Bio

 Joseph Quinn received his PhD in sociology in 2022 from Duke University, specializing in social network analysis and social psychology. He studies how dissimilar people learn to get along, and whether interactions between members of different groups can reduce inequality.

Research

 Substantive research interests: social psychology; cognition; social networks; stratification and inequality; segregation and homophily; belief change; social policy

Department cluster: Social Psychology

Research Overview: Joe studies how people’s environments and connections to members of other groups combine to (a) shape their beliefs about and behaviors toward dissimilar people, and (b) influence macro patterns of stratification, discrimination, and segregation. A portion of his current research explores methods for measuring and modeling networks, and approaches to measuring differences in social status of different occupational identities.

Current Projects: Joe’s ongoing projects leverage novel survey data, experiments, agent-based simulations, and secondary datasets to explore the following questions:

• Did the Covid-19 pandemic make people change their beliefs about certain jobs?
• Can persistent stereotype-inconsistent information help retool stereotypes?
• Does prior cooperation between dissimilar people cause future cooperation between people of different groups?
• How might social and structural conditions attenuate downstream segregation in networks?
• Do Americans devalue jobs that are perceived as increasingly female-dominated?

 

Teaching

Sociology 392 – Elementary Statistics for Sociologists