Culture and Cognition E-Book

Wayne H. Brekhus

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Cultural Sociology
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 359

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

How does culture shape our thinking? In what ways do our social and cultural worlds enter into our mental worlds? How do the communities we belong to influence what we notice and what we ignore? What cultural variation do we see in cognition? What general patterns do we see across this diversity and variation?

In this lively and engaging book, Wayne H. Brekhus shows us the many ways that culture influences our cognitive thought processes. Drawing on a wide range of fascinating examples, such as how members of different subcultures perceive danger and safety, how cultures variably classify and perceptually weight race, how social actors use and present identity as a strategic resource, and how people across different organizational settings experience time, Brekhus takes us on a creative, diverse, and insightful tour of the sociocultural character of cognition.

Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality offers an invaluable survey of a wide-ranging body of research in the sociology of culture and cognition that will be an inviting resource for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and established research scholars alike.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Culture and Cognition in Sociology

Why culture and cognition?

Sociological approaches to culture and cognition: Durkheimian (cultural), Goffmanian (social), and Bourdieusian (individual practical actor) foundations

Five contemporary traditions in the sociology of culture and cognition

Theoretical and methodological pluralism: integrating multi-contextual evidence to understand culture and cognition

The organization of the chapters

1 Perception, Attention, and Framing: The Sociology of Relevance and Irrelevance

Marked and unmarked: social figure and ground

Automatic and deliberate cognition

Local cognitive cultures of attention: institutional, subcultural, and socially networked norms of focusing

Cognitive variation in perceptions of danger and safety, risk and routine

Seeing sex and talking race: sensory and social attention and inattention

Perception: framing and priming relevance

Conclusion

2 Classification, Categorization, and Boundary Work

Lumping and splitting: thinking categorically

Classification conventions, categorization, and weight assignment: race as an example

The sociomental weighing of acts and attributes in categorization and classification

Local cognitive subcultures and nature/civilization classifications

Purity and contamination: categorization, polarization, and symbolic boundary maintenance

Transitional boundary work: crossing boundaries, bridging realms, boundary shifts, and liminality

Conclusion

3 Meaning-Making, Metaphor, and Frames of Meaning

Cultural frames of meaning: money as a case

Meaning and metaphor

Meaning, analogy, and narrative framing

Conclusion

4 Identity Construction: Identity Authenticity, Multidimensionality, and Mobility

Identity not: identity as boundary work

Strategies of identity: identity as a resource

Identity authenticity claims and identity disputes

Identity multidimensionality

Identity mobility

Conclusion

5 Memory and Time

Collective memory and the construction of the past

Timing frames and time sequencing

Doing time: the sociocognitive meanings and manipulations of time

Conclusion

Conclusion

The embodied/neuropsychology challenge to social and cultural approaches

Critical responses to the embodied/ neuropsychology challenge to cultural and social approaches

Culture and cognition in sociology: prospects for studying social action, social power, and general patterns

Conclusion

References

Index

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Cultural Sociology series

Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality, Wayne H. Brekhus

Protest: A Cultural Introduction to Social Movements, James M. Jasper

The Culture of Markets, Frederick F. Wherry

Culture and Cognition

Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality

Wayne H. Brekhus

polity

Copyright © Wayne H. Brekhus 2015

The right of Wayne H. Brekhus to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2015 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9822-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brekhus, Wayne.Culture and cognition : patterns in the social construction of reality / Wayne H. Brekhus.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-7456-7176-5 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-7177-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Cognition and culture. 2. Social psychology. I. Title.BF311.B7224 2015306.4’2--dc23

2015004488

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to several people who have contributed greatly to my thinking during the writing of this book. Eviatar Zerubavel introduced me to the exciting analytic possibilities of studying culture and cognition many years ago when I was a graduate student at Rutgers University in the 1990s. Eviatar’s intellectual passion and ongoing support and friendship continue to inspire me. I have benefitted tremendously from our many stimulating conversations about cognitive sociology. My thinking about culture and cognition has been sharpened by the valuable insights of Karen Danna, Tom DeGloma, Asia Friedman, Daina Cheyenne Harvey, Kyle Puetz, and J. T. Thomas, who all read and commented on an early draft. Each of them guided me to consider new angles that have expanded the breadth and depth of this book. I am grateful for the steady encouragement and enthusiasm of Jonathan Skerrett, my editor at Polity. He has advised me well throughout the process. I am also indebted to Fiona Sewell at Polity for her very thorough, efficient, and attentive copy-editing. Finally, I thank my wife, Rachel Brekhus, who provided an extra set of eyes and a full measure of moral support whenever they were needed.

