Category: Dispositions

Power and thinking dispositions

In a previous post, Gordon Brett made a compelling argument for moving sociological work on dual-process cognition forward. In a nutshell, Gordon encouraged sociologists to begin to study structural and situational variation in the extent to which people rely on one cognitive mode (e.g., intuition, System I) versus the other (deliberation, System II), rather than focusing on the ideal-typical distinction between System I (intuitive, automatic) and System II (deliberative, reflective) thinking for its own sake.

As proof of concept, Gordon pointed to a recent Sociological Science piece co-authored with Andrew Miles (Brett & Miles, 2021) showing systematic variation in the extent to which people report relying on “rational” versus “intuitive” cognitive styles by structural locations and social categories familiar to sociologists, such as age, gender, and education. For instance, Brett and Miles (2021) show, using data from the 2012 Measuring Morality Survey, that men are more likely to report relying on a rational over an intuitive cognitive style, as are the most educated people. In the conclusion to that paper, Brett and Miles encouraged

…researchers to build on this work to better understand how and why individuals vary in their use of cognitive processes. In particular, scholars should attempt to replicate our results using multivariate analyses in large, representative data sets and cross-validate findings using multiple measures of cognitive processing…Once we have a clear understanding of how cognitive styles differ and for whom, scholars can begin to investigate the social and cultural mechanisms that translate particular demographic characteristics into differences in cognitive processing (2021, p. 111).

Regarding the last task of coming up with mechanisms and theoretical accounts linking social structural location to cognitive style, Brett and Miles pointed to multiple plausible options. These include the Simmelian proposal that urbanity and the money economy break habits and tilt people toward abstraction and rationality, the Bourdieusian proposal that certain scholastic institutions lead to people developing dispositions towards intellectualist thinking styles removed from action, and the classic Kohn and Schooler argument linking occupational complexity to more reflexive thinking dispositions among members of certain classes.

These are all fascinating and worthwhile avenues deserving of future work and attention. Here, nevertheless, I would like to point to one existing (and generic) theoretical mechanism, not touched upon by Brett and Miles, linking naturally to sociological concerns with inequality and stratification, and for which suggestive evidence of its effects on thinking dispositions already exists: Namely, power. Recent work in the psychology of power links this factor to thinking styles and thinking dispositions (Keltner et al. 2003; Smith & Trope, 2006). Suggestively, different theoretical approaches make conflicting predictions (while pointing to distinct sociocognitive mechanisms), indicating that this could be an area where cross-disciplinary collaboration and theorizing within the larger umbrella of cognitive social science may be generative and productive.

Take, for instance, Keltner and collaborators approach-inhibition theory (see Keltner et al. 2003 for the initial statement and Cho & Keltner, 2020 for a recent review of the evidence). This theory postulates a link between perceived or actual power, and therefore occupancy of powerful positions and cognitive style (among other cognitive and affective outcomes). The theory predicts that because power both facilitates action and agency while activating “approach” tendencies toward desired goals, being in a powerful position leads persons to rely on automatic rather than deliberate cognition, as automatic cognition has a more direct link to action (Vaisey, 2009). On the other hand, being in a less powerful position activates action inhibition and threat detection tendencies, thus encouraging more reflective and deliberative thought (Keltner et al., 2003).

Interestingly, the predictions of the approach-avoidance theory conflict with that of another well-documented approach, namely, Chaiken and Liberman’s construal level theory (see Rim et al., 2013 for a review), which also provides a linkage between power and cognitive style. According to construal level theory, being in a powerful position implies being “removed” (distant) from the hustle and bustle, leading to an experience of psychological distance from less powerful others, thus encouraging abstract levels of “construal” of the cognitive representations used to make sense of others and the situation (in contrast to the use of more concrete representations). Because abstract representations tend to be processed more reflectively, construal level theory predicts powerful people are more likely to default to a more deliberative, less automatic thinking style. Experimental work yields evidence consistent with this approach. Interestingly, the association is bidirectional: Manipulating one’s sense of power encourages abstract thinking (Smith & Trope, 2006), and encouraging an abstract thinking style leads to an enhanced sense of power (Smith et al., 2008).

Usually, different theories in the social and behavioral sciences making conflicting predictions about the link between similar antecedents and outcomes is cause for despair. In this case, I think this may be an opportunity for cross-disciplinary convergence and theory-building. After all, since Weber (2019), sociologists have been interested in power, in its many forms (Reed, 2013). Gordon’s call for “a sociology of thinking dispositions,” coupled with evidence from the psychology of power linking a favorite sociological concept to thinking styles is thus more than suggestive, opening up opportunities for sociologists to make substantive contributions to this area.

One possibility is of course, that different dimensions and features of the experience of power affect thinking dispositions in countervailing ways. For instance, the oft-noted association between more deliberate thinking styles and a masculine gender identity (for which Brett & Miles find evidence) is consistent with construal level theory, given the obvious and well-documented link between people’s gender identification and the structure of power in society (Risman, 2018). The same goes for Brett & Miles’s (2021, Figure 2) suggestive finding that education leads to more rational thinking dispositions, but only for those at the very top of the educational scale, suggesting that it is education’s serving as the conduit for occupying powerful positions in contemporary credential societies (rather than the “formalizing” substantive effect of education on abstract thought) that accounts for this linkage.

The negative effect of age on rational thinking dispositions uncovered by Brett and Miles (2021, Figure 2), on the other hand, seems more consistent with the approach-avoidance mechanism, given the association of older age with less power and influence in Euro-American societies (Cuddy et al., 2005). This suggests that different social locations may activate distinct socio-cognitive processes, leading to different linkages between social position and thinking disposition contingent on the mechanism that is activated. How the social locations activate each mechanism as well as the particular mechanisms involved opens up exciting new questions for future work.

References

Brett, G., & Miles, A. (2021). Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition. Sociological Science, 8, 96–118.

Cho, M., & Keltner, D. (2020). Power, approach, and inhibition: empirical advances of a theory. Current Opinion in Psychology, 33, 196–200.

Cuddy, A. J., Norton, M. I., & Fiske, S. T. (2005). This old stereotype: The pervasiveness and persistence of the elderly stereotype. Journal of social issues, 61(2), 267-285.

Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284.

Reed, I. A. (2013). Power: Relational, discursive, and performative dimensions. Sociological Theory, 31(3), 193-218.

Rim, S., Trope, Y., Liberman, N., & Shapira, O. (2013). The Highs and Lows of Mental Representation: A Construal Level Perspective on the Structure of Knowledge. In D. Carlston (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition. Oxford University Press.

Risman, B. J. (2018). Gender as a social structure. In Handbook of the Sociology of Gender (pp. 19-43). Springer, Cham.

Smith, P. K., & Trope, Y. (2006). You focus on the forest when you’re in charge of the trees: power priming and abstract information processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(4), 578–596.

Smith, P. K., Wigboldus, D. H. J., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2008). Abstract thinking increases one’s sense of power. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(2), 378–385.

Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and justification: A dual-process model of culture in action. American journal of sociology, 114(6), 1675-1715.

Weber, M. (2019). Economy and Society: A New Translation (K. Tribe, trans.; Illustrated Edition). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1921-1922)

Consciousness and Schema Transposition

In a recent paper published in American Sociological Review, Andrei Boutyline and Laura Soter bring much-needed conceptual clarification to the sociological appropriation of the notion of schemas while also providing valuable and welcome guidance on future uses of the concept for practical research purposes. The paper is a tour de force, and all of you should read it (carefully, perhaps multiple times), so this post will not summarize their detailed argument. Instead, I want to focus on a subsidiary but no less important set of conclusions towards the end, mainly having to do with the relationship between declarative and nondeclarative cognition and an old idea in sociological action theory due to Bourdieu (1980/1990) that was further popularized in the highly cited article by Sewell (1992) on the duality of structure. I refer to the notion of schematic transposition.

In what follows, I will first outline Bourdieu’s and Sewell’s use of the notion and then go over how Boutyline and Soter raise a critical technical point about it, pointing to what is perhaps a consequential theoretical error. Finally, I will close by pointing to some lines of evidence in cognitive neuroscience that seem to buttress Boutyline and Soter’s position.

The idea of schematic transposition is related to an older idea due to Piaget of schema transfer. The basic proposal is that we can learn to engage in a set of concrete activities (e.g., let’s say “seriation” or putting things in rows or lines) in one particular practical context (putting multiple pebbles or marbles in a line). Then, after many repetitions, we develop a schema for it. Later, when learning about things in another context, let’s say “the number line” in basic arithmetic, we understand (assimilate) operations in this domain in terms of the previous seriation schema. Presumably, analogies and conceptual metaphors also depend on this schema transfer mechanism. In Logic of Practice, Bourdieu built this dynamic capacity for schema transfer into the definition of habitus everyone loves to hate, noting that the habitus can be thought of as “[s]ystems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures…” and so forth (p. 53).

This idea of transposibility ends up being essential for a habit theory like Bourdieu’s because it adds much-needed flexibility and creativity to how we conceive the social agent going about their lives (Joas, 1996). This is because thinking of action as driven by habitus does not entail people stuck with “one-track” inflexible or mechanical dispositions. Instead, via their capacity to transpose classificatory or practical habits learned in one domain to others, their internalized practical culture functions in a more “multi-track” way, being thus adaptive and creative. In an old paper on the notion of habitus (2004), I noted something similar to this, pointing out that “it is precisely this idea of flexible operations that allows for the habitus to not be tied to any particular content…instead, the habitus is an abstract, non-context specific, transposable matrix” (p. 391-392). Thus, there is something about transposability that seems necessary in a theory of action so that it does not come off as overly deterministic or mechanical.

In his famous 1992 paper, Sewell went even further, putting transposability at the very center of his conception of social change and agency. Departing from a critique of Bourdieu, Sewell noted two things. First (p. 16), any society contains a multiplicity of “structures” (today, we’d probably use the term “field,” “sphere,” or “domain”). Secondly (p. 17), this means people need to navigate across them somehow. Single-track theories of habit and cognition cannot explain how this navigation is possible. This navigation is made possible, according to Sewell, only by theorizing “the transposability of schemas.” As Sewell notes:

…[T]he schemas to which actors have access can be applied across a wide range of circumstances…Schemas were defined above as generalizable or transposable procedures applied in the enactment of social life. The term “generalizable” is taken from Giddens; the term “transposable,” which I prefer, is taken from Bourdieu…To say that schemas are transposable, in other words, is to say that they can be applied to a wide and not fully predictable range of cases outside the context in which they are initially learned…Knowledge of a rule or a schema by definition means the ability to transpose or extend it-that is, to apply it creatively. If this is so, then agency, which I would define as entailing the capacity to transpose and extend schemas to new contexts, is inherent in the knowledge of cultural schemas that characterizes all minimally competent members of society (p. 17-18).

