Sociologists have been interested in cognition at least as far back as Durkheim, who, with his nephew Marcel Mauss, sought to uncover the social origins of mental categories (Durkheim [1912] 1995; Durkheim and Mauss, [1903] 1963). However, it was arguably Pierre Bourdieu who “supercharged” the cognitive turn in contemporary sociology (Cerulo, 2010), providing an invaluable foundation for studying the social and cultural dimensions of cognition. One of the many reasons why Bourdieu has been so useful for sociologists is the clear affinities between his work (particularly his conception of “habitus”) and a variety of influential frameworks and research programs within the cognitive sciences, most notably embodied cognition, cognitive schemas, and dual-process cognition (see DiMaggio, 1997; Lizardo, 2004; Lizardo and Strand, 2010; Vaisey, 2009).
Bourdieu versus Dewey on Reflexivity, Habit, and Deliberation
Bourdieu has been central to what Brekhus (2015) described as the “individual practical actor approach” to culture and cognition, which, he notes, resurrects the pragmatist concern for individual thought and practical action. There is, of course, a lot of common ground between Bourdieu and American pragmatism, and Bourdieu himself noted that he and John Dewey shared an emphasis on dispositional action and a rejection of conceptual dualisms (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 122). However, there are some subtle but consequential differences in the way Bourdieu and Dewey theorized cognition and action that have direct relevance for how sociologists analyze and conceptualize automatic and deliberate processing. I suggest that some of the criticisms aimed at early and influential work on dual-process cognition (specifically the work of DiMaggio (1997) and Vaisey, 2009)) also apply to Bourdieusian practice theory, and reflect a perspective more aligned with the work of Dewey. I focus on three of the major criticisms sociologists have made regarding early dual-process model scholarship – 1) that automatic and deliberate processes are dynamic and interactive rather than separate and independent processes, 2) that deliberation is not rare but commonplace, and 3) that dual-process models are non-exhaustive – all of which go against Bourdieu and are supported by Dewey.
The Integration of Habit and Reflexivity
First, several sociologists have argued that automatic and deliberate processes are not wholly separate or independent (as in DiMaggio (1997) and Vaisey (2009)) but are instead highly dynamic and interactive processes (e.g., Cerulo, 2018; Leschziner and Green, 2013; Winchester, 2016). This speaks directly to the fact that early accounts of dual-process cognition in sociology fit the general structure of Bourdieusian practice theory, which argues that actors generally rely upon the unconscious dispositions of habitus save for times of “crisis” in which they may be “superseded” for “rational and conscious computation” (Bourdieu, 1990: 108; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 131-137). Here, Bourdieu seems to imply that habitus and reflective thought are mutually exclusive, rather than dialogical (Crossley, 2013: 151).
Conversely, in my recent article in Sociological Theory (Brett, 2022), I draw on Dewey’s account of deliberation, which conceives of reflective thought and habits as directly interwoven: “Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. It is an experiment in making various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses, to see what the resultant action would be like if it were entered upon” (Dewey, [1922]2002: 190). Instead of asking whether an action was the result of either automatic or deliberate thought, this invites us to ask how and to what degree did both automatic and deliberate processing contribute to a given action or decision. I also draw upon Dewey’s account of a “reflective disposition,” a habit which itself encourages more thorough and protracted deliberation. Unlike Bourdieu, Dewey suggested that habit and deliberation were integrated to such a degree that “it is a perilous error to draw a hard and fast line between action into which deliberation and choice enter an activity due to impulse and matter-of-fact habit” (Dewey, [1922]2002:279). Therefore, for those arguing for the interactive nature of automatic and deliberate processes, Dewey provides a much more suitable theoretical foundation.
The Importance of Reflection
A second and related criticism of early dual-process scholarship is that it discounts the role of reflection (e.g., Hitlin and Kirkpatrick-Johnson 2015; Mische 2014; Vila-Henninger 2015), wrongly arguing that deliberate cognition both rarely occurs and is rarely in charge of our action (DiMaggio, 1997; Vaisey, 2009). Again, this fits with Bourdieu’s account, in which crisis-induced deliberation was generally a rare occurrence, resulting from large-scale social or political disruptions. In contrast, such disruptions were both more mundane and more common for Dewey (Crossley, 2013: 151), resulting from the dynamic relationship between flesh-and-blood actors and ever-changing social and material environments. Though Dewey viewed habit as the predominant mode of human conduct, he did not discount reflection, but stressed that the disruption of habit and the emergence of deliberation was a regular and consequential occurrence in our everyday lives.
