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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 14h

agreed.

turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 18h

cultural sociologists often get too attached to “patterns.”

culturalists reward good "images" as marks of insight (I like making them too), but I wonder if we’ve become a bit too obsessed with them.

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 18h

this is a great take:

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 1d

IMO, one of the big differences between early and contemporary formal analysis of culture is that we are starting to move away from visualization as a form of explanation.

What John Mohr called "iconic."

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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 1d

Two astronauts looking at earth. One: wait it's all just weird weighted averages? The other, pointing a gun: always has been.

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 1d

demographer, ethnographer, and the Guy Obsessed with Networks.

Evangeline Warren @evangelinewarren.com · 1d

assistant professor, associate professor, grad student

the coach of the KC Chiefs, Travis Kelce, and Patrick Mahomes. From left to right they are wearing (1) a very normal grey suit with red tie, (2) a newsboy cap in brown with a shirt that looks like a bad motel wallpaper, and (3) a barbie-esque italian table cloth vest

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 1d

ah, my nemesis... so we meet again.

"Running MCMC with 4 parallel chains..."

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 6d

Don’t deny people’s lived decapitation experience man

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 6d

4% of Americans say "yes" to "have you ever been decapitated?"

Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 7d

1% of US adults have never heard of Trump.

A new Pew Research Center survey of 3,445 U.S. adults finds:
Views of Trump, Vance and congressional leaders in both parties are all more negative than positive % who say that they have a(n)
_ view of ...
Donald Trump (R)
Unfavorable
58
Favorable
40
JD Vance (R)
51
40
Never heard of
1
8
Mike Johnson (R)
John Thune (R)
38
26
25
36
16
Hakeem Jeffries (D)
30
56
45
Chuck Schumer (D)
50
24
21
26
Note: No answer responses are not shown.
Source: Survey of U.S. adults conducted Sept. 22-28, 2025.
PEW RESEARCH CENTER

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 8d

who's your favourite jedi? (wrong answers only).

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Patrick Stotz @patrickstotz.bsky.social · 10d

Found in my parents' basement. #dataviz from the 1932 Olympics

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 13d

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.

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 14d

people's opinions are formed through a combination of long-lasting exposures and political socialization, and we should not expect one-shot experimental settings to *scale* in the first place.

this is such a needed correction to the "polarization" literature:

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 14d

Depolarization is not "a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict.... achieving lasting depolarization will likely require....moving beyond individual-level treatments to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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Boo!levard of Broken Memes @olizardo.bsky.social · 14d

This is Isaac Chotiner calling about that interview

a man with glasses is holding a cell phone in his hand and says `` oh ... '' .

Alt: a man with glasses is holding a cell phone in his hand and says `` oh ... no no no'' .

media.tenor.com

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John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 15d

I mean, we are living in two different realities now, and this really hasn't always been the case.

Partisan views on "more crime": used to move fairly closely, but now radically different (90% say up for GOP, 29% for Dems).

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Josh Sternberg @joshsternberg.com · 22d

RIP Robert Redford, a Hollywood icon and GIF legend.

a close up of a man with long hair and a beard .

ALT: a close up of a man with long hair and a beard .

media.tenor.com

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 26d

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?

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · Sep 6

Andrei Tarkovsky's Tropic Thunder.

Boo!levard of Broken Memes @olizardo.bsky.social · Sep 6

Ari Aster's Madea Goes to Jail

Marjorie James Keenan @unenthusiast.com · Sep 6

Darren Aronofsky's Bluey, The Movie

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Boo!levard of Broken Memes @olizardo.bsky.social · Sep 5

casual causal language

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · Sep 5

a take: it should be perfectly acceptable for an author to use causal language when doing an observational research even if they simply condition on the observables. writing weasel words as lip-service is only making things worse and harming the entire conversation.

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · Sep 4

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.

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Boo!levard of Broken Memes @olizardo.bsky.social · Sep 1

Blueskyism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · Sep 1

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.

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andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · Aug 29

good research statement I think

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Boo!levard of Broken Memes @olizardo.bsky.social · Aug 26

What a fragedy

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