What is the association between cultural tastes and the qualities we prefer in our friends? Previous research has studied cultural tastes and friendship preferences in conjunction but either relates both to people's occupancy of social-structural positions or limits attention to the association between high-culture preferences and preferences for cultured friends. Adopting an alternative approach, I reconceive tastes as “contentful forms” whose numerical or relational properties lend them inherent meanings. Performing OLS regression on 1993 General Social Survey data, I show that friendship preferences vary in relation to two such properties of tastes: (1) the popularity of respondents’ preferred musical genres and (2) conventionality, which concerns the frequency that respondents’ preferred musical genres are selected in tandem by others. I find that favoring highly disliked genres and atypical combinations of genres are each associated with making boundaries on aesthetic grounds. These results suggest that, affording us a sense of position vis-à-vis others, relational properties such as popularity and conventionality operate as platforms from which we render judgments regarding what kinds of people make appropriate candidates for friendship.

文化品味与我们喜欢朋友的品质之间有什么联系？以前的研究结合研究了文化品味和友谊偏好，但要么与人们占据社会结构位置有关，要么将注意力限制在高文化偏好和对有文化的朋友偏好之间的关联上。采用另一种方法，我将品味重新设想为“内容丰富的形式”，其数字或关系属性赋予它们内在的意义。对 1993 年综合社会调查数据执行 OLS 回归，我表明友谊偏好与两个这样的品味属性有关：（1）受访者喜欢的音乐流派的流行程度和（2）传统性，这涉及受访者喜欢的频率音乐流派是由其他人同时选择的。我发现偏爱非常不受欢迎的类型和类型的非典型组合都与在审美基础上划定界限有关。这些结果表明，为我们提供相对于他人的位置感，人气和惯例等关系属性作为平台运作，我们从中可以判断什么样的人适合做朋友。