Category: Schemas

The MAGA schematic narrative template

In a previous post, I discussed the concept of a schematic narrative template coined by psychologist and social anthropologist James V. Wertsch. In this post, I employ this concept to analyze President Donald Trump’s political rhetoric, which relies on the slogan “Make America Great Again”. I claim that when this slogan is embedded in the context of Trump’s political speeches and social media posts, it often includes a narrative for political mobilization (a recent example is his inaugural speech). I also argue that different MAGA narratives that Trump tells different audiences are based on the same schematic narrative template, which I will call “The MAGA template”.

Here is my analysis of the MAGA template:

  1. There was a time when America was great.
  2. America is not great anymore because of P.
  3. If we get rid of P, then America will become great again.
  4. Let’s make America great again by getting rid of P.

The MAGA template can be understood as a flexible and forward-looking narrative schema that Trump and his supporters apply in different contexts to address different audiences. This is because the variable “P” can be anything that the intended audience dislikes, including illegal immigrants, the Biden-Harris administration, the Washington elite, the “deep state”, “woke ideology”, “foreign terrorist organizations”, “Marxist maniacs and lunatics”, DEI programs, the rights of LGTB+ people, non-binary gender categories, environmental legislation, U.S. memberships in international organizations, scientifically-established facts concerning climate change and biodiversity loss, etc. Some of these items (e.g., the “deep state”) are purely fictional constructs, while others include groups of people, institutions, ideas, and facts.

“We,” in turn, is a fiction that includes both “ordinary Americans” and “the Great MAGA Leader”, who allegedly is on their side. “Us” is typically contrasted with “Them”, which can encompass different groups and social categories depending on the situation in which the story is told and the intended audience.

The time when America supposedly was great can refer to a mythical past that never existed, or it can be specified differently for various audiences and purposes. For example, depending on the audience and the issue addressed, the period of America’s greatness might alternatively be the 1950s, the 1800s, the period of colonization of America, or Trump’s previous presidency.

What is interesting is that the MAGA narrative template is similar to the “Expulsion of Alien Enemies” template (or “the triumph-over-alien-forces” template as it was called in Wertsch’s early work) which, according to Wertsch (2008; 2021), has underlie the official historical narratives in Russia for many decades.

As I show in my previous post, it was also employed by President Vladimir Putin to legitimize Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine. Narratives that are based on these two templates have turned out to be immune to critiques that identify falsehoods and factual inaccuracies in them. Nevertheless, when compared to the “Expulsion of Alien Enemies” template, the MAGA narrative template is less militaristic. This is not to say that it cannot be employed for military purposes, as the variable “P” may take the value of the “ownership of a particular area” that currently belongs to a sovereign country. We have already seen this happen.

In my recently published article “Schematic Narrative Templates in National Remembering”, I propose that, for the purposes of cognitive sociological analysis, it is useful to decompose Wertsch’s notion of a schematic narrative template into three interrelated parts: (1) plot structures, (2) narrative schemata, and (3) the practices of narrative production, dissemination, and consumption. One reason for this suggestion is that these three are different entities that need to be analyzed using different types of methods. I suggested that plot structures can be understood as shared patterns of semiotic affordances and constraints for meaning-making in many narrative texts. In contrast, a narrative schema is a dynamic cognitive structure culturally learned by individuals from many written and oral narratives with a similar plot structure.

For example, the above analysis of the MAGA template can be seen as a representation of the plot structure that is shared by many MAGA narratives that, we may hypothesize, are more or less congruent with Trump’s supporters’ narrative schemas they have developed from the repeated MAGA narratives Trump has told in his campaign rallies and in his social media posts. The practices of narrative production, dissemination, and consumption, in turn, are institutionally embedded social processes through which both narrative texts and narrative schemata spread within a specific population. In the case of national historical narratives that serve traditional authoritarian leaders, they may include, for example, state-controlled formal schooling and the production of history textbooks about the nation’s past. Techno-oligarchies may include social media platforms owned and controlled by billionaires whose interests are served by the state administration. 

References

Kaidesoja, Tuukka. 2025. Schematic Narrative Templates in National Remembering. Memory Studies.18(1): 44-58 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17506980241247264 

Wertsch, James V. 2002. Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wertsch, James V. 2008. The Narrative Organization of Collective Memory. Ethos, 36(1): 120–135. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2008.00007.x 

Wertsch, James V. 2021. How Nations Remember: A Narrative Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schematic Narrative Templates in Collective Remembering: The Case of Russia

James V. Wertsch introduced the concept of schematic narrative template in his book Voices of Collective Remembering published twenty years ago. The book provides a thorough theoretical discussion on collective remembering and an account of the continuities and discontinuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory in Russia. In this blog post, I focus on Wertsch’s notion of schematic narrative template and his illustrative example of the triumph-over-alien-forces narrative template that he uses to explain continuities in the Russians’ collective memory through the disintegration of the Soviet Union. By utilizing this template, I also analyze and assess the denazification narrative that Vladimir Putin has used in his attempts to legitimate Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Collective Memory and Collective Remembering

Collective memory is an ambiguous term that is used in different ways in different disciplines (Hirst & Manier 2008; Olick 1999; Wertsch 2002, chapter 3). I will not attempt to resolve these ambiguities here. Instead, I will rely on Roediger III and Abel’s (2015, 359) characterization of the core meaning of collective memory as “a form of memory that is shared by a group and of central importance to the social identity of the group’s members”. This account distinguishes collective memory from both historical research and idiosyncratic autobiographical memories of individuals.

Wertsch (2002) shares this understanding of collective memory. However, he prefers using the term collective remembering instead of collective memory since he wants to emphasize the dynamical and mediated nature of collective memory. In his view, collective remembering is a process that is distributed across many individuals and their cultural tools. He regards narrative texts about past events as the primary – albeit not the only – cultural tools that mediate collective remembering in literate societies. His book focuses on the processes of production and consumption of narrative texts in modern states by using Russia as an exemplary case.

Schematic Narrative Templates

The notion of schematic narrative template plays an important role in Wertsch’s (2002, 60-62) analysis of how modern states produce official national histories through state-controlled schooling and how these official histories are appropriated by citizens who consume these narratives. He describes schematic narrative templates as generalized forms that include abstract types of settings, actors, and events, and suggests that a specific narrative template may “underlie a range of narratives in cultural tradition” (p. 61) that fill in the template in different ways. The idea then is that narrative templates of this kind mediate collective remembering of past events in specific groups. Wertsch (2002, 62) also uses the term “textual community” to describe “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991), such as nations, that are “grounded in the use of a shared set of texts”. He illustrates the notion schematic narrative template by analyzing the history textbooks used in the secondary schools during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods and interviewing people who have consumed these books during their schooling.

The Triumph-Over-Alien-Forces Narrative Template

According to Wertsch’s (2002) analysis of the Russian case, the schematic narrative template of “the triumph-over-alien-forces” affects Russians’ shared understanding of those past events that are considered important for the national history of the country and the social identity of its citizens. This is his depiction of the basic elements of this template:

Triumph-Over-Alien-Forces:

  1. An “initial situation” in which the Russian people are living in a peaceful setting where they are no threat to others is disturbed by:
  2. The initiation of trouble or aggression by an alien force, or agent, which leads to:
  3. A time of crises and great suffering, which is:
  4. Overcome by the triumph over the alien force by the Russian people, acting heroically and alone (Wertsch 2002, 156; also 93; cf. Wertsch 2022, 461)

The idea is that the nature of the trouble, aggression, alien force, alien agent, crises, and suffering as well as the ways in which Russian people overcome the trouble or aggression caused by the alien forces may take different forms in different narratives about different episodes in the national history of Russia. Despite its flexibility, the template incorporates a strict distinction between peaceful Russian people (“us”) and hostile alien forces or agents (“them”), which is an instance of the “Manichean consciousness” that allows no neutral parties (Wertsch 2002, 95).

Wertsch (2002, chapter 5) provides an analysis of how this narrative template is instantiated in the history textbooks’ accounts of the Civil War of Russia (1917-1923) and World War II (1939-1945) in the Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. He argues that both the Soviet and post-Soviet history textbooks’ narratives about these two episodes are based on the triumph-over-alien-forces template. In these narratives, Russians are depicted as victims of a threat or offensive by some alien forces or agents whose aggressive actions caused a crisis, forcing Russians to heroically defeat them without any help from others. In the case of WWII—usually termed as “the Great Patriotic War” in the textbooks—the alien force was, of course, Nazi Germany which invaded Russia and was, according to the textbook narratives, defeated by the Russian soldiers who fought heroically and without the help of others. The role of other allied countries in fighting against Nazi Germany is systematically downplayed in Russian textbook accounts of WWII. However, Wertsch’s analysis shows that specific actors and events mentioned in the narratives about different episodes are different, and the textbooks used at different times include slightly different narratives about both these episodes, with different points of emphasis and moral interpretations.

