Gordon Brett

Bourdieu, Dewey, and Critiques of Dual-Process Models in Sociology

Sociologists have been interested in cognition at least as far back as Durkheim, who, with his nephew Marcel Mauss, sought to uncover the social origins of mental categories (Durkheim [1912] 1995; Durkheim and Mauss, [1903] 1963). However, it was arguably Pierre Bourdieu who “supercharged” the cognitive turn in contemporary sociology (Cerulo, 2010), providing an invaluable foundation for studying the social and cultural dimensions of cognition. One of the many reasons why Bourdieu has been so useful for sociologists is the clear affinities between his work (particularly his conception of “habitus”) and a variety of influential frameworks and research programs within the cognitive sciences, most notably embodied cognition, cognitive schemas, and dual-process cognition (see DiMaggio, 1997; Lizardo, 2004; Lizardo and Strand, 2010; Vaisey, 2009).

Bourdieu versus Dewey on Reflexivity, Habit, and Deliberation

Bourdieu has been central to what Brekhus (2015) described as the “individual practical actor approach” to culture and cognition, which, he notes, resurrects the pragmatist concern for individual thought and practical action. There is, of course, a lot of common ground between Bourdieu and American pragmatism, and Bourdieu himself noted that he and John Dewey shared an emphasis on dispositional action and a rejection of conceptual dualisms (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 122). However, there are some subtle but consequential differences in the way Bourdieu and Dewey theorized cognition and action that have direct relevance for how sociologists analyze and conceptualize automatic and deliberate processing. I suggest that some of the criticisms aimed at early and influential work on dual-process cognition (specifically the work of DiMaggio (1997) and Vaisey, 2009)) also apply to Bourdieusian practice theory, and reflect a perspective more aligned with the work of Dewey. I focus on three of the major criticisms sociologists have made regarding early dual-process model scholarship – 1) that automatic and deliberate processes are dynamic and interactive rather than separate and independent processes, 2) that deliberation is not rare but commonplace, and 3) that dual-process models are non-exhaustive – all of which go against Bourdieu and are supported by Dewey.

The Integration of Habit and Reflexivity

First, several sociologists have argued that automatic and deliberate processes are not wholly separate or independent (as in DiMaggio (1997) and Vaisey (2009)) but are instead highly dynamic and interactive processes (e.g., Cerulo, 2018; Leschziner and Green, 2013; Winchester, 2016). This speaks directly to the fact that early accounts of dual-process cognition in sociology fit the general structure of Bourdieusian practice theory, which argues that actors generally rely upon the unconscious dispositions of habitus save for times of “crisis” in which they may be “superseded” for “rational and conscious computation” (Bourdieu, 1990: 108; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 131-137). Here, Bourdieu seems to imply that habitus and reflective thought are mutually exclusive, rather than dialogical (Crossley, 2013: 151).

Conversely, in my recent article in Sociological Theory (Brett, 2022), I draw on Dewey’s account of deliberation, which conceives of reflective thought and habits as directly interwoven: “Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. It is an experiment in making various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses, to see what the resultant action would be like if it were entered upon” (Dewey, [1922]2002: 190). Instead of asking whether an action was the result of either automatic or deliberate thought, this invites us to ask how and to what degree did both automatic and deliberate processing contribute to a given action or decision. I also draw upon Dewey’s account of a “reflective disposition,” a habit which itself encourages more thorough and protracted deliberation. Unlike Bourdieu, Dewey suggested that habit and deliberation were integrated to such a degree that “it is a perilous error to draw a hard and fast line between action into which deliberation and choice enter an activity due to impulse and matter-of-fact habit” (Dewey, [1922]2002:279). Therefore, for those arguing for the interactive nature of automatic and deliberate processes, Dewey provides a much more suitable theoretical foundation.

The Importance of Reflection

A second and related criticism of early dual-process scholarship is that it discounts the role of reflection (e.g., Hitlin and Kirkpatrick-Johnson 2015; Mische 2014; Vila-Henninger 2015), wrongly arguing that deliberate cognition both rarely occurs and is rarely in charge of our action (DiMaggio, 1997; Vaisey, 2009). Again, this fits with Bourdieu’s account, in which crisis-induced deliberation was generally a rare occurrence, resulting from large-scale social or political disruptions. In contrast, such disruptions were both more mundane and more common for Dewey (Crossley, 2013: 151), resulting from the dynamic relationship between flesh-and-blood actors and ever-changing social and material environments. Though Dewey viewed habit as the predominant mode of human conduct, he did not discount reflection, but stressed that the disruption of habit and the emergence of deliberation was a regular and consequential occurrence in our everyday lives.