Beyond Habit and Reflexivity
Lastly, in a more recent critique, Pagis and Summers-Effler (2021) suggest that dual-process models alone do not exhaust the range of human practices and experiences. They argue that aesthetic engagement – “open and purposeful attention to the immediate context that overrides both habitual and reflective/deliberative processing” (2021:1372) – is a cultural practice that does not fit either automatic or deliberate processing. Aesthetic engagements are motivated by curiosity and exploration and require sustained uncertainty through the inhibition or overriding of both automatic and deliberate cognition. They theorize aesthetic engagement through both phenomenology and pragmatism, most notably drawing on Dewey’s distinction between “perception” and “recognition”: aesthetic engagement involves dwelling in (open and curious) perception and bracketing the automatic and deliberate processes involved in recognition (e.g., automatic categorization, deliberate search for meaning). Conversely, it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to locate a mode of cognition and action within Bourdieu’s work that precludes both automatic processes (i.e., habitus) or deliberate processes (e.g., conscious computation).
Taken together, it seems as though some of the major criticisms aimed towards dual-process models in sociology could have just as easily been directed at Bourdieu. Although sociologists have drawn from a variety of empirical work from the cognitive sciences to make claims about the dual-nature of cognition, it is possible that the persistence of assumptions like process-independence is partly the result of thinking about cognition through Bourdieu. Furthermore, one wonders what dual-process scholarship, or even culture and cognition more broadly would look like had Dewey, rather than Bourdieu, served as the primary framework for theorizing cognition.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Brekhus, Wayne H. 2015. Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Brett, Gordon. 2022. “Dueling with Dual-Process Models: Cognition, Creativity, and Context.” Sociological Theory: 07352751221088919.
Cerulo, Karen A. 2010. “Mining the Intersections of Cognitive Sociology and Neuroscience.” Poetics 38(2):115–32.
Cerulo, Karen A. 2018. “Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making, and Meaning Attribution.” American Sociological Review 83(2):361–89.
Crossley, Nick. 2013. “Habit and Habitus.” Body & Society 19(2-3): 136-161.
Dewey, John. [1922] 2002. Human Nature and Conduct. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.
DiMaggio, Paul. 1997. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23:263–87.
Durkheim, Emile. [1912] 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
Durkheim, Emile, and Marcel Mauss. [1903] 1963. Primitive Classification. London: Cohen and West.
Hitlin, Steven, and Monica Kirkpatrick-Johnson. 2015. “Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead.” American Journal of Sociology 120(5):1429–72.
Leschziner, Vanina, and Adam Isaiah Green. 2013. “Thinking about Food and Sex: Deliberate Cognition in the Routine Practices of a Field.” Sociological Theory 31(2):116–44.
Lizardo, Omar. 2004. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34(4): 375-401.
Lizardo, Omar, and Michael Strand. 2010. “Skills, Toolkits, Contexts and Institutions: Clarifying the Relationship between Different Approaches to Cognition in Cultural Sociology.” Poetics 38(2):205–28.
Mische, Ann. 2014. “Measuring Futures in Action: Projective Grammars in the Rio+20 Debates.” Theory and Society 43(3–4):437–64.
Pagis, Michal, and Erika Summers-Effler. 2021. “Aesthetic Engagement.” Sociological Forum 36(S1):1371–94.
Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114(6):1675–715.
Vila-Henninger, Luis Antonio. 2015. “Toward Defining the Causal Role of Consciousness: Using Modelsof Memory and Moral Judgment from Cognitive Neuroscience to Expand the Sociological Dual-Process Model.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 45(2):238–60.
Winchester, Daniel. 2016. “A Hunger for God: Embodied Metaphor as Cultural Cognition in Action.” Social Forces 95(2):585–606.
Steve Vaisey’s 2009 American Journal of Sociology paper is, deservedly, one of the most (if not the most) influential pieces in contemporary work on culture and cognition in sociology. It is single-handedly responsible for the efflorescence of interest in the study of cognitive processes by sociologists in general, and more specifically it introduced work on dual-process models and dual-process theorizing to the field (see Leschziner, 2019 for a recent review of this work).
Yet, like many broadly influential pieces in science, there’s an odd disconnect between the initial theoretical innovations (and inspirations) of the original piece and the way that the article figures in contemporary citation practices by sociologists. There are also some key misrepresentations of the original argument that have become baked into sociological lore. One of the most common ones is the idea that Vaisey introduced the dual-process model to sociologists or the “sociological dual-process model” (see Leschziner, 2019).
However, as my co-authors and I pointed out in a 2016 piece in Sociological Theory, the use of the singular to refer to dual-process models in social and cognitive psychology is a mistake. From the beginning, dual-process theorizing has consisted of a family of models and theories designed to explain a wide variety of phenomena, from stereotyping to persuasion, biases in reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making, categorization and impression-formation, individual differences in personality, trust, and so forth. As noted in the title of the two most influential collections on the subject (Chaiken & Trope, 1999 and its sequel Sherman, Gawronski & Trope, 2014), social psychologists refer to “dual process theories” and comment on their variety and compatibility with one another. In the paper, we proposed seeing dual-process theorizing as united by a broad meta-theoretical grammar (which we called the “dual process framework”) from which specific dual-process models can be built. In fact, Vanina Leschziner in the aforementioned piece follows this practice and refers to “dual-process models” in sociology.