Wertsch (2002, chapter 5) also shows that his interviewees largely relied on the triumph-over-alien-forces template when they described these two episodes. However, there were some systematic differences in the agents and events that were named in their narratives and in the evaluations concerning the agents’ actions and particular historical events, depending on whether the interviewee’s schooling occurred during the Soviet era or after that. For example, the Communist Party played an important role in the narratives of WWII by the members of the former group while it was mostly absent from the narratives of WWII by the members of the latter group.

Putin’s Legitimation of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Next, I will briefly address the question of the extent to which the triumph-over-alien-forces template was used in Vladimir Putin’s legitimation Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It can be expected that Putin is familiar with this template since he went to school in Leningrad (currently known as Saint Petersburg) during the Soviet era when, according to Wertsch (2002), the teaching of the history of Russia largely relied on this template. My analysis is mostly based on Putin’s infamous speech preceding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (the English translation is available on the Kremlin website).

In Putin’s historical narrative, Ukraine was an organic part of the Russian Empire before the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 after which the Ukrainian Soviet State was artificially created under the leadership of V.I. Lenin in the 1920s. However, since the Soviet Union was centrally ruled, Ukraine remained an integral part of Soviet Russia. According to Putin’s narrative, the crisis period begins with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, after which the Ukrainian people have been gradually suppressed by an allied set of “alien forces” consisting of nationalists, Russophobes, and neo-Nazis. In particular, he claims that these “alien agents” have occupied and corrupted Ukrainian political elite and state leadership with the help of Western countries and started planning all kinds of hostile actions towards Russia, such as preparing Ukraine’s membership application to NATO, planning to manufacture nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and making secret plans to invade Russia. Putin mentions these hostile developments as the main reasons why Russia was forced to start a preventive “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine. He has also declared that this operation is aimed to “liberate” the Ukrainian people and bring Ukraine back under Russian control.

It seems to me that the elements (1)-(3) of the triumph-over-alien-forces narrative template can be easily identified in Putin’s historical narrative. In line with this template, Putin probably expected a rapid defeat of Ukraine by the Russian soldiers which he could have presented as a heroic triumph over alien forces. However, Russia’s war against Ukraine cannot be described as a triumph in any sense and the actions of Russian soldiers in Ukraine have not been heroic but brutal and cruel. In addition, there are at least three problems with the denazification narrative if we assess it from the epistemic viewpoint. First, there are few neo-Nazis in Ukraine and the Jewish Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelensky is not definitely one of them. Second, there is no evidence about Ukraine’s plans to invade Russia with the help of their Western allies or plans to manufacture nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Third, as Putin has hopefully realized by now, Ukrainians do not want to be “liberated” by Russians. In other words, Putin’s narrative includes many demonstrably false claims.

However, as state control over media and history teaching at schools has again increased in Putin’s Russia and political opposition has been violently repressed, there seem to be no publicly available counter-narratives to this fictional “denazification narrative” in Russia today. Despite the lack of alternatives, it is hard to say to what extent Russian people believe this narrative because there is no reliable information available for estimating its support. However, Putin’s denazification story, as I tried to show above, relies on a familiar triumph-over-alien-forces narrative template many Russians seem to have internalized from their history textbooks and media representations. Likewise, It is possible that Putin, who, according to some media reports, has quite efficiently isolated himself from reliable sources of information, has become a victim of his own propaganda and no one in his administration dares to question his increasingly paranoid interpretations of history. If Russia ends up losing this brutal war, then the previous narrative template will hopefully be thoroughly questioned through open public discussion in Russia. However, this is not likely to happen as long as Putin remains in power.

Concluding Remarks

Wertsch’s notion of schematic narrative template is a promising conceptual tool for analyzing collective remembering in modern societies. It also bears an interesting resemblance to Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn’s (1997) notion of cultural schema that has been influential in the so-called interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology (e.g., Kaidesoja et al., 2022). Hence, it may be an intriguing project to compare these two concepts in detail since it seems to me that cognitive sociologists’ recent specifications of the notion of cultural schema (e.g., Boutyline & Soter, 2021; Hunzaker & Valentino, 2019; Wood et al., 2018) may help to clarify the notion of schematic narrative template. In addition, the latter notion raises similar issues regarding the degree of implicitness, internalization, and cultural transmission as the concept of cultural schema. Hence, cognitive sociologists’ recent analyzes of these issues (e.g., Cerulo et al 2021: Lizardo 2017; 2021; 2022) may prove useful in addressing the cognitive and social mechanisms through which schematic narrative templates are internalized by individuals and transmitted between generations.

The concept of affordance could also prove useful for investigating how exactly narrative texts mediate collective remembering in different contexts (see my previous blog post on cognitive artifacts, affordances, and external representations). Wertsch’s (2002, 119-123) distinction between mastery and appropriation of textual means is an interesting one in this respect. Mastery refers here to individuals knowing how to use a specific type of narrative text, such as history textbooks. Mastery of a specific type of text is reflected in one’s “ability to recall them at will and to employ them with facility when speaking” as well as in one’s skills for “reasoning about the actors and motives behind the events discussed” (p. 119). Appropriation in turn refers to the use of a particular narrative text as a resource for building one’s social identity by “making it one’s own” (p. 120). One of Wertsch’s (2002, 120) points in this context is that these two do not go hand in hand since a person may have mastery over history textbooks while resisting them rather than using them as identity resources (and vice versa). The concept of affordance provides an analytical tool for analyzing the possibilities and constraints that a particular text provides for its user with a specific degree of mastery over the text in a specific situation, although it may not help much in investigating the degree to which an individual has appropriated the text. The latter issue seems to be a bigger challenge for cognitively oriented social research.

References

Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso: London.

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: 728–758. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224211024525

Cerulo, K., Leschziner V., & Shepherd, H. (2021) Rethinking Culture and Cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 47: 63–85. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-072320-095202

Hirst, W. and Manier, D. (2008) Towards a Psychology of Collective Memory. Memory 16: 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210701811912

Hunzaker, M.B. F., & Valentino, L. (2019) Mapping Cultural Schemas: From Theory to Method. American Sociological Review, 84: 950–981. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419875638

Kaidesoja, T., Hyyryläinen, M. & Puustinen, R. (2022) Two Traditions of Cognitive Sociology: An Analysis and Assessment of Their Cognitive and Methodological Assumptions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jtsb.12341

Lizardo, O. (2017) Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes. American Sociological Review, 82: 88–115. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122416675175

Lizardo, O. (2021) Culture, Cognition, and Internalization. Sociological Forum, 36: 1177–1206. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12771

Lizardo, O. (2022) What is Implicit Culture? Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12333

Olick, J. K. (1999) Collective Memory: The Two Cultures. Sociological Theory, 17: 333–348. https://doi.org/10.1111%2F0735-2751.00083

Roediger III, H. L. & Abel, M. (2015) Collective Memory: A New Arena of Cognitive Study. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(7): 359-361. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.04.003

Wertsch, J. V. (2002) Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Wertsch, J. V. (2022) The Narrative Tools of National Memory. In H.L. Roediger III & J.V. Wertsch (Eds) National Memories: Constructing Identity in Populist Times. Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp. 454-472.

Wood, M. L., Stoltz, D. S., Van Ness, J., & Taylor, M. A. (2018). Schemas and Frames. Sociological Theory, 36(3), 244-261. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275118794981

 

 

 

Wax On, Wax Off: Transposability and the Problem with “Domains”

 

In the film Happy Gilmore, Adam Sandler plays a hockey player who is a terrible skater but has a powerful slap shot. The main story arc of the film is that Sandler will use this ability in the entirely different sport of golf. This is a fairly common trope. Very often this becomes associated with something biological—we don’t know where Sandler’s character learned to hit the puck as he does, he may just be “a natural.” In the Karate Kid, though, we famously see the “wax on, wax off” motions of waxing Mr. Miyagi’s car turned into blocking motions in hand-to-hand combat. This same scenario occurs in, for example, the zombie series Santa Clarita Diet. Joel is instructed to shove a pear into a dead chicken as quickly as possible. Later, when fighting a zombie, he shoves a lemon into the zombie’s mouth as if by muscle memory. We then see that the odd pear-chicken skill is meant to remove the zombie’s ability to bite. In each case, we see an ability seemingly transposed across domains.