Beyond Habit and Reflexivity

Lastly, in a more recent critique, Pagis and Summers-Effler (2021) suggest that dual-process models alone do not exhaust the range of human practices and experiences. They argue that aesthetic engagement – “open and purposeful attention to the immediate context that overrides both habitual and reflective/deliberative processing” (2021:1372) – is a cultural practice that does not fit either automatic or deliberate processing. Aesthetic engagements are motivated by curiosity and exploration and require sustained uncertainty through the inhibition or overriding of both automatic and deliberate cognition. They theorize aesthetic engagement through both phenomenology and pragmatism, most notably drawing on Dewey’s distinction between “perception” and “recognition”: aesthetic engagement involves dwelling in (open and curious) perception and bracketing the automatic and deliberate processes involved in recognition (e.g., automatic categorization, deliberate search for meaning). Conversely, it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to locate a mode of cognition and action within Bourdieu’s work that precludes both automatic processes (i.e., habitus) or deliberate processes (e.g., conscious computation).

Taken together, it seems as though some of the major criticisms aimed towards dual-process models in sociology could have just as easily been directed at Bourdieu. Although sociologists have drawn from a variety of empirical work from the cognitive sciences to make claims about the dual-nature of cognition, it is possible that the persistence of assumptions like process-independence is partly the result of thinking about cognition through Bourdieu. Furthermore, one wonders what dual-process scholarship, or even culture and cognition more broadly would look like had Dewey, rather than Bourdieu, served as the primary framework for theorizing cognition.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Brekhus, Wayne H. 2015. Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Brett, Gordon. 2022. “Dueling with Dual-Process Models: Cognition, Creativity, and Context.” Sociological Theory: 07352751221088919.

Cerulo, Karen A. 2010. “Mining the Intersections of Cognitive Sociology and Neuroscience.” Poetics 38(2):115–32.

Cerulo, Karen A. 2018. “Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making, and Meaning Attribution.” American Sociological Review 83(2):361–89.

Crossley, Nick. 2013. “Habit and Habitus.” Body & Society 19(2-3): 136-161.

Dewey, John. [1922] 2002. Human Nature and Conduct. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.

DiMaggio, Paul. 1997. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23:263–87.

Durkheim, Emile. [1912] 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.

Durkheim, Emile, and Marcel Mauss. [1903] 1963. Primitive Classification. London: Cohen and West.

Hitlin, Steven, and Monica Kirkpatrick-Johnson. 2015. “Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead.” American Journal of Sociology 120(5):1429–72.

Leschziner, Vanina, and Adam Isaiah Green. 2013. “Thinking about Food and Sex: Deliberate Cognition in the Routine Practices of a Field.” Sociological Theory 31(2):116–44.

Lizardo, Omar. 2004. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34(4): 375-401.

Lizardo, Omar, and Michael Strand. 2010. “Skills, Toolkits, Contexts and Institutions: Clarifying the Relationship between Different Approaches to Cognition in Cultural Sociology.” Poetics 38(2):205–28.

Mische, Ann. 2014. “Measuring Futures in Action: Projective Grammars in the Rio+20 Debates.” Theory and Society 43(3–4):437–64.

Pagis, Michal, and Erika Summers-Effler. 2021. “Aesthetic Engagement.” Sociological Forum 36(S1):1371–94.

Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114(6):1675–715.

Vila-Henninger, Luis Antonio. 2015. “Toward Defining the Causal Role of Consciousness: Using Modelsof Memory and Moral Judgment from Cognitive Neuroscience to Expand the Sociological Dual-Process Model.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 45(2):238–60.

Winchester, Daniel. 2016. “A Hunger for God: Embodied Metaphor as Cultural Cognition in Action.” Social Forces 95(2):585–606.

