Dalton Clark Conley (born 1969) is an American sociologist. Conley is a professor at Princeton University and has written eight books, including a memoir and a sociology textbook.

Conley attended Stuyvesant High School. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in humanities and from Columbia University with an M.P.A. in public policy and a Ph.D. in sociology. He also holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in biology (genomics) from NYU.^[1]

Conley is best known for his contributions to understanding how health and socioeconomic status are transmitted across generations.^[2] His first book, Being Black, Living in the Red (1999), focuses on the role of family wealth in perpetuating class advantages and racial inequalities in the post-Civil Rights era.^[3]

He has also studied the role of health in the status attainment process. An article, "Is Biology Destiny: Birth Weight and Life Chances" (with Neil G. Bennett, American Sociological Review 1999) and his second book, The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (with Kate Strully and Neil G. Bennett, 2003) addressed the importance of birth weight and prenatal health to later socioeconomic outcomes.^[4] Conley's next book, The Pecking Order, which followed in 2004, argued for the importance of within-family, ascriptive factors in determining sibling differences in socioeconomic success.^[5] Conley's subsequent book, Elsewhere, U.S.A., published in 2009, describes changes in American work-life attitudes and social ethics in the information economy.^[6] In 2014, he published the satirical book, Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask, using his own parenting decisions as examples.^[7][8]

In 2017, Conley published The Genome Factor, co-authored with Jason Fletcher. This book discusses the nature versus nurture debate and the influence of genes on social life.^[9] Conley has also written an introductory sociology textbook, entitled You May Ask Yourself, currently in its 7th edition.^[10] He has also penned a memoir, Honky (2000) that examines Conley's own childhood growing up white in an inner-city neighborhood of housing projects of New York City.^[11]

Conley is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.^[12]

• Otis Dudley Duncan Award, American Sociological Association (2018).^[13]
• Guggenheim Fellow (2011).^[14]
• Elected to the Council on Foreign Relations (2007).^[15]
• Alan T. Waterman Award, National Science Foundation (2005).^[16]
• CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (2001).^[17]

Conley is married to the Bosnian-American astrophysicist Tea Temim with whom he has a child. He also has two children from a previous marriage with Natalie Jeremijenko: a daughter named E and a son named Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley.^[18][19][20]

• Being Black, Living in the Red. University of California Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-520-21673-0.
• Honky. University of California Press. 2000. ISBN 0-520-21586-9.
• The Pecking Order. Random House. 2004. ISBN 978-0-375-71381-1.
• Elsewhere, U.S.A. Random House. 2009. ISBN 978-0-375-42290-4.
• You May Ask Yourself. W. W. Norton & Company. 2011. ISBN 978-0-393-12020-2.
• The Genome Factor. Princeton University Press. 2017. ISBN 978-0-691-16474-8., with Jason Fletcher
• The Social Genome. W. W. Norton & Company. 2025. ISBN 978-1324092636.

• The Guardian profile of Honky