Sam Friedman
When it comes to personal narratives, what was really interesting was the disconnect we could see between the way people perceive their origins and what we could see when we measured their origins in the ways that social scientists normally do. Something like 30 percent of people we surveyed in Who’s Who had said they came from a more disadvantaged background than they would be characterized as belonging to in a standard social science way.
What that reflects, I think, is a desire to be ordinary through an ability to tell an upward story about your destination in life — that you weren’t given that privilege through your birth, and that, instead, your trajectory reflects a meritocratic legitimacy. The best way to do that, in a way, is to downplay your privilege. Now, I don’t necessarily say that that’s intentional. I don’t think we necessarily know the degree of intentionality, and that’s an interesting question to pose and, I think, for others to study. But we definitely could see that regardless of intentionality, there was this downplaying of privilege.
The other key way that elite identity is expressed is in taste and lifestyle. There what’s interesting in a way is that the public persona that these elites project is one that is very carefully curated to give the impression of being open to tastes and art forms and lifestyle practices that both signal ordinary-ness and signal a high-brow acculturation. But what was really interesting was that when we compared the private personas that we got in anonymized interviews with the public profiles that are actually published online, searchable by journalists, you saw quite a strong disconnect.
These people were generally much more high-brow in the way they articulated who they were in this anonymized interview than they were in their public profile. I think that, while we…
Auteur: Sam Friedman