We also noted that another generator of variety among dual-process theories is the actual aspect of cognition they focus on. Thus, there are dual-process models of learning, memory, action, and so forth, and these need to be analytically kept distinct from one another, so that their interconnections (or lack thereof) can be properly theorized. Although all dual-process models share a family resemblance, they have different emphases and propose different mechanisms, and core imageries depending on what aspect of cognition they aim to make sense of.
As we pointed out in the Sociological Theory piece, this means that the particular dual-process model Vaisey used as inspiration in his original piece becomes relevant. This was Jonathan Haidt’s (2001) “social intuitionist” model of moral judgment. Vaisey (correctly) framed his paper as a contribution to the “culture in action” debate in cultural sociology inaugurated by Ann Swidler (1986) in her own classic paper. Yet, the dual-process model that served as inspiration was really about judgment (what we called culture in “thinking”) and not action (although you can make a non-controversial proposal that judgment impacts action). Moreover, Haidt’s model was not about judgment in general, but about judgment in a restricted domain: Morality. Regardless, the key point to keep in mind is that the core construct in Haidt’s social intuitionist model was intuition, not action. Haidt’s basic point is that most judgments of right and wrong result from an intuitive and not a reflective “reasoning” process, and that post hoc moral “reasoning” emerges after the fact to justify and make sense of our intuitively derived judgments.
Oddly, and perhaps due to the fact that Vaisey’s paper has mostly been interpreted with regard to action theory and research in sociology, the fact that it built on a key construct in social and cognitive psychology, namely, intuition, has essentially dropped out of the picture for sociologists today. For instance, despite its wide influence, Vaisey’s piece has not resulted in sociologists thinking about or theorizing about intuition in judgment and decision-making, developing a sociological approach to intuition (or a “sociology of intuition”), or even thinking seriously about what intuition is, and about the theoretical and empirical implications of the fact that a lot of time we reason via intuition. This is despite the fact that intuition is a going concern across a wide range of fields (Epstein, 2010).
Here I argue that this is something that needs to be corrected. Intuition is a rich and fascinating topic, cutting across a variety of areas of concern in the cognitive, social, and behavioral sciences (see Hodgkinson et al. 2008) and one that could benefit from more concerted sociological attention and theorizing both inside and outside the moral domain. But this means going back to Vaisey’s article (or Jonathan Haidt’s 2001 piece for that matter) and re-reading it in a different theoretical context, one focused on the very idea of what intuition is in the first place, the theoretical implications that a good chunk of our judgments and beliefs come to us via intuition, while revisiting the question of where intuitions come from in the first place.
What are Intuitions?
So, what are intuitions? The basic idea is deceptively simple, but as we will see, the devil is in the details. First, as already noted, “intuition” is best thought of as a quality or a property of certain judgments or reasoning processes (Dewey, 1925, p. 300). Although sometimes people use intuition as a noun, to refer to the product of such an intuitive reasoning process (e.g., “an intuition”). In what follows I stick to the process conception, with the caveat that usually we are dealing with a process/product couplet.
So, we say a given judgment is “intuitive” instead of what? The usual complement is something like “reasoned” or “analytic.” That is, when trying to solve a problem or come up with a judgment, it seems like we can go through the problem step by step in some kind of logical, effortful, or reasoned way, or we can just let the solution “come to us” without experiencing any phenomenological signature of having gone through a reasoned process. This last is an intuition.
Thus, according to the social and cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman (2000, p. 109), “phenomenologically, intuition seems to lack the logical structure of information processing. When one relies on intuition, one has no sense of alternatives being weighted algebraically or a cost-benefit analysis being undertaken.” Jerome Bruner, provides a similar formulation, noting that intuition is “…the intellectual technique of arriving at plausible but tentative conclusions without going through the analytic steps by which such formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions” (1960, p. 13). When applied to beliefs, the quality of being intuitive is thus connected to the fact that judgments regarding their truth or falsity are arrived at “automatically” without going through a long deductive chain of reasoning from first principles (Baumard & Boyer, 2013; Sperber, 1997). In the original case of moral reasoning (Haidt, 2001), these are beliefs that particular practices or actions are just “wrong,” but where the actor cannot quite tell you where the judgment of wrongness comes from.
Notably, there appears to be a convergence among various dual-process theorists that “intuition” could be the best global descriptor of what would otherwise be referred to with the uninformative label of “Type I cognition.” For instance, the cognitive psychologist Steve Sloman (2014) in an update to a classic dual-process theory piece on “two systems of reasoning” (Sloman, 1996) complains about the proliferation of terms that emerged in the interim to refer to the ideal-typical types of cognition in dual-process models (e.g., “…associative-rule based, tacit-explicit thought implicit-explicit, experiential-rational, intuitive-analytical…” 2014, p. 70), while also rejecting the usefulness of the uninformative numerical labels proposed by Stanovich and West, as these lack descriptive power. To solve the problem, Sloman recommends abandoning his previous (1996) distinction of “associative versus rule-based processing” in favor of the distinction between intuition and deliberation. These folk terms are apposite according to Sloman because they provide a minimal set of theoretical commitments for the dual-process theorist centered on the idea that “…in English, an intuition is a thought whose source one is not conscious of, and deliberation involves sequential consideration of symbolic strings in some form” (ibid, p. 170).
