Taste boundaries and friendship preferences: Insights from the formalist approach

Abstract

What is the association between cultural tastes and the qualities we prefer in our friends? Previous research has studied cultural tastes and friendship preferences in conjunction but either relates both to people's occupancy of social-structural positions or limits attention to the association between high-culture preferences and preferences for cultured friends. Adopting an alternative approach, I reconceive tastes as “contentful forms” whose numerical or relational properties lend them inherent meanings. Performing OLS regression on 1993 General Social Survey data, I show that friendship preferences vary in relation to two such properties of tastes: (1) the popularity of respondents’ preferred musical genres and (2) conventionality, which concerns the frequency that respondents’ preferred musical genres are selected in tandem by others. I find that favoring highly disliked genres and atypical combinations of genres are each associated with making boundaries on aesthetic grounds. These results suggest that, affording us a sense of position vis-à-vis others, relational properties such as popularity and conventionality operate as platforms from which we render judgments regarding what kinds of people make appropriate candidates for friendship.