In a recent blog post, Omar offered a critical discussion of the use of “transposability” as a concept in the sociology of culture. Namely, the idea that schematic knowledge is, or must be, “transposable” across “domains” is a critical error:

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…

If implicit culture is, by definition, domain-specific, how can it be transposed across domains? The argument, as I understand it is, to the extent schemas are transposed “requires that they be ‘representationally redescribed’… into more flexible explicit formats.” The complication with this discussion thus far, though, is that “domain” is doing a lot of theoretically heavy lifting, and I don’t think it can hold the weight.

The Problem with Domains

Let’s start with Durkheim’s “puzzle” in the introduction to Elementary Forms. As he saw it, in the quest to understand where knowledge comes from there were two camps: the Rationalists and the Empiricists. He thought the Empiricists were on the right track in that we gain knowledge from our moment-to-moment experience. However, the Empiricists didn’t have a solution for integrating what we learn across each moment: 

…the things which persons perceive change from day to day, and from moment to moment. Nothing is ever exactly the same twice, and the stream of perception…must be constantly changing… The question from this perspective, is how general concepts can be derived from this… stream of particular experiences, which are literally not the same from one moment to the next, let alone from person to person.” (Rawls 2005, 56)

As we are exposed to chairs in different moments, what is it that allows us to pull out the basic properties of “chairness”? Indeed, even the same chair at different times and in different places will be objectively “different”—diverse shading, slow decaying, a coating of dust. Of course, Durkheim was less concerned with the mundane (like chairness) than with the “pure categories of the understanding” a.k.a. “skeleton of thought” a.k.a. the “elementary forms” or often just “The Categories.” We would likely call all of these schemas today, and something more like image schemas or primary schemas. 

The developmental neuroscientist Jean Mandler (2004) approaches Durkheim’s problem of knowledge with the question: what is the minimum that must be innate to get learning started? She argues that we have an innate attentional bias towards things in motion, but more importantly, we also have an innate ability to schematize and redescribe experience in terms of those schematizations. Schematization is, in my mind, best understood not as retaining but as forgetting, elegant forgetting. As the richness of an immediate moment slowly starts to fade, certain properties are retained because they have structural analogies in the current moment. Properties that do not have such analogies in the current moment continue along a fading path, slowly falling away (unless brought to the fore by the ecology of a new moment). What is left is a fuzzy structure — a schema — with probabilistic associations among properties. Probabilities shaped by exposure to perceptual regularities. Therefore, the most persistent perceptual regularities will also be the most widely shared.

Mandler also argues that once we have a few basic schemas, as fuzzy and open-ended as they may continue to be, we can then redescribe our experience using these schemas. More importantly for the present discussion, both schematization and redescription seem to implicate transposability. But, Mandler works with infants and toddlers, so much of this occurs rapidly in human development—before what we would typically call “conscious control” is up and running.

It is here where the discussion implicates “domains.” Can we reserve “transposability” as the use of schematic knowledge in a “new domain”? And, then simply call the more pervasive “carrying of schemas from moment to moment” something else? In this setup, if encountering or thinking about a chair in chair-domains (domains where chairs typically are), then drawing on my chair-schema will not qualify as transposability. It is only when chairs are encountered or thought about in non-chair-domains (domains where chairs typically aren’t) that transposition is occurring. Without an analytical definition of what a domain is, however, this becomes slippery: If transposition requires that implicit knowledge be “representationally redescribed into more flexible explicit formats,” then by definition we can only know “new domains” whenever we see this occurring.

Spectrum of Transposability

I think we should ditch domains as the linchpin of transposability rather than salvage it. Schematic knowledge is transposable. At least in the most basic notion of “drawing on implicit knowledge” from moment to moment. But, sure, it is not transposable without constraint. Implicit knowledge is called forth by the recognition of familiar affordances in a moment. The problem is that affordances are not cleanly bundled into mutually exclusive “domains.” 

Perhaps transposition across normatively distinct domains typically occurs via deliberate mediation — but the idea that it only occurs via deliberate mediation is perhaps a step too far. New situations will evoke some implicit knowledge acquired in a prior situation without the individual deliberating. Much of what we call “being a natural” is likely just such a process. True, Mr. Myagi was conscious that “wax on, wax off” would transpose to fighting, but Daniel was not. And, more importantly, it was Daniel who was transposing it, and it was the affordances of the fighting situation that evoked the “wax on, wax off” response.

As a starker example of transposition without deliberation — or even against deliberation — we can look to hysteresis: The mismatch between the person and environment (Strand and Lizardo 2017). When I was a freshman in college, I boxed for extra money. I had never boxed before, but I had wrestled for years.  Luckily for me, someone was kind enough to properly wrap my wrists during my first fight! During that fight, I continually did something I knew was not correct: I got an underhook, a wrestling move involving placing your bicep in the armpit of your opponent and wrapping your hand around their shoulder, giving you leverage over their body position. The second or third time I did this, the referee stopped the fight and informed me that this was not allowed in boxing and I would lose points if I continued to do it. Getting an underhook when the move was “open” was “second nature.” It was “muscle memory.” I  deliberately tried to stop this automatic response. I continued to fail. I lost points. Despite this being a domain distinct from wrestling (normatively), my body interpreted the affordances of the moment as being a familiar domain (ecologically). Transposition occurred against my conscious effort.

References

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

Mandler, Jean Matter. 2004. The Foundations of Mind: Origins of Conceptual Thought. Oxford University Press.

Rawls, Anne Warfield. 2005. Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Cambridge University Press.

Strand, Michael, and Omar Lizardo. 2017. “The Hysteresis Effect: Theorizing Mismatch in Action.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 47(2):164–94.

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.

Image Source: Vantage Circle
Image Source: Vantage Circle

Can Schemas Motivate?

In an influential paper entitled “Schemas and Motivation,” the cognitive anthropologist Roy D’Andrade once remarked on the curious lack of relation (with reference to anthropological theory)

…between culture and action. Of course, one can say ‘people do what they do because their culture makes them do it.’ The problem with this formulation is that it does not explain anything. Do people always do what their culture tells them to? If they do, why do they? If they don’t, why don’t they? And how does culture make them do it? Unless there is some specification of how culture ‘makes’ people do what they do, no explanation has been given (1992: 23).

D’Andrade’s overall observation, namely, that cultural theory is not worth its salt unless it tells us how culture links to action, is important and worth making, as I noted in a previous post. As social scientists, we care about culture to the extent that it helps us explain what people do. In the same way, D’Andrade’s dismissal of the “naive” or unqualified version of the “culture causes action” (CCA) thesis is on the right track. In its unqualified form, CCA is explanatorily vacuous because it is completely unconstrained and does not specify the mechanisms via which such causal effects are supposed to happen.

D’Andrade notes that the “explanatory gap” he points to is particularly salient when it comes to trying to explain why people put effort and striving in engaging in some lines of action at the expense of others. For D’Andrade, there is a “standard account” that posits that culture helps in action selection (and persistence) because culture helps to motivate people to pursue one line of activity over others. But it

…remains unclear how culture is connected to motivational strivings. Without an account of the relation between culture and motivation, we may have an intuitive sense that there are culturally based strivings, but we have no explanation of this (1992: 23).

D’Andrade observes that to link culture and motivation, we must clarify what we mean by motivation. He proposes a quick and dirty definition based on the usual “folk” understanding. For D’Andrade, “motivation is experienced as a desire or wish, followed by a feeling of satisfaction if the desire is fulfilled.” Thus, motivation is intimately linked to the folk category of desire (as more recently argued by Schroeder 2004). Motivation also has to do with internal processes that “energize” or activate people to act in a given setting (as more recently argued by Turner 2010); “[a]long with this increase in activity there is is typically a striving for something—a goal directedness in behavior” (24).

Thus, motivation is the persistent, energized pursuit of goals, where the latter pertains to the fulfillment of desires. D’Andrade goes on to review models of motivation that were prominent in mid-twentieth century psychological science, namely, those conceptualizing motivation in terms of “drive reduction” (e.g., satiation of hunger, thirst, and the like) and those conceptualizing motivation in terms of “need-fulfullment” where the “needs” concern usually very long (or open-ended) lists of abstract things, states, or relations people might desire to pursue (e.g., achievement, autonomy, affiliation, order, dominance, and the like).