Introduction: Culture and Cognition in Sociology

This book explores the cultural sociology of cognition. Despite the quite common feeling that our thoughts are individualistic in nature – private and uniquely our own – thinking is a distinctly social phenomenon. Our thoughts are co-produced within the cultures, subcultures, social networks, communities, and organizations that we belong to. The social construction of reality, an idea first defined and popularized by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), is widely discussed in introductory sociology courses and is an operating ground assumption for sociologists, though often taken for granted as background rather than explicitly outlined. Cognitive sociologists, in studying the cultural and social aspects of cognition, engage with the task of demonstrating variations and patterns in the social construction of reality. In recent years there has been growing scholarly interest in studying the nature of the relationship between culture and cognition. Within sociology, this interest cuts across many topical subfields, including cultural sociology, the sociology of race, social control and deviance, inequalities, economic sociology, social organizations, social movements, environmental sociology, urban sociology, and the sociology of identity. Sociologists of culture and cognition are contributing to a rapidly expanding body of work on how thought and action are intricately linked to cultural and social life.

The approach I take in this book is to discuss sociological research on culture and cognition across a range of cultural, subcultural, identity affiliational, and organizational settings and across varying levels of culture from macrocultures to microcultures. In doing so, I intend to illustrate both cognitive variation and general social patterns in sociocultural cognition. Here I take the social pattern analysis approach of Eviatar Zerubavel (2007), who recommends using multi-contextual evidence both to display cultural variation and diversity, and to locate general social patterns in that diversity. I organize the main body of this book around key cognitive processes (perception, classification, meaning and metaphor, identity, memory, and time construction) rather than around theoretical camps, and bring contributions from the different theoretical and methodological traditions together in order to better illuminate and understand these processes. In this introductory chapter, however, I provide a little background on sociological traditions in culture and cognition as a way of illustrating some of the key methodological and theoretical debates in the field. I will then draw from these varying approaches throughout the book to move across levels of scale, traverse both the quotidian and the morally salient, and demonstrate how culture and cognition can motivate social action and produce and sustain inequalities and simultaneously be produced by inequalities. Before I turn to these traditions, and then to the cognitive processes they study, I offer an illustrative case for why social scientists should study culture and cognition in the first place.

Why culture and cognition?

Why study culture and cognition? What does a cultural approach offer to the study of human thought and the human mind? To address this question it is worth noting that we do not think as “generic” rational human actors, but rather, we interpret the world from specific social standpoints based on the societies we live in, the communities we inhabit, and the social networks we belong to.

For fun, I begin with revelations about a peculiar group that demonstrates a unique, culturally specific thought style and view of social perception. In 2010 three social scientists (Joe Henrich, an anthropologist, and Steven Heine and Ara Norenzyan, two psychologists) published an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences entitled “The Weirdest People in the World?” In this article, the authors looked at a number of classical social psychological experiments thought to explain human social behavior and discovered that the findings of these studies were not replicable in many other cultures. Years of established scholarly wisdom had assumed that these experimental studies revealed evolved psychological traits common to universal human perception and cognitive processes, when in fact the subjects for the experiments came almost exclusively from industrialized Western cultures. These studies, presumed to be measuring human cognition, were actually measuring the unique cognition of a specific cultural group. By compiling cross-cultural research on common experiments such as the prisoner’s-dilemma-style ultimatum game, and visual perceptions of optical illusions, the authors demonstrated that significant elements of human thought are as much cultural and social as they are neurological.

The culture in which one is raised, these authors showed, heavily influences how one responds to a bargaining experiment or even how one perceives optical images. For example, in a well-known optical illusion showing two equal length lines where one line ends in fins that point diagonally forward to create a tail and the other line ends in fins that point diagonally backward to create an arrow tip, Americans (Illinois college undergraduates) judge the line with the tail as being significantly longer. When the test was replicated across 14 small-scale, non-Western societies, however, some cultures saw no difference in size of the main line and none saw the significant degree of difference that Americans saw. The lines are not an optical illusion to the biological human brain; they are an optical illusion to the cultural minds of Westerners. Similarly, in economic bargaining experiments that behavioral economists had considered evidence for evolved universal motivations, findings drawn from Western undergraduates, when compared against findings from 23 other societies from Africa, Amazonia, Oceania, Siberia, and New Guinea, again turned out to be outliers at the extreme end of the distribution. Ara Norenzayan, one of the experimental psychologists who revealed the group-specific cognition of the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) observes that experimental psychologists and economists were so focused on finding underlying universal hardware at work that they missed the central role of culture in cognition (Watters 2013).

