Daniel DellaPosta

About

Daniel DellaPosta is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Data Analytics at The Pennsylvania State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University in 2017 and holds a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago, obtained in 2011. As a sociologist, he applies tools such as network science, agent-based computational modeling, natural language processing, and a wide range of statistical methodologies to study core questions arising in political, economic, cultural, and organizational contexts. His research broadly aims to understand how interdependent actors collectively shape social structure, addressing puzzles that pique his curiosity. For example, he investigates why it is easy to predict someone's political ideology based on their music or beverage preferences, how the American Mafia was able to form a nationwide criminal conspiracy despite geographic isolation and disconnection among groups, and how proximity to outgroups can simultaneously foster both tolerance and enmity. His work has been published in leading journals including the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Networks, and Organization Science. He has received awards from various sections of the American Sociological Association and the Academy of Management's division on Organization and Management Theory. Outside of his academic pursuits, he enjoys writing amateur movie blurbs, studying Japanese, and reading John Le Carre…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Criminology
• Computer Security
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Pluralistic Collapse: The “Oil Spill” Model of Mass Opinion Polarization

  American Sociological Review · 2020 · 214 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Despite widespread feeling that public opinion in the United States has become dramatically polarized along political lines, empirical support for such a pattern is surprisingly elusive. Reporting little evidence of mass polarization, previous studies assume polarization is evidenced via the amplification of existing political alignments. This article considers a different pathway: polarization occurring via social, cultural, and political alignments coming to encompass an increasingly diverse a…

  PublisherDOI

• Vertical organizations, flat networks: Centrality and criminal collaboration in the Italian-American Mafia

  Social Networks · 2021-06-12 · 13 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Can Social Media Anti-abuse Policies Work? A Quasi-experimental Study of Online Sexist and Racist Slurs

  Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2020 · 13 citations

  The authors use the timing of a change in Twitter’s rules regarding abusive content to test the effectiveness of organizational policies aimed at stemming online harassment. Institutionalist theories of social control suggest that such interventions can be efficacious if they are perceived as legitimate, whereas theories of psychological reactance suggest that users may instead ratchet up aggressive behavior in response to the sanctioning authority. In a sample of 3.6 million tweets spanning one…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• To racketeer among neighbors: spatial features of criminal collaboration in the American Mafia

  International Journal of Geographical Information Science · 2021 · 12 citations

  The American Mafia is a network of criminals engaged in drug trafficking, violence and other illegal activities. Here, we analyze a historical spatial social network (SSN) of 680 Mafia members found in a 1960 investigatory dossier compiled by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The dossier includes connections between members who were ‘known criminal associates’ and members are geolocated to a known home address across 15 major U.S. cities.Under an overarching narrative of identifying the netw…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Aesthetic Style: How Material Objects Structure an Institutional Field

  Sociological Theory · 2022-02-08 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  How does material culture matter for institutions? Material objects are increasingly prominent in sociological research, but current studies offer limited insight for how material objects matter to institutional processes. We build on sociological insights to theorize aesthetic style, a shared pattern of material object presence and usage among a cluster of organizations in an institutional field. We use formal relational methods and a survey of material objects from religious congregations to u…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Clio Andris

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  6 shared

• Victor Nee

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• Michael W. Macy

  Cornell University

  3 shared

• Hanzhou Chen

  Pennsylvania State University

  2 shared

• Terry Nichols Clark

  2 shared

• Joshua Baker

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  2 shared

• Brittany N. Freelin

  Ashland (United States)

  2 shared

• Arkaida Dini

  Université Paris Cité

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Awards from the American Sociological Association's sections…
• Awards from the Academy of Management's division on Organiza…

Similar researchers at Pennsylvania State University

• Duane Alwinh-64
• Stephanie Lanzah-56
• Vasant Honavarh-53