These definitions should already give a sense that intuition is a rich and multifaceted phenomenon, which makes it even more of a shame that no sociological approach to intuitive judgment, intuitive reasoning, or even intuitive belief (as it exists, for instance, in the cognitive science of religion) has been developed in the field in the wake of Vaisey’s influential article. One exception to this, noted in a previous post, is Gordon Brett’s and Andrew Miles’s call to study socially contextualized variation in “thinking dispositions.” Clearly, reliance on intuition to solve problems, make judgments, and arrive at decisions is something that varies systematically across people, such that an intuitive disposition is one such individual attribute worthy of sociological consideration.
In the remaining, I will comment on one core issue related to intuition, ripe for future consideration in culture and cognition studies in sociology, that follows naturally from the idea that people exercise intuitive judgment relatively frequently across a wide variety of arenas and domains, namely, the question of the origins of intuitions.
Intuition and Implicit Learning
Where do intuitions come from in the first place? Surprisingly, there is actually now a well-developed consensus that intuitions develop in life as a result of implicit learning (Epstein, 2010; Lieberman, 2000). This is a substantive theoretical linkage between two sets of dual-process models developed for two distinct aspects of cognition (reasoning and learning). In our 2016 Sociological Theory piece, we made the point that different flavors of the dual-process model result from whether you focused on four distinct aspects of cognition (learning, memory, thinking, or action). However, this work shows that there is a systematic linkage between intuitive reasoning and implicit learning (see Reber, 1993) so that we reason intuitively about domains for which we have acquired experience via implicit learning mechanisms. The linkage between intuition and implicit learning in recent work (e.g., Epstein, 2010) thus speaks to the advantages of distinguishing the different flavors of dual-process theories rather than putting them all into a non-distinct clump.
What is implicit learning? The modern theory of implicit learning has been developed by the psychologist Arthur Reber (1993) who connects it to Michael Polanyi’s (1966) reflections on tacit and explicit knowledge as well as work by the American pragmatists like William James. Reber defines implicit learning as “the acquisition of knowledge that takes place largely independently of conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired” (1993, p. 5). Essentially, implicit learning leads to the acquisition of tacit knowledge, which operates differently from the explicit knowledge acquired via traditional learning mechanisms. Importantly, implicit learning is involved in the extraction of “rule-like” patterns that are encoded in environmental regularities. As Vaisey (2009) noted in his original paper, this is precisely the sort of learning mechanism required by habitus-type theories like Bourdieu’s (1990) where rule-like patterns are acquired from enculturation processes keyed to experience without the internalization of explicit rules.
In this way, the connection between implicit learning and intuition links naturally with recent work in culture and cognition studies dealing with socialization, internalization, and enculturation (see Lizardo, 2021). This also clarifies an aspect of Vaisey’s (2009) argument that remained somewhat fuzzy, especially when making the link between Haidt’s social intuitionist approach and the work of Bourdieu and Giddens. In the original piece, Vaisey noted that Bourdieu’s habitus could be a sociological equivalent of the “intuitive mind” described in terms of the dual-process framework (and contrasted with the conscious or reflective mind in charge or “justifications”). The intuitive mind was usually in charge and the reflective mind provide conscious confabulations that made it look like it was in charge. In this respect, the link between Bourdieu and cognitive science Vaisey made was with respect to content: The contents of the intuitive mind described by social and cognitive psychologists were equivalent to the “unconscious dispositions” that Bourdieu thought made up the habitus.
But in linking implicit learning to intuition, we can make a more substantive linkage between the process via which habitus develops and the penchant to engage particular life domains via intuition. This is something that is closer to the dynamic enculturation model of habitus that Vaisey noted was developed by the anthropologists Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn when they explicitly liked “habitus to the set of unconscious schemas that people develop through life experience” (Vaisey, 2009, p. 1685).
Thus, intuitions (product conception), as (one of the) contemporaneous contents of the “implicit mind” have their origin in an implicit learning process of abstraction of consistent patterns from the regularities of experience (social and otherwise). As Hodgkinson et al. note, “[i]mplicit learning and implicit knowledge contribute to the knowledge structures upon which individuals draw when making intuitive judgments” (2008, p. 2). If you think this is an unwarranted or forced conceptual linkage, note that the equation between implicit learning and intuition was even made by Reber in the original statement of the modern theory of implicit learning and tacit knowledge. According to Hodgkinson et al. (2008, p. 6; paraphrasing Reber, 1989, p. 232):
Intuition may be the direct result of implicit, unconscious learning: through the gradual process of implicit learning, tacit implicit representations emerge that capture environmental regularities and are used in direct coping with the world (without the involvement of any introspective process). Intuition is the end product of this process of unconscious and bottom-up learning, to engage in particular classes of action.
