Misrecognition

The purpose of this analysis is to explore whether there is any evidence of misrecognition in the data set.

Coding misrecognition

This will potentially be contentious but I think there are broadly two ways to think about this dynamic:

1. Does the proportion of people who think an artist/tv show should be seen as high quality is consistent with critical legitimacy?
2. What proportion of people who like an artist/tv show think it should not be seen as high quality?
3. What proportion of people who dislike an artist/tv show think it should be seen as high quality?

Does misrecognition vary across social groups?

We have discussed this is a bit and it seems there are various positions but I think I am right in saying that if misrecognition is present that we should not see large variation in the levels of misrecognition across groups.

Analysis

For the most part, I have people who do not express an opinion for the analysis. Although when comparing whether an artist/tv show should be considered high quality, I have kept in the people who have a view about that but who do not express an opinion about whether they like them or not. For example, I can say that I am personally unsure about Celine Dion and still say that I think she shoudl be considered high quality.

Misrecognition at a high level

These are the answers to the question regarding whether artists should be considered high quality.

Blue Planet, Lous Theroux, Downton Abbey, Eric Clapton, Bon Jovi, and Celine Dion all have widely legitimacy in the eyes of the general public. Married at First Sight and Iggy Azalea definitely do not.

Misrecognition as ‘liking something but not thinking it should be seen as high quality’.

Here we are interested in another pattern. Do the people who like things, say Kendrick Lamar, also think it should be seen as high quality?

The pattern gives some evidence for misrecognition. There are a number of illegitimate items where people like them but they know they should not be seen as high quality. For example, Married at First Sight, Mrs Brown’s Boys, but also bands like One Direction and artists like Iggy Azalea. To put this in context, 60% of the people who like Married at First Sight do not think it should be viewed as High Quality.

In general, critically legitimate items typically have fewer people who also think they should not be seen as high quality.

But there are some exceptions too, like Celine Dion.

Misrecognition as ‘disliking something but still thinking it should be seen as high quality’.

Here we are interested in a different pattern. Do the people who dislike things, say Kendrick Lamar, still think they should be seen as high quality?

The pattern here is a little more complex but still gives some evidence for misrecognition. Very few people who dislike illegitimate items think that they should be considered high quality (such as Married at First Sight, Mrs Brown’s Boys, and Iggy Azalea). And there are some legitimate items where people know they are high quality even though they do not personally like them, such as Blue Planet and Game of Thrones.

But the music space is weird again. People seem to think that Celine Dion is high quality even though she is not critically legitimate.

Does the degree to which people think these artists/tv shows are high quality vary by education?

Yes, there are fairly big gaps. Numbers of the right (positive and above zero) mean that people with degrees are more like to say that these artists/tv shows should be seen as high quality. The big ones here are Kendrick Lamar, Aphex Twin, Radiohead, Succession, Blue Planet, and Louis Theroux. Whereas, people with degrees are less likely to say that Celine Dion, One Direction, Bon Jovi, Coronation St., Mrs Brown’s Boys, Married at First Sight, Britain’s Got Talent, and Top Gear should be seen as high quality.

So, there is an education gap in perceptions of quality.

Next we move onto the next form of misrecognition: liking something that I do not think should be considered high quality.

So, this graph is a little more confusing so let me try to explain what is going on here with a few examples.

Look at Radiohead. The association with having a degree is negative. This means people with a degree are less likely to (a) say they like Radiohead and then (b) say that it should not be seen as high quality.

Contrast with Married at First sight, here people with degrees are more likely to (a) say they like Married at First sight and then (b) say that it should not be seen as high quality.

Looking down the list, it seems that educated people are more invested in the critical legitimacy of cultural objects.

Next we move onto the final form of misrecognition: disliking something that I think should be considered high quality.

Again, this graph is a little more confusing so let me try to explain what is going on here with a few examples.

Look at Blue Planet. The association with having a degree is positive. This means people with a degree are more likely to (a) say they dislike Blue Planet and then (b) say that it should be seen as high quality.

