Why do some people regularly attend the opera, visit art galleries, or go to classical music concerts–while others rarely, if ever, do?
The easy answer might be, “They can’t afford it.” But according to recent research from the University of California San Diego Rady School of Management, the real explanation goes far beyond money.
The new paper — published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research and coauthored by Joe Gladstone, an assistant professor of behavioral sciences and marketing at the Rady School — studied roughly 7,500 people in the United Kingdom and the United States to understand what actually drives participation in so-called “highbrow” cultural activities.
Their findings reveal that a person’s education, vocabulary, and social networks are much stronger predictors of cultural engagement than however much is in their bank account.
“In the UK, we found that cultural capital — things like education, knowledge, and linguistic ability — was the stro