CCI Seminar Series, 2024-25

Amir Goldberg, Stanford, Not All Distances Were Created Equal, Or Why Culture Is Not Exactly Geometric
February 24, 2025, 12:00-1:00, MIT Building E62 Room 446

Social scientists often use spatial metaphors to describe social reality. The distances between coordinates—representing people, ideas, organizations—in such spatial apparatuses presumably correspond to socially meaningful differences between them. The advent of computational text methods, specifically word embedding models, catalyzed analyses of culture as a spatial geometry. Yet, the distances between words inferred from computational methods do not correspond to how people perceive their semantic properties. We analyze heterogeneity in people’s interpretations of a variety of cultural objects, and distinguish between different interpretations that are inconsistent with one another (which we term oppositional interpretations) and those that are divergent but not inconsistent (which we term orthogonal interpretations). Using a combination of surveys, free text storytelling, and computational analyses, we demonstrate that geometric representations of cultural space overestimate orthogonal interpretative distance, and underestimate oppositional interpretative distance. Moreover, we show that oppositionality and orthogonality have different sociological implications. People perceive others with opposed interpretations more negatively than those whose interpretations are orthogonal to theirs, and are less inclined to engage with them socially.

Amir Goldberg is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and (by courtesy) Sociology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he is the founding co-director of the Computational Culture Lab. His research uses computational methods, specifically machine learning and large language models, to measure and model cultural dynamics in organizations, as well as in broader social contexts. His work has been published in leading journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and Administrative Science Quarterly. He currently serves as Department Editor for the Organizations Department in Management Science.