A Sociology of “Thinking Dispositions”

In a recent interview about his life and career, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman said two particularly interesting things. First, he said much of his current work is focused on individual differences in what he refers to as “System 1” and “System 2” thinking. He discussed his fascination with the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), which includes the famous “bat and ball problem”:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? _____ cents.

What makes this a great question is that it has an intuitive (but wrong) answer that immediately comes to mind (10 cents), and a correct answer (5 cents) that requires you to override that initial intuition and think deliberately to attain it. Some people read this question and simply “go with their gut,” while others take time and think more carefully about it. Kahneman says that what makes this so interesting is that people who are certainly intelligent enough to obtain the correct answer (like students at Harvard) get this wrong all the time and that it predicts important things, including belief in conspiracy theories and receptivity to pseudo-profound “bullshit” (see Pennycook et al., 2015; Rizeq et al., 2020).

As Shane Frederick (a post-doctoral student of Kahneman’s, who developed the measure) proposed, the CRT measures ““cognitive reflection”—the ability or disposition to resist reporting the response that first comes to mind.” (2005:35). The CRT is one of several measures of what psychologists refer to as “thinking dispositions” or “cognitive styles,” general differences in the propensity to use Type 2 processing to regulate responses primed by Type 1 processing. People with more reflective or analytical thinking dispositions are more careful, thorough, and effortful thinkers, while those with more intuitive or experiential thinking dispositions are more likely to “go with their gut” and trust in their initial responses (Cacioppo et al. 1996; Epstein et al. 1996; Pennycook et al. 2012; Stanovich 2009, 2011).

The second interesting thing Kahneman discussed was his omission of the work of the late psychologist Seymour Epstein. In the early 1970’s, when Kahneman and Amos Tversky started publishing their work on heuristics and biases, Epstein was developing his “cognitive-experiential self theory”: a dual-process theory that proposed that people process information through either a rational-analytical system or an intuitive-experiential system. Apparently, Epstein was upset that Kahneman had failed to recognize his work, even in his popular book Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). Kahneman said that he regretted not engaging with his ideas because they were directly relevant to his work on System 1 and System 2 thinking.

Individual Differences in Thinking Dispositions

What neither Kahneman nor the interviewer seemed to recognize is that Kahneman’s recent interest in individual differences in dual-process cognition and his omission of Epstein’s work are in some ways interrelated. Arguably, Kahneman is quite late to the “individual-differences” party. Psychologists have been using measures of thinking dispositions for many years; they have already been established as a workhorse for research in social and cognitive psychology and proven invaluable for explaining pressing issues, including the susceptibility to fake news, the acceptance of scientific evidence, and beliefs and behaviors around COVID-19 (Erceg et al., 2020; Fuhrer and Cova, 2020; Pennycook et al., 2020; Pennycook and Rand, 2019). However, if he had followed Epstein’s work more closely, he likely would have gotten to these individual differences much sooner in his career. Almost a decade before the validation of the CRT, Epstein and his colleagues (1996) developed the popular Rational-Experiential Inventory (REI), a self-report measure of differences in intuitive and analytical thinking.

If Kahneman is late to the party, sociologists do not even seem to know or care about it. Cultural sociologists have been engaging with dual-process models for years, and this scholarship has been highly generative (e.g., DiMaggio, 1997; Lizardo et al., 2016; Vaisey, 2009). However, this work is almost always accompanied by claims about how cognition operates in general. For example, in DiMaggio`s (1997) agenda-setting “Culture and Cognition,” he asserted that due to its inefficiency, deliberate cognition was “necessarily rare” (1997: 271). Similarly, Vaisey (2009:1683) argued that “practical consciousness” is “usually in charge” (2009: 1683). Conversely, those who argue against these works draw on “social psychologically oriented models that assume greater reflexivity on the part of social actors” (Hitlin and Kirkpatrick-Johnson, 2015: 1434) or suggest that “findings from cognitive neuroscience suggest that this model places too much emphasis on the effects of subconscious systems on decision-making” (Vila-Henninger, 2015: 247). These claims presuppose a general, “one-size fits all” model of social actors and the workings of human cognition.