Thus, in Sewell, the very concept of agency becomes defined by the actor’s capacity to transpose schemas across contexts and domains!

Nevertheless, is the link between the idea of schema and that of schematic transposition cogent? Boutyline and Soter (2021) incisively point out that it may not be. To see this, it is important to reiterate their “functional” definition of schemas as “socially shared representations deployable in automatic cognition” (735). The key here is “automatic cognition.” As I noted in an earlier post on “implicit culture,” a common theoretical error in cultural theory consists of taking the properties of forms of “explicit” representations we are familiar with and then postulating that there are “implicit” forms of representation having the same properties, except that they happen to be unconscious, tacit, implicit and the like. The problem is that representations operating at the tacit level need not (and usually cannot) share the same properties as those operating at the explicit level.

Boutyline and Soter note a similar tension in ascribing the property “transposable,” to a tacit or nondeclarative form of culture like a schema, which generally operates in type I cognition. In their words,

A..correlate of Type I cognition is domain-specificity. Type II knowledge can be context-independent and abstract—qualities enabled in part via the powerful expressive characteristics of language—and tied to general-purpose intelligence and logical or hypothetical reasoning…In contrast, Type I knowledge is often domain-specific—thoroughly tied to, and specifically functioning within, contexts closely resembling the one in which it was learned…Type II knowledge (e.g., mathematical or rhetorical tools) can be transposed with relative ease across diverse contexts, but the principles that underlie Type I inferences may not be transferrable to other domains without the help of Type II processes.

So, it seems like both Bourdieu and Sewell (drawing on Bourdieu) made a crucial property conjunction error, bestowing a magical power (transposability) to implicit (personal) culture. This type of personal culture cannot display the transposability property precisely because it is implicit (previously, I argued that people do this with a version of symbolic representational status). Boutyline and Soter (p. 742) revisit Sewell’s example of the “commodity schema,” convincingly demonstrating that, to the extent that this schema ends up being “deep” because it is transposable, specific episodes of transposability cannot themselves operate in automatic autopilot. Instead, “novel instance[s] of commodification” must be “consciously and intentionally devised” (ibid). Thus, to the extent that they are automatically deployable, schemas are non-transposable. Transposability of schemas requires that they be “representationally redescribed” (in terms of Karmiloff-Smith 1995) into more flexible explicit formats. Tying this insight to recent work on the sociological dual-process model, Boutyline and Soter conclude that the “application of existing knowledge to new domains understood as a feature of effortful, controlled cognition” (750).

Boutyline and Souter’s compelling argument does pose a dilemma and a puzzle. The dilemma is that a really attractive theoretical property of schemas (for Bourdieu, Sewell, and the many, many people who have used their insights and been influenced by their formulation) was transposability. Without it, it seems like schemas become a much diminished and less helpful concept. The puzzle is that there are many historical and contemporary examples of empirical instances of what looks like schematic transposition. How does this happen?

Here, Boutyline and Soter provide a very elegant theoretical solution, drawing on recent work suggesting that culture can “travel” within persons across the declarative/nondeclarative divide via redescription processes and across the public/personal one via internalization/externalization processes. They note that because schemas are representational, they can be externalized (or representationally redescribed) into explicit formats (from nondeclarative to declarative). People can also internalize them from the public domain when they interact in the world (from public to personal/nondeclarative; see Arseniev-Koehler and Foster, 2020). As Boutyline and Soter note, representational redescription,

…could make the representational contents of a cultural schema available to effortful conscious cognition, which we suspect may be generally necessary to translate these representations to novel domains. After they are transformed to encompass new settings, the representational contents could then travel the reverse pathway, becoming routinized through repeated application into automatic cognition. The end product of this process would be a cultural schema that largely resembles the original schema but now applies to a broader set of domains. Representational redescription may thus be key to social reproduction, wherein familiar social arrangements backed by widely shared cultural schemas…are adapted so they may continue under new circumstances (751).

Does cognitive neuroscience’s current state of the art support the idea that consciousness is required to integrate elements from multiple experiential and cultural domains? The answer seems to be a qualified “yes,” with the strongest proponents suggesting that the very function of consciousness and explicit processing is cross-domain information integration (Tononi, 2008). A more plausible weaker hypothesis is that consciousness greatly facilitates such integration. Without it, the task would be challenging, and for complex settings such as the socio-cultural domains of interest to sociologists, perhaps impossible. As noted by the philosophers Nicholas Shea and Chris Frith,

The role of consciousness in facilitating information integration can be seen in several paradigms in which local regularities are registered unconsciously, but global regularities are only detected when stimuli are consciously represented…consciousness makes representations available to a wider range of processing, and processing that occurs over conscious representations takes a potentially wider range of representations as input (2016, p. 4).

This account supports Boutyline and Soter’s insightful observation that it was an initial mistake to link the property of transposability to schemas, especially in the initial formulation by Bourdieu, where schemas were seen as part of habitus (Vaisey, 2009). Therefore, schemas reside in the implicit mind and operate as automatic Type I cognition (Sewell was more ambiguous in this last respect). Work in cognitive psychology and the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness supports the idea that transposition requires information integration across domains. For complex domains, conscious representation and deliberate processing may be necessary for the initial stages of transposition (Shea & Frith, 2016). Of course, as Boutyline and Souter note, once institutional entrepreneurs have engaged in the first bout of transposition mediated by explicit representations, the new schema-domain linkage can be learned by others via proceduralization and enskilment, becoming part of implicit personal culture operating as Type I cognition.

Finally, a corollary of the preceding is that we may not want to follow Sewell in completely collapsing the general concept of agency into the more restricted idea of schematic transposition, as this would have the untoward consequence of reducing agency to conscious representations and system II processing over these, precisely the thing that practice and habit theories were designed to prevent. 

References

Arseniev-Koehler, A., & Foster, J. G. (2020). Machine learning as a model for cultural learning: Teaching an algorithm what it means to be fat. In arXiv [cs.CY]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/c9yj3

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1980)

Boutyline, A., & Soter, L. K. (2021). Cultural Schemas: What They Are, How to Find Them, and What to Do Once You’ve Caught One. American Sociological Review, 86(4), 728–758.

Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. University of Chicago Press.

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1995). Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science. MIT Press.

Lizardo, O. (2004). The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 34(4), 375–401.

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1992). A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. The American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1–29.

Shea, N., & Frith, C. D. (2016). Dual-process theories and consciousness: the case for ‘Type Zero’cognition. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2016(1).

Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as integrated information: a provisional manifesto. The Biological Bulletin, 215(3), 216-242.

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

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.

The Relation(s) Between People and Cultural Kinds

How do people relate to cultural kinds? This is a big topic that will be the subject of future posts. For now, I will say that the discussion has been muddled mostly because, in the history of cultural theory, some cultural kinds have been given excessive powers compared to persons. For instance, in some accounts, people’s natures, essential properties and so on have been seen as entirely constituted by cultural kinds, especially the “mixed” cultural kinds (binding cultural cognitive to artifactual aspects) associated with linguistic symbols (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Geertz, 1973). The basic idea is usually posed as a counterfactual, presumably aimed at getting at something deep about “human nature” (or the lack thereof): “if people didn’t have language, [or symbols, etc.], then they’d be no different from (non-human) animals.” This is an idea with a very long history in German Romantic thinking (Joas, 1996), and which was revived in 20th century thought by the turn to various “philosophical anthropologies,” most influentially the work of Arnold Gehlen, who conceptualized the “human-animal” as fundamentally incomplete, needing cultural input, and in particular language, symbols, and institutions, to become fully whole (Joas & Knobl, 2011).

I argue that these type of theories (showing up in a variety of thinkers from Berger and Luckman–directly influenced by Gehlen–to Clifford Geertz) has led theorists to fudge what should be the proper relationship between people and cultural kinds in a way that does not respect the ontological integrity between culture and persons. What we need is a way to think about how persons (as their own natural kind) relate to cultural kinds (and even come to depend on them in fairly strong ways) in a way that does not dissolve persons (as ontologically distinct kinds) into cultural kinds (Archer, 1996; Smith, 2010). or, as in some brands of rational actor theory, see people as overpowered, detached manipulators of a restricted set of cultural kinds (usually beliefs), that they can pick up and drop willy-nilly without being much affected by them. Whatever relations we propose, they need to respect the ontological distinctiveness of the two sides of the relata (people and cultural kinds), while also acknowledging the sometimes strong forms of interdependence between people and culture we observe. So this eliminates hyper-strong relations like “constitution” from the outset.

Possession

What are the options? I suggest that there are actually several. For cultural kinds endowed with representational properties (e.g., beliefs, attitudes, values), Abelson’s (1986) idea that they are like possessions is a good one. Thus, we can say that people “have” a belief, a value, or an attitude. For persons, “having” these cultural-cognitive kinds can be seen as the end state of a process that has gone by the name of “internalization” in cultural theory. Note that this possession version of the relation between people and culture works even for the cultural-cognitive kinds that have been called “implicit” in recent work (Gawronski et al., 2006; Krickel, 2018; Piccinini, 2011); thus if a person displays evidence of conforming to an implicit belief, or attitude, etc., we can still say that they “have” it (even if the person disagrees!). This practice is both of sufficient analytic precision while respecting the folk ascription practices visible in the linguistic evidence pointing to the pervasiveness of the conceptual metaphor of possession concerning belief-like states (Abelson 1986). The possession relation also respects the ontological distinctiveness of people and culture, since possessing something doesn’t imply a melding of the identities between the possessor and possessed.

As a bonus, the possession relation is not substantively empty. As Abelson has noted, if beliefs are like possessions, then the relationship should also be subject to a variety of phenomena that have been observed between persons and their literal possessions. People can become attached to their beliefs (and thus refuse to let go of them even when exposed to countervailing evidence), experience loss aversion for the beliefs they already have, or experience their “selves” as extended toward the beliefs they hold (Belk 1988). People may even become “addicted” to their beliefs, experiencing “withdrawal” once they don’t have them anymore (Simi et al. 2017).

