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tkeskinturk.bsky.social
turgut keskintürk
@tkeskinturk.bsky.social
1.4K followers 250 following 79 posts
sociology phd candidate @duke | https://tkeskinturk.github.io/
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tkeskinturk.bsky.social
the correct spirit for writing. everyone should propose their own Law.
In fact, I should like to propose a generalization; one which I fondly hope will some day come to be known as 'Fodor's First Law of the Nonexistence of Cognitive Science'. It goes like this: the more global (e.g., the more isotropic) a cognitive process is, the less anybody understands it. Very global processes, like analogical reasoning, aren't understood at all. More about such matters in the last part of this discussion.
December 4, 2025 at 1:00 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
well, more likely, sociology is neither that nor the other, not both:
I have always been a little too eclectic. Unable to make up my mind whether to be a scientist or a humanist, I learned what I could about both. I took most of my college courses outside my major (maybe that’s why I never figured it out), drifting toward graduate school with no idea of what field to enter. I chose sociology because more than any other social science sociology would let me do what I pleased.
December 2, 2025 at 11:56 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
two job market candidates in an abysmal market competing for the same job at Heidelberg: Walter Benjamin and Karl Mannheim.
As 1922 came to an end, Benjamin traveled once more to Heidelberg— less to make a final attempt at establishing an academic home than to reassure himself that, after years of effort, there was no place for him there. Arriving in early December, he rented rooms and continued to work on the essay on lyric poetry that was to serve as the introduction to Heinle’s papers. But even this proved a torture, as he was continually disturbed by the noise of children playing next door. He quickly reestablished contact with the economist Emil Lederer, who had published “Critique of Violence” in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, hoping through him to obtain a direct line to Jaspers. After a presentation in Lederer’s seminar, however, Benjamin was not invited back. He also returned to the sociological evenings at the home of Marianne Weber. Invited to deliver a talk, he found himself in a difficult position. He had nothing suitable prepared, so he plunged ahead with the “next best thing”: an oral version of the essay on lyric poetry. Although the talk was a miserable failure, it would have made no difference. Benjamin learned that Alfred Weber had already taken on a candidate for habilitation: “a Jew,” as he wrote to Scholem, “by the name of Mannheim.” Benjamin had become acquainted with Karl Mannheim, whom he found a “pleasant young man,” through Bloch. Mannheim’s career as a towering figure in sociology was still ahead of him: he served as an adjunct faculty member at Heidelberg from 1926 to 1930, when he obtained a position in Frankfurt, and after 1933 he was in exile in En gland, teaching at the London School of Economics. Benjamin’s instincts had been right, and Heidelberg was now, defi nitively, a closed chapter in his life.
November 15, 2025 at 12:13 AM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
since everyone is thinking about returns to ideological moderation and the Vibe, I just came up with a toy theoretical exercise to think about how we may bring ideology and Good Vibes together.

I'm vehemently in favor of someone building A Theory of Political Vibe:
tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/vibes
a model of for the effect of vibes on utility at different levels of ideological distance.
October 31, 2025 at 5:28 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
in some sense, yes! I think this is one of the defining takes on it:
October 30, 2025 at 11:46 AM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
"an ideology must create a drama."
An image of the world becomes an ideology if it creates in the mind of the person holding it a role for himself which he values highly. . . . To create a role, however, an ideology must create a drama. The first essential characteristic of an ideology is then an interpretation of history sufficiently dramatic and convincing so that the individual feels that he can identify with it and which in tum can give the individual a role in the drama it portrays. (Boulding 1964, 39; quoted in Goertzel 1992)
October 19, 2025 at 1:27 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
sorry, not sorry:
mel gibson explaining things to Jesus Christ: - "political scientists talking about age-period-cohort" - sociologists
October 16, 2025 at 1:06 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
I think the issue is that those viewpoints are not "substantive" enough.

