Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, 1979) by Pierre Bourdieu, is a sociological report about the state of French culture, based upon the author's empirical research from 1963 until 1968.

Because they lack the superior education (cultural knowledge) needed to describe, appreciate, and enjoy the aesthetics of a work of art, 'working-class people expect objects to fulfil a function' as practical entertainment and mental diversion, whilst middle-class and upper-class people passively enjoy an objet d'art as a work of art, by way of the gaze of aesthetic appreciation.

[2] The acceptance of socially dominant forms of taste is a type of symbolic violence between social classes, made manifest in the power differential that allows the ruling class to define, impose, and endorse norms of good taste upon all of society.

[3] Hence, the naturalization of the distinction of taste and its misrepresentation as socially necessary, deny the dominated classes the cultural capital with which to define their own world.

As researchers, Bourdieu and the statistician Salah Bouhedja applied geometric data analysis, as part of a multiple correspondence analysis, of "the complete system of [social] relations that make up the true principle of the force and form specific to the effects recorded in such and such correlation" using correspondence analysis of the data from two surveys: (i) the "Kodak survey" (1963) and (ii) the "Taste survey" (1967), and subsets of data from the "dominant classes" and from the "petite-bourgeoisie".