Note that an implication of this is that we cannot have “intuitions” about domains for which have not had consistent histories of implicit learning. Instead, absent such history, we will tend to default to coming up with judgments and decisions using explicit reasoning mechanisms (“type 2 cognition”). This means that experts in a given domain will likely have more intuitions about that domain than non-experts (Hodgkinson, et al. 2008).
Overall, the implications for the study of the link between enculturation processes and down-the-line outcomes and group differences in thinking and action of Vaisey’s original argument is one thread that sociologists would do well to pick up again. The aforementioned also speaks for the value of keeping different flavors of dual-process theorizing analytically distinct so that we can theorize their interconnections.
References
Baumard, N., & Boyer, P. (2013). Religious beliefs as reflective elaborations on intuitions: A modified dual-process model. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(4), 295-300.
Bruner, J. S. (1960). The Process of Education. Vintage Books.
Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (1999). Dual-process Theories in Social Psychology. Guilford Press.
Dewey, J. (1925). Experience and Nature. Open Court.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834.
Hodgkinson, G. P., Langan‐Fox, J., & Sadler‐Smith, E. (2008). Intuition: A fundamental bridging construct in the behavioural sciences. British Journal of Psychology, 99(1), 1-27.
Leschziner, V. (2019). Dual-Process Models in Sociology. In W. Brekhus and Gabe Ignatow (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology. Oxford University Press.
Lieberman, M. D. (2000). Intuition: a social cognitive neuroscience approach. Psychological Bulletin, 126(1), 109–137.
Lizardo, O. (2021). Culture, cognition, and internalization. Sociological Forum , 36, 1177–1206.
Lizardo, O., Mowry, R., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D. S., Taylor, M. A., Van Ness, J., & Wood, M. (2016). What are dual process models? Implications for cultural analysis in sociology. Sociological Theory, 34(4), 287-310.
Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Peter Smith.
Reber, A. S. (1989). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 118(3), 219–235.
Reber, A. S. (1993). Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious. Oxford University Press.
Sherman, J. W., Gawronski, B., & Trope, Y. (Eds.). (2014). Dual-process theories of the social mind. Guilford Publications.
Sloman, S. A. (2014). Two systems of reasoning: An update. In J. W. Sherman, B. Gawronski, & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual-process theories of the social mind (Vol. 624, pp. 69–79). The Guilford Press, xvi.
Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 3–22.
Sperber, D. (1997). Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind & Language, 12(1), 67–83.
Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review, 51(2), 273–286.
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.
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Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and justification: A dual-process model of culture in action. American journal of sociology, 114(6), 1675-1715.
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Although having a history as old as the social and behavioral sciences (and for some, as old as philosophical reflections on the mind itself), dual-process models of cognition have been with us only for a bit over two decades, becoming established in cognitive and social psychology in the late 1990s (see Sloman, 1996 and Smith and DeCoster, 2000 for foundational reviews). The implicit measurement revolution provided the “data” side to the theoretical and computational modeling side, thus fomenting further theoretical and conceptual development (Strack & Deutsch, 2004; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Although not without its critics, the dual-process approach has now blossomed into an interdisciplinary framework useful for studying learning, perception, thinking, and action (Lizardo et al., 2016). In sociology, dual-process ideas were introduced by way of the specific dual-process model of moral reasoning developed by Jonathan Haidt (2001) in Steve Vaisey’s (2009) now classic and still heavily cited paper. Sociological applications of the dual-process framework for specific research problems now abound, with developments on both the substantive and measurement sides (Miles, 2015; Miles et al. 2019; Melamed et al. 2019; Srivastava & Banaji, 2011).
The dual-process framework revolves around the ideal-typical distinction between two “modes” or “styles” of cognition (Brett & Miles, 2021). These are now very familiar. One is the effortful, usually conscious, deliberate processing of serially presented information, potentially available for verbal report (as when reasoning through a deductive chain or doing a hard math problem in your head). The other is the seemingly effortless, automatic, usually unconscious, associative processing information (as when a solution to a problem just “comes” to you, or when you just “know” something without seemingly having gone through steps to reach the solution). This last is usually referred to as intuitive, automatic, or associative “Type 1” cognition, and the former is usually referred to as effortful, deliberate, or non-automatic “Type 2” cognition.
As with many hard and fast distinctions, there is the virtue of simplification and analytic power, but there is the limitation, evident to all, that the differentiation between Type 1 versus Type 2 cognition occludes as much as it reveals. For instance, people wonder about the existence of “mixed” types of cognition or iterative cycles between the two modes or the capacity of one mode (usually Type 2) to override the outputs of the other (usually Type 1). It seems like the answer to all these wonders is a general “yes.” We can define a construct like “automaticity” to admit various “in-between” types (Moors & De Houwer, 2006), suggesting that a pure dichotomy is too simple (Melnikoff & Bargh, 2018). And yes, the two types of cognition interact and cycle (Cunningham & Zelazo, 2007). The interactive perspective is even built into some measurement strategies, which rely on overloading or temporarily overwhelming the deliberate system to force people to respond with intuitive Type 1 cognition (as in so-called “cognitive load” techniques; see Miles, 2015 for a sociological application).