[added a comment to Andrew's post after seeing it here]:
One possibility is to argue that social scientists avoid hypotheses or arguments that go against their political interests. While this feels true anecdotally (e.g., I know I raise eyebrows at sociology meetings when I say things like “evolution”), this is not in itself an evidence of scholarly practices gone wrong. It seems more plausible to expect that I or someone else should be able to formulate these hypotheses precisely, document them through appropriate methods, and publish the findings using rigorous methods. I don’t see any such substantive minority of ideas that is supposed to change how social science works today. Another possibility is to argue that even if such work exists, it’s being censored in academia. Now, that seems more plausible (after all, people may avoid publishing normatively bad findings or avoid studying them altogether), but even if that’s the case for quite many people, one would expect that this research would circulate via some kind of “samizdat,” perhaps via arXiv or some other medium. That doesn’t seem to be happening either.
October 12, 2025 at 11:13 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
I believe that the experimental paradigm in "polarization research" should receive strong criticism for its thin conception of political culture. I make this argument in a new blog post.

Experiments Can’t Reduce Partisan Animosity
tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/experiments
The Question of Manipulability I believe that this is a long-overdue correction for a reason. Much of the literature on polarization has operated under a tacit assumption: that political attitudes are malleable. If you frame an issue one way, you can shift people’s support for particular candidates. If you “humanize” out-partisans, animosity declines. If you push people into a room and make them discuss a question for 15 minutes, you see that ideology is more moderate than it would be1. The implicit theory of political culture operating here is that people’s ideologies are weak, malleable, and ready to be channeled into something “good” if only we have the “right” intervention. 1 That is, they are more likely to be 2, 3, or 4 in a Likert scale than being 1 or 5 on a 5-point scale.
September 24, 2025 at 9:26 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
cultural evolution folks pretty much moved past "the Question on California & Paris," but it is still a valuable lens to think about sociology's core problems.

here are some of my reflections on transmission & directionality.

Thinking About California and Paris
tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/attactors
Consider a simple thought experiment to flesh this out. Three toddlers are (with a social science magic) hanging out on an island. They have ordinary perceptual capacities, but no shared language, institutions, or instructors. If categories are indeed social in origin, then before a “society” forms, these toddlers will have certain perceptions and proto-concepts, but will lack properly standardized cultural schemas. As interactions deepen (because, hey, why not?), pressures for coordination and disputes over resources and authority will force solutions to emerge. Through ritual, sanction, and pedagogy, those solutions will be codified into social templates for categories, anchored in a specific place and time, and faithfully preserved across generations. But what kinds of solutions do we end up with? If we keep mercilessly sending different toddlers to different islands, how do we get a green, a blue or a grue?
September 12, 2025 at 12:29 AM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
the idea of being on "the left" or "the right" has clear implications for many of us, particularly for predicting what people think about economic or cultural issues.

but does this "alignment" show up across many countries? not really.

a new blog post here: tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/leftright
the alignment of left-right identity and cultural and economic preferences across 78 countries, showing that the alignment is score among WEIRD countries.
September 4, 2025 at 6:50 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
a new working paper: osf.io/vsr5b

I propose a three-stage model of cohortization where dynamics of cohort learning and political sorting serve as complementary engines of aggregate political change.

I apply this to the case of the killing of George Floyd & the BLM.

it's also my job market paper!
Generational Imprinting: How Political Events Shape Cohorts Turgut Keskintürk August, 2025 How, and for whom, do political events translate into enduring political change? This article advances a three-stage model of cohortization, in which salient events produce age differential changes in attitudes, elite cues drive identity-congruent political sorting, and life-course timing regulates whether these attitude changes remain persistent over time. Focusing on the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 as a quasi-natural experiment, I test this model by analyzing attitudes toward U.S. law enforcement among non-Hispanic White Americans using five surveys that collectively span from 2016 to 2024. The findings consistently show that Democrats and Independents became strongly unfavorable toward law enforcement—much more so among younger than older individuals. Moreover, the changes persisted for younger individuals, while fading among older individuals, leading to cohort-led polarization. This article integrates two classic—though largely partial—theories of political learning, offering a model for understanding how salient events can realign generational divides.
September 1, 2025 at 5:33 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
not much of a sequence anymore; it's tragedy & farce at the same time:
an article published in Theory and Society: "The methodological stagnation of sociology is related to its left-wing skew."
August 26, 2025 at 1:18 AM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
August 24, 2025 at 7:13 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
one awkward piece of language in sociology papers is the frequent "I use such and such theory to understand such and such social outcome," which often reminds me of what Barry Barnes says here:
"Every theorist may be confident that, whatever the field and the theoretical tradition to which she has committed herself, there is a little piece of "society" reserved for her, a little set of data that will allow her theory to work: it is a comfortable and even-handed arrangement. The alternative to such eclecticism is to seek theoretical unity. When coins are tossed, sometimes they land "heads" and sometimes "tails". It is useless to deploy two theories here, one for each kind of outcome, and to choose whichever "works" in a given case. It is useless, that is, if one's aim is more than that of shovelling words over the coffin of a dead event. What is needed is one theory to make sense of both kinds of event, not two distinct theories. It is scarcely a justification for either one of such theories that it "works" half the time."
August 23, 2025 at 7:24 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
a new working (i.e., for now, an idle) paper.