At some level, the lack of consideration for individual differences in sociological work on dual-process cognition is entirely understandable. The term “individual differences,” closely associated with psychological research on intelligence and personality, certainly sounds “non-sociological.” Accordingly, it is not likely to inspire much faith or curiosity from sociologists, similar to the way they might turn their nose up at psychological research about “choice” and “decision-making” (Vaisey and Valentino, 2018). However, these individual differences exist, and therefore sociological models of culture, cognition, and action may be missing something important by not accounting for this individual variability. Furthermore, there is good reason to think that these “individual” differences are actually socially patterned.

Thinking Dispositions in Sociological Work

We can go back to the classics to find concepts that approximate thinking dispositions and propositions about how and why they are socially patterned. Georg Simmel argued that the psychological conditions of the metropolis (e.g., constant sensory stimulation, the money economy) produce citizens that (dispositionally and habitually) react “with [their] head instead of [their] heart” (2012[1905]: 25) – a more conscious, intellectual, rational, and calculating mode of thought. Relatedly, John Dewey (2002[1922], 1933) wrote about a “habit of reflection” or a “reflective disposition” born out of education and social customs.

We can also find this line of thinking in more contemporary works. Pierre Bourdieu (2000) argued that the conditions of the skholè foster a “scholastic disposition” characterized by scholastic reasoning or hypothetical thinking. Annette Lareau’s (2011) account of “concerted cultivation” found that wealthier families aimed to stimulate and encourage their children’s rational thinking and deliberate information processing to develop their “cognitive skills.” Critical realists aiming to hybridize habitus and reflexivity have argued that certain conditions (e.g., late-modernity, socialization that emphasizes contemplation) produce habiti in which reflexivity itself becomes dispositional – a reflexive habitus (Adkins, 2003; Mouzelis, 2009; Sweetman, 2003). All of these accounts broadly suggest that people in different social locations are exposed to different types of social and cultural influences which lead them to develop thinking dispositions.

Socially Locating Thinking Dispositions

In a recent paper with Andrew Miles, I put these considerations to the empirical test by comprehensively establishing the social patterns of thinking dispositions (Brett and Miles, 2021). We quickly found that some psychologists had indeed tested this, particularly using Epstein’s (1996) REI. However, this research was limited in several respects; these studies measured for differences (usually based on age, education, and gender) with little to no theoretical explanation for why these differences exist, nor analytic justification for why they were tested. Furthermore, they typically used bivariate analyses and convenience samples, and taken together, they offered conflicting findings on whether these variables actually matter. As such, we first performed a meta-analysis of 63 psychological studies that used the REI to measure differences in thinking dispositions based on age, education, and gender, followed by an original analysis with nationally representative data. Overall, we found strong evidence that thinking dispositions vary by age, education, and gender, and weaker evidence that they vary by income, marital status, and religion.

While this covers some social patterns of thinking dispositions as an object of study, sociologists would do well to establish their causes and consequences. The thinkers above suggest a variety of mechanisms that may promote thinking dispositions, including specific child-rearing practices and forms of socialization, heightened sensory stimulation, and having the time and space for imaginative, contemplative, or experimental thought – all of which could be tested empirically. But perhaps more importantly, thinking dispositions likely hold significant consequences for culture, cognition, and action that ought to be explored.

For example, in a recent paper with Vanina Leschziner (Leschziner and Brett, 2019) I used the notion of thinking dispositions to help explain patterns of culinary creativity. We found that chefs who were more invested in innovative styles of cooking tended to be more analytical in their approach, while chefs invested in more traditional styles of cooking held a more heuristic approach to cooking. Notably, this was not simply the result of exogenous pressures they had to create novel dishes; instead, these chefs developed an inclination and excitement for these modes of thought during the creative process that had become dispositional over time. While culture and cognition scholars would typically ascribe these differences to the type of restaurants chefs worked in or the style of food they produced, this misses the distinct link between cognitive styles and culinary styles. As this illustrates, thinking dispositions may hold important but (as of now) largely untapped explanatory value for sociologists.

References

Adkins, Lisa. 2003. “Reflexivity: Freedom or Habit of Gender?” Theory, Culture & Society 20(6):21-42.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Brett, Gordon, and Andrew Miles. 2021. “Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition.” Sociological Science 8: 96-118.

Cacioppo, John T., Richard E. Petty, Jeffrey A. Feinstein, and W. Blair G. Jarvis. 1996. “Dispositional Differences in Cognitive Motivation: The Life and Times of Individuals Varying in Need for Cognition.” Psychological Bulletin 119(2):197–253.