Reliance

What about ability-based cultural-cognitive kinds? Here things get a bit more complicated; we can always go with “possession,” and this works for most cases, especially when talking about dispositional skills and abilities (e.g., abilities we impute to people “in stasis” when they are not exercising them). Thus, we can always say that somebody can play the piano, write a lecture, or fix a car even when that ability is not being exercised at the moment; in that respect, abilities are also “like possessions” (Abelson, 1986).

However, possession doesn’t work for “occurrent” cultural kinds exercised in practice. It would be weird to refer to the relation between a person and a practice they are currently engaged in as one of possession; instead, here we must “move up” a bit on the ladder of abstraction, and get a sense of what the “end in view” is (Whitford, 2002). Once we do that, it is easy to see that the relationship between people and the non-conceptual skills they exercise is one of reliance (Dreyfus, 1996). People rely on their abilities to get something (the end in view) done or simply to “cope” with the world (Rouse 2000). The reliance relation concerning non-representational abilities has the same desirable properties as the possession relation for representational cultural-cognitive kinds; it is consistent with folk usage, and respect the ontological distinctiveness between persons as natural kinds and the abilities that they possess. A person can gain an ability (and thus be augmented as a person), and they can also lose an ability (e.g., because they age or have a stroke), and they still count as people.

Parity and Externality

Finally, what about the relation between people and public cultural kinds such as artifacts? First, it is important to consider that, in some cases, artifacts mimic the functional role played by cultural cognitive kinds. So when we use a notepad to keep track of our to-do list, the notepad plays the role of an “exogram” that is the functional analog of biological memory (Sutton 2010). In the same way, when we use a calculator to compute a sum, the calculator plays the same functional role (embodying an ability) that would have been played by our internalized ability to make sums in our head. In that case, as it would not be disallowed to use the same relational descriptors, we use for the relationship between people and cultural-cognitive kinds regardless of location (internalized by people or located in the world). So we would say that Otto possesses the belief that he should pick up butter from the store regardless of whether they committed it to “regular” (intracranial) memory (an “engram”) or to a notebook (an “exogram”).

This “parity principle,” first proposed by Clark and Chalmers (1998) in their famous paper on the “extended mind,” can thus easily be transferred to the case of beliefs, norms, values, “stored” in the world (acknowledging that this does violence to traditional folk-Cartesian usages of concepts such as belief). The same goes for the (lack of) difference between exercising abilities that are acquired via repetition and training, which are ultimately embodied and internalized, and those exercised by reliance on artifacts that also enable people to exercise those abilities (so we would say that you rely on the calculator to compute the sum). In both cases, people use the ability (embodied or externalized) to get something done.

Usage/Dependence/Scaffolding

This last point can be generalized, once we realize that most artifactual cultural kinds (inclusive of those made up of “systems” of mixed—e.g., symbolic–kinds) have a “tool-like” nature. So we say people use language to express meanings or use tools to get something done. Even the most intellectualist understanding of language as a set of spectatorial symbolic representations acknowledges this usage relation. For instance, when theorists say that people “need” (e.g., use) linguistic symbols “to think” (Lizardo, 2016) (a pre-cognitive science exaggeration, based on a folk model of thinking as covert self-talk; most “thinking” is non-linguistic (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), and a lot of it is unconscious (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006)).

The general relation between people and artifactual kinds is thus analogous to the relationship between people and the skills they possess; for the most part, people use or depend on public artifactual kinds to get stuff done (another way of saying this is that artifactual cultural kinds enable the pursuit of many ends in view for people). Once again, note that the use or dependence relation is what we want; public cultural kinds do not “constitute” or otherwise generate, or “interpellate” people as a result of its impersonal functioning (as in older structuralist models of language). Instead, people use public artifactual culture as a “scaffold” that allows them to augment internalized abilities and skills to engage in action and pursue goals that would otherwise not be possible (alone or in concert with others).

In sum, we can conceive of the relationship between people and cultural kinds in many ways. Some, (like constitution) are too strong because they dissolve or eliminate the ontological integrity of one of the entities in the relation (usually, people). But there are other options. For representational cultural cognitive kinds, the relation of possession fits the bill; people can have (and lose) beliefs, norms, values, and the like. For non-conceptual abilities, the relation of reliance works. Finally, for externalized artifacts and other “tool-like” public kinds, the relation of usage, and more strongly dependence and scaffolding can do the analytic job.

References

Abelson, R. P. (1986). Beliefs Are Like Possessions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 16(3), 223–250.

Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the Extended Self. The Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168.

Archer, M. S. (1996). Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory. Cambridge University Press.

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Doubleday.

Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The Extended Mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.

Dijksterhuis, A., & Nordgren, L. F. (2006). A Theory of Unconscious Thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 1(2), 95–109.

Dreyfus, H. L. (1996). The current relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4(4), 1–16.

Gawronski, B., Hofmann, W., & Wilbur, C. J. (2006). Are “implicit” attitudes unconscious? Consciousness and Cognition, 15(3), 485–499.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic books.

Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. University of Chicago Press.

Joas, H., & Knobl, W. (2011). Social theory: twenty introductory lectures. Cambridge University Press.

Krickel, B. (2018). Are the states underlying implicit biases unconscious? – A Neo-Freudian answer. Philosophical Psychology, 31(7), 1007–1026.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.

Lizardo, O. (2016). Cultural symbols and cultural power. Qualitative Sociology. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11133-016-9329-4.pdf

Piccinini, G. (2011). Two Kinds of Concept: Implicit and Explicit. Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue Canadienne de Philosophie, 50(1), 179–193.

Rouse, J. (2000). Coping and its contrasts. Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science.

 

Rethinking Cultural Depth

The issue of whether some culture is “deep” versus “shallow” has been a thorny one in both classical and contemporary theory. The basic argument is that for some piece of culture to have the requisite effects (e.g., direct action) then it must be incorporated at some requisite level of depth. “Shallow culture” can’t have deep effects. Thus, according to Parsons, values had to be deeply internalized in order to serve as guiding principles for action.

Postulating cultural objects always found at a “deep” level begs for the development of a theory that tells us how this happens in the first place. That is: we require a theory about how the same cultural “object” can go from (1) being outside the person, to (2) being inside the person, and (3) once inside from being shallowly internalized to being deeply internalized. For instance, a value commitment may begin at a very shallow level (a person can report being familiar with that value) but by some (mysterious) “internalization” process it can become “deep culture” (when the value is now held unconditionally and motivates action via affective and other unconscious mechanisms; the value is now “part” of the actor).

Depth After Structuration

One thing that is not often noted is that the discussion of “cultural depth” in the post-Parsonian period (especially post-Giddens) is not the same sort of discussion that Parsons was having. This is one of those instances where we retain the same set of lexical terms—e.g. “deep” versus “shallow” culture—but change the conceptual parameters of the argument (a common occurrence in the history of cultural theory). In contrast to Parsons, for post-Giddensian theorists, the main issue is not whether the same type of cultural element can have different levels of “depth” (or travel across levels via a socialization process). The point is that different cultural elements have (because of some inherent quality) exist necessarily at a requisite level of “depth” because of their inherent properties.

These are very different claims. The first way of looking at things is technically “Parsonian”; that is Parsons really thought that “culture patterns are [for an actor] frequently objects of orientation in the same sense as other [run of the mill] objects…Under certain circumstances, however, the manner of his [sic] involvement with a cultural pattern as an object is altered, and what was once an [external] object becomes a constitutive part of the actor” (Parsons and Shils 1951:8 italics mine). So here we have the same object starting at a shallow level and then “sinking” (to stretch the depth metaphor to death) into the actor, so that ultimately it becomes part of their “personality.”

Contrast this formulation to the cultural depth story proposed by Sewell (1992), who writes that

…structures consist of intersubjectively available procedures or schemas capable of being actualized or put into practice in a range of different circumstances. Such schemas should be thought of as operating at widely varying levels of depth, from Levi-Straussian deep structures to relatively superficial rules of etiquette.

(1992: 8-9)

Sewell (1992: 22-26), in contrast to Parsons, decouples the depth from the causal power dimension of culture. Thus, we can find cultural schemas that are “deep but not powerful” (rules of grammar) and schemas that are powerful but not deep (political institutions). Sewell’s proposal is clearly not Parsonian; it is instead (post)structuralist: there are certain things (like a grammar) that have to be necessarily deep, while other things (like the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate) are naturally encountered in the surface, and can never sink to the level of deep culture.

Swidler (circa 1986) inherited the Parsonian, not the post-structuralist problematic (because at that stage in American sociology that would have been an anachronism). Swidler’s point was that for the thing that mattered to Parsons the most (valuation standards) there weren’t different levels of depth, or more accurately, they didn’t need to have the depth property to do the things that they were supposed to do (guide action).

Recent work incorporating dual-process models of moral judgment and motivation, I think, is aimed to revive a modified version of the Parsonian argument (Vaisey 2009). That is, in order to direct behavior the point is that some culture needs to be “deeply internalized” (as moral intuitions/dispositions). To make matters even more complicated, we have to consider with the fact that by the time we get to Swidler (2001) the conversation has changed even further, mainly because Bourdieu and practice theory happened in the interim. This means that Swidler’s original argument has also changed accordingly. In Talk of Love, Swidler ingeniously proposes that what Parsons (following the Weberian/Germanic tradition) called “ideas” can now be split into “practices + discourses.” Practices are “embodied” (and thus “deep” in the post-structuralist sense) and discourses are “external” (and thus shallow in the neo-pragmatist sense).

Does Bourdieu Fit?

This leads to the issue of how Bourdieu (1990) fits into the post(Parsonian/structuralist) conversation on cultural depth. We can at least be sure of one thing: the Parsonian “deep internalization” story is not Bourdieu’s version (even though Bourdieu (1990: 55) used the term “internalization” in Logic of Practice). The reason for this is that habitus is not the sort of thing that was designed to give an explanation for why people learn to have attitudes (orientations) towards “cultural objects,” much less to internalize these “objects” so that they become constitutive of the “personality.”

There is a way to tell the cultural depth story in a Bourdieusian way without falling into the trap of having to make a cultural object a “constituent” of the actor but this would require de-Parsonizing the “cultural depth” discussion. There is one problem: the more you think about it, the more it becomes clear that, insofar as the cultural depth discussion is a pseudo-Parsonian rehash, there might not that much leftover after this type of conceptual repositioning. More specifically, the cultural depth discussion might be a red herring because it still retains the (Parsonian) “internalization” language, and internalization makes it seem as if something that was initially subsisting outside of the person now comes to reside inside the person (as if for instance, “I disagree with women going to work and leaving their children in daycare” was a sentence stored in long term memory to which a “value” is attached.