Another sort of wonder revolves around whether these are the only types of cognition that exist. Are there any more types? Accordingly, some analysts speak of “tri” or “quad” process models and the like (Stanovich, 2009). It seems, therefore, that field is moving toward a taxonomic approach to the study of cognitive processes. However, the criteria or “dimensions” around which such taxonomies are to be constructed are in a state of flux. As I noted in a previous post, moving toward a taxonomic approach is generally a good thing. Moreover, the field of memory research is a good model for how to build taxonomic theory in cognitive social science (CSS), especially since the “kinds” typically studied in CSS are usually “motley” (natural kinds that decompose into fuzzy subkinds). When studying motley kinds and organizing into fruitful taxonomies, it is essential to focus on the analytic dimensions and let the chips fall where they may. This is different from thinking up “new types” of cognition from the armchair in unprincipled ways, where the dimensions that define the types are ill-defined (as with previous attempts to talk about tri-process models of cognition and the like). Moreover, the dimensional approach leaves things open to discover surprising “subkinds” that join properties that we would consider counter-intuitive.
Accordingly, an upshot of everyone now accepting (even begrudgingly) some version of the dual-process theory is that we also agree that the cognitive-scientific kind “cognition” is itself motley! That is, whatever it is, cognition is not a single kind of thing. Right now, we kind of agree that it is at least two things (as I said, an insight that is as old as the Freudian distinction between primary and secondary process), but it is likely that it could be more than two. In this post, I’d like to propose one attempt to define the possible dimensional space from which a more differentiated typology of cognitive processes can be constructed.
Taxonomizing Cognition
So if we needed to choose dimensions to taxonomize cognition, where would we begin? I think a suitable candidate is to pick two closely aligned dimensions of cognition that people thought were fused or highly correlated but now are seen as partially orthogonal. For example, in a previous post on the varieties of “implictness” (which is arguably the core dimension of cognition that defines the core distinction in dual-process models), I noted that social and cognitive psychologists differentiate between two criteria for deeming something “implicit.” First, a-implicitness uses an “automaticity” criterion. Here, cognition is implicit if it is automatic and explicit if it is deliberate or effortful. Second, there is u-implicitness, which uses a(n) (un)consciousness criterion. Here, cognition is implicit if it occurs outside of consciousness, and it is explicit if it is conscious.
I implied (but did not explicitly argue) in that post that maybe these two dimensions of explicitness could come apart. If they can, these seem like pretty good criteria to build a taxonomy of cognitive process kinds that goes beyond two! This is precisely what the philosophers Nicholas Shea and Chris Frith did in a paper published in 2016 in Neuroscience of Consciousness. Cross-classifying the type of processing (deliberate v. automatic) against the type of representations over which the processing occurs (conscious v. unconscious), yields a new “type” of cognition which they refer to as “Type 0 cognition.”
In Shea and Frith’s taxonomy, our old friend Type 1 cognition refers to the automatic processing of initially conscious representations, typically resulting in conscious outputs. In their words, “[t]ype 1 cognition is characterized by automatic, load-insensitive processing of consciously represented inputs; outputs are typically also conscious.” (p.4). This definition is consistent with Evans’s (2019) more recent specification of Type 1 cognition as working-memory independent cognition that still uses working memory to “deposit” the output of associative processing. In Evans’s words,
While Type 1 processes do not require the resources of working memory or controlled attention for their operation (or they would be Type 2) they do post their products into working memory in a way that many autonomous processes of the brain do not. Specifically, they bring to mind judgements or candidate responses of some kind accompanied by a feeling of confidence or rightness in that judgement (p. 384).
For Shea and Frith (2016), on the other hand, our other good friend, Type 2 cognition, refers to the deliberate, effortful processing of conscious representations. In their words,
Type 2 cognition is characterized by deliberate, non-automatic processing of conscious representations. It is sensitive to cognitive load: type 2 processes interfere with one another. Type 2 cognition operates on conscious representations, typically in series, over a longer timescale than type 1 cognition. It can overcome some of the computational limitations of type 1 cognition, piecemeal, while retaining the advantage of being able to integrate information from previously unconnected domains. It is computation-heavy and learning-light: with its extended processing time, type 2 cognition can compute the correct answer or generate optimal actions without the benefit of extensive prior experience in a domain (p. 5).