The fact that culture shapes the human mind is as instructive to sociology as it is to experimental psychology. The idea that we think not as generic humans, but as socially and culturally located humans, informs sociological approaches to studying culture and cognition.

Sociological approaches to culture and cognition: Durkheimian (cultural), Goffmanian (social), and Bourdieusian (individual practical actor) foundations

Sociological interest in the relationship between the mental and the social can be traced as far back as Émile Durkheim’s critiques of universalist and individualist approaches to perception and thought. Durkheim ([1912] 1965) positioned himself against Immanuel Kant’s universalist model of innate categories of reason, suggesting instead that the processes of the mind are socially formed and that they therefore vary by cultural location. Treating the mind as social, Durkheim rejected the idea of a universal, single, “rational” way of thinking. Society and “social facts,” for Durkheim, were formed in “enacted [social] practices that give rise to real social forces that participants in the assembled group experience jointly” (Rawls 1996: 434). Durkheim also positioned himself against the individualist position of William James’ pragmatism. While Durkheim ([1913–14] 1983) agreed with James that there was a dynamic relationship between thought and reality, he warned that James and the pragmatists proceed from a purely individualist position, because James linked individual thought to individual action as the only reality and therefore could not escape the individual as a unit of analysis. Durkheim argued that the relationship pragmatists posit is the action relation between the biological being and the natural world, not the action relation among social beings engaged in enacting social practices (see also Rawls 1997: 9). For Durkheim, the self and mind are socially constructed in a dynamic relationship with the social world rather than constituted only in an individual human–object relationship with the natural environment. Durkheim’s collectivist, social constructionist position examines cognition beyond the individual as its primary unit of analysis.

The foundations of Durkheim’s sociological approach emphasizing the cultural and social over the universal human or the autonomous individual remain influential in cultural sociological approaches to cognition. Cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander (2003a), for instance, uses a “strong culture” program that merges Durkheim’s collectivist cultural approach with the structuralist ideas of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss (1963) noted, for instance, that myths have similar general motifs, yet show considerable variation in specific content because of the different social worlds people inhabit. Eviatar Zerubavel (1997) emphasizes the importance of the “social mind” in his positioning of cognitive sociology as the intermediate domain between the poles of cognitive universalism and cognitive individualism. He emphasizes sociocultural variation as an important element in the study of thought as distinct from attempts to distill universal foundations of human cognition.

In contrast to the Durkheimian cultural and social orientations evident in much of cultural sociology, there is also a growing school of interdisciplinary cognitive sociologists who engage with cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology to apply models of the human brain to cognition. They resurrect some of the pragmatist interest in the relationship between individual thought and practical action. They identify the individual, bodily responding to sensory input through largely unconscious dispositions, as the central element linking culture to social action. This school of cognitive sociology breaks from Durkheim’s idea of collective representations located in the social realm and emphasizes an embodied neuropsychological view of culture and cognition that centers the individual’s cognitive processing on embodied experiences. This tradition draws from the anthropology of Maurice Bloch (1998), who challenged the views of Lévi-Strauss that myths (a form of thinking) followed the same logic as language. This school in interdisciplinary cognitive sociology develops many of its sociological ideas from the foundations of Pierre Bourdieu.

Current scholarship in the sociology of culture and cognition is sometimes divided between the more cultural and social traditions inspired by Durkheim and other sociologists such as Erving Goffman and George Herbert Mead, and a more individual practical actor and neuropsychological tradition that draws inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu. After a discussion of cultural, social, and individual practical actor approaches to cognition and some of their foundational underpinnings in Durkheim, Goffman, and Bourdieu, five contemporary traditions in cognitive sociology that draw from these foundations will be presented.