Dewey, John. 1933. How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. New York: D.C. Heath.

Dewey, John. [1922] 2002. Human Nature and Conduct. Amherst, New York,: Prometheus Books

DiMaggio, Paul. 1997. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23(1):263–87.

Epstein, Seymour, Rosemary Pacini, Veronika Denes-Raj, and Harriet Heier. 1996. “Individual Differences in Intuitive–Experiential and Analytical–Rational Thinking Styles.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71(2):390–405.

Erceg, Nikola, Mitja Ružojčić, and Zvonimir Galić. 2020 “Misbehaving in the corona crisis: The role of anxiety and unfounded beliefs.” Current Psychology: 1-10.

Fuhrer, Joffrey, and Florian Cova. 2020. ““Quick and Dirty”: Intuitive Cognitive Style Predicts Trust in Didier Raoult and his Hydroxychloroquine-based Treatment Against COVID- 19.” Judgment & Decision Making 15(6):889–908.

Hitlin, Steven, and Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson. 2015. “Reconceptualizing Agency Within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead.” American Journal of Sociology 120(5):1429-1472.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Penguin.

Lareau, Annette. 2011. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Univ of California Press.

Leschziner, Vanina, and Gordon Brett. 2019. “Beyond Two Minds: Cognitive, Embodied, and Evaluative Processes in Creativity.” Social Psychology Quarterly 82(4):340-366.

Lizardo, Omar, Robert Mowry, Brandon Sepulvado, Dustin S. Stoltz, Marshall A. Taylor, Justin Van Ness, and Michael Wood. 2016. “What Are Dual Process Models? Implications for Cultural Analysis in Sociology.” Sociological Theory 34(4):287–310.

Mouzelis, Nicos. 2009. “Habitus and Reflexivity.” In Modern and Postmodern Social Theorizing: Bridging the Divide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Pennycook, Gordon, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang. 2015. “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit.” Judgment and Decision making 10(6):549-563.

Pennycook, Gordon, James Allan Cheyne, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Albert Fugelsang. 2020. “On the Belief that Beliefs Should Change According to Evidence: Implications for Conspiratorial, Moral, Paranormal, Political, Religious, and Science Beliefs.” Judgment and Decision Making 15 (4):476–498.

Pennycook, Gordon, James Allan Cheyne, Paul Seli, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang. 2012. “Analytic Cognitive Style Predicts Religious and Paranormal Belief.” Cognition 123(3):335–46.

Pennycook, Gordon, and David G. Rand. 2019. “Lazy, not Biased: Susceptibility to Partisan Fake News is Better Explained by Lack of Reasoning than by Motivated Reasoning.” Cognition 188:39-50.

Rizeq, Jala, David B. Flora, and Maggie E. Toplak. 2020. “An Examination of the Underlying Dimensional Structure of Three Domains of Contaminated Mindware: Paranormal Beliefs, Conspiracy Beliefs, and Anti-Science Attitudes.” Thinking & Reasoning 27(2):187-211.

Simmel Georg. 1964 [1902]. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Pp. 409–24 in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited and translated by K. H. Wolff. New York: Free Press.

Stanovich, Keith E. 2009. What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Stanovich, Keith E. 2011. Rationality and the Reflective Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sweetman, Paul. 2003. “Twenty-First Century Dis-Ease? Habitual Reflexivity or the Reflexive Habitus.” Sociological Review 51:528–49

Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114(6):1675–715.

Vaisey, Stephen, and Lauren Valentino. 2018.”Culture and Choice: Toward Integrating Cultural Sociology with the Judgment and Decision-Making Sciences.” Poetics 68: 131-143.

Vila‐Henninger, Luis Antonio. 2015. “Toward Defining the Causal Role of Consciousness: Using Models of Memory and Moral Judgment from Cognitive Neuroscience to Expand the Sociological Dual‐Process Model.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 45(2): 238-260.