By way of contrast with these familiar faces, our new friend Type 0 cognition refers to the automatic processing of non-conscious representations. Shea and Frith see isolating Type 0 cognition as a separate cognitive-process subkind as their primary contribution. Previous work, in their view, has run Type 0 and Type 1 cognition together, to their analytic detriment. Notably, they argue for the greater (domain-specific) efficiency and accuracy of Type 0 cognition over Type 1. They note that various deficiencies of Type 1 cognition identified in such research programs as the “heuristics and biases” literature come from the fact that, in Type 1 cognition, there is a mismatch between process and representation because automatic/associative processes are recruited to deal with conscious representational inputs.
For instance, Type 1 cognition is at work when Haidt asks people whether they would wear Hitler’s t-shirt, and they say “ew, no way!” but are unable to come up with a morally reasonable reason why (or make up an implausible one on the spot). Type 1 moral cognition “misfires” here because the associative (“moral intuition”) system was recruited to process conscious inputs, relied on an associative/heuristic process to generate an answer (in this case, based on implicit contact, purity, and contagion considerations), and produced a conscious output, the origins of with subjects are completely unaware of (and is thus forced to retrospectively confabulate using Type 2 cognition). The same goes for judgment and decision-making producing answers to questions when engaging in the base-rate fallacy, using a representativeness heuristic, and the like (Kahneman, 2011).
The types of cognition for which a match is made in heaven between process and representation (like Type 2 and their Type 0) result in adaptive cognitive processes that “get the right answer.” Type 2 cognition refers to domain-general problems requiring information integration and the careful weighing of alternatives. In Type 0 cognition, this refers to domain-specific problems requiring fast, adaptive cognitive processing and action control, where consciousness (if it were to rear its ugly head) would spoil the fun and impair the effectiveness of the cognitive system to do what is supposed to do, similar to athletes who “choke” when they become conscious of what they are doing (see Beilock, 2011).
So, what is Type 0 cognition good for? Shea and Frith point to things like the implicit learning of probabilistic action/reward contingencies after many exposures (e.g., reinforcement learning), where neither the probabilities nor the learning process is consciously represented, and the learning happens via associative steps. As they note, in “model-free reinforcement learning can generate optimal decisions when making choices for rewards, and feedback control can compute optimal action trajectories…non-conscious representation goes hand-in-hand with correct performance” (p. 3). In the same way, “Type 0 cognition is likely to play a large role in several other domains, for example in the rich inferences which occur automatically and without consciousness in the course of perception, language comprehension and language production” (ibid).
Organizing the Types
So, where does Shea and Frith’s taxonomy of cognitive process kinds leave us? Well, maybe something like the dimensional typology shown in Figure 1. It seems like at least three different cognitive process kinds are well-defined, especially if you are convinced that we should distinguish Type 0 from Type 1 cognition (and I think I am).
Figure 1.
However, as I argued earlier, a key advantage of beginning with dimensions in any taxonomical exercise is that we may end up with a surprise. Here, it is the fact that a fourth potential type of cognition now appears in the lower-right quadrant, one that no one has given much thought to before. Type ??? cognition: deliberate processing of unconscious representations. Can this even be a thing? Shea and Frith do note this implication of their taxonomic exercise but think it is too weird. They even point out that it may be a positive contribution of their approach to have discovered this “empty” slot in cognitive-process-kind space. In their words, “[w]hat of the fourth box? This would be the home of deliberate processes acting on non-conscious representations. It seems to us that there may well be no type of cognition that fits in this box. If so, that is an important discovery about the nature of consciousness” (p. 7).
Nevertheless, are things so simple? Maybe not. The Brains Blog dedicated a symposium to the paper in 2017 in which three authors provided commentaries. Not surprisingly, some of the commenters did not buy the “empty slot” argument. In their comment, Jacob Berger points to some plausible candidates for Shea and Frith’s Type ??? cognition (referred to as “Type 0.5 cognition”). This includes the (somewhat controversial) work of Dijksterhuis, Aarts, and collaborators (e.g., Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006; Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010) on “unconscious thought theory” (UTT) (see Bargh, 2011 for a friendly review). In the UTT paradigm, participants are asked to make seemingly deliberate choices between alternatives, with a “right” answer aimed at maximizing a set of quality dimensions. At the same time, conscious thinking is impaired via cognitive load. The key result is that participants who engage in this “unconscious thinking” end up making choices that are as optimal as people who think about it reflectively. So, this seems to be a case of a deliberate thinking process operating over unconscious representations.
Berger does anticipate an objection to UT as being a candidate for Type ??? cognition, which itself brings up an issue with critical taxonomic ramifications:
S&F might reply that such [UT] cases are not genuinely unconscious because, like examples of type-1 cognition, they involve conscious inputs and outputs. But if this processing is not type 0.5, then it is hard to see where S&F’s taxonomy accommodates it. The cognition does not seem automatic, akin to the processing of type 0 or type 1 of which one is unaware (it seems, for example, rather domain general); nor does it seem to be a case of type-2 cognition, since one is totally unaware of the processing that results in conscious outputs. Perhaps what is needed is an additional distinction between the inputs/outputs of a process’ being conscious and the consciousness of states in the intervening processing. In type-1 cognition, the inputs/outputs are conscious, but the states involved in the automatic processing are not; in type-2, both are conscious. We might therefore regard Dijksterhuis’ work as an instance of ‘type-1.5’ cognition: conscious inputs/outputs, but deliberative unconscious processing.