This is a nice Parsonian folk cognitive model (shared by most public opinion researchers). But it is clear that if, we follow dual-process models of memory and information processing, that what resides in the person is not a bunch of sentences to which they have an orientation; instead the sentence lives in the outside world (of the GSS questionnaire) and what resides “inside” (what has been internalized) is a multi-track disposition to react (negatively, positively) to that sentence when I read it, understand it and (technically if we follow Barsalou (1999)) perceptually simulate its meaning (which actually involve running through multimodal scenarios of women going to work and leaving either content or miserable children behind). This disposition is also presumably one that can highly overlap with others governing affective-intuitive reactions to other sorts of items designed to measure my “attitude” towards related things. I can even forget the particular sentence (but keep the disposition) so that when somebody or some event (I drive past the local daycare center) reminds me of it I still reproduce the same morally tinged reaction.

Note that the depth imagery disappears under this formulation, and this is for good reason. If we call “dispositions to produce moral-affective judgments when exposed to certain scenarios or statements in a consistent way through time” deep, so be it. But that is not because there exist some other set of things that are the same as dispositions except that they lack “depth.” Dispositions either exist in this “deep” form or they don’t exist at all (dispositions, are the sorts of things that in the post-Giddensian sense are inherently deep). No journey has been undertaken by some sort of ontologically mysterious cultural entity to an equally ontologically spurious realm called “the personality.” A “shallow disposition” is a contradiction in terms, which then makes any recommendation to “make cultural depth a variable” somewhat misleading, as long as that recommendation is made within the old Parsonian framework. The reason why this is misleading is that this piece of advice relies on the imagery of sentences with contents located at “different levels” of the mind traveling from the shallow realm to the deep realm and transforming their causal powers in the process.

Implications

If we follow the practice-theoretical formulation more faithfully, the discussion moves from “making cultural depth a variable” to “reconfiguring the underlying notional imagery so that what was previously conceptualized in these terms is now understood in somewhat better terms.” This implies giving up on the misleading metaphor of depth and the misleading model of a journey from shallow-land to depth-land via some sort of internalization mechanism.

Thus, there are things to which I have dispositions to react, endowed with all of the qualities that “depth” is supposed to provide such as consistency and stability, in a certain (e.g. morally and emotionally tinged) distinct way towards (Vaisey and Lizardo 2016). We can call this “deep culture” but note that the depth property does not add anything substantive to this characterization. In addition, there are things towards which I (literally) have no disposition whatever, so I form online (shallow?) judgments about these things because this suit-wearing-in-July interviewer with NORC credentials over here apparently wants me to do so. But this (literally confabulated) “attitude” is like a leaf in the wind and it goes this or that way depending on what’s in my head that day (or more likely as shown by Zaller (1992), depending on what was on the news last night). Is this the difference between “shallow” and “deep” culture? Maybe, but that’s where the (Parsonian version of the) internalization language reaches its conceptual limits.

Thus, we come to a place where a dual process argument becomes tightly linked to what was previously being thought of under the misleading “shallow culture/deep culture” metaphor in a substantive way. I think this will keep anybody who wants to talk about cultural depth from becoming ensnared in the Parsonian trap because we can instead say “deep= things that trigger consistent dispositions or intuitions” and “shallow=attitudes formed by conscious, on-the-fly confabulation.” Note that, conceptually, this is the difference is between thinking of “depth” as a property of the cultural object (in this case the survey item) (the misleading Parsonian view) or thinking of “depth” as a resultant of the interaction between properties of the person (internalized as dispositions) and qualities of the object (e.g., the cognitive meaning of a proposition or statement).

References

Barsalou, L. W. 1999. “Perceptual Symbol Systems.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(4):577–609; discussion 610–60.

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

Parsons, Talcott and Edward A. Shils. 1951. Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sewell, William H. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” The American Journal of Sociology 98(1):1–29.

Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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

Vaisey, Stephen and Omar Lizardo. 2016. “Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change.” Socius 2:2378023116669726.

Zaller, John. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Public Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Habit and the Explanation of Action

Habits play a double role. They are both a kind of action and a resource for explaining action. This makes them different from other parts of the conceptual arsenal used by people (and social scientists) to explain action. For instance, while the notion of belief is a resource for explaining action (“Sam opened the fridge because they thought there was leftover pizza in there”), belief itself is not a type of action. In this respect, the mentalistic notion that is closest to that of habit is intention. Like habits, intentions play double roles as both a central element in the explanation of action (“Alex swatted at the fly because they intended to kill it”) and as a type of action (“intentional” versus “unintentional”).

Accordingly, it is not a surprise than in the history of the philosophy of action and action theory in the social sciences, habit or habitual action is counterposed, often invidiously, to intention and intentional action (Camic 1986). In the intellectualist tradition in sociology (Parsons 1937; Campbell 2009; Archer 2010), habits are seen as not having equal explanatory status in relation to intentions. In fact, some go on to define action as those patterns of activity that have intentions as the main causal driver (Campbell 2009; Searle 2003). Habit-driven action, from this perspective, does not even deserve to be called action, devolving into mere “behavior” or “reflex” tied to environmental “conditions.” In a previous post, I talked about the criteria of what makes action a habit. Here, I will argue that (lay or scientific) explanations of action using habit as a resource, are as legitimate as those appealing to the mentalistic vocabulary of intentions, beliefs, and desires. They are not only a coherent way of explaining action, but they also have distinctive analytic advantages.

How do habit explanations explain action? According to Pollard (2006b, 57), habit explanations explain by “referring to a pattern of a particular kind of behavior which is regularly performed in characteristic circumstances, and has become automatic for that agent due to this repetition.” The notion of automaticity is doing a lot of work here, and I dealt with what that entails in the previous post referenced earlier. For present purposes the thing to note is that, for Pollard, when we explain action via habit, we are putting a given action in a larger context of previously performed actions in the past. Explaining action by calling it a habit forces us to say something about the person’s previous history, while putting the present action in the context of that history. When we say a person did something out of habit, we imply that they (a) have done this activity in the past many times before, and (b) due to this repetition they have acquired the tendency to perform the action in similar circumstances in the present (and will do so in the future). The conjunction of repetition and the acquisition of automaticity and fluidity in performing the action is sufficient to explain why the person is doing the action in the present.

Note that this type of action explanation differs from the one John Levi Martin (2015: 217) has referred to as “Good Old Fashioned Action Theory” (GOFAT). First, the habit explanation is minimally intellectualistic, as it does not traffic in the usual representational talk of internal mental entities such as intentions, beliefs, desires, and the like (Strand and Lizardo 2015). Second, the explanation is not teleological in the sense of pointing to the causal force of aims, goals or desired future states in accounting for action (Parsons 1937). Instead, it is the past history of repetition that makes the action persevere in the present and that past history of habituation is sufficient to explain the current occurrence of the act (without implying that habits lack goal directedness). Finally, the explanation is causal-historical in the sense that the “habit” can only be thought of as a cause of the action when it is put in the context of the person’s previous history. Habits necessarily make reference to a history of acquisition and “ontogenesis” which itself may be put in the context of a larger social history involving multiple agents, socializing institutions, and so on (Bourdieu 1988, 1996). In this respect, habits explain by taking a given action and putting it in the more encompassing landscape of previously repeated tokens of the same action. The overall “habit” then, is a complex object, is composed of all of those temporally distributed actions.

This type of explanation, in which something is accounted for by pointing to the fact that it is “building block” of a larger whole has been referred by Pollard (2006b) as a constitutive explanation, and isolated as what makes habit explanations of action distinctive from intentional ones. Intentional explanations of action point to the causal role of internal mentalistic constructs, the most important of which (namely, intentions) are also teleological (Searle 2003). Habit based explanations negate teleology, minimize the role of representational constructs, and put the causal mechanisms underlying action in a larger ontogenetic context presupposing a previous history of repetition and enculturation.

Note also that it is important to clarify what sort of causal relation we are talking about here. In common parlance, it is natural to imply that having a habit is a cause of the present action. But note that if a habit explanation implies that the present action is constitutive of the temporally extended entity we are referring to as a habit, then habits are not causes of a given action. Instead, a given action that is identified as a habit is explained by being part of a larger ensemble of similar actions that form part of a given individual’s previous history. While habits don’t cause actions a given habitual action may have it’s efficient subpersonal causes each time it is performed (Pollard, 2006a). 

Habit-based explanations also imply a different relationship between the agent and the resources used to explain action than intentional explanations. In the latter, the relationship between the agent and the mental constructs (beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on) used to account for action is one of possesion. That is, an agent is said to have beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like (Abelson 1986). This possessive relation also implies a theory of change, that is just like one can abandon a physical possession, one can also “drop” a belief, desire, or intention. The theory of change implied by GOFAT makes these “changes of mind” something that people can also do intentionally, and which thus requires effort and control. In a habit-based explanation as noted by Pollard (2006a), the relevant relation between person and explanatory resource (habit) is not one of possession but of also constitution.

Although the Latin root of habit (habere, to “hold” or “have”) does invite the possessive interpretation, and although we normally speak of people “having” or “kicking” a habit, the relationship implied is stronger. Rather than having habits, people are their habits. As Pollard (2006a: 245) notes “if one acquires a habit of Φ-ing, one thereby makes Φ-ing one’s own, and Φ-ing is quite literally, part of who one is.” The (social) self, as noted by the American pragmatists, is just such a bundle of mental and emotional habits.

As such, “kicking” or “dropping” a habit is a different matter than changing your mind about a belief. For one, the timescales are different; one can happen in the span of seconds, but dropping or changing a habit can take years and only be partially successful. While both belief and habit change qualify as intentional actions, the role intentions play in each is different.

In the case of belief change the link between intention and action is more or less direct; confronted with evidence controverting a belief, a controlled act of belief revision can take place. In the case of habit, having the intention of changing does not necessarily result in the habit disappearing. In fact, the intention to drop a habit may be a necessary, but is hardly a sufficient condition for change. In this respect changing habits imply a fundamental retooling of the self, changing who the person is in a more fundamental way than changing a belief or an intention. Habits can decay, and new habits can replace them, but the timescale of change is slower. Ontogenetically the accumulation of habits constitutes a perduring self, with its own “inertia” that is resistant to change even in the face of environmental disruption (Strand & Lizardo, 2017).

