Cognition and Cultural Kinds13 min read

What the proper relationship should be between “culture” and “cognition” has been a fundamental issue ever since the emergence of psychology as a hybrid science in the middle of the nineteenth century (Cole, 1996). This question became even more pressing with the consolidation of anthropology and sociology as standalone socio-cultural sciences in the late nineteenth century (Ignatow, 2012; Turner, 2007). Initially, the terms of the debate were set when Wundtian psychology, having lost its “cultural” wing, became established in the English speaking world (and the U.S. in particular) as a quasi-experimental science centered on individual mental processes, thus ceding the unruly realm of the cultural to whoever dared take it (something that a reluctant anthropology, with a big push from functionalist sociology, ultimately did, but not until the middle of the twentieth century, only to drop it again at the end of Millenium (Kuper, 2009) just as it was being picked up again by an enthusiastic sociology). The changing fates of distinct meta-methodological traditions in psychology through the twentieth century (e.g., introspectionist, to behaviorism, to information processing, to neural computation) has done little to alter this, despite sporadic calls to revitalize the ecological, cultural, or “socio-cultural” wing of psychology in the intervening years (Bruner, 1990; Cole, 1996; Neisser, 1967)

In anthropology and sociology, the early mid-twentieth century saw the development of a variety of approaches, from Sapir and Boas-inspired Psychological Anthropology to Parsons’s functionalist sociology, that attempted to integrate the psychological with the socio-cultural (usually under the auspices of a psychoanalytic conceptualization of the former domain). As noted previously, by the 1960s and 1970s, psychological integration movements had lost steam in both disciplines, with perspectives conceiving of culture in mainly anti-psychological (or non-psychological) terms taking center stage. Meanwhile, psychology continued its march toward the full naturalization of mental phenomena, first under the banner of the computer metaphor of first-generation cognitive science (and the associated conception of cognition as computation over symbolic mental representations), and today under the idea of full or partial integration with the sciences of the brain yielding the interfield of cognitive neuroscience (united by the hybrid ideas of cognition as neural computation over biologically realized representations in the brain (Churchland & Sejnowski, 1990)).

Cognition in Anthropology and Sociology

The Emergence of Cognitive Anthropology

But the domain of the psychological was never completely eradicated from the socio-cultural sciences. Instead, anthropology and sociology developed small islands dedicated to the link between psychology (now indexed by the idea of “cognition”) and culture. This happened first in anthropology via the development, by Ward Goodenough and a subsequent generation of students and collaborators (Goodenough, 2003), of a “cognitive anthropology,” that took language as the main model of what culture was (inspired by American structuralist linguistics), centered on the ethnosemantics of folk categories, and was aided by the method componential analysis (decomposition into semantic features differentiating terms from one another) of linguistic terms belonging to specific practical domains. This methodological approach was later followed by the “consensus analysis” of Romney Kimball and associates (D’Andrade, 1995).

Today, the primary representative of a cognitive approach in anthropology is the “cultural models” school developed in the work of Dorothy Holland, Naomi Quinn, Claudia Strauss, and Bradd Shore. This approach emerged during the 1980s and 1990s via the incorporation of a (rediscovered from Jean Piaget and Frederic Bartlett) notion of “schemata” in artificial intelligence and first-generation cognitive science (which developed the related notions of “script”), and the importation of the idea of “cognitive models” from the then emerging cognitive movement in linguistics (Holland, 1987), as represented primarily in the work of George Lakoff (1987). This conception of schemata and cultural models was later supplemented by the incorporation of new understandings of how agents come to internalize culture as a set of distributed, multimodal, sub-symbolic, context-sensitive, but always meaningful representations constitutive of personal culture (Strauss & Quinn, 1997), inspired by connectionist models of cognition developed by the cognitive scientist David Rumelhart and associates in the 1980s (McClelland et al., 1986).

A critical insight in this regard developed, somewhat independently, by the anthropologists Maurice Bloch (1991) and Strauss and Quinn (1997), is that the core theoretical takeaway of Pierre Bourdieu’s reflections in Outline of a Theory of Practice is that the practice-based model of cultural internalization and deployment developed therein was mostly consistent with this emerging “connectionist” understanding of how cultural schemata where implemented in the brain as primarily non-linguistic, multimodal, distributed representations in a connectionist architecture, operating as tacit knowledge, and equally internalized via experienced-based, mostly implicit processes.