Cultural approaches to cognition observe thought collectively through visible social forces or social facts such as cultural codes, discourses, or narratives. Consistent with Durkheim’s vision, they tend to emphasize collective representations such as language and symbols and enacted practices such as social rituals that influence members to see and experience the world as cultural and social beings. I refer to approaches as “cultural” if they focus on macrocultural settings such as societies and “social” if they refer to more local settings such as subcultures, social networks, workplaces, or peer groups. The distinction between cultural and social is therefore heuristic rather than literal. Social approaches are closely related to cultural approaches in that they locate social life in the collective but they do so at the group level. As a result, analysts using social approaches often focus on group-level interactions, studying social life in interactional settings. These approaches focus on culture as transmitted through group-level interactions such as imitation and role modeling of the styles, moral boundary categorizations, and identity performances of peer groups, occupational colleagues, or other categories of social belonging. Practical actor, neuropsychological, or embodied individual approaches locate culture in the practical culture of individuals’ largely unconscious thought processes as they respond to repeated sensory simulations within their environments. These approaches borrow from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to emphasize the mechanisms of individual thought in cognition. Each of these heuristic orientations – the cultural, the social, and the individual – may be seen as having a foundational sociologist in Émile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Pierre Bourdieu respectively.

Erving Goffman’s influence on the sociology of culture and cognition relates to his interests in interactional social attention, social framing, and strategic identity. Goffman, like Durkheim, views the self as socially constituted but his focus is drawn toward culture in interactional and organizational forms. Goffman also expands upon sociologist George Herbert Mead’s ([1934] 1967) interest in selves as emergent from social interactions and experience. Goffman’s focus on the social organization of attention and inattention in social interaction, frames of interpretation, and personal and social identity management all share an interest in the social nature of attention. This broad interest, studied across different domains and across different processes of framing, interactional attention, and identity, has influenced researchers in collective representations (frames as collective representations), symbolic interactionist, and social mindscapes traditions of cognitive sociology. Goffman’s analysis of attention and inattention in social interactions (1963) has influenced research on the sociology of perception; his analyses of identity in the presentation of self in everyday life (1959) and the management of social stigma ([1963] 1986) have influenced studies on the strategic presentation of identity; and his analysis of frames (1974) has inspired a range of cognitive approaches to attention, meaning-making, and classification, including David Snow and Robert Benford’s research on social movement frames (e.g. Snow and Benford 1988; Benford and Snow 2000) and frame alignment processes (e.g. Snow et al. 1986). In his cartography of contemporary cognitive sociology, Piet Strydom (2007: 350) asserts that “given his wide-ranging impact on later developments [Goffman] must surely count as the most central and influential figure in cognitive sociology.” Goffman’s wide-ranging influence has been strongest with respect to traditions that emphasize cognition at the social and interactional levels.

Parallel to Goffman’s influence on researchers emphasizing social and interactional elements of cognition, Pierre Bourdieu’s influence on research traditions focused on the habitual unconscious elements of cognition is strong. In The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu (1990) argues that “practice” has a logic that is organized by unconscious schemas and instantaneous intuitive judgments rather than conscious reasoned deliberation. For Bourdieu (1977; 1990) culture is located less in conscious ideas or shared cultural symbols than in the routines of institutions and individuals. As such, culture is inconsistent and fragmented in its uses. Bourdieu’s view of culture as located in everyday practice and lacking consistency within individuals and across collectives informs cultural sociologist Ann Swidler’s (1986; 2001) theoretical approach that conceives of culture as a toolkit that people use inconsistently. Bourdieu’s (1977) interest in the use of “habitus” in unconscious action has significantly influenced contemporary scholars of culture and cognition who advance an interdisciplinary, neuroscience-informed cognitive sociology. Omar Lizardo (2004) argues that while many cultural sociologists are interested in Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital or his field theory of cultural production (the meso-level aspects of his work), his more psychological, cognitive-practical-level analysis of the habitus has particular relevance for cognitive sociologists. For Bourdieu, people develop unconscious schemas through life experience, and while experience can change these schemas, the habitus allows us to function in the everyday without always questioning and closely analyzing what we do. Most of our decisions, then, are not made with conscious deliberation and explicit acknowledgment of making a choice between multiple actions, but rather become part of our routines and a piece of the everyday structure through which we operate. Scholars interested in connecting sociology to findings from neuroscience are exploring the ways that we put culture into action through the habitus of unconscious schemas and intuitive dispositions.

Contemporary traditions in the sociological study of culture and cognition draw variously from these more foundational interests in the relationship between culture, thought, and action.