Thus, Berger proposes to dissociate not only conscious/unconscious representations from deliberate/automatic processing but also adds the dimension of whether the inputs and outputs of the cognitive process and its intervening steps are themselves conscious or unconscious. Berger’s implied taxonomy can thus be represented as in Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Figure 2 clarifies that the actual mystery type does not connect conscious inputs and outputs with deliberate unconscious processing (UT), but a type linking unconscious inputs and outputs with deliberate unconscious processing (the new Type ???). Also, the figure makes clear that the proper empty slot is a type of cognition conjoining unconscious inputs and outputs with deliberate conscious processing; this bizarre and implausible combination can indeed be ruled out on a priori grounds. Note, in contrast, that if there is such a thing as deliberate unconscious processing (and the jury is still out on that), there is no reason to rule out the new Type ??? cognition shown in Figure 2 on a priori grounds (as Shea and Frith tried to do with Berger’s Type 1.5). For instance, Bargh (2011) argues that unconscious goal pursuit (a type of unconscious thought) can be triggered outside of awareness (unconscious input) and also has behavioral consequences (e.g., trying hard on a task) that subjects may also be unaware of (unconscious output). In this sense, Bargh’s unconscious goal pursuit would qualify as a candidate for Type ??? cognition. So, following Berger’s recommendation, we end up with five (I know an ugly prime) candidate cognition types.
So, What?
Is all we are getting after all of this a more elaborate typology? Well, yes. And that is good! However, I think the more differentiated approach to carving the cognitive-process world also leads to some substantive insight. I refer in particular to Shea and Frith’s introduction of the Type 0/Type 1 distinction. For instance, in a recent review (and critique) of dual-process models of social cognition, Amodio proposes an “interactive memory systems” account of attitudes and impression formation (“Social Cognition 2.0”) that attempts to go beyond the limitations of the traditional dual-process model (“Social Cognition 1.0”).
Amodio’s argument is wide-ranging, but his primary point is that there are multiple memory systems and that a conception of Type 1 cognition as a single network of implicit concept/concept associations over which unconscious cognition operates is incomplete. In addition to concept/concept associations, Amodio points to other types of associative learning, including Pavlovian (affective) and instrumental (reinforcement learning). Amodio’s primary point is that something like an “implicit attitude,” insofar as it recruits multiple but distinct (and dissociable) forms of memory and learning subserved by different neural substrates, is not a single kind of thing (a taxonomical exercise for the future!). This dovetails nicely with the current effort to taxonomize cognitive processes. Thus, a standard conceptual association between categories of people and valenced traits operates via Type 1 cognition. However, it is likely that behavioral approach/avoid tendencies toward the same type of people, being the product of instrumental/reinforcement learning mechanisms, operate via Shea and Frith’s Type 0 cognition.
References
Bargh, J. A. (2011). Unconscious Thought Theory and Its Discontents: A Critique of the Critiques. Social Cognition, 29(6), 629–647.
Beilock, S. L. (2011). Choke. The secret of performing under pressure. London: Constable.
Brett, G., & Miles, A. (2021). Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition. Sociological Science, 8, 96–118.
Cunningham, W. A., & Zelazo, P. D. (2007). Attitudes and evaluations: a social cognitive neuroscience perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(3), 97–104.
Dijksterhuis, A., & Aarts, H. (2010). Goals, attention, and (un)consciousness. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 467–490.
Evans, J. S. B. T. (2019). Reflections on reflection: the nature and function of type 2 processes in dual-process theories of reasoning. Thinking & Reasoning, 25(4), 383–415.
Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2006). Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: an integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change. Psychological Bulletin, 132(5), 692–731.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Lizardo, O., Mowry, R., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D. S., Taylor, M. A., Van Ness, J., & Wood, M. (2016). What are dual process models? Implications for cultural analysis in sociology. Sociological Theory, 34(4), 287–310.
Melamed, D., Munn, C. W., Barry, L., Montgomery, B., & Okuwobi, O. F. (2019). Status Characteristics, Implicit Bias, and the Production of Racial Inequality. American Sociological Review, 84(6), 1013–1036.
Melnikoff, D. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2018). The mythical number two. Trends in cognitive sciences, 22(4), 280-293.
Miles, A. (2015). The (Re)genesis of Values: Examining the Importance of Values for Action. American Sociological Review, 80(4), 680–704.
Miles, A., Charron-Chénier, R., & Schleifer, C. (2019). Measuring Automatic Cognition: Advancing Dual-Process Research in Sociology. American Sociological Review, 84(2), 308–333.
Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: a theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 297–326.
Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 3.-22
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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.
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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
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