The Emergence of the “New” Cognitive Sociology

Renewed engagements with cognition in sociology, occurring later than in anthropology, have been the beneficiary of all of these interdisciplinary developments. After the ethnomethodological false start of the 1970s (Cicourel, 1974), cognitive sociology went into hibernation until it was jump-started in the 1990s by scholars such as, inter alia, Eviatar Zerubavel (1999), Karen Cerulo (1998), and Paul DiMaggio (1997).

DiMaggio’s highly cited review paper was particularly pivotal. In that paper, DiMaggio made three points that “stuck” and heralded the current era of “cultural cognitive sociology”:

• The first one, now hardly disputed by anyone, is that sociologists interested in how culture works and how it affects action cannot afford to ignore cognition. The reason DiMaggio pointed to was logical: Claims about culture entail claims about cognition. As such, “[s]ociologists who write about the ways that culture enters into everyday life necessarily make assumptions about cognitive processes,” (italics mine) that therefore it is always better if they got more transparent and more explicit on what those cognitive presuppositions are (1997: 266ff).
• The second point is that while these underlying cognitive presuppositions are seldom directly scrutinized by sociologists (they are “meta-theoretical” to sociologists’ higher level substantive concerns), they “are keenly empirical from the standpoint of cognitive psychology” (1997: 266). This means that rather than being seen as part of the (non-empirical) presuppositional background of cultural theory (Alexander, 1982), they are capable of adjudication and evaluation by setting them against what the best empirical research in cognitive psychology has to say. The underlying message is that we can compare a given pair of cultural theories and see which one seems to be more consistent with the evidence in cognitive science to decide which one to go with (as DiMaggio himself did in the paper for “latent variable” and toolkit theories of how culture works). Thus, cognitive psychology could play a regulatory and largely salutary work in cultural theorizing, helping to adjudicate otherwise impossible to settle debates (Vaisey, 2009, 2019; Vaisey & Frye, 2017).
• Finally, DiMaggio argued that the cognitive theory developed by the school of cultural models in cognitive anthropology, and the centerpiece notion of “schema” was the best way for sociologists to think about how the culture people internalize is mentally organized (1997: 269ff). Additionally, DiMaggio noted, in line with the then consolidating “dual process” perspective in cognitive and social psychology (Smith & DeCoster, 2000), that internalized schemata can come to affect action in two ideal-typical ways, one automatic and efficient, and the other deliberate, explicit, and effortful. Thus, in one fell swoop, DiMaggio set the research agenda in the field for the next twenty years (and to this day). In particular, the isolation of schemas as a central concept linking the concerns of cognitive science and sociology, and of dual-process models of cultural use as being a skeleton key to a lot of the “culture in action” problems that had accreted in sociology throughout the post-Parsonian era, proved profoundly prescient leading to an efflorescence of empirical, measurement, and theoretical work on both schemas and dual-process cognition in cultural sociology(e.g., Boutyline & Soter, 2020; Cerulo, 2018; Frye, 2017; Goldberg, 2011; Hunzaker & Valentino, 2019; Leschziner, 2019; Leschziner & Green, 2013; Lizardo et al., 2016; Miles, 2015, 2018; Taylor et al., 2019; Vaisey, 2009; Wood et al., 2018).

In all, interest in the link between culture and cognition and the role and import of cognitive processes and mechanisms for core questions in sociology has only grown in the last two decades in sociology, with a critical mass of scholars now identifying themselves as doing active research on cognition and cognitive processes. As the cultural sociologist Matthew Norton (2020, p. 46) has recently noted, in sociology, “the encounter with cognitive science has ushered in something of a cognitive turn, or at least a robust cognitive option, for cultural sociological theory and analysis.” The resurgence of the cognitive in sociology means that the question of the relationship between culture and cognitive acquires renewed urgency.

