{"id":8551,"date":"2016-09-15T07:00:57","date_gmt":"2016-09-15T07:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/?p=8551"},"modified":"2016-09-14T18:42:38","modified_gmt":"2016-09-14T18:42:38","slug":"variety-is-the-spice-of-life-but-are-traditional-dishes-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/2016\/09\/15\/variety-is-the-spice-of-life-but-are-traditional-dishes-best\/","title":{"rendered":"Variety is the Spice of Life, but Are Typical Dishes Best?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n Amir Goldberg, Michael T. Hannan, and Bal\u00e1zs Kov\u00e1cs, <\/span>“Cultural Boundaries? Variety and Atypicality in Cultural Consumption,” American Sociological Review<\/em>,<\/a><\/span> 2016<\/span><\/div>\n
\"Japanese<\/a>
Japanese tacos, an atypical offering. Photo by Prayitno, Flickr CC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a broad sense, there are two kinds of consumers. First, there are\u00a0the people who like variety, and tend to be curators of things in multiple, specific genres. Generally, enjoying a wider variety of things is a way for people to distinguish themselves from the less educated or the exclusive snob, marking their status as high class, open-minded consumers. The other way of thinking about consumption is in terms of \u201ctypicality,\u201d or how well something fits into a particular genre, and some consumers require their cultural objects to fit into its pre-defined genre. Amir Goldberg<\/a>, Micheal Hannan<\/a>, and Bal\u00e1zs\u00a0Kov\u00e1cs<\/a> explore how these two different types of consumers respond to boundary-spanning creations – those restaurants, movies, and music that combine elements of multiple genres to create something new and unusual.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div> The authors analyze over 3 million movie reviews from Netflix and over 700,000 restaurant reviews from Yelp to categorize reviewers as different types of consumers. To measure atypicality<\/em>, they looked at how many genre labels were applied to each restaurant (Asian, Latin, American, etc.) or film (Drama, Action, Comedy, etc.). For variety<\/em> they looked at users\u2019 pasts reviews to understand the range of movies or restaurants they consume.\u00a0\u00a0As a reviewer’s penchant for new and innovative (atypical) restaurants and movies decreases, their desire for variety increases.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

What the researchers found is that as a reviewer’s penchant for new and innovative (atypical) restaurants and movies decreases, their desire for variety increases. This finding is consistent with the view that consumers tend to know and like multiple types of genres, but that they like a clear understanding of what genre they\u2019re consuming. \u00a0This allows them to be \u201cexperts\u201d of many particular types of food or music, and atypical offerings challenge their hard-won cultural capital.\u00a0Enjoying variety then, is not about making connections with others, but distinguishing oneself\u00a0from the uneducated masses or the snob who only knows and likes one type of thing. For these consumers, variety may be the spice of life, but only when eaten in typical dishes.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amir Goldberg, Michael T. Hannan, and Bal\u00e1zs Kov\u00e1cs, “Cultural Boundaries? Variety and Atypicality in Cultural Consumption,” American Sociological Review, 2016 In a broad sense, there are two kinds of consumers. First, there are\u00a0the people who like variety, and tend to be curators of things in multiple, specific genres. Generally, enjoying a wider variety of things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1957,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[42171,14907,42170],"class_list":["post-8551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-consumers","tag-sociology-of-culture","tag-genres"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8551"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8568,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8551\/revisions\/8568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}