Jesse Hoey’s paper wins two awards from American Sociological Association

Wednesday, May 10, 2017
 
Published in American Sociological Review, the paper received the 2017 Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association’s section on mathematical sociology as well as the Outstanding Recent Contribution in Social Psychology Paper Award from the society’s social psychology section.
 
The authors proposed a generalization of affect control theory — how people maintain meaning through their actions and interpretation of events — using Bayesian probability theory. Using a series of mathematical computer simulations, they illustrated how this generalization resolves several issues within sociology and social psychology by balancing cultural consensus with individual deviations from shared meanings, balancing meaning verification with the learning processes reflective of change, and accounting for noise in communicating identity. [CS News]