 

References

Abelson, R. P. (1986). Beliefs Are Like Possessions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 16(3), 223–250.

Archer, M. S. (2010). Routine, Reflexivity, and Realism. Sociological Theory, 28(3), 272–303.

Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo Academicus. Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power (L. Clough, trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Camic, C. (1986). The Matter of Habit. The American Journal of Sociology, 91(5), 1039–1087.

Campbell, C. (2009). Distinguishing the Power of Agency from Agentic Power: A Note on Weber and the “Black Box” of Personal Agency*. Sociological Theory, 27(4), 407–418.

Martin, J. L. (2015). Thinking Through Theory. W.W. Norton, Incorporated.

Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.

Pollard, B. (2006a). Action, Habits, and Constitution. Ratio, 19(2), 229–248.

Pollard, B. (2006b). Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43(1), 57–69.

Searle, J. R. (2003). Rationality in Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2015). Beyond world images: Belief as embodied action in the world. Sociological Theory. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0735275115572397

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2017). The hysteresis effect: theorizing mismatch in action. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 47(2), 164–194.

 

 

 

 

 

The Symbolic Making of the Habitus (Part I)

Habitus and Embodiment

Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and embodiment (Bourdieu, 1990, 2000; Lizardo, 2004; Wacquant, 2016), represents a promising conceptual starting point for renewed studies of socialization. On the one hand, habitus is a way of specifying what is really at stake with socialization, namely the nature of its product. The idea of a set of systematic and durable dispositions, together with the idea of a generative structure, represents progress compared to vague (and “plastic”) notions inherited from classical cultural and social theory, such as self or personality. 

The notion of habitus also highlights that socialization fundamentally deals with the formation of an idiosyncratic style, of generic behavioral forms, rather than the accumulation of specific contents, such as cultural knowledge or moral values (see, on this blog, the clarification proposed by Lizardo). On the other hand, describing socialization as embodiment is an invitation to root this social process in the most concrete aspect of human ordinary life, in other words, in practice (as practice theory generally suggests). Whatever our childhood and teenage memories, the person we are now is essentially not the result of explicit, memorable episodes of cultural transmissions. Therefore, effective research on socialization must include a careful exploration of a learning process that literally goes without saying.

For Bourdieu, this implies a strong focus on bodily activities, because the body is seen as the vector par excellence of habitus making (see particularly Wacquant, 2014). The way the body is used, controlled, constrained, habituated, correspond, indeed, to emergent dispositions. When Bourdieu gave detailed examples of actual processes of embodiment (he rarely did so), he favored ethnographic vignettes where social agents learn through their bodies. For example, in The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu elaborates about a ball game played by Kabyle boys in the 1950’s (qochra), which arguably familiarizes the young players to traditional gender relations (according to Bourdieu’s interpretation, the ball in motion is a structural equivalent to a woman, who has to be “fight for, passed and defended”, see Bourdieu, 1990: 293-294). 

Bourdieu’s ethnographic study of the French Bearn also insists on socialization processes involving the use of the body, and more broadly the material construction of dispositions: the peasant’s habitus is forged via his habitual walk on the mud, via the way he traditionally dances, and so on (Bourdieu, 2008). Bourdieusian sociology highlights the bodily or “carnal” (Wacquant, 2014) dimension of the enculturation for a good reason. The principal aim is to break away with a spontaneous intellectualist bias, according to which human learning would lie in explicit education, edifying discourses, the expression of moral principles, and so on.

The Symbolic Making of the Habitus

The focus on the material making of the habitus (including cognitive dispositions) is obviously a heuristic strategy for the social sciences of socialization – also demonstrated, by the way, by non-bourdieusian researchers in other fields, such as Lakoff’s work on the concrete foundations of metaphors (Lakoff, 2009), or the anthropological efforts to link spatial experience of children to the learning of core social classifications (Toren, 1990; Carsten, 1996). But this strategy has its limitations. It tends to minimize the more abstract processes of embodiment, and more precisely what we may call the symbolic making of the habitus.

The phrase “symbolic making of the habitus”, like the corresponding idea that embodiment has a symbolic dimension, is not an oxymoron. If embodiment connotes a process that ends with physical/material outputs (specific gestures, bodily features, including neural organization), that does not necessary means that embodiment always starts with the body. In principle, the input can be a social practice whose central and distinctive characteristic is not physical. 

In passing, specifying distinctive kinds of inputs (material and symbolic) in embodiment processes does not imply that we assume any analytical dualism, for example between “practical” and “discursive” inputs (as suggested by Vaisey and Frye, 2017). We consider here that, as far as embodiment is concerned, inputs are always practical, both at an ontological and analytical level.

So, symbolic practices – linguistic practices, in particular – may also lead to the formation of habitus, as an embodied result. For example, if a child recurrently listens to a pretty specific phrase from his or her mother (say, “you’re giving me a headache…”), they will internalize it in some ways, at least as a memory (“my mother often says she has a headache”), but also as a cultural resource, available for action (at one point, the child will literally bear in mind– in the sense that a neuroscientist may find a trace of that in the brain – that mentioning “headaches” is a way of making people stop what they are doing).

Besides, we must remember that symbols always have a material dimension, even though they cannot be reduced to it. Words are sounds (or signs), heard (or deciphered) in physical contexts (Elias, 1991). Also, language cannot be described “as a disembodied sign system” (Lizardo et al., 2019), since it involves perception, emotion, and action. So, it is not so paradoxical that symbolic inputs, considering their material and physical dimension, can end up in the body, and contribute to the construction of a set of dispositions.

Practical Language

But what kind of symbolic inputs have such a socializing power, exactly? If we don’t want to fall back into the intellectualist trap, we need careful theoretical specifications. I will confine the discussion to language here. In a word, within the frame of practice theory, language has to be practical to constitute an input for embodiment.

Practical language has at least three main characteristics. First, it has to be a part of a routine, that is repeated multiple times in the course of the ordinary life of the socializees. The hypothesis is that a word, or phrase, or rule, or principle that is only exceptionally uttered by socializing agents will generally have little effect on embodiment, or at least very superficial ones, compared to the most recurrent phrases, injunctions, metaphors, narratives, etc. Only the latter have the training effects that habitual practice conveys. Second, practical language is generally semi-conscious or nonconscious, in the sense that a socializing agent, if asked, will not necessarily recall what he or she has precisely said in the interaction with the socializee. 

This last characteristic is linked to the former: people hardly notice their speech, when it is a part of a routine. What has to be underscored, here, is that exploring the linguistic dimension of embodiment does not equal exploring the reflexive, explicit part of socialization (“education”, according to the Durkheimian distinction, Durkheim, 1956). On the contrary, the hypothesis is that words are not so different from gesture, as far as their degree of reflexivity is concerned. Admittedly, sometimes, we exactly know what we are saying or have said. But most of the time, we don’t. 

A third characteristic would be that practical language, as an embodiment of input, is typically irrepressible: even if they want to (so, despite the possibility of reflexivity), socializing agents will hardly be able to not speak, or to change their habitual way of speaking (because their verbal behavior is also a part of their own habitus – the construction of a habitus indeed involves many already constructed habituses). 

Developmental psychologists who conduct experiments with children and parents are familiar with this. Psychologists habitually ask the parents, for example a mother with her baby on her lap, to stay as quiet and neutral as possible. But, in the course of action, it is extremely difficult for the mother to do so. She can’t help intervening, “scaffolding” the baby in some ways: correcting the child if he or she is losing patience, for example.

Implications

Such a theoretical focus on practical language has methodological consequences. First of all, naturalistic observations are required to define what kind of routinized speech can virtually lead to embodiment in a given social context.  Sociologists cannot entirely rely on indirect reports (such as interviews with parents, or questionnaires), because of the tacit, semi-conscious nature of socializing language (most of the time, memories of everyday linguistic interactions are vague). Moreover, sociologists themselves have to collect observed speech in a very detailed manner, so as to apprehend practical language in its most minute details – including, at best, elements of prosody (pitch is an important component of socializing language, notably because it is key in the management of attention, see Bruner, 1983). Having the possibility of quantifying practical language may also be crucial, as long as frequency matters for embodiment.

All of this means that sociological accounts of symbolic embodiment require an intensive, formalized ethnography, that may resemble the empirical studies proposed by ethnomethodologists (for a recent example, see Keel, 2016). With key differences, though.  Ethnomethodologists reject the idea of embodiment, because they consider that social structures emerge “on the spot”, during the interactions themselves (they are not internalized in bodies, neither the bodies of the socializees nor the bodies of the socializers). Another important difference is the presentism of ethnomethodological accounts, in line with the idea that sociality is a matter of immediate social context. By contrast, the study of symbolic embodiment calls for longitudinal observations of speech.

Embodiment is by definition a process that requires time. Analysts who want to understand the role of language in the making of the habitus beyond hermeneutic suppositions have to be in a position to observe the effective flow of signs and sounds from the context to the persons. More precisely, they will have to document and analyze the transformation of a wide range of symbolic inputs into (embodied) outputs – a difficult task, because this transformation modifies the symbols themselves. For example, we have some evidence that children do not just repeat what adults tell them; they often recycle adult speech, i.e. they use their words in an unexpected sense, in a different context, and sometimes in hardly recognizable aspects (Lignier and Pagis, 2017; Lignier, 2019).

In a follow-up post, I will give some illustration of existing empirical studies that, although not articulated in the Bourdieusian idiom, could partly be used as a model for the type of study I have sketched here.

References

Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. 2008. The Bachelor’s Ball. The Crisis of Peasant Society in Bearn. University of Chicago Press.

Bruner, J. 1983. Child’s Talk. Learning to Use a Language. Norton.

Carsten, J. 1997. The Heat of the Hearth. The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford UP.

Durkheim, E. 1956. Education and Sociology. Free Press.

Elias, N. 1991. The Symbol Theory. Sage.

Keel, S. 2016. Sozialization : Parent-Child Interaction in Everyday Life. Routledge.

Lakoff, G. 2009. “The Neural Theory of Metaphor.” https://ssrn.com/abstract=1437794

Lignier, W. and Pagis, J. 2017. L’enfance de l’ordre. Comment les enfants perçoivent le monde social. Seuil.

Lignier, W. 2019. Prendre. Naissance d’une pratique sociale élémentaire. Seuil.

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

Lizardo, O., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D.S., and Taylor, M.A. 2019. “What Can Cognitive Neuroscience Do for Cultural Sociology.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Online First.