Five contemporary traditions in the sociology of culture and cognition

One challenge in characterizing the current sociological study of culture and cognition is that this growing area of research has several different theoretical strands and traditions, often with different goals and sometimes with competing theoretical assumptions and methodological orientations. While it is not possible in this short text to cover every theoretical approach to culture and cognition in sociology, I briefly outline five important contemporary theoretical orientations that help to illuminate some of the key foundations, analytic and methodological perspectives, and debates. Although these five schools and their theoretical influences are not mutually exclusive they are here roughly organized from more Durkheimian cultural, through Goffmanian social, to more Bourdieusian embodied individual approaches. These orientations are (1) a discourse, iconic, and neo-Durkheimian collective representations tradition; (2) symbolic interactionism; (3) Eviatar Zerubavel’s social mindscapes tradition; (4) Ann Swidler’s cultural toolkit tradition; and (5) an intersections with cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology tradition. These five orientations are not exhaustive of the sociological study of cognition, but they are important ones for representing active schools of thought and the big theoretical and methodological debates in the field. The traditions range in their primary units of analysis, from the cultural, to the social, to the embodied neurological individual, as well as in their methodological approaches for accessing the role of culture in cognition.

Discourse, iconic, and neo-Durkheimian collective representations tradition

The first tradition is a collective representations approach to understanding cultural meaning-making and cultural performance that traces its classical roots back to Émile Durkheim’s interest in collective representations of social life. Researchers in this tradition locate their unit of analysis not in the individual but in cultural discourses, or meaning structures, or codes, or other collective representations of culture. Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (2003), for instance, emphasize a strong autonomy of culture approach that views culture as a set of codes that guide understanding and that are reproduced through social performance and practice. They argue for a “thick description” (Geertz [1973] 2000) of the codes, narratives, and symbols that create textured social meaning, and the use of these details to look for deeper principles of social life. They view cultural structures such as codes, symbols, narrative forms, discourses, and other collective representations as durable, underlying, motivating foundations of meaning in social life. Narrative forms such as the morality play, or tragedy, or irony, for instance are general types that carry particular implications for meaning and social life (Alexander and Smith 2003: 25). Donileen Loseke (2009) draws upon Alexander’s idea of symbolic codes to show how United States President George W. Bush’s speeches in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks linked symbolic codes of “victim,” “hero,” and “villain” to emotion codes of sympathy, of pride and patriotism, and of hate, fear, anger, and nationalism respectively. She argues that emotion codes are sets of socially circulating ideas about what emotional feelings it is appropriate to experience and to express outwardly when, where, and toward whom or what. She examines the president’s nationally televised speeches justifying war as melodramatic tales that contained multiple emotion codes that encouraged audiences to feel in certain ways about the primary characters in the drama: the Good American victim and hero and the evil terrorist villain.

Researchers in this tradition concern themselves both with how cultural discourses shape thought and with how this further motivates social action. Lyn Spillman (1995) suggests, for instance, that the “discursive field” is the mediating link between structure and action. In Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia versus MOVE, Robin Wagner-Pacifici (1994) demonstrates how discourses shaped meaning in a standoff between Philadelphia city officials and the radical black separatist group MOVE that ultimately ended in the Philadelphia police dropping explosives from a helicopter onto the MOVE compound, killing 11 people and destroying an entire urban block in the process. Wagner-Pacifici shows how a discourse of sentimental domesticity constructed the Philadelphia neighborhood as an orderly community threatened by disorder brought on by MOVE and how the bureaucratic, means-oriented discourses of government and law officials contributed to the city addressing disorder as a tactical problem to be solved militarily. Using discourse, narratives, cultural codes, and other observable manifestations of cultural thought, researchers in this discursive and iconic orientation use an interpretive approach to understand meaning-making, classification, and other cognitive processes.

Symbolic interactionism

Related to and sometimes intersecting with the discourse, iconic, and collective representations tradition represented in the cultural sociologies of Jeffrey Alexander, Lyn Spillman, and Robin Wagner-Pacifici is a symbolic interactionist approach to cognitive sociology. Symbolic interactionism has its classical roots in George Herbert Mead ([1934] 1967), who emphasized that the self is constructed in interaction with society and its symbols. The approach also draws from Goffman’s interest in social interaction as an important location for studying culture. The symbolic interactionist tradition highlights a concern with how our meanings are built up and negotiated through interactions with others in society and how these meanings are assembled in symbols and discourse. Symbolic interactionism, like neo-Durkheimian iconic approaches, examines collective representations, but typically analyzes them at the social group level rather than at the macrocultural level of a whole society.