D’Andrade profers three (correct) critiques of such models.

  • First, a “list of motives” approach is incapable of capturing the open-ended nature of human desire (Schroeder 2004). Essentially, there is nothing that cannot be conceptualized as a “need,” which means that analysts will be forced to include all kinds of heterogeneous, incompatible, and contradictory goals (e.g., needs for “abasement,” and “enhancement”) into any presumably exhaustive (but largely unstructured) list. Both arbitrariness and the lack of structure make these lists suspect.
  • Second, motive lists will always be incomplete. Such lists will be necessarily partial and tilted towards the “needs” or strivings that make sense to WEIRD populations. They will necessarily lack cross-cultural (or even historical) coverage and thus will be powerless to account for the full observed empirical variation of motives and motivations exhibited by people.
  • Third, there are very few “trans-situational” motives. Most motivations are contextually specific; they are inclinations or dispositions to pursue particular goals in particular settings. That is why lists of motives end up degenerating into lists of personality-like traits. Saying someone has a trans-situational “need for dominance” is no different from saying that they will be aggressive in all or most settings. But as modern personality research shows (Cervone 2005), there are few (or no) trans-situational personality traits, needs, or strivings. List of motives approaches cannot capture the “situated” nature of human motivation.

D’Andrade also points to the difficulty of measuring motives (a problem shared by all theories of motives). At one point, analysts inspired by the list of motives approach relied on discredited instruments taken from psychodynamic theories (e.g., inkblot tests). Today, the workhorse measurement method is self-report, whether in surveys or interviews, as these approaches are more likely to capture the cultural and contextual specificity of motives. Regardless, the main point is that without calibrating standard social science techniques to detect people’s wishes, desires, goals, and strivings, the search for motives grounded in a solid empirical footing will continue to be elusive.

Motives as Schemas

D’Andrade provides a swift solution to these problems: Conceptualize motives as schemas. Thinking of motives as schemas is useful, according to D’Andrade, because of three (representational) properties schemas have.

  • First, schemas can capture the processual and interpretive nature of many motives and motivations. In particular, schemas are useful for representing categorical domains with “prototype” organization, are readily memorable, and are used to fill in the blanks in context. Human motivation is one such domain. Representing goals in schematic format thus makes them cognitively available and usable.
  • Second, D’Andrade claims that schemas “have the potential of instigating action” (29). Although as we will see, he never quite cashes in on this claim. He points to the American “schema of achievement” as an example. D’Andrade notes that this schema does more than just representing the concept of achievement; it also functions as a “goal” for people. Albeit a goal of varying strength depending on the specificities of the situation in which it is activated.
  • Third, goal-schemas differ in their level of autonomy. This means that both motivations to engage in relatively short-term actions that are the means to larger goals, and more pervasive goals people pursue at longer time scales (perhaps lasting a lifetime) can be represented as schemas. In this way, low autonomy goals are embedded within larger projects. For instance, we activate the driving the car schema in order to make it to the PTA meeting, which satisfies a higher-order motive for affiliation or social integration. However, others (high autonomy) goals operate more or less as pervasive or chronically active (e.g., dominance, achievement). People for whom a given goal is in a high state of activation are likely to interpret even ambiguous cues in situations as prompts to engage in actions that are consistent with those goals.
  • Fourth, schemas differ in their schematicity, with some more specific or lower-level schemas nested within higher-level ones (thus reproducing standard categorical taxonomies). This, for D’Andrade, solves the problem of unstructured lists of motives. Instead of coming as an unstructured (and arbitrary) list, motives are structurally organized as hierarchies, with some of the vague needs and motivations (power, achievement, affiliation, and the like) being at the top, and then more specific action-guiding schemas (become a CEO, join the local PTA) at lower levels. For D’Andrade, goal-schemas at a lower-level of schematicity (and thus higher in specificity) are more context-driven, while higher-level (and thus more schematic) goal-schemas function as the pervasive “goals” of classical theories of motivation. These (autonomous) motives function “as a person’s most general goals,” or “master motives” (30). They are not directly connected to action (because many particular actions would be consistent with the schema). Still, They are connected to specific actions via more particular goal-schemas.

In sum, for D’Andrade, schemas solve many problems for anyone seeking to link culture, cognition, and motivation. Thinking of goals as having schematic representation in human memory allows us to understand human action as the result of cognitive structures activated in the situation, used by the person for categorization and interpretation, which ultimately “instigate” action. This context dependence accounts for situational variations in motivated action within-persons. At the same time, since motives differ in both autonomy and specificity, schemas can also represent pervasive, chronically active motivations that transcend situations. In contrast to the list of motives approach, the schema approach allows to properly theorize people’s goals as being part of an “overall interpretive system,” in which goals interrelate in structured ways, such as the hierarchical organization of lower-level goals nested within more schematic master motives. Finally, because schematic representation is a general representational format (capable of capturing anything that can be conceptually represented), there is no one “list” of motives; instead, “there are at least as many kinds of motives as there kinds of goal-schemas” (32). This accounts for cross-cultural variability in motivations since many goal-schemas will be specific to particular settings and locations. Schematic representation also facilitates the social-scientific job of identifying motives empirically. When motives are conceptualized as schemas, this task becomes the same as the more general endeavor of identifying schemas in text, discourse, and talk (Mohr et al. 2020; Quinn 2016).

How do Goal-Schemas Motivate?

D’Andrade’s argument that goals can be stored in human memory in the form of (more or less) schematic representations endowed with systematic organization is compelling. That is, D’Andrade provides (one) story of how one aspect of human motivation (the goals towards which we strive) is internalized as personal culture in the forms of a particular set of representations. However, representation is necessary but not sufficient for motivation. For a mental state or structure to be motivational, it must have the power to cause action. D’Andrade uses various metaphors to refer to this power in the paper, such as “instigate.” However, it is unclear how exactly a goal representation can be motivational. After all, we can have many goals represented in memory (or even currently active) without any of those goals “moving” us to act.

Toward the end of the paper, D’Andrade gives another shot to explaining how an internalized goal-schema can be motivating. Here, he moves to a different metaphor: The idea that some internalized goal-schemas have “directive force.” Directive force can be thought of in the (Durkheimian) sense of a given representation exercising a “sense of [moral] obligation” in people. But for D’Andrade, this is actually “a special case of the more general phenomenon of motivation.” And therefore, schemas are “equally central to things people wanted directly—love, friendship, success…some of these schemas turn out to have their own obligations as well as their direct and indirect rewards” (36). D’Andrade then notes that these provide a link between the conception of motives as goal-schemas and Melford Spiro’s model of “levels” of internalization of cultural beliefs. Schemas endowed with motivational force would thus be those that have the “deepest” levels of internalization in Spiro’s sense. According to Spiro, people can go from simply being “acquainted,” with some set of public representations (level 1), to accepting them as half-hearted cliches (level 2), to adopting them as part of their stock of personal beliefs (level 3), to having them motivate and guide their action in everyday life (level 4) (D’Andrade, 1995, pp. 227–228). Only culture “taken up” at levels 3 and 4 counts as “internalized,” in a way that could plausibly “motivate” action. 

However, there is a problem here. The idea of internalization “depth” that D’Andrade, Spiro, along with other psychological anthropologists (Quinn et al., 2018a, 2018b) talk about is not a generic internalization story (in the sense discussed in a previous post). Instead, it is a special-purpose story that only applies to culture internalized as explicit, verbalizable belief; essentially knowledge-that (as distinguished from knowledge-what; see here for further discussion of knowledge-what). In a later publication, D’Andrade made this clear, noting that “[a]t the third level [of internalization], individuals hold their beliefs to be true, correct, or right” (1995, pp. 228, italics added). But as described by D’Andrade, goal-schemas are not a type of knowledge-that. Instead, they are a type of (categorical or conceptual) knowledge-what, endowed with all the characteristics of concepts when internalized in long-term memory and used for the same tasks (interpretation, property induction, inference, categorization, and the like). 

In this last respect, “levels” of internalization can be plausibly distinguished for beliefs concerning the “commitment” dimension. But this “levels imagery breaks down when it comes to the internalization of conceptual knowledge-what. It is nonsensical to say that people have a “lightly held” concept of achievement, affiliation, power, self-enhancement, and the like. Individual differences in internalized knowledge-what can be made, but the relevant dimension of internalization is not “depth” or “commitment” but something like “elaborateness.” Experts in a domain have more elaborate concepts of the entities and activities in that domain, not “deeper” ones. People for whom achievement is important may also have a more elaborate conceptual network (and perhaps hierarchical schema taxonomy) connecting various achievement-related goals and actions across various settings. 