Thinking with Theory Diagrams

A recent book by Kate Raworth entitled Doughnut Economics (2017) has garnered a lot of attention. The goal of the book is revolutionary in spirit: to move economists to think more about basic social and ecological well-being. While this aim will certainly resonate with sociologists, the means of getting there may surprise you: a doughnut. Raworth argues that what is needed are new models, new theoretical diagrams to facilitate this major change in the way economists should think about the economic world. Her major diagrammatic innovation, the doughnut, helps economists think not just about growth, but a world that promotes and produces basic social needs and ecological responsibility:

This is a major diagrammatic shift. One of its most striking ambitions is to move economists away from the conception of growth as indiscriminately good. Below is a diagram of what GDP growth in economics might look like:

What kinds of thinking are embedded within diagrams like this? As Raworth notes, this exponential growth curve fits perfectly with how people metaphorically understand progress – as ‘up’ and ‘forward’. This observation is in line with the influential work of Lakoff and Johnson (2008) who show how ubiquitous the orientational metaphors ‘GOOD IS UP’ and ‘GOOD IS FORWARD’ are in Western culture; for example, ‘things are looking up’, and ‘I’m moving forward with my life’. However, metaphors are not purely linguistic phenomena. For one, as embodied cognition research has shown, these kinds of metaphors are actually grounded in ‘image-schemas’ connected to our bodies and our physical experiences (Barsalou, 2008; Lakoff and Johnson, 2008 – see Wood et al., for a sociological discussion). Secondly, these conceptual metaphors are also embedded in diagrams and are a part of how we think with and through them (Reed, 2013). In some sense then, it is likely that we are drawn to this kind of diagrammatic view of economics because it ‘resonates’ (McDonnell, Bail, and Tavory, 2017) or fits so neatly with the way we think, act, and orient ourselves to the world more generally.

Raworth (2017) argues that a basic set of core diagrams– the curves, parabolas, lines, and circles that proliferate economics articles and books – linger in the back of most economists’ minds when thinking about a given economic issue, providing them with major assumptions about economic theory. They are indelibly etched in their minds, providing consequential ‘intellectual baggage’. More controversially, she argues that many of the most iconic of these diagrams are “out of date, blinkered, or downright wrong” (pg. 21).

Accordingly, she aims to provide a new type of diagram to encourage a new type of thinking: to see the economy as embedded in society and the environment and to strive not simply for growth, but as an ecologically safe and socially just space for human flourishing. In the Doughnut, we must be careful not to ‘overshoot’ beyond the ecological ceiling, meaning that any growth that produces environmental degradation is bad. ‘Up’ and ‘forward’ are no longer indiscriminately ‘good’ as it was with the metaphorical underpinnings of the exponential growth curve diagram; instead, there is a ‘sweet spot’ within the doughnut to which economists should aim.

So why do we need diagrams to spur this kind of intellectual revolution? Why do they matter so much? A lot can be said here, but I’d like to focus on three interrelated points: First, human beings are wired for visuals; because visualization plays such a major role in cognition, we perform mental tasks like image recognition, pattern recognition, and meaning attachment with incredible speed and ease (Thorpe et al., 1996). Moreover, images, unlike non-visual ideas and concepts, go directly into our long-term memory, leaving a lasting impression with a surprising level of detail (Brady et al., 2008). Secondly, we know that a number of disciplines rely heavily on diagrams to produce new knowledge and facilitate new discoveries (Coopmans et al. 2014; Knorr Cetina 2003; Tversky, 2011).

While we tend to think of theory figures as useful tools for teaching (Baldamus, 1992), they are important tools for explanation, elaboration, clarification, analysis, critique, and intellectual creativity (Lynch, 1991; Silver, 2018; Swedberg, 2016; Turner, 2010; see also Mills, 1959, pg. 213). Lastly, diagrams do not simply support our intellectual work, but they actively shape and direct it (Silver, 2018; Turner, 2014). Diagrams are both ‘servants’ and ‘guides’ – useful for both problem-finding and problem-solving (Humphrey, 1996). They are often imbued with theoretical assumptions (e.g. Owens, 2012), can shape the kinds of questions we ask and how we interpret our findings (e.g. Lennewick, 2010) and promote certain kinds of thinking over others (Tversky, 2011). The metaphorical underpinning of the exponential growth curve is a perfect example of that.