In an influential work connecting the analysis of cultural codes from the collective representations tradition with symbolic interactionism, Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman (2003) link culture to action by demonstrating the ways groups put culture into use in everyday life. They use two cases – (1) an exurban activist group operating in a community where activism is muted and (2) bar patrons at a local civic space such as an Elks club – to analyze three dimensions of group style: group boundaries, group bonds, and speech norms. The group styles they highlight in relation to the default cultural style of excessive individualism include timid affiliation in the activist group and active disaffiliation in the civic bar space group. The activist group used the language of individualism in a way that complemented the group style of timid affiliation, choosing not to confront the implied selfishness or hedonism of individualism, but instead to signify that it is desirable to give everyone room to speak out as sincere individuals (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003: 756). The civic bar group affirmed the code of civil society by systematically and deftly inverting it to avoid the difficult burden of serious conversa-tion; they avoided direct discussion of political issues, persuasive speech, serious conversation, idealist talk, and good manners, and emphasized teasing and offensive jokes as ways to appear not to take things too seriously (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003: 761–2). Group styles, these authors argue, filter collective representations and use common collective representations and shared symbols, vocabularies, and codes in different ways. Eliasoph and Lichterman’s idea of “group styles” highlights cognitive variation between groups and offers general understandings of the ways groups employ shared vocabularies and codes to filter collective representations from the larger culture. Eliasoph and Lichterman inform sociological work on local cognitive cultures (discussed in chapter 1) and group-level approaches to studying culture and cognition.

The methodological approach of symbolic interactionism emphasizes empirical investigations of social life grounded in observable social interactions. Its focus on the interactional level makes it an influential approach for studying group-level cognitive processes in peer groups, identity communities, and other reference groups. In his study of social interaction among little league baseball teams, ethnographer Gary Alan Fine (1979: 734) employs this tradition to develop the idea of an “idioculture” to refer to the system of knowledge, understandings, beliefs, and customs shared by members of an interacting group, which members can refer to and use as the basis for further interaction. Symbolic interactionism often shares with discourse and iconic perspectives an interest in cultural codes, but does so in the context of social groups in everyday interaction.

Eviatar Zerubavel’s social mindscapes tradition

Eviatar Zerubavel’s social mindscapes tradition of cognitive sociology draws influences from social constructionism and from Erving Goffman’s social attention and inattention and social framing perspectives to emphasize cognitive pluralism and the sociocultural mind (Brekhus 2007). In Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology, Eviatar Zerubavel (1997) advances a comparative approach to studying thinking. This approach draws upon classical “social standpoint” theories in the sociology of knowledge such as that of Ludwik Fleck ([1935] 1979), who proposed the idea of “thought collectives” or “thought communities” that come to see the world from a particular institutional or subcultural paradigm, and that of Karl Mannheim ([1936] 1985: 79–81), who further advanced the idea that humans think as members of collectives, located in a particular social location, and that their mental structures are shaped by social structures; their worldviews result from affiliations such as professions, generations, social classes, and status groups. Researchers in the Zerubavelian tradition focus on how perceptions of reality are shaped, filtered, and influenced by culture and social location.

Like the collective representations tradition of Jeffrey Alexander, this tradition includes Durkheim as an intellectual predecessor, but it also traces classical roots back to Georg Simmel. Whereas Durkheim analyzed collectives as largely coherent units, Simmel focused on intersectionality as a potential source for considerable variation between individuals in the same society. In his analysis of the web of group affiliations, Simmel ([1955] 1964: 140–3) advances the idea that individuals are made up of a pluralistic mix of multiple affiliations that shape who they are and how they think. This observation represents an early sociological interest in the multidimensional and intersectional character of personal identities, and one that informs researchers in this tradition to explore the multidimensionality of identity (e.g. Brekhus 2003).