Contrast with Bon Jovi, here people with degrees are less likely to (a) say they dislike Bon Jovi and then (b) say that it should be seen as high quality.

Looking down the list, it seems that educated people are more invested in the critical legitimacy of cultural objects.

But it is also fair to say that there are some anomalies here (e.g., Mrs Brown’s Boys). This is probably driven by the fact that very few people who dislike Mrs Brown’s Boys also think it is high quality.

Who are the misrecognisers?

We have talked about this a bit but in exploring this I have discovered something interesting and important, at least I think it is.

First, we agreed the other day that misrecognisers should be defined as follows.

1. They are people who think critically legitimate TV and Music should be seen as high quality
2. They are people who are personally ambivalent about critically illegitimate TV and Music

I have defined people as misrecognisers if they think:

1. 4 of the legitimate artists/shows are legitimate
2. 4 of the illegitimate artists/shows are not legitimate (something other than high quality)

Around 44% of our sample meet this criteria.

Second, we agreed that we would focus on those who experience some inconsistency in their tastes and what they think is high quality. We decided to define those who experience this in the following way.

1. They are people who like something when they are ambivalent about whether it is high quality
2. They are people who dislike something they know is high quality.

This is the combination of those who are inconsistent in their preferences/perception of the status hierarchy described above.

We defined this group as people that are inconsistent on at least 2 items.

Around 54% of our sample experiences some form of this rejection of their own tastes

So, these two groups are not subsets of each other. In fact, putting them together, you broadly speaking get four groups:

1. People who do not agree with the status hierarchy in general nor do they experience inconsistency. These are the kind of people who like Mrs Brown’s Boys and who think it is High Quality. Around 33% of the sample. This group could be called consistent ignorers because they are consistent in their tastes even though they seem to be somewhat unaware of the cultural hierarchy.
2. People who do not agree with the status hierarchy in general but do experience inconsistency. These are the kind of people who are unsure about Succession but think it is high quality. Around 24% of the sample. This group could be called inconsistent ignorers because they seem to be somewhat aware of the cultural hierarchy but their own preferences do not align with.
3. People who do agree with the status hierarchy in general but whose own tastes do not align with it perfectly. These are the kind of people who do not like Mrs Brown’s Boys and who do not think it is high quality but they are also people who do not like Louis Theroux but know it is High Quality. Around 30% of the sample. This group could be called inconsistent misrecognisers because they seem to be aware of the cultural hierarchy and are largely operating in a safe way within it, even though they do not perfectly align.
4. People who do agree with the status hierarchy in general nor do they experience inconsistency. These are the kind of people who like Succession and think it is high quality. Around 14% of the sample. This group could be called the consistent misrecognisers because they seem to be aware of the cultural hierarchy and their tastes mostly align with it.

Parsing these 4 groups seems important.

So, who are they?

Let me work through each group in turn.

consistent ignorers

In general, what we see here is that consistent ignorers:

1. Do not have a degree
2. Are not white
3. Are disabled
4. Identify as WC
5. Are on the lowest incomes
6. Are none aligned with political parties
7. Not interested in politics

inconsistent ignorers

In general, what we see here is that inconsistent ignorers:

1. Are women
2. Do not have a degree
3. Are not in professional occupations
4. Are on low and middle incomes
5. are not aligned to a party
6. Authoritarian (particularly on the left)
7. not interested in politics

inconsistent misrecognisers

In general, what we see here is that inconsistent misrecognisers:

1. Do have a degree
2. are white
3. Identify as MC
4. Are in professional occupations
5. Are on high incomes
6. Labour supporters
7. Libertarian (particularly on the left)
8. sympathetic to welfare recipients
9. interested in politics

consistent misrecognisers

In general, what we see here is that consistent misrecognisers:

1. Are men
2. Do have a degree
3. Libertarian (particularly on the left)
4. interested in politics

In short, the misrecogisers are meaningfully distinct from the non-misrecognisers but the degree of consistency is not as important among misrecognisers. But inconsistency does seem to divide those who are ignorers.