References

Alexander, J. (1982). Theoretical Logic in Sociology: Positivism, Presupposition and Current Controversies (Vol. 1). University of California Press.

Bloch, M. (1991). Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science. Man, 26(2), 183–198.

Boutyline, A., & Soter, L. (2020). Cultural Schemas: What They Are, How to Find Them, and What to Do Once You’ve Caught One. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ksf3v

Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press.

Cerulo, K. A. (1998). Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong. Psychology Press.

Cerulo, K. A. (2018). Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making, and Meaning Attribution. American Sociological Review, 83(2), 361–389.

Churchland, P. S., & Sejnowski, T. J. (1990). Neural Representation and Neural Computation. Philosophical Perspectives. A Supplement to Nous, 4, 343–382.

Cicourel, A. V. (1974). Cognitive sociology: Language and meaning in social interaction. Free Press.

Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Harvard University Press.

D’Andrade, R. G. (1995). The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.

DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and Cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.

Frye, M. (2017). Cultural Meanings and the Aggregation of Actions: The Case of Sex and Schooling in Malawi. American Sociological Review, 82(5), 945–976.

Goldberg, A. (2011). Mapping Shared Understandings Using Relational Class Analysis: The Case of the Cultural Omnivore Reexamined. The American Journal of Sociology, 116(5), 1397–1436.

Goodenough, W. H. (2003). In Pursuit of Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32(1), 1–12.

Holland, D. (1987). Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge University Press.

Hunzaker, M. B. F., & Valentino, L. (2019). Mapping Cultural Schemas: From Theory to Method. American Sociological Review, 84(5), 950–981.

Ignatow, G. (2012). Mauss’s lectures to psychologists: A case for holistic sociology. Journal of Classical Sociology. http://jcs.sagepub.com/content/12/1/3.short

Kuper, A. (2009). Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Harvard University Press.

Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Concepts Reveal about the Mind. Chicago University Press.

Leschziner, V. (2019). The Specter of Schemas: Uncovering the Meanings and Uses of Schemas in Sociology. Unpublished Manuscript.

Leschziner, V., & Green, A. I. (2013). Thinking about Food and Sex: Deliberate Cognition in the Routine Practices of a Field. Sociological Theory, 31(2), 116–144.

Lizardo, O., Mowry, R., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D. S., Taylor, M. A., Van Ness, J., & Wood, M. (2016). What are dual process models? Implications for cultural analysis in sociology. Sociological Theory, 34(4), 287–310.

McClelland, J. L., Rumelhart, D. E., Group, P. R., & Others. (1986). Parallel distributed processing. Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, 2, 216–271.

Miles, A. (2015). The (Re)genesis of Values: Examining the Importance of Values for Action. American Sociological Review, 80(4), 680–704.

Miles, A. (2018). An Assessment of Methods for Measuring Automatic Cognition. In W Brekhus And (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, e (p. forthcoming). Oxford University Press.

Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Norton, M. (2020). Cultural sociology meets the cognitive wild: advantages of the distributed cognition framework for analyzing the intersection of culture and cognition. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 8(1), 45–62.

Smith, E. R., & DeCoster, J. (2000). Dual-Process Models in Social and Cognitive Psychology: Conceptual Integration and Links to Underlying Memory Systems. Personality and Social Psychology Review: An Official Journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, 4(2), 108–131.

Strauss, C., & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning (Vol. 9). Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, M. A., Stoltz, D. S., & McDonnell, T. E. (2019). Binding significance to form: Cultural objects, neural binding, and cultural change. Poetics , 73, 1–16.

Turner, S. P. (2007). Social Theory as a Cognitive Neuroscience. European Journal of Social Theory, 10(3), 357–374.

Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.

Vaisey, S. (2019). From Contradiction to Coherence: Theory Building in the Sociology of Culture. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/9mwfc

Vaisey, S., & Frye, M. (2017). The Old One-Two: Preserving Analytical Dualism in Psychological Sociology. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/p2w5c

Wood, M. L., Stoltz, D. S., Van Ness, J., & Taylor, M. A. (2018). Schemas and Frames. Sociological Theory, 36 (3), 244–261.

Zerubavel, E. (1999). Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Harvard University Press.