Toren, C. 1990. Making Sense of Hierarchies. Cognition as Social Process in Fiji. The Athlone Press.

Vaisey, S. and Frye, M. 2017. “The Old One-Two: Preserving Analytical Dualism in Psychological Sociology.” SocArXiv paper, https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/p2w5c

Wacquant, L. 2014. “Homines in Extremis: What Fighting Scholars Teach Us about Habitus.” Body and Society 20(2): 3-17.

Wacquant, L. 2016. “A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus.” Sociolological Review 64(1): 64-72

On the Nature of Habit

Recently, however, some philosophers have begun to pay attention to habits. An example is a series of papers by Bill Pollard starting in the mid-aughts (Pollard, 2006a, 2006b), and more recently Steve Matthews (2017). Pollard tackles some fundamental issues arguing (positively) for habit-based explanations of action as a useful addendum (if not replacement) for folk-psychological accounts (along the lines of previous posts). Here I’d like to focus on Mathews more recent work, which deals with the core characteristics making something a habit.

One useful (implicit) message in this work is that consistent with the modern notion of concepts in cognitive semantics, habits are a radial category. Rather than being a crisp concept with necessary and sufficient conditions of membership, habits are a fuzzy concept, with some “core” or “central” exemplars that share most of the features of habits, and some “peripheral” members that only share some features.

Most anti-habit theorists (with Kant and Kant-inspired theorists such as Parsons being one of the primary examples) equate habit with mindless compulsion and use this equation to expunge habit from the category of action. Critiques of habit theories can thus be arranged on a strength gradient depending on which element of the radial category they decide to focus on. The weakest critiques pick peripheral members, passing them off as “prototypes” for the whole category. Peripheral members of the habit category, such as tics, reflexes, addictions, and compulsions, tend to share few features with action that is experienced as intentional. It is thus easy for these critics to deny habit-based behavior the characteristic that we usually reserve for “action” proper.

Much like American sociological theory post-Parsons (Camic, 1986), habits have been given short shrift in the analytic philosophy of action tradition. As noted in previous posts, one problem is that habit-based explanations, being a form of dispositional account of action, are hard to reconcile with dominant intellectualist approaches to explaining action. The latter, require resort to the usual “psychological” apparatus of reasons, intentions, beliefs, and desires. In habit-based explanations, actions are instead accounted for by referring to their own tendencies to reliably reoccur in specific environments given the agent’s history. This makes them hard to square with typical folk psychological explanations, in which “mental” items are the presumed causal drivers.

Matthews’s argument is that the core or prototypical members of the habit category are what Marcel Mauss called techniques. Skilled ways of being proficient at an action, acquired via an enskillment process requiring training and repetition. These include both “behavioral” skills (e.g. playing the piano, typing, riding a bike) and “cognitive” or “mental” skills, although the latter is less central members of the habit category for most people.  In this respect, most bona fide habits are mindful, without necessarily being intentional in the folk psychological sense. They also have five core features, which I discuss next.

Habits are socially shaped.- This might seem obvious. However, there is a tendency in some corners of social theory to think of habit-based accounts as somehow imposing an “individualistic” explanatory scheme. Some people decry while others celebrate (Turner, 1994) the alleged commitment to individualism that comes with habit-based accounts of action. This conception is misguided. Matthews is correct in noting that for core (prototypical) habits are hardly individualistic since they comprise culturally transmitted “techniques” for how to do things (Tomasello, 1999). That each person could have their own way (say of typing or swimming) does not make habits purely individual since they would not be constructed or transmitted if people were Crusoe-like isolates. Instead, most true habits, as revealed by recent sociological “apprenticeship ethnographies” require the embeddedness of the individual in some pedagogical context (for most children this being the family). In this way, most habits are “relational” in a fairly straightforward sense.

Habits are acquired through repetition.- Another one that seems obvious. Nevertheless, I believe this point is more consequential than meets the eye. Recent work emphasizing the root of so-called “dual process” models in theories of learning and memory emphasize that routes to cultural acquisition (ideal-typical “fast” and one shot and “slow” and high repetition) are a key way to partitioning different cultural elements. Namely propositional “beliefs” from non-declarative practices. Habits, having only the slow route of acquisition open to them belong to the latter. Hence the relatively harmless analytic equation of habits and practices. This criterion also serves to demarcate degenerate or borderline examples of the habit radial category such as phobias acquired after a single exposure to a threatening object (e.g., fear of dogs after a dog bite), which depend on analytically and physiologically distinct neural substrates. These we can safely rule out as robust members of the habit category based on the acquisition history criterion.

Habits modify people in durable ways.- As Mike and I have noted (Lizardo & Strand, 2010), this criterion serves to demarcates “strong” habit or practice theories from theories who purport to pay attention to practices but from which embodied agents with their own inertia and history of habituation seem to be absent. Commitment to habit as an explanatory category entails commitment to persons as causally powerful particulars who have been modified by habit in a durable way. This makes durable habits a disposition to behave in such-and-such ways under certain circumstances. Durable modification also entails making conceptual room for the fact that, once acquired, habits are hard to get rid of. So it is usually easier to “refunctionalize” a habit (e.g. take an old habit and put to use for new purposes) than to completely retool.

Since habits operate according to a Hebbian “use or lose it” rule, it is possible for habits to atrophy and decay. However, this decay is relatively graceful and gradual, not fast and sudden. In addition, the previous acquisition of a habit entails faster re-acquisition even when that habit has been weakened or partially lost. This is behind the folk idea that many things are “like riding a bike,” so they can come back easier when you try them again even after a period of disuse.

Considering the “second nature” created by habit means we need to differentiate the temporality of habit (acquisition, use, rehearsal or decay) from the temporality of “macro” social life, as these may not always be in sync; habits will try to persevere even under changing or adverse conditions (Strand & Lizardo, 2017). Durable modification also links nicely to classic sociological notions on the power of “cohorts” to enact social change as history is “encoded” in individuals (Bourdieu, 1990; Ryder, 1965; Vaisey & Lizardo, 2016).

Habits are activated by environmental cues and triggers.- This is one of the better documented empirical regularities in the psychology of action (Ouellette & Wood, 1998). Yet, its meager representation in sociological action theory as an explanatory tool is telling, despite sociologists obvious preference for environmental over attribute-based explanations. Perhaps part of the problem if conceptual; thinking of the environment as a “trigger” may bring fears of removing voluntarism (or as we call it today “agency”) out of the equation thus producing a unidimensional theory of action that reduces action to “conditions” (Parsons, 1937). Yet this fear is unfounded.

First, most people can prospectively plan to enter an environment they know will trigger a habit. For instance, we may set up our work space in the office in a way that facilitates the evocation of the “writing” habit. Second, agents can actively perceive that certain situations have certain “moods” or affordances and they welcome that these trigger reliable (usually pleasant) habits. For instance, a social butterfly can actively perceive that a cocktail party will be good for triggering the complex of habits making up their “outgoing” personality. These have “negative” versions; we avoid certain environments precisely because we know that they’ll trigger a habit we may want to atrophy or decay. There’s no reason to think of the triggering function of environments in purely mechanical ways.

Second, that habits are automatically triggered by environmental cues does not impugn their link to goal-oriented action. In fact, habits can be thought of as a way to facilitate the pursuit and attainment of goals. It is a Parsonian prejudice to presume that the only way to pursue goals is to “picture” them reflectively before the action is initiated and then deploy “effort” to get moving. In fact, this effortful control of action may be subject to more disruption (and thus failure in the attainment of goals) than when agents “offload” the control of action to the environment via habit. In the latter case, goals can be pursued efficiently in a way that is more robust to environmental disruption and entropy.

Habits partake of certain conditions of “automaticity”.- That habits are “automatic” also seems self-evident. However, this can also be conceptually tricky. The problem is that automacity is not a molar concept; instead, it decomposes into a variety of features, some of which can vary independently (Moors & De Houwer, 2006). This can lead to semantic ambiguity because different theorists may actually emphasize different aspects of habitual action when they use the term “automatic” to refer to it.

As already intimated earlier, for prototypical habits, the automaticity feature that most people have in mind is efficiency. After acquiring a habit via lots of repetition people gain proficiency in performing the action. This means that the action can be performed faster and more reliably. Another feature of efficiency is that we no longer have to monitor each step of the action; instead, the action can be performed while our attention resources can be freed to do something else. For instance, experienced knitters can become so efficient at knitting they can do that while reading a book or watching TV.

However, other theorists may take efficiency for granted and point to other features of automaticity as definitional of habitual action. The most controversial of these is the link to intention. For some habits are automatic because they are patterns of behavior that, via the environmental trigger condition mentioned above, bypass intention. This leads to a sometimes counterproductive dualism between “intentional action” and “habit.” I believe a better solution is to think of habitual action as having its own form non-representational “intentionality” (Pollard, 2006b). Driving a car, or riding a bike is intentional action with its own feel, the difference from reflexive intentional action being that representing each step in the action is not required (Dreyfus, 2002).

As noted earlier, the feature of automacity that makes the weakest criterion for defining prototypical habits is (lack of) goal dependence. Most habits are not automatic by this criterion since most habitual action is action for something. Habits without goals (e.g., twirling your hair, tapping your fingers) exist, but they are actually fairly peripheral members of the category. In accord with the pragmatist conception, most habits exist because they help the agent accomplish their goals. As mentioned earlier, most goals are reached via habitual action rather than by reflexive contemplation of ends and effortful initiation of action.

Other features of automaticy are even more peripheral for fixing the nature of habit. For instance, the feature that Bargh refers to as “control.” This refers to whether the agent can “stop” an action sequence once it is started. In this sense, prototypical habits (playing the piano, specifying a regression model) are “controlled” not automatic actions (Pollard, 2006b, p. 60). Skills and procedures, especially those that are narratively extended in Matthew’s (2017) sense, are all “stoppable” by the agent so don’t count as automatic by this criterion. Complete incapacity to stop a line of action only applies to peripheral members of the habit category (e.g., reflexes, phobias, etc.) and probably pertain to habitual actions with short temporal windows.

Note that this refers to whether habits are “intentional” as described above. Most habits may fail to be intentional (in the classical sense) because they are triggered by the environment, but they can be controlled because the agent (if they have the capacity) can stop them once triggered. This is why it is useful to keep different features of automacity separate when thinking about the nature of habit.

