Lauren Valentino CV [PDF]

I am a cultural sociologist of inequality and stratification. My work asks how people understand their place in an increasingly unequal society, and how they draw on these perceptions to reproduce or challenge inequality. I use experiments, survey data, and interviews to study these processes across a variety of domains, such as work and occupations, politics, poverty, social movements, and education. My prior research has examined how people construct and understand the occupational status hierarchy, why some Americans are so opposed to welfare and other anti-poverty policy measures, how we can explain the persistent gender gap in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, and the ways in which racialized and politicized perceptions of violence impact bystanders’ support of social movements. I am also interested in how we can use concepts and tools from the cognitive sciences to advance theory and methods in sociology.