Overall, the metaphor of “cultural depth,” while taken as a general-purpose account of cultural internalization (Sewell, 1992; Swidler, 2001), is a special-purpose story applicable to certain forms of knowledge that, like beliefs, encoding propositions about the world. While distinctions between different internalization modes can be made concerning knowledge-what, these will have very little to do with the idea of “depth,” or strength of commitment. In the end, it is unclear whether a schema is the sort of internalized culture to which the idea of levels of commitment applies. But more generally, it is doubtful that one can get a theory of motivation from a theory of degrees of commitment to such entities as beliefs or propositions. This account of motivation is not only overly intellectualist (as it restricts itself to consciously held belief), it is also not compatible with the very definition of motivation that D’Andrade began the paper with (where motivation is defined in terms of desire, want, pleasure, and reward). This commitment theory of motivation is also incompatible with the schema theory of representation that D’Andrade pursues in the paper. While motivation does undoubtedly have a representational component (something cannot be a motivation unless it is represented cognitively by the agent in some way) that role remains obscured in D’Andrade’s treatment. 

Conclusion

Overall, D’Andrade’s critique of the “list of motives” approach is well-taken, as is his suggestion that thinking of goals is represented in long-term memory in the form of schemas. D’Andrade thus provides an instructive account of how thinking about the format of mental representation can help us rethink some central concepts in cultural analysis such as “goals” or “ends.” The paper’s key message is still a sound one; to link culture and action, you need to have a story of how culture is internalized and represented in memory.  Mental representation (of goals, needs, desires, objects) is key because there can be no motivation without representation (Schroeder 2004). This approach can be extended by considering that schemas are only one way to represent goals in memory. After all, there is no reason why (following Rupert 2011) goals could also be represented by a panoply of other types of representation described by cognitive scientists, including (already considered) propositional beliefs, episodic memories, action-oriented representations, embodied representations, perceptual symbols, and many others.

However, to connect culture represented at the personal level to action, we need a substantive account of how mental states can be implicated in the causation of action; essentially we need a theory of motivation. Unfortunately, D’Andrade never closes the gap between the general representational proposal and actual motivational mechanisms. Nowhere are we told how purely representational, conceptual, or schematic mental representations can go on to “energize” or sustain motivated action in context. Missing are key elements that any theory of motivation should have (and which were embedded in D’Andrade’s very definition of the concept), such as wants, striving, desire, reward, pleasure, reinforcement, and learning (Kringelbach and Berridge 2016). Instead, D’Andrade never moves from purely metaphorical versions of how a purely representational state links to action, for instance, speaking of schematically represented goals can “instigate” action once activated (which sounds like a covert, and largely unsatisfactory, “ideomotor” account of the link between represented goals action of the “monkey represents, monkey does” type). This cannot deal with the fact that people in a given setting walk around with many goal representations that never become motivational. Ultimately, it is unclear why some goal representations have this instigating virtue and others do not. 

When he tries to get more concrete, D’Andrade provides a (familiar to sociologist) story: the goal representations that motivate are the ones that have been “deeply” internalized. But beyond the fact that this is just another (spatial) metaphor, the account D’Andrade provides, based on Spiro’s theory of internalization, does not even match the representational format he spent the entire paper arguing goals are represented in: Conceptual knowledge-what combining procedural and declarative components. Instead, the Spiro levels account for a special-purpose internalization story applicable to “beliefs.” Even in the case of belief, it is unclear whether the Spiro story actually tells us how beliefs motivate without relying on circularities and tautologies. That is, it seems like the deeply internalized beliefs (levels 3 and 4) are the ones causally implicated in the production of action, but as we saw earlier, this is literally the definition of what it is for a mental state to be motivating. We are not given an “origin” story of why some belief-like mental states acquire this power. 

This is not to pile on D’Andrade (or Spiro). The problem of linking culture and action via motivation is a tough one. But as argued before, even if some solutions previously provided are not up to par, we can agree on what the general outlines of a satisfactory solution can be. In this post, we have learned that having an account of cultural internalization or how culture is represented in memory is not enough. This is especially the case when linking culture and motivation, because motivation while incorporating a representational component, is not exhausted by it. Thus a theory that links culture to action must also be a theory of motivation, as D’Andrade observed. Motivation is key, because it tells us which slice of the culture that people have internalized has causal effects on action and which one will not.

One problem is that contemporary social science does not have satisfactory conceptions of motivation (relying on outdated drive-reduction or “need” models). D’Andrade’s account in which “motivation is experienced as a desire or wish, followed by a feeling of satisfaction if the desire is fulfilled,” and is linked to internal processes that “energize” or activate people to act such that there is typically a striving for something—a goal directedness in behavior” (24) is not a bad one as a starter pack. However, as noted, none of these elements end up (striving, wish, pleasure, fulfillment) end up being linked to schemas as candidate motivating (and not just representational) structures in D’Andrade’s classic paper. Future posts will be dedicated to cracking the puzzle of motivation and linking it to cultural analysis. 

References

Cervone, D. (2005). Personality architecture: within-person structures and processes. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 423–452.

D’Andrade, R. G. (1992). Schemas and motivation. In R. G. D’Andrade & C. Strauss (Eds.), Human motives and cultural models. (pp. 23–44). Cambridge University Press.

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

Kringelbach, M. L., & Berridge, K. C. (2016). Neuroscience of Reward, Motivation, and Drive. In Recent Developments in Neuroscience Research on Human Motivation (Vol. 19, pp. 23–35). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Mohr, J. W., Bail, C. A., Frye, M., Lena, J. C., Lizardo, O., McDonnell, T. E., Mische, A., Tavory, I., & Wherry, F. F. (2020). Measuring Culture. Columbia University Press.

Quinn, N. (2016). Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods. Springer.

Rupert, R. D. (2011). Embodiment, Consciousness, and the Massively Representational Mind. Philosophical Topics, 39(1), 99–120.

Schroeder, T. (2004). Three Faces of Desire. Oxford University Press.

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

Swidler, A. (2001). Talk of love: How culture matters. University of Chicago Press.

Turner, J. H. (2010). Motivational Dynamics in Encounters. In J. H. Turner (Ed.), Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 2: Microdynamics (pp. 193–235). Springer New York.

Explaining social phenomena by multilevel mechanisms

Four questions about multilevel mechanisms

In our previous post, we discussed mechanistic philosophy of science and its contribution to the cognitive social sciences. In this blog post, we will discuss three case studies of research programs at the interface of the cognitive sciences and the social sciences. In our cases, we apply mechanistic philosophy of science to make sense of the epistemological, ontological, and methodological aspects of the cognitive social sciences. Our case studies deal with the phenomena of social coordination, transactive memory, and ethnicity.

In our work, we have drawn on Stuart Glennan’s minimal account of mechanisms, according to which a mechanism for a phenomenon “consists of entities (or parts) whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for the phenomenon” (Glennan 2017: 17). We understand entities and activities liberally so as to accommodate the highly diverse sets of entities that are studied in the cognitive social sciences, from physically grounded mental representations to material artifacts and entire social systems. In our article, we make use of the following four questions drawn from William Bechtel’s (2009) work to assess the adequacy and comprehensiveness of mechanistic explanations:

  1. What is the phenomenon to be explained (‘looking at’)?
  2. What are the relevant entities and their activities (‘looking down’)?
  3. What are the organization and interactions of these entities and activities through which they contribute to the phenomenon (‘looking around’)?
  4. What is the environment in which the mechanism is situated, and how does it affect its functioning (‘looking up’)?

The visual metaphors of looking at the phenomenon to be explained, looking down at the entities and activities that underlie the phenomenon, looking around at the ways in which these entities and activities are organized, and looking up at the environment in which the mechanism operates, are intended to emphasize that mechanistic explanations are not strongly reductive or “bottom-up” explanations. Rather, multilevel mechanistic explanations can bring together more “bottom-up” perspectives from the cognitive sciences with more “top-down” perspectives from the social sciences in order to provide integrated explanations of complex social phenomena. In the following, we will illustrate how we have used mechanistic philosophy of science in our case studies and what we have learned from them.

