Conference Agenda

Scholars are interested in what keeps people in groups: their commitment to the group’s ideals or social structures. Classic economic theories would expect people to make individually rational assessments of the gains they get from a group, and leave when the group’s values shift from their own. Insight from sociological and social networks research, on the other hand, suggests that people’s commitment to groups is not reducible to their individual beliefs alone, and that group cohesion plays an important role in decisions to leave. This problem has been difficult to study because it is rare to find a clear test case where (1) an organization dramatically and clearly shifts its stated values and (2) there is information on individuals who left the group. We identify a case that addresses both of these problems: the United Methodist Church (UMC), which experienced a recent schism over same-sex marriage. We analyzed a dataset of UMC pastors in North Carolina collected prior to the schism to investigate the ideological and social network predictors of leaving the UMC. Preliminary findings show that, net of personal beliefs, pastors were more likely to remain in the UMC if they were connected to other pastors who also remained. Individuals’ ideology is a significant factor in group cohesion, but social structure plays an important role as well.

Project 2025 is a political initiative of The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think-tank based in Washington, D.C. The initiative’s agenda is captured in its book, Mandate for Change: The Conservative Promise: Project 2025 (Dans and Groves 2023). It seeks to promote conservative policies for reshaping the federal government. Some critics argue that the initiative is a Christian nationalist plan to infuse the government with conservative Christian values. There is little doubt that Project 2025 seeks to shape the Federal government in a conservative direction. It is less clear that it is a Christian nationalist plan to promote Christian values. Notably, “Christian” only appears seven times in the Project’s book. Although it may be true that theologically-conservative Christians find many of Project's policy recommendations appealing, that does not mean that the initiative is a Christian nationalist document; one would expect conservative Christians to see many of the policy recommendations of a conservative think-tank appealing for the simple reason that they are conservatives. This paper will draw on semantic network analysis and LDA topic modeling to examine the Project's primary text and assess the extent to which it is a Christian nationalist document. Ideally, it will do so by comparing it with earlier mandate editions (conditional on the availability of digital copies of earlier mandates).

A large body of research demonstrates that inter-group friendships reduce stigma and increase acceptance. Using longitudinal data on the friendship networks between students in a seminary where there is increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals, the authors seek to test the relative strength of several competing hypotheses about the mechanisms that underlie these changes. A baseline model measures how simply perceiving LGBTQ+ people as in your friendship network influences changing attitudes on same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay clergy. Subsequent models explore whether reciprocated ties, tie strength, the number of ties, the centrality of ties, and homophily alter this association. We also explore whether these associations hold for students with strongly negative attitudes at baseline. In a time when LGBTQ+ individuals are facing increasing social exclusion, this research helps inform important debates about the factors that increase acceptance.

This paper investigates how cultural schemas – networks of cognitive associations – influence the belief formation of students in higher education. One challenge in studying cultural schemas is the difficulty of measuring them using traditional survey data, which focuses on measuring beliefs rather than the underlying relational nature of meaning between beliefs. Although work on belief networks has recently gained prominence, it assumes that all uniformly share the same perceived relationship between beliefs.

In this paper, we leverage the insight behind the development of relational class analyses that, even though we cannot measure an individual’s belief schema through traditional survey instruments alone, we can estimate the relational similarity between the beliefs of one person and another. Using longitudinal social network data from a mainline Protestant seminary, we examine how shared cognitive associations mediate the transmission of beliefs between students.

We find that belief shifts towards one's peers are more likely to occur when they increase the similarity between individuals' cognitive schemas, highlighting that social influence is not simply a matter of adopting specific beliefs but of aligning cognitive structures. Moreover, we find that social interactions activate these schemas, leading to the emergence of shared meanings. Our findings contribute to the study of cultural transmission by (1) developing a novel method for measuring individuals’ cultural schemas, (2) demonstrating how shared schemas mediate belief shifts, and (3) showing that social influence involves aligning cognitive structures rather than just adopting beliefs.