I ask whether "dynamic constraint" may emerge when both credible information & cross-issue cues target political beliefs--lowering the cost of consistency-seeking memory search.

I field an experiment and find that the answer is no: osf.io/yh2fm
Evaluating Dynamic Constraint in Belief Systems Turgut Keskintürk August, 2025 Do political belief systems exhibit dynamic constraint? Drawing on a bounded rationality account of belief formation, I examine whether coordinated belief change occurs when credible information and cross-issue cues target a range of political beliefs. I test this expectation in a pre-registered survey experiment in the United States (N = 2,414), in which participants are presented with factual information about income inequality and social mobility—with and without explicit target cues, which indicate that the two issues are conceptually linked. The information treatments produced large first-stage effects on their respective target beliefs, while leaving peripheral beliefs unaffected. In exploratory analyses, I extend these analyses to economic preferences and people's self-perceptions of belief consistency. The findings delimit the scope of dynamic constraint and suggest that belief updating may be largely domain-specific.
August 13, 2025 at 12:07 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
watching everyone going to the ASA from my room:
guy sitting in front of a computer.
August 9, 2025 at 6:45 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
disaster girl meme saying "the plan? cancelling bourdieu entirely."
August 7, 2025 at 8:08 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
I got inspired by a recent debate in the ASR on "religious habitus," so I'd like to call all fellow cultural sociologists to cancel the word habitus.

Let’s Cancel Habitus Before It Explains Something Else
tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/habitus
bourdieu reacting to Godard, saying: "How annoying. It's beautiful but I don't understand a thing."
August 7, 2025 at 4:49 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
apparently, the ANES conducted a short survey in 2024 of cohabiting spouses/partners of its sample, allowing us to observe the ideologies of both the focal individuals and their spouses/partners.

naturally, that provides a wonderful excuse for procrastination:
a plot titled "ideological homophily in marital/cohabiting relationships in the U.S.,", documenting a strong correlation using ANES 2024 data.
August 6, 2025 at 11:38 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
hello 911 I'd like to report a literary emergency.
the cover of the upcoming novel by Thomas Pynchon: Shadow Ticket.
July 17, 2025 at 9:40 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
a 1914 one (though now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople, etc.):
July 12, 2025 at 10:24 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
an early dataviz from the 'Ottoman Census,' looking at the distribution of Muslims, Greeks, and Armenians across major cities:
a map of Anatolia, part of the Ottoman Empire and roughly corresponding to the contemporary borders of Turkey.
July 12, 2025 at 10:20 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
"Rather, to have confidence in any claim that cultural socialization and internalization matter for attainment, it is necessary to specify the beliefs, desires, and skills that are associated with the parents’ culture; to specify that their children share these habitus features in common with their parents; to demonstrate how (and indeed, that) parents have transmitted these aspects of their religious subculture to their children; and to show that parents have influenced their children’s outcomes accordingly."
July 5, 2025 at 6:12 PM
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
it's wild to think that this language from Theory & Society is aimed at "correcting" the ties between scholarship & normative thinking. it instead seems that the problem is simply "we ain't like your politics."
Productive Takes on Policing Participating journal: Theory and Society Like many bad ideas born in the ivory tower, the anti-police sentiment favored by sociologists and criminologists has found its way into mainstream journalism and political debates. Following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, calls to “defund the police” gained traction, bolstered by social movements and academic scholarship. This ideological shift led to reductions in law enforcement driven by policy changes and declining morale among officers. Recruitment and retention of police officers have also suffered in this climate of hostility. The consequences of de-policing have been devastating in many urban communities. The anti-police mentality in sociology and much of academic criminology is politically driven, empirically flawed, and harmful to public safety. This special issue seeks to offer a necessary course correction by elevating research, theory, and commentary that illuminates the various ways policing promotes – or could promote – public safety and social order.
July 4, 2025 at 10:54 AM