Social Coordination

Interpersonal social coordination has been studied during recent decades in many different scientific disciplines, from developmental psychology (e.g., Carpenter&Svetlova 2016) to evolutionary anthropology (e.g., Tomasello et al. 2005) and cognitive science (e.g., Knoblich et al. 2011). However, despite their shared interests, there has so far been relatively limited interaction between different disciplinary research programs studying social coordination. In this case study, we argued that mechanistic philosophy of science can ground a feasible division of labor between researchers in different scientific disciplines studying social coordination.

In evolutionary anthropology and developmental psychology, one of the most important ideas that has gained considerable empirical support during recent decades is that human agents and our nearest primate relatives differ fundamentally in our dispositions to social coordination and cooperation: for example, chimpanzees rarely act together instrumentally in natural settings, and they are not motivated to engage in the types of social games and joint attention that human infants find intrinsically rewarding already at an early age (Warneken et al. 2006). Importantly, this does not seem to be due to a deficit in general intelligence since chimpanzees score as well as young human infants on tests of quantitative, spatial, and causal cognition (Herrmann et al. 2007). According to the shared intentionality -hypothesis of evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello, this is because “human beings, and only human beings, are biologically adapted for participating in collaborative activities involving shared goals and socially coordinated action plans (joint intentions)” (Tomasello et al. 2005).

Given a basic capacity to engage in social coordination, one can raise the question of what types of cognitive mechanisms enable individuals to share mental states and act together with other individuals. To answer this question, we made use of the distinction between emergent and planned forms of coordination put forth by cognitive scientist Günther Knoblich and his collaborators. According to Knoblich et al. (2011: 62), in emergent coordination, “coordinated behavior occurs due to perception-action couplings that make multiple individuals act in similar ways… independent of any joint plans or common knowledge”. In planned coordination, ”agents’ behavior is driven by representations that specify the desired outcomes of joint action and the agent’s own part in achieving these outcomes.” Knoblich et al. (2011) discuss four different mechanisms for emergent coordination: entrainment, common object affordances, action simulation, and perception-action matching. While emergent coordination is explained primarily by sub-intentional mechanisms of action control (which space does not allow us to discuss in more detail here), planned coordination is explained by reference to explicit mental representations of a common goal, the other individuals in joint action, and/or the division of tasks between the participants.

In our article, we argued that cognitive scientists and social scientists answer different questions (see above) about mechanisms that bring about and sustain social coordination in different environments and over time. Thus they are in a position to make mutually interlocking yet irreducible contributions to a unified mechanistic theory of social coordination, although they may also sometimes reach results that challenge assumptions that are deeply ingrained in the other group of disciplines. For a more detailed discussion of how cognitive and social scientists can collaborate in explaining social coordination, we refer the reader to our article (Sarkia et al. 2020: 8-11).

Transactive Memory

Our second case study concerned the phenomenon of transactive memory, which has been studied in the fields of cognitive, organizational, and social psychology as well as in communication studies, information science, and management. The social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues (Wegner et al. 1985: 256) define transactive memory in terms of the following two components:

  1. An organized store of knowledge that is contained entirely in the individual memory systems of the group members
  2. A set of knowledge-relevant transactive processes that occur among group members.

They attribute transactive memory systems to organized groups insofar as these groups perform functionally equivalent roles in group-level information processing as individual memory mechanisms perform in individual cognition, i.e. (transactive) encoding, (transactive) storing, and (transactive) retrieving of information. For example, Wegner et al. (1985) found that close romantic couples responded to factual and opinion questions by using integrative strategies, such as interactive cueing in memory retrieval. Subsequent research on transactive memory systems has addressed small interaction groups, work teams, and organizations in addition to intimate couples (e.g., Ren & Argote 2011; Peltokorpi 2008). What is crucial for the development of a transactive memory system is that the group members have at least partially different domains of expertise and that the group members have learned about each other’s domains of expertise. If these two conditions are met, each group member can utilize the other group members’ domain-specific information in group-related cognitive tasks and transcend the limitations of their own internal memories.

In our article, we made use of the theory of transactive memory systems to argue that some cognitive mechanisms transcend the brains and bodies of individuals to the social and material environments that they inhabit. For example, in addition to brain-based memories, individual group members may also utilize material artifacts, such as notebooks, archives, and data files, as their memory stores. In addition, other members’ internal and external memory storages may in an extended sense be understood as part of the focal member’s external memory storages as long as she knows their domains of expertise and can communicate with them. Thus the theory of transactive memory can be understood as describing a socially distributed and extended cognitive system that goes beyond intra-cranial cognition (Hutchins 1995; Sutton et al. 2010). For a more detailed discussion of this thesis and its implications for interdisciplinary memory studies, we refer the reader to our article (Sarkia et al. 2011, 11-15).

Ethnicity

The sociologist Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators (Brubaker et al. 2004) has made use of theories in cognitive psychology and anthropology to challenge traditional approaches to ethnicity, nationhood, and race that view them as substantial groups or entities with clear boundaries, interests, and agency. Rather, he treats them as different ways of seeing the world, based on universal cognitive mechanisms, such as categorizing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Brubaker et al. (2004) also make use of the notions of cognitive schema and stereotype, defining stereotypes as “cognitive structures that contain knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about social groups” and schemas as “representations of knowledge and information-processing mechanisms” (DiMaggio 1997). For example, Brubaker et al. (2004, 44) discuss the process of ethnicization, where ”ethnic schemas become hyper-accessible and… crowd out other interpretive schemas.”

In our article, we made use of Brubaker’s approach to ethnicity to illustrate how cognitive accounts of social phenomena need to be supplemented by traditional social scientific research methods, such as ethnographic and survey methods when we seek to understand the broader social and cultural environment in which cognitive mechanisms operate. For example, in their case study of Cluj, a Romanian town with a significant Hungarian minority, Brubaker et al. (2006) found that while public discourse was filled with ethnic rhetoric, ethnic tension was surprisingly scarce in everyday life. By collecting data with interviews, participant observation, and group discussions, they were able to identify cues in various situations that turned a unique person into a representative of an ethnic group. Importantly, this result could not be achieved simply by studying the universal cognitive mechanisms of stereotypes, schemas, and categorization, since these mechanisms serve merely as the vehicles of ethnic representations, and they do not teach us about the culture-specific contents that these vehicles carry. We refer the reader to our article for more discussion of the complementarity of social scientific and cognitive approaches to ethnicity (Sarkia et al. 2020, 15-17).

References

Bechtel W (2009) “Looking down, around, and up: mechanistic explanation in psychology.” Philosophical Psychology 22(5): 543–564.

Brubaker R, Loveman M and Stamatov P (2004) “Ethnicity as cognition.” Theory and Society​ 33(1): 31–64.

Brubaker R, Feischmidt M, Fox J, Grancea L (2006) Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Carpenter M, Svetlova M (2016) “Social development.” In: Hopkins B, Geangu E, Linkenauer S (eds) Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 415–423.

DiMaggio P (1997) “Culture and cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263-287.

Herrmann E, Call J, Hernandez-Loreda, M, Hare B, and Tomasello, M (2007). “Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: the cultural intelligence hypothesis.” Science 317: 1360-1366.

Hutchins E (1995) Cognition in the wild. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Peltokorpi V (2008). Transactive memory systems. Review of General Psychology 12(4): 378–394.

Ren Y and Argote L (2011) “Transactive memory systems 1985–2010: An integrative framework of key dimensions, antecedents, and consequences.” The Academy of Management Annals 5(1): 189–229.

Sarkia M, Kaidesoja T, and Hyyryläinen (2020). “Mechanistic explanations in the cognitive social sciences: lessons from three case studies.” Social Science Information. Online first (open access). https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0539018420968742

Sutton J, Harris C.B., Keil P.G. and Barnier A.J. 2010. “The psychology of memory, extended cognition and socially distributed remembering.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9(4), pp. 521-560.

Tomasello M, Carpenter M, Call J, et al. (2005) “Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 675–691.

Warneken F, Chen F, Tomasello M (2006) “Cooperative activities in young children and chimpanzees.” Child Development 77(3): 640–663.

Wegner DM, Giuliano T and Hertel P (1985) “Cognitive interdependence in close relationships.” In: Ickes WJ (ed) Compatible and Incompatible Relationships. New York: Springer, pp. 253–276.

Cognition and Cultural Kinds

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

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

Cognition in Anthropology and Sociology

The Emergence of Cognitive Anthropology

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

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

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

The Emergence of the “New” Cognitive Sociology

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internalization and Knowledge What

As discussed in a previous post, the sociological discussion of internalization has been traditionally dominated by an emphasis on processes in which other people, via the mediation of artifacts, serve as the primary conduits via which cultural-cognitive kinds are internalized. In that respect, sociologists do not seem to make too much of an effort to differentiate internalization, or the acquisition of cultural kinds from interaction and experience in the world, from the more specific idea of socialization, or the acquisition of cultural kinds from the concerted efforts of other people (the “agents” of socialization) to try to transmit or teach them to us in some way (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Parsons 1952). 