Nevertheless, the issue of controllability brings up interesting conceptual problems for habit theory. These have been sharply noted in a series of papers by the philosopher Christos Douskos (to be the subject of a future post). The basic issue is that categorizing an action as a “habit” may be separable from its status as “skill.” Basically, we have lots of skills that do not count as habitual (remaining in “abeyance” so to speak), and some habits that are not skillful. Overall, the ascription conditions for calling a pattern of action a habit, may be more  holistic, and thus empirically demanding, than pragmatist and practice theories suppose because they do not reduce to features inherent to the action or its particular conditions of acquisition.

How about the feature of the “unconscious” nature of some automatic actions? Only degenerate or peripheral members of the habit category are “unconscious.” This refers to whether the person reflexively knows whether they are performing the action. Once again, for some peripheral members of the category (cracking your knuckles while engrossed in some other activity), this may apply but it is unlikely to apply to prototypical skills and procedures (we are all aware of driving, typing, etc.). Some people point to “mindless” habit-driven actions as having this feature, such as driving to work when we meant to drive to the store. Here, however, it is unlikely that the person was unconscious of performing the action. So the lapse seems to have been one of failure to exercise control (e.g. stopping the habit because it was not the one that was properly linked to the initial goal) rather than lack of consciousness per se.

Other theorists emphasize unconscious cognitive habits, and maybe for these, this feature is more central than for more prototypical behavioral habits and procedures. Even here, however, unconscious cognitive habits may have the potential to become “conscious” (e.g. the person knows of their existence qua habits) without losing the core automaticity features defining their habitual nature (e.g. the fact they are efficient means to the accomplishment of certain cognitive goals). Overall, however, while most habitual action does rely on subpersonal processes embedded in the cognitive unconscious, most habits are performed in a “mindful” manner (without implying reflexive self-consciousness). As such, they are not automatic actions by this criterion.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford University Press.

Camic, C. (1986). The Matter of Habit. The American Journal of Sociology, 91(5), 1039–1087.

Dreyfus, H. L. (2002). Intelligence Without Representation–Merleau-Ponty’s critique of mental representation the relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(4), 367–383.

Lizardo, O., & Strand, M. (2010). Skills, toolkits, contexts and institutions: Clarifying the relationship between different approaches to cognition in cultural sociology. Poetics , 38(2), 205–228.

Matthews, S. (2017). The Significance of Habit. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 14(4), 394–415.

Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: a theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 297–326.

Ouellette, J. A., & Wood, W. (1998). Habit and intention in everyday life: The multiple processes by which past behavior predicts future behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 124(1), 54.

Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.

Pollard, B. (2006a). Action, Habits, and Constitution. Ratio, 19(2), 229–248.

Pollard, B. (2006b). Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43(1), 57–69.

Ryder, N. B. (1965). The cohort as a concept in the study of social change. American Sociological Review, 843–861.

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2017). The hysteresis effect: theorizing mismatch in action. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 47(2), 164–194.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Human Adaptation for Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28(1), 509–529.

Turner, S. P. (1994). The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. University of Chicago Press.

Vaisey, S., & Lizardo, O. (2016). Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change. Socius, 2, 2378023116669726.

Exaption: Alternatives to the Modular Brain, Part II

Scientists discovered the part of the brain responsible for…

In my last post, I discuss one alternative to the modular theory of the mind/brain relationship: connectionism. Such a model is antithetical to modularity in that there are only distributed networks of neurons in the brain, not special-purpose processors.

One strength of the modular approach, however, is that it maps quite well to our folk psychology. And, much of the popular discourse surrounding research in neuroscience involves the celebrated “discovery” of the part of the brain responsible for X. A major theme of the previous posts is that the social sciences should be skeptical of the baggage of our folk psychology. But, is there not some truth to the idea that certain regions of the brain are regularly implicated in certain cognitive processes?

The earliest attempts at localization relied on an association between some diagnosed syndrome—such aphasia discussed in the previous posts—and abnormalities of the brain’s structure (i.e. lesions) identified in post-mortem examinations. For example, Paul Broca, discussed in my previous post, noticed lesions on a particular part of the brain in patients with difficulty producing speech. This part of the brain became known as Broca’s area, but researchers only have a loose consensus as to the boundaries of the area (Lindenberg, Fangerau, and Seitz 2007).

Furthermore, the relationship between lesions in this area and aphasia is partial at best. A century later, Nina Dronkers, the Director of the Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders, states (2000:60):

After several years of collecting data on chronic aphasic patients, we find that only 85% of patients with chronic Broca’s aphasia have lesions in Broca’s area, and only 50–60% of patients with lesions in Broca’s area have a persisting Broca’s aphasia.

More difficult for the modularity thesis, those with damage to Broca’s area and who also have Broca’s aphasia usually have other syndromes. This implies that the area is multi-purpose, and thus not a single-purpose language production module (see this book-length discussion Grodzinsky and Amunts 2006). One reason I focus on Broca’s area (apart from my interest in linguistics) is that it is considered the exemplary case for the modular theory quite dominant (if implicit) in much neuroscientific research (Viola and Zanin 2017).

Part of the difficulty with assessing even weak modularity hypotheses, however, is that neuroanatomical research continues to revise the “parcellation” of the brain. The first such attempt was by Korbinian Brodmann, published in German in 1909  as “Comparative Localization Studies in the Brain Cortex, its Fundamentals Represented on the Basis of its Cellular Architecture.” He divided the cerebral cortex (the outermost “layer” of the brain) into 52 regions based on the structure of cells (cytoarchitecture) sampled from different sections of brains taken from 64 different mammalian species, including humans (see Figure 1). Although Brodmann’s studies were purely anatomical, he wrote: “my ultimate goal was the advancement of a theory of function and its pathological deviations.” Nevertheless, he rejected what he saw as naive attempts at functional localization:

[Dressing] up the individual layers with terms borrowed from physiology or psychology…and all similar expressions that one encounters repeatedly today, especially in the psychiatric and neurological literature, are utterly devoid of any factual basis; they are purely arbitrary fictions and only destined to cause confusion in uncertain minds.

20180522-Selection_003
Figure 1. Brodmann’s handdrawn parcellation of the human brain.

Over a century later, many researchers continue to refer to “Brodmann’s area” numbers as general orientation markers. More recently (see Figure 2), using data from the Human Connectome Project and supervised machine learning techniques, a team of researchers characterized 180 areas in each hemisphere — 97 new areas and 83 areas identified in previous work (Glasser et al. 2016). This study used a “multi-modal” technique which included cytoarchitecture, like Brodmann, but also connectivity, topography and function. For the latter, the study used data from “task functional MRI (tfMRI) contrasts,” wherein resting state measures are compared with measures taken during seven different tasks.

glasser-map

One of these tasks was language processing using a procedure developed by Binder et al. (2011) wherein participants read a short fable and then are asked a forced-choice question. Glasser et al. found reasonable evidence associating this language task with previously identified components of the “language network” (for recent overviews of the quest to localize the language network, see Frederici 2017 and Fitch 2018, both largely within the generative tradition).  Specifically, these are Broca’s area (roughly 44) and Wernicke’s area (roughly PSL), and also identified an additional area, which they call 55b). Their findings also agreed with previous work going back to Broca on the “left-lateralization” of the language network—which means not that language is only in the left hemisphere (as some folk theories purport), but simply the left areas show more activity in response to the language task than in homologous areas in the right hemisphere (an early finding which inspired Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind hypothesis)

Does this mean we have discovered the “language module” theorized by Fodor, Chomsky, and others? Not quite, for three reasons. First, Glasser et al. found if they removed the functional task data, their classifier was nearly as accurate at identifying parcels. Second, the parcels were averaged over a couple hundred brains, and yet the classifier was still able to identify parcels in atypical brains (whether this translated into changes in functionality was outside the scope of the study).

Third, and most important for our purposes, this work does not—and the researchers do not attempt to—determine whether parcels are uniquely specialized (or encapsulated in Fodor’s terms). That is, while we can roughly identify a language network implicating relatively consistent areas across different brains, this does not demonstrate that such structures are necessary and sufficient for human language, and solely used for this purpose. Indeed, language may be a “repurposing” brain parcels used for (evolutionarily or developmentally older) processes. This is precisely the thesis of neural “exaption.”

What is Exaption?

In the last few decades several new frameworks—under labels like neural reuse, neuronal recycling, neural exploitation, or massive redeployment—attempt to offer a bridge between the modularity assumptions which undergird most neuroanatomical research, on one hand, and the connectionist assumptions which spurred advancements in artificial intelligence research and anthropology on the other. Such frameworks also attempt to account for the fact there is some consistency in activation across individuals, which does look a little bit like modularity.

The basic idea is exaption (also called exaptation): some biological tendencies or anatomical constraints may predispose certain areas of the brain to be implicated in certain cognitive functions, but these same areas may be recycled, repurposed, or reused for other functions. Exemplars of this approach are Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain and Michael Anderson’s After Phrenology.

Perhaps the easiest way to give a sense of what this entails is to consider cases of neurodiversity, specifically the anthropologist Greg Downey’s essay on the use of echolocation by the visually impaired. While folk understandings may suggest that hearing becomes “better” in those with limited sight, this is not quite the case. Rather, one study finds, when listening to “ a recording [which] had echoes, parts of the brain associated with visual perception in sighted individuals became extremely active.” In other words, the brain repurposed the visual cortex as a result of the individual’s practices. While most humans have limited echolocation abilities and the potential to develop this skill, only some will put in the requisite practice.

Another strand of research supporting neural exaption falls under the heading of “conceptual metaphor theory” (itself a subfield of cognitive linguistics). The basic argument from this literature is that people tend to reason about (target) domains they have had little direct experience with by analogy to (source) domains with which they have had much direct experience (e.g. the nation is a family). As argued in Lakoff and Johnson’s famous Metaphors We Live By, this metaphorical mapping is not just figurative or linguistic, but rather a pre-linguistic conceptual mappings, and an—if not the—essential part of all cognition (Hofstadter and Sander 2013). Therefore, thinking or talking about even very abstract concepts re-activates a coalition of neural associations, many of which are fundamentally adapted to the mundane sensorimotor task of navigating our bodies through space. As we discuss in our forthcoming paper, “Schemas and Frames” (Wood et al. 2018), because talking and thinking recruit areas of our neural system often deployed in other activities—and at time-scales faster than conscious awareness can adequately attend—our biography of embodiment channels our reasoning in ways that seem intuitive and yet are constrained by the pragmatic patterns of those source domains. This is fully compatible with the dispositional theory of the mental Omar discusses.