Simmel and Goffman’s influences on the social mindscapes approach are methodological as well as theoretical and substantive. Studying patterns of cognition, in this tradition, involves analyzing themes and concepts across different substantive cases, and across different levels of cases (Zerubavel 2007). Important to this method is adopting a formal sociological imagination that allows us to see the generic elements of the specific as well as variation between cases. Generic concepts about how we socially construct reality come in cross-case examples and the power of a sociological concept, Zerubavel argues, comes in its applicability across cases. Erving Goffman’s studies of substantively different but analytically similar “total institutions” (1961) and “stigmatized identities” ([1963] 1986) are classic examples of using multi-contextual substantive data to develop a theoretically focused analysis (Zerubavel 2007: 135). In this tradition, Jamie Mullaney (2006) analyzes abstinences from sex, drugs, meat, alcohol, television, and consumption to develop general concepts about abstinence maintenance strategies such as “fence building” and “fire walking” and to distinguish between different temporal kinds of abstinences. The breadth of levels of analysis in using a multi-contextual approach to explore a cognitive process can be witnessed in Zerubavel’s (2006) general sociology of collective denial, where he explores the single theme of collective denial in small groups such as a family, medium-sized groups such as an organization, and large groups such as a nation. Although a family’s denial of alcoholism and a nation’s denial of genocide are substantively different in content and scale, the formal sociological patterns and general principles of social denial and social inattention are quite similar. Zerubavel’s methodology emphasizes the sociocognitive dimensions of thought with a strong interest in highlighting generic social patterns from specific cases.

Ann Swidler’s cultural toolkit tradition

Ann Swidler’s cultural toolkit approach to understanding culture in action may be seen as a blend between cultural- and individual-level analysis. This approach is cultural in that it analyzes a common pool of cultural resources, such as Americans’ culture of love (Swidler 2001), but also individual in that it focuses on individuals’ contextual and fragmented uses of these cultural resources. Swidler (1986; 2001) views culture as an oddly assorted toolkit or a repertoire of symbols, rituals, stories, worldviews, and ideas that we select from in partial ways, picking up and setting aside different cultural themes at different times and under varying circumstances. In contrast to the relatively coherent view of culture found in Durkheim, Swidler views culture as too fragmented and contradictory to allow individuals to simply internalize cultural symbols, rules, or codes wholesale. When middle-class Americans talk about love, for instance, their views are often fragmented and self-contradictory (Swidler 2001: 181). They draw from cultural ideas but they often do so in a haphazard way. Because she observes culture as inconsistently deployed, Swidler locates culture less in the conscious statements of values or in the shared cultural symbols of a society, and more in the routines and habits of institutions and actors. She draws from Bourdieu’s idea of “practice,” which refers to action that is immediate, strategically oriented to practical outcomes, and largely organized by unconscious schemas, so that it operates intuitively, to understand the ways that culture is used in habitual everyday life. Swidler is interested in variations in the way culture is mobilized, appropriated, deployed, and linked to experience, and in the relationship of these variations to structural conditions in the culture. Specific cultural patterns shape the circumstances of action and determine what tools are most available. People are therefore constrained from freely choosing how to convert their beliefs into action. For Swidler, culture shapes action not by providing the ultimate values that orient action, but by shaping strategies of action such as habits, styles, skills, and vocabularies of action.

Swidler’s toolkit approach is more often defined as a theory of culture in action than a theory of cognition, but her interest in which kinds of culture enter one’s repertoire and which kinds of strategies of action come out of the toolkit at which times is implicitly cognitive. Her cultural toolkit perspective is also important because of its central role in cultural sociology, and because its model of individuals deploying culture serves as an important debating point among cultural and cognitive sociologists about the role of culture in action.

Intersections with cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology tradition

A growing number of cognitive sociologists have begun to focus on the intersections between cognitive sociology and cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Broadly conceived, this tradition includes several strands such as experimental social psychology in social cognition, Stephen Turner’s (2007) call for social theory to become a cognitive neuroscience, Karen Cerulo’s (2010) efforts to identify bridges between sociology and cognitive neuroscience, and an increasingly influential Bourdieusian interdisciplinary cognitive sociology advanced by cognitive scholars such as Steven Vaisey, Omar Lizardo, John Levi Martin, and Gabriel Ignatow. I primarily emphasize this wing because of the recent and growing influence its scholars have on key debates in cultural and cognitive sociology. The perspectives they offer help to illustrate key differences between neuropsychological approaches and other approaches to culture and cognition. Before turning specifically to the Bourdieusian wing, it is worth noting that there has been a relatively longstanding tradition of experimental social psychology in social cognition that examines the individual social thinker and his or her thinking or brain activity in experiments. Researchers in this tradition have developed important insights about individual cognition including ideas about dual modes of automatic and controlled processes of cognition, and various models of social thinkers as cognitive misers, motivated tacticians, or activated actors. I address some ideas and concepts from important experimental studies as they shine light on the cultural sociology of cognition, but my primary focus will be sociological studies of cognition conducted outside of laboratory settings. Readers interested in the large body of research on experimental social psychology in social cognition should see Fiske and Taylor (2013).