Equating internalization and socialization works well for the cultural-cognitive kinds considered in the previous discussion; in the case of beliefs and skills, internalization necessarily involves interaction with artifacts created by other people (beliefs conveyed via oral or written communications), interaction with people when they produce “live” version of such artifacts in the form of spoken words (or other overt symbols), and even the direct manipulation of the body of apprentices on the part of teachers (Downey 2014). 

Interestingly, the case of belief and the case of skill are prototypical versions of two types of knowledge usually contrasted in social and cognitive science, following a classic distinction proposed by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (2002). In Ryle’s rendering, propositional beliefs rendered as sentences in a natural language are a clear case of “knowledge that,” while skills, hard or impossible to verbalize or put in propositional form, are the prototypical case “knowledge how.” For instance, we would say, of a person who holds this belief, they think that immigrants are good for America and, of a person who commands this skill, they know how to dance Capoeira. 

However, more extensive consideration of a lot of the internalized knowledge held by people reveals the existence of a large swath of internalized culture that does not quite fit the neat division between explicit propositional beliefs and skills (in terms of the nature of the kind of involved) nor does it fit the usual origin story we tell of such kinds in terms of their provenance in teachers, socialization agents, role models and the like. Take, for instance, cultural knowledge about such entities as cats, computers, houses, or camping trips. These are the cultural cognitive kinds psychologists refer to as concepts (Barsalou 1992; Machery 2009; Prinz 2004). 

Concepts clearly count as a form of internalized culture but it is unlikely any socialization agents set out (or spent much effort) to teach you cats have fur, computers run on electricity, or camping trips happen in the summer and the same for the myriad of concepts you have internalized. Instead, this is knowledge that you likely “picked up,” just by living in a world containing cats, computers, and camping trips. In fact, the reason why people don’t need teachers and socialization agents to internalize that cats and birds are alive but a rock is not, is that this knowledge is taken to be so obvious that it, in the words of anthropologist Maurice Bloch (1998:22ff), it “goes without saying”; accordingly, no socialization agent would expend effort transmitting this knowledge since they presume people will pick it up on their own (saving their energies for things that are not that obvious). This means that a lot of internalized culture does not come about via any “socialization” process at least as this is traditionally conceived (Bloch 1998:23ff; Bourdieu 1990); this, in particular, seems to apply to conceptual knowledge as an internalized cultural kind.

In contrast to most propositional beliefs attaching normative, conventional, or arbitrary predicates to entities (e.g., such as “good for America” to “immigrants”), it is a necessary condition that the world is the way it is for people to internalize a lot of the conceptual knowledge they have. For instance, if you were to take a magical time machine and go back to the fourteenth century armed with your current (explicit) conceptual knowledge of what computers are and do and tried to convey it to medieval denizens by talking to them, it is likely that you would fail to transmit the concept of a computer to your interlocutors (although you might be able to transmit a number of fantastical beliefs about the mysterious entity you are calling a “computer”). 

In this last respect, all of your “socialization” efforts would be for naught, because in order to internalize workable conceptual knowledge about a thing, you need to interact (directly or indirectly) with the thing the concept is about; in addition, you need to have workable conceptual knowledge about a number of other domains related to the thing (e.g., electricity and machinery in the case of computers) and about the likely situations and contexts in which the thing is likely to be found (e.g., offices) (Yeh and Barsalou 2006).

This is different from belief acquisition. For instance, I (a socialization agent) can stipulate the existence of a substance called “dilithium” and transmit to you the belief “dilithium can power a starship.” You do not need to have a working concept of dilithium, beyond the most general one (e..g, dilithium is a kind of substance), in order for you to acquire beliefs about dilithium (although you will have to have some conceptual knowledge, however vague, indirect, and metaphorically structured, about what “powering up” a technological artifact is, and what a “starship” is).

Enculturation versus Socialization

The above discussion suggests that concepts are a theoretically important cultural-cognitive kind, distinct from explicit beliefs and non-conceptual skills, that can help broaden and enrich our understanding of the different ways cognitive-cultural kinds can come to be internalized by people. This is for (at least) two main reasons.  

First, the existence and pervasiveness of concepts as internalized cultural-cognitive kinds license the distinction between socialization and enculturation as routes to the internalization of cultural kinds. Most sociologists are like Zerubavel in the birthday party example offered in the previous post and use the terms interchangeably, talking about “socialized or acculturated” people. We are now in a position to make a more principled distinction. Socialization is the internalization of cultural-cognitive kinds, such as beliefs and skills, from interaction with agents who intend for us to learn explicit beliefs via direct or indirect (e.g., put them in the world in artifactual form for us to find) symbolic interaction or apprenticeship relations in which such agents coordinate, supervise, and ensure the acquisition of particular skills (e.g., walking, writing, riding a bike). 

Enculturation, on the other hand, is a more general idea, referring to all forms of internalization of cultural kinds, even in cases where no explicit teachers or communicators (either human or artifactual) are involved. In contrast to socialization, where we can reconstruct a direct or indirect communicative or transmissive  intention on the part of a socialization agent and directed to a socialization target (which, when successful results in internalization), with enculturation, we encounter the, initially puzzling case, of cultural internalization that seems to work by “osmosis.”

 Most conceptual knowledge is not acquired via socialization; instead, the bulk of conceptual knowledge is acquired via enculturation: Non-directive processes of experience with and exposure to (solitary or with others, direct or mediated) to exemplars of the physical, artifactual, biological, or social kind in question. For instance, a lot of the conceptual knowledge about the properties of objects residing in the “middle-sized” world of cats, dogs, rocks, tomatoes, magnets, and computers (e.g., not electron, quarks, and supernovas) is acquired via enculturation (not socialization), although knowledge about implicit aspects of some of those objects, if it exists, is usually acquired via socialization (we can go to engineering school and figure how computers work from a teacher or a book). Contextual or variable knowledge about practices regarding such objects (e.g., that in this house cats stay outside) is clearly acquired by socialization, while knowledge that cats eat food, like to sleep, and can move on their own without having to be pushed around by a person (Mandler 1988), is acquired mainly via enculturation. 

While a lot of (lexical) linguistic knowledge (e.g., mapping of word labels to objects) is acquired via socialization, it is important to underscore that conceptual knowledge (e.g., that cats have tails and dogs bark) is distinct from the knowledge of how to map lexical labels to objects in a natural language (Tomasello 2005). Children begin to acquire conceptual knowledge about a lot of categories before they learn the mapping between lexical items and members of that category in their native language (Bloch 1991). In the same way, grammatical linguistic knowledge is acquired via enculturation (Tomasello 2005), although a second-order version of it is re-acquired in school via socialization. 

Knowledge What

Second, concepts as cultural-cognitive kinds do not quite fit Ryle’s “knowledge-that” and “knowledge-how” binary mentioned earlier. As already noted, we can have “knowledge-that” beliefs about things we have no (or very faint) concepts of (like dilithium). In addition, the hallmark of procedural knowledge (e.g., knowledge of how to ride a bike) is precisely that it is non-conceptual (Dreyfus 2005). You do not need the conceptual knowledge about bikes (e.g., that they are typically made out of metal) in order to learn how to ride one. In fact, you could theoretically lose the conceptual knowledge (e.g., via some traumatic brain injury causing selective amnesia) while retaining the practical expertise. 

In this last respect, the existence of conceptual knowledge as internalized cultural-cognitive kinds, distinct from propositional and procedural knowledge, points to the possibility that Ryle’s classic distinction of know-how/know-that does not provide an exhaustive taxonomy of internalized cultural kinds, as has been presumed in previous work (Lizardo 2017). What is missing is what philosophers Peter Gardenfors and Andreas Stephens (2018; see also Stephens 2019) have recently referred to as knowledge-what; general (impersonal) knowledge about the expected properties and features of objects and events in the world. Knowledge-what is equivalent to what other theorists refer to as “conceptual knowledge” or knowledge stored in the “human conceptual system” (Barsalou 2003; Barsalou et al. 2003). 