Sociologists also work with diagrams, and so it is natural to ask ourselves about what kind of theoretical diagrams linger in the back of the minds of sociologists, and how they shape the kind of work we do. Of course, we have some iconic theory diagrams that have inspired a lot of research: Coleman’s boat/bathtub, Burgess’ ‘concentric-zone model’, or Parsons’ various AGIL schemes. We also use popular, more conventionalized diagrammatic forms: cross-classification, Venn, cartesian coordinates and more. But while a few sociologists have studied theory diagrams in sociology (Lynch, 1991; Silver, 2018; Swedberg, 2016; Turner, 2010) none have produced any data demonstrating which diagrams are most commonly used.

A paper in progress I co-authored with Daniel Silver (presented at this year’s ASA conference in Philadelphia) on some of the practical considerations of theory visualization, addresses this issue. We took a random sample (40 articles per journal) from some of the leading journals of sociological theory in North America and Europe (Sociological Theory, Theory and Society, Theory, Culture, and Society, European Journal of Social Theory) as well as some of the leading generalist journals that often include theoretical work (American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, European Journal of Sociology).

We found that, of the theory diagrams in our sample (figures without data), of all of the conventionalized diagrammatic forms the path diagram was the most commonly used – making up around 20% of the theory diagrams in our sample. This likely does not come as a surprise to most sociologists: I always seem to come across path-like diagrams in my reading, both with and without data, and can think of multiple times a professor had recommended using a path diagram to think and make sense of a research project. If path diagrams are so popular in sociology, and at least some professors generically prescribe them to struggling graduate students, it is worth asking: what does it mean to see the social world through a path diagram, like the one below?

Like with the exponential growth curve model, we can learn a lot here by unpacking the basic cognitive elements embedded within the diagram. While this appears to be somewhat reductive, all concepts, even abstract theoretical concepts in sociology, are grounded in a similar structure (Lizardo, 2013). Path diagrams may be viewed as an integrated or compound image-schema (Kimmel, 2005) with two main imagistic bases:

Variables as ‘containers’

First, the path diagram asks us to visualize variables as static entities that are ‘contained’ within a bounded space. Again, this fits with another one of the most fundamental metaphors identified by Lakoff and Johnson – the ‘container’ metaphor (for example, when we say ‘I’ve lived a full life’). This is an ontological metaphor, that tells us that there is an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ – and in this case anything ‘inside’ the circle is understood as contained within its ‘boundary’.

Source-path-goal

The source-path-goal schema is one of the most important sense-making structures people have; it structures our conception of ‘journey’ (a starting point – trajectory – and a destination), ‘story’ (a beginning – middle – end) , or ‘purposeful life’ (initial problem or ambition – action – solution or achievement) (Forceville, 2006).

Visually, we can see these structures in most conventional path diagrams:

But do all sociologists see social phenomena as bounded entities with relationships moving from a starting point, along a path, towards a given outcome? Interestingly, while many sociologists certainly think this way, ‘relational sociology’ (see Abbott, 2004; Emirbayer, 1997) explicitly rejects this line of thinking. Rather than treating phenomena as static ‘things’, relational sociologists conceive the social world as dynamic relations and processes. For them, boundary specification becomes a far more difficult and contentious question. For example, where do we end webs of social relations in a network, and when do sets of relations count as a ‘thing’? Or how do we fix a particular group if its membership, the frequency, and intensity of its relationships, its definition, aims etc. are continuously changing?

The same can be said for the source-path-goal schema: Can we commit to one causal story, one fixed set of relationships between entities? Ontologically, both the ‘container’ and ‘source-path-goal’ schemas appear incompatible with relational sociology; rather than fixed, bounded entities and static, linear relationships, relational sociologists see the social world as process—expanding and contracting, appearing and disappearing, merging and dividing, and so on. While path diagrams have been extremely useful and productive in sociology, if one’s aims are relational in nature, path diagrams may not be useful for thinking through or representing them.

Given this, one can speculate about what this may mean for the discipline. If diagrams are as influential as many suggest, and path diagrams are a go-to way to visualize theoretical ideas, could this be operating as a kind of visual roadblock to some forms of theory development? Could the way sociologists think and represent their ideas visually be stifling the development of relational theory? Can relational sociologists create a small revolution of their own, as Raworth (2017) has, by inventing or promoting alternative diagrammatic forms? For now, I can only speculate – but it seems to me that we have yet to explore how our visual language may be shaping the trajectory of the field as a whole.

Works Cited

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