Sociologists practicing a Bourdieusian interdisciplinary cognitive sociology combine Bourdieu’s view of habitus and his theory of practical action with insights from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to advance an embodied view of cognition and a view of culture as located in practical action. This perspective draws from Bourdieu’s interest in Piaget’s developmental psychology and Piaget’s view of bodily schemas in cognitive development. Gabriel Ignatow (2007: 129) argues that these basic bodily operations can structure discourses through processes endogenous to culture itself. At the center of this tradition is the idea that culture in action is found not on the surface level but deep and embodied within the individual’s subconscious. This idea is expressed in Steven Vaisey’s (2008; 2009) “dual-process model” of cognition, in which the self is cognitively divided between a fast, hot, automatic, and unconscious cognitive system deep in the consciousness, and a slow, cool, reflexive, and conscious cognitive system on the surface. The dual-process model combines Bourdieu’s and anthropologist Maurice Bloch’s notions of culture as embodied schemas with recent cultural theory that regards culture and social structure as analytically separate (Vaisey and Lizardo 2010: 7). Scholars in this tradition emphasize that there is an inconsistency between the cultural beliefs and ideas that people talk about to explain their behavior and what they actually do. These authors propose therefore that we need to look beyond the surface to the deep intuitive level of unconscious dispositions, snap judgments, and bodily responses to find culture in action.

To demonstrate the greater coherence of culture at the subconscious level, Steven Vaisey (2009) uses a quantitative analysis from the National Study of Youth and Religion to demonstrate that fixed-response choices from a list of moral scripts on a survey question in 2002 more strongly predict youths’ later behavior in 2005 on a range of issues, from using alcohol and other drugs, cheating in school, and cutting class to keeping secrets from parents, than do parents’ education, peer networks, church attendance, or other sociologically established correlations. Moreover the youths showed this consistency over time even when their answers to narrative questions showed that at the discursive level they could not clearly articulate their moral decision-making or do so without contradictions.

Scholars in this tradition challenge sociological conceptions that imply a high degree of shared culture or that culture is stored consciously as ideology or values. John Levi Martin (2010) argues, for instance, that culture is largely not shared because we have different experiences and the vast majority of culture goes unused (most books sit in libraries unread, most of our memories are not shared, etc.), so that culture takes the form of haphazard chunks and a set of potentials for experiences. These scholars emphasize embodied habits in largely unconscious responses to one’s environment rather than socialization and language as the primary way that culture is internalized. Omar Lizardo (2007) associates Bourdieu’s habitus with the neuroscience of mirror neurons. Lizardo argues that direct instructions and socialization are not required because practices can be transmitted and largely picked up unconsciously through mirroring others. Lizardo (2007: 336) suggests, for example, that Bourdieu’s (1969) metaphor of a “feel for the game,” wherein social actors read off goals and purposes from other actors without ever resorting to conscious deliberation of goals and purposes, is instructive in understanding the role of unconscious strategizing and mirroring in guiding embodied cognitive behavior; that is, we can pick up practical knowledge through unconscious enculturation without direct, explicit transmission. Bourdieusian interdisciplinary sociologists attempt to blend cultural sociology and cognitive neuroscience by looking at the relationship between internalized schemas, neurology, and embodied practice. They are interested in the mechanics of cognition and in the physical and embodied processes that individuals use in cognition and social action.

Theoretical and methodological pluralism: integrating multi-contextual evidence to understand culture and cognition

What do sociologists and aspiring sociologists make of the broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions within the sociology of culture and cognition? Should we study cognition at the cultural, the social, or the individual level? Should we use the individual social actor as a unit of analysis, or must we strive for other units of analysis? Should cultural sociologists methodologically search for culture in discourse, in social interaction, in individual actors’ narrative accounts, in comparative historical methods, in formal sociology, or in individuals’ recall on fixed-response surveys?

I take a pluralistic approach to these questions. Each kind of tradition, the cultural, the social, and the practical actor or embodied neurological, provides fascinating insights into the ways we think as sociocultural beings. Different units of analysis, from cultural codes and discourses, to interactional settings, to the individual, give us unique analytic vantage points for exploring culture and cognition. Similarly the wide range of methods, from discourse analysis, to ethnography, to interviews, to surveys, to comparative methods, gives us multiple ways to study culture. I also employ a pluralistic approach to the kinds of substantive topics that sociologists of culture and cognition study. In chapter 1