In terms of the contemporary theory of memory systems, if knowledge-how is associated with non-declarative procedural memory and knowledge-that with declarative episodic memory, then knowledge-what encompasses both non-declarative and declarative aspects of semantic memory (Stephens 2019). Accordingly, if knowledge-how is composed of the sum total of cultural-cognitive kinds internalized as skills, and knowledge-that is that composed of cultural-cognitive kinds internalized as (explicit) beliefs (and other declarative “propositional attitudes” about the world (Schwitzgebel 2013)), then knowledge-what is primarily stored in the form of concepts (although we do not need to settle on any one particular theory about the format in which concepts are stored in long term memory). 

What makes conceptual knowledge distinctive from non-conceptual (procedural) or strictly propositional knowledge is the fact that it allows us to categorize, make inferences (e.g., derive new knowledge from old knowledge), and thus make reliable inductions about the properties and characteristics of the physical, biological, and social kinds that fall under the concept (Gärdenfors and Stephens 2018). In this respect, concepts stored in semantic memory seem to have both procedural (they allow us to do things) and declarative components (Parthemore 2011; Stephens 2019). Thus, if we know that an event is a “birthday party” (as with the Zerubavel example above), we can reliably guess (and expect) that cake will be served. If we know something is a cat, then we can reliably guess (and expect) that it likes to sleep, eat food, and it’s not ten feet tall. 

In this last respect, it seems like Zerubavel was talking about enculturation (as an example of internalization), not socialization, if only because it would be odd to find socializing agents expending much effort “teaching” people that cakes are eaten at birthday parties; instead, parents bring out the cake since even before kids can talk (or show them picture books with birthday parties featuring cake), so by the time they can talk they expect to see cakes at birthday parties. In this respect, the presence of cake is part of the (Euro-American) concept of a birthday party (and is not a propositional belief about birthday parties although it may be that too), and people learn it via an enculturation process (although a late newcomer from a society in which something else was served on this occasion would probably have to learn it via socialization). 

There are of course systematic relations between both enculturation and socialization processes, and knowledge-that and knowledge-what as internalized cultural kinds. People become encultured (exposed to a multimodal ensemble featuring people, activities, and objects in a situational context) at the same time that they are socialized; so these internalization processes are not mutually exclusive. However, since enculturation is the more general form of internalization, it follows that, even though all socialization entails enculturation, a lot of enculturation takes place absent the concerted effort or explicit attempts at teaching coming from socialization agents (Bloch 1998; Bourdieu 1990; Strauss and Quinn 1997). Just by acting pragmatically (alone or in concert with others) in a world populated by physical, biological, artifactual, and social kinds people will come to internalize a large swath of (some easy some hard or impossible to explicitly articulate) conceptual knowledge-what about those kinds. 

In this last respect, it is likely that one reason why the distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-what has not been sharply made in cultural theory has to do with the “linguistic fallacy” (Bloch 1998:23ff); this is the idea that, just because we can paraphrase conceptual knowledge using linguistic propositions (e.g., we can say that cats have tails) in belief-like form, it follows that conceptual knowledge consists of just such a collection of know-that sentences and propositions (e.g., “beliefs about” the kind the concept refers to (Bloch 1991; Strauss and Quinn 1997:51)). However, despite their many differences (Machery 2009), no contemporary theory of concepts taken as a serious contender in cognitive psychology sees them exclusively represented as a collection of sentence-like structures (although some armchair philosophical theories, such as Jerry Fodor’s “language of thought” hypothesis do). 

A well-known problem with the proposal that conceptual knowledge-what can be reduced or paraphrased as a lot of “knowledge-that” statements is what the philosopher Daniel Dennett (2006) once referred to as the “frame problem.” This is the idea that the number of explicit beliefs we would have to impute to a person to try to summarize their storehouse of (multimodal, cross-contextual) conceptual knowledge what of even the simplest of “basic level” objects such as a chair is virtually infinite, exploding exponentially once we realize how much “implicit beliefs” people seem to have about the category (e.g., we would have to presume that people “know that” chairs are not made out of cheese, did not exist in the Pleistocene, do not explode five minutes after someone sits on them, are not secretly laughing behind our backs, and so on.)

Partly motivated by this (and other issues; see Prinz (2004) and Barsalou (1992)), some of the more promising accounts of concepts as internalized cultural (and cognitive) kinds, abandon lingua-form representation altogether, suggesting that conceptual knowledge consists of simulations stored in the same modality-specific format as the perceptions we have of the (physical, biological, social, etc.) kinds represented by the concept (Barsalou 1999; Clark 1997; Prinz 2004). This account is consistent with observations about cultural internalization made by ethnographers. As Bloch (1998: 25) notes, “[a]ctors’ concepts of society are represented not as strings of terms and propositions, but as governed by lived-in models, that is, models based as much in experience, practice, sight, and sensation as in language” (see also Shore (1996); Bourdieu (1990) and Strauss and Quinn (1997)); propositional beliefs that are a cultural kind distinct from concepts of. In this respect, concepts as a cultural cognitive kind, acquired via enculturation processes may represent a much more crucial aspect of people’s everyday knowledge of the world than propositional beliefs “about” the world. 

One upshot of the above discussion is that we do not need three separate internalization stories for the three (broad) forms of internalized knowledge (that, how, and what). Instead, enculturation, or, the emergence of personal culture via pragmatic and bodily interaction in the world, serves as a general template, with concept acquisition being the most general form of this process, and skill acquisition and belief formation serving as special-purpose stories featuring artifact-mediated interactions with the world, typically involving other people as intentional drivers of the internalization process (“socialization”). In this respect, all cultural-cognitive kinds (e.g., concepts, skills, beliefs, etc.) are constructed and internalized via people’s activity-driven experience in the world, only a subset of which involve interaction with artifactual cultural kinds. Some cultural-cognitive kinds (e.g., concepts for animals and objects) can emerge from people’s direct interactions with other biological and physical kinds, while others (beliefs about the benefits to America that come from immigration) from people’s interactions with artifactual kinds produced by others with the intent to transmit them to us. 

References

Barsalou, L. (2003). Situated simulation in the human conceptual system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18(5-6), 513–562.

Barsalou, L. W. (1992). Frames, concepts, and conceptual fields. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual Symbol Systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(4), 577–609.

Barsalou, L. W., Kyle Simmons, W., Barbey, A. K., & Wilson, C. D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(2), 84–91.

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

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

Bloch, M. E. F. (1998). How we think they think: Anthropological approaches to cognition, memory, and literacy. Westview Press.

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

Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. MIT Press.

Downey, G. (2014). “Habitus in Extremis”: From Embodied Culture to Bio-Cultural Development. Body & Society. http://bod.sagepub.com/content/20/2/113.short

Dreyfus, H. L. (2005). Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79(2), 47–65.

Gärdenfors, P., & Stephens, A. (2018). Induction and knowledge-what. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 8(3), 471–491.

Lizardo, O. (2017). Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes. American Sociological Review, 82(1), 88–115.

Machery, E. (2009). Doing without Concepts. Oxford University Press.

Mandler, J. M. (1988). How to build a baby: On the development of an accessible representational system. Cognitive Development, 3(2), 113–136.

Parsons, T. (1952). The superego and the theory of social systems. Psychiatry, 15(1), 15–25.

Parthemore, J. E. (2011). Concepts enacted: confronting the obstacles and paradoxes inherent in pursuing a scientific understanding of the building blocks of human thought [Doctoral, University of Sussex]. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/6954

Prinz, J. J. (2004). Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. MIT Press.

Ryle, G. (2002). [1949], The Concept of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,. With an lntroduction by Daniel C. Dennett.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2013). A Dispositional Approach to Attitudes: Thinking Outside of the Belief Box. In N. Nottelmann (Ed.), New Essays on Belief: Constitution, Content and Structure (pp. 75–99). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Stephens, A. (2019). Three levels of naturalistic knowledge. In M. Kaipainen, F. Zenker, A. Hautamäki, & P. Gärdenfors (Eds.), Conceptual Spaces: Elaborations and Applications (pp. 59–75). Springer.

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

Tomasello, M. (2005). Constructing a Language. Harvard University Press.

Yeh, W., & Barsalou, L. W. (2006). The situated nature of concepts. The American Journal of Psychology, 119(3), 349–384

Image Schemas: The Physics of Cultural Knowledge?

Recent posts by Omar (see here and here) discuss the importance of specifying underlying philosophical claims when conceptualizing culture. The first post distinguishes ontic philosophical claims (about the nature of an entity/process) from epistemic philosophical claims (about the best way to gain knowledge about an entity/process), noting that “a lot of recent (productive) disagreement in cultural analysis has been really