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When a group shares a viewpoint on a status order, their consensus imparts legitimacy to their shared understanding of that order. Conversely, a group espousing multiple viewpoints undermines the notion that one “true” hierarchy exists. To build empirical knowledge about how social groups contribute to the construction of status orders, we take the occupational hierarchy as a case study and map the structure of agreement across intersectional groups. First, we quantify the extent to which groups (1) agree internally on their occupational rankings (within-group consensus) and (2) agree with other groups (intergroup consensus). Using General Social Survey data on occupational perceptions, we find a cluster of privileged groups—namely, highly educated White men and women—who agree internally and with each other on the occupational status order. Lesser advantaged groups exhibit less internal agreement and do not cohere around an alternative conceptualization of value, leaving unchallenged the consensus of privileged groups. 

Recent instances of lethal mass violence have been linked to digital communities dedicated to misogynist and sexist ideologies. These forums often begin with discussions of more conventional or mainstream ideas, raising the question about the process through which these communities transform from relatively benign to extremist. This article presents a study of the Reddit incel community, active from mid-2016 to its ban in late 2017, which evolved from a self-help forum to a hub for extremist ideologies. We use computational grounded theory to deduce empirical patterns in forum composition, psychological states reflected in language use, and semantic content before refining and testing an interactional process that explains this change: a shift away from drawing on real-world experiences in discussion toward a greater reliance on cognitively simple symbols of group membership. This shift, in turn, leads to more discussions centered on deviant ideology. The results confirm that understanding the dynamics of conversation—specifically, how ideas are interpreted, reinforced, and amplified in recurrent, person-to-person interactions—is crucial for understanding cultural change in digital communities. Implications for sociology of groups, culture, and interactions in digital spaces are discussed.