What does this mean for sociology? I think there are numerous implications and we are just beginning to see how generative these insights are for our field. Here, I will limit myself to discussing just two, specifically related to how we tend to think about the role of language in our work. First, for an actor, knowing what text or talk means involves an actual embodied simulation of the practices it implies, very often (but not necessarily) in service of those practices in the moment (Binder and Desai 2011). Therefore, language should not be understood as an autonomous realm wherein meanings are produced by the internal interplay of contrastive differences within an always deferred linguistic system. Rather, following the later Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, “in most cases, the meaning of a word is its use.” Furthermore, as our embodiment is largely (but certainly not completely) shared across very different peoples (for example, most of us experience gravity all the time), there is a significant amount of shared semantics across diverse peoples (Wierzbicka 1996)—indeed without this, translation would likely be impossible.

Second, the repurposing of vocabulary commonly used in one context into a new context will often involve the analogical transfer of traces of the old context. This is because invoking such language activates a simulation of practices from the old context while one is in the new context. (Although this is dependent upon the accrued biographies of the individuals involved). This suggests that our language can be constraining in predictable ways, but not because the language itself has a structure or code rendering certain possibilities unthinkable. Rather, it is that language is the manifestation of a habit inextricably involved in a cascade of other habits, making it easier to execute  (and therefore more probable for) some actions or thoughts over others. For example, as Barry Schwartz argued in his (criminally under-appreciated) Vertical Classification, it is nearly universal that UP is associated with power and also the morally good as a result of (near-universal) practices we encounter as babies and children. This helps explain the persistence of the “height premium” in the labor market (e.g., Lundborg, Nystedt, and Rooth 2014).

 

References

Binder, Jeffrey R. et al. 2011. “Mapping Anterior Temporal Lobe Language Areas with fMRI: A Multicenter Normative Study.” NeuroImage 54(2):1465–75.

Binder, Jeffrey R. and Rutvik H. Desai. 2011. “The Neurobiology of Semantic Memory.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15(11):527–36.

Dronkers, N. F. 2000. “The Pursuit of Brain–language Relationships.” Brain and Language. Retrieved (http://www.ebire.org/aphasia/dronkers/the_pursuit.pdf).

Fitch, W. Tecumseh. 2018. “The Biology and Evolution of Speech: A Comparative Analysis.” Annual Review of Linguistics 4(1):255–79.

Friederici, Angela D. 2017. Language in Our Brain: The Origins of a Uniquely Human Capacity. MIT Press.

Glasser, Matthew F. et al. 2016. “A Multi-Modal Parcellation of Human Cerebral Cortex.” Nature 536(7615):171–78.

Grodzinsky, Yosef and Katrin Amunts. 2006. Broca’s Region. Oxford University Press, USA.

Hofstadter, Douglas and Emmanuel Sander. 2013. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. Basic Books.

Lindenberg, Robert, Heiner Fangerau, and Rüdiger J. Seitz. 2007. “‘Broca’s Area’ as a Collective Term?” Brain and Language 102(1):22–29.

Lundborg, Petter, Paul Nystedt, and Dan-Olof Rooth. 2014. “Height and Earnings: The Role of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills.” The Journal of Human Resources 49(1):141–66.

Viola, Marco and Elia Zanin. 2017. “The Standard Ontological Framework of Cognitive Neuroscience: Some Lessons from Broca’s Area.” Philosophical Psychology 30(7):945–69.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 1996. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press, UK.

Wood, Michael Lee, Dustin S. Stoltz, Justin Van Ness, and Marshall A. Taylor. 2018. “Schemas and Frames.” Retrieved (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/b3u48/).

 

What are Dispositions?

A recurrent theme in previous posts is that social scientists have a lot to gain by replacing belief-desire psychology as an explanatory framework with a dispositional theory of the mental. As I argued before, it is something that we already do and has a good pedigree in social theory.

The notion of disposition has had a somewhat checkered history in sociological theory. It was central to Bourdieu’s definition of one of his core concepts (habitus) and played a central role in his scheme (Bourdieu defined habitus as a “system” of dispositions). Yet, American sociologists seldom use the notion in a generative way. I want to propose here that it should be a (if not the) central notion in any coherent action theory.

Dispositional explanations of action are not philosophically neutral because they make strong assumptions about the linkage between the capacities presumed to be embodied in agents and our ability to make sense of their actions. This is a good thing since a lot of action theories are not explicit as to their commitments. For instance, a dispositional account has to presuppose that the fact we can make sense of other people’s actions (e.g. when skilfully playing the role of folk psychologists) is itself a manifestation of a disposition, which may or may not manifest itself (sometimes we make sense of other people’s actions by taking other stances that are not folk psychological). In this respect, a dispositional account of action is one that must refer to an unobserved process which is only available via its overt manifestations. Because of this, dispositional explanations must deal with some unique conceptual and philosophical challenges (Turner 2007).

I outline some of these in what follows.

First, a dispositional explanation of action is consistent with a realist, capacities-based account of causation and causal powers. One useful such account has been referred to as “dispositional realism.” According to Borghini and Williams (2008, 23), dispositional realism “refers to any theory of dispositions that claims an object has a disposition in virtue of some state or property of the object.”

In addition, the fact that dispositions are properties possessed by their bearers entails that observing an overt manifestation of a disposition suffices to conclude that the agent possesses that disposition. However, the reverse is not the case. Dispositions may fail to manifest themselves even when their conditions for manifestation obtain (Fara 2005: 42). So not observing an action or profession of belief does not indicate the agent lacks the disposition to behave like X or believe X.

For sociologists, whose “objects” are people, this last statement entails for instance, that we can ascribe dispositions to people in the absence of any overt manifestation (e.g. dispositions to believe), and that this ascription is therefore partially independent from any single present (or past) situation in which we may have observed the agent. For instance, we may be familiar with the causal history experienced by the person, know that certain causal histories result in the acquisition of certain dispositions, and thus ascribe dispositions based on our familiarity with a person’s causal history before we see any of their manifestations.

Second, dispositions are causally relevant to their manifestations (Fara 2005, 44). In most settings to say  an agent has a disposition (D) to take a given intentional stance (belief, desire) towards propositional content Y, or to engage in action W in context C is to say D suffices to produce that intentional stance or that action in that context.

Third, dispositions are properties of the person, not properties of “the situation” or some external environmental feature. This is not say situations don’t have properties. It is to say, however, that in order for a situational property to apply to the explanation of action, we must presume the agent has a disposition to react in such-and-such a way to that situational property. Environments and situations have no free-standing causal powers in determining action. Any environmental effect has to be mediated by the dispositions to act and react that the agent is taken to possess (Cervone 1997).

This also entails that dispositions have bases, but the dispositions are not reducible to some non-dispositional substrate. Dispositional properties are irreducibly dispositional. Dispositions are not holistic glosses over behavior that could be realizable over “wildly disjunctive” set of underlying substrates. Instead, a dispositional ascription is an inherently ontological claim: something exists (the disposition) the causal power of which is responsible for the overt behavioral manifestation in question.

Do dispositions entail conditionals? A popular philosophical view defines a disposition as those properties of objects or persons that entail a conditional statement. For instance, the disposition “fragile” ascribed to a cup entails the condition “would break if struck by a sufficiently rigid object.” Here I follow Fara (2005) in noting that the conditional account of dispositions fails for a variety of reasons. We can consider something to be a disposition without referring to what would occur in a possible world or mental space. Instead of conditionals, dispositional ascriptions entail habituals (Fara 2005: 63), thus a dispositional explanation of action is consistent with a habit-based theory of action.

Accordinngly, fourth, dispositional realism entails a rejection of the conditional (e.g. counterfactual) definition of causation for explaining action (Martin 2011). The reason for this is that under conditional accounts the causal potency of dispositions is given a backseat in favor of talk about “the laws of nature, possible worlds, abstract realms, or what have you” (Borghini and Williams 2004: 24). This penchant to substitute talk about fake or possible worlds for talk about this world is the source of various pathological understandings of causality in social science (Martin 2011).

Fifth, when we say an agent has a certain disposition to do Y, we say that the agent does Y because of something inherent in his or her nature. Note that this account is perfectly compatible with the idea that this nature is “acquired.” The notion of something behaving like a natural property of an agent is separable from how is it that that something became part of the agent’s nature (e.g. learning or genetics). Sociologists are sometimes allergic to talking about properties inherent in agents lest they be accused of “essentialism.” Once acquired and locked in via habituation, dispositions can function as “second nature” in which case the provisional and qualified use of so-called “essentialist” language is not misleading.

This view of dispositions, as noted earlier, entails that there are not purely situational or derived properties, such as for instance, “relational properties” floating around unmoored in the ontological ether. This is not say there are no relational properties. Instead, it is to say that relational properties depend on dispositional properties but not the reverse: the capacity of the agent to enter into relations with properties and entities in the environment requires dispositions. This is what the joining of a habitual account of action (which trades on dispositional talk) and a field theory (which trades on relational talk) is not arbitrary but required to deal with the sorts of questions sociologists are disposed to ask (Merriman and Martin 2015).

Sixth, the relationship between a disposition and an overt manifestation is normally one to many. A single disposition may manifest itself as distinct forms of overt behavior or experiences depending on context (Borghini and Williams 2004: 24).

Finally, dispositions may organize themselves into systems of dispositions. Bourdieu thought this was the natural tendency. However, a dispositional explanation of action does not require the assumption of overall systematicity. In fact, the weaker assumption of loose coupling until proven otherwise is more likely to be empirically accurate.

In a follow-up post, I will outline other consequences of adopting a dispositional ontology at the level of the actor.

References

Borghini, Andrea, and Neil E. Williams. 2008. “A Dispositional Theory of Possibility.” Dialectica 62 (1). Wiley Online Library: 21–41.

Cervone, Daniel. 1997. “Social-Cognitive Mechanisms and Personality Coherence: Self-Knowledge, Situational Beliefs, and Cross-Situational Coherence in Perceived Self-Efficacy.” Psychological Science 8 (1). SAGE Publications Inc: 43–50.

Fara, Michael. 2005. “Dispositions and Habituals.” Nous 39 (1): 43–82.

Martin, John Levi. 2011. The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press.

Merriman, Ben, and John Levi Martin. 2015. “A Social Aesthetics as a General Cultural Sociology?” In Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, 152–210. Routledge.

Turner, Stephen P. 2007. “Practice Then and Now.” Human Affairs 17 (2): 375.