What do these 4 groups think about art and culture?

So, in general the misrecognisers are more similar to each other and so are the ignorers.

But in general the consistent misrecognisers have more of the aesthetic disposition than the others

What do they think about the general art questions?

There is slightly less variation here than in the other more specific questions but the patterns still have some interesting features, particularly when comparing the illegiitmate and legitimate misrecognisers.

There is no difference in terms of people saying that one’s persons taste is as good as the next. Legitimate misrecognisers are less likely than illegitimate misrecognisers to say they need to know more about art than they do to understand it. Illegitimate misrecognisers are more likely to say that anythign can count as art these days. Legitimate misrecognisers are less likely to say that the old snobberies are gone. No real difference in terms of whether there are definite standards.

What do the people in these 4 categories like?

The consistent misrecognisers are the most legitimate. They like the highbrow stuff the most and the lowbrow stuff the least. Similar to them but not quite as strong in either direction is - as you would expect - the inconsistent misrecognisers. The real surprise is that the inconsistent misrecognisers are the ones who seem to most fully reject the cultural hierarchy. They pretty consistently like the lowbrow stuff the most and the highbrow stuff the least. The consistent ignorers are somewhere inbetween.

in what ways are the consistent misrecognisers different from the inconsistent misrecognisers in terms of their tastes?

There is just more inconsistency in general on these items.

But, are the consistent misrecognisers hedging a bit more?

One puzzle is that the consistent misregonisers are not necessarily more affluent than the inconsistent misreognisers. One possibility is that consistent misrecognisers avoid expressing strong opinions and this is why they appear more consistent and are less distinctive in terms of their social profile.

It turns out that there is not clear evidence of this. They are the most likely to express a strong opinion about what they like and they are the second most likely to express a strong opinion about what should be considered high quality.

Rejectors

This is the group of people who like illegitimate stuff, dislike legitimate stuff and do not seem to experience any inconsistency in their sense of the cultural hierarchy.

So, rejectors are less likely to have a degree and less likely to identify as MC, and be part of the None category, they are left authoritarian, interested in politics.

What is going on with Celine Dion?

One of the puzzles of our results is Celine Dion. I wanted to start by outling who actually likes her music.

What is clear from this figure is that the divides we would expect to exist around Celine Dion are present? She is not liked as much by men, younger people, people with degrees, people who identify as MC, and especially left libertarians.

But there are still large chunks of people who like her in these groups.

Is this being driven by the fact that many people have heard of her? Not really. Lots of people have heard of her but not that much more than Taylor Swift, One Direction, and Bon Jovi.

Moreover, the results we get are the same when you only look at people who have heard of her.

Next, I’ll look at whether people imagine other people believe she is high quality and then their own judgements.

There is very little variation in whether people imagine other people think she is high quality.

When we look at whether people themselves think she should be considered high quality there is more social stratification again and so people are drawing a distinction between what they imagine other people think and their own sense of quality.

It is important to remember here that she is the 2nd most over-rated musician though and so there is a sense that people recognise she has more popular acclaim than she should.

We might need more qualitative data here but my sense is that people are answering this question in the way that we have talked about before. That is, people agree that she is a good singer and that this is why many people think of her as high quality.

Divisions with professional occupations

I had a look and we do not have details occupations codes and so I have tried to create my own divisions within the professional occupations. I have created 3 groups:

1. Degree but low earnings (High cultural and low economic)
2. Degree and high earnings (High cultural and high economic)
3. No degree and high earnings (Low cultural and high economic)

The differences are not really striking but there are some differences. For example, people with low cultural capital (no degree) and (high economic captial) typically like more illegitimate items (such as Coronation Street, Mrs brown’s Boys, and Britain’s Got Talent). People with high economic and high cultural capital are the most legitimate.

The same is generally true for the should be high quality questions too.

I also looked at whether these class groupings were connected to the categories of misrecognition described above as well. And it looks like people with high cultural and economic capital are the most likely to be in the misrecogniser groups.