are highly situational, just change depending on context.
Well, maybe this is wrong. I don’t know – hard one!
Andrew – I would guess JL is making the case that tastes are more fixed than prefs based on evidence from Bourdieu, that habitus comes early in life and is sticky (hence the argument that it is related fundmanetally to class). While preference is more point-of-sale, or as you put it, something that explains ‘what I want today’.
I’m with you, though, that the prefs-as-contingent and taste-as-fixed is kind of shaky, theoretically. I also think, with regards preferences, it runs the dramatic risk of being tautological. Assumedly, preferences are ‘revealed’ through action – a quick econlit search shows recent research like Udo Ebert’s “Revealed Preference and Household Production” (which abstract I’ve reproduced below). Since the strong assumption is that preferences lead to action, if we can determine household production functions, and they are consistent, then whammo – we can go backwards to derive the preference function.
See how nicely that works? We can’t know preferences, but we can know outcomes (what people spend money on). Bit if the outcomes are stable and consistent, we can assume that they reflect preferences.
So IMHO, we’re having two conversations here. The first one is the one that Jeremy left us with – the role of preferences in determining social action. My guess is that this is meant as an address to the economic assumption that straightforwardly, preferences->action. The second conversation is more derived from the Bourdieu-like concerns over where taste comes from. And in that conversation, there is lots of room for debate still, about structural and situational ways that preferantastes come about and affect cultural capital.
My own interest is in the second with regards my research on art markets and whatnot (but really I would love to knock out of the box the assumption that preferences are stable and lead to action).
Abstract from Ebert’s “Revealed Preference and Household Production”. March 2007 Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.
Whoa! I’m very sorry that I am only responding to this now. I suck. I appreciate your thoughts and hope you are not insulted by my losing track of this.
As far as I can tell from rational choice literature, the distinction they draw on is fuzzy, and seems to be along the lines that preferences are very close to choice itself (say, a preference for _Adaptation_ versus _Atonement_) and tastes are closer to commodities that one can think of as being terms in a utility function (say, a taste for quirky). But this seems extremely loose as far as I can tell and I’m not sure I have it right. More to the point, it’s clear that from the different posts above that these terms have really different meanings to different people, so my confusion about trying to talk them in an essay seems about right.
Unfortunately for my essay I only have 7500 or so words. I’m caught up mostly on the question of how you can talk about preferences as an explanation for action if you don’t think preferences actually characterize something specifically real inside the head. That is, there’s no reason to think that two people who have the same preference have something similar going on in their brains, beyond just that this holistic characterization can be made. This gets you very close to a position that preferences are just that which is ‘revealed’ in choices, but if you go there, then you mostly lose the prospect of preferences being explanatory, at least if by explanatory we mean by reference to causes. Instead, Gintis has a recent essay in which he says basically that preferences (along with beliefs and constraints) are an apparatus for re-describing choices; to me that position is a dead-end for explanation, since redescription may be useful but it isn’t explanation.
Ah ha! We may have had to wait, but the waiting was worth it! I *love* the topic, Jeremy, and Peter and I have the answer!! (mwah ha ha) I refer you to the typology of whatwethencalled tastes on Peter’s Rethinking Markets (which–Peter?–seems to be redesigned in a delightful citrus burst)–a post called something like “How do you know what to get?”
In other words, the typology of “causes” reveals that two people can choose the same vacation (or whatever) but for different reasons. Ah, but this isn’t published…. Erm, to resort to the place of last resort: doesn’t Distinction include a discussion of how upper and middle [sic] class Frenchies interpret photographs differently? I seem to remember that the photographs of potholes and garbage were “ugly” to the working class folks, and “beautiful” to the elites.
Sorry I’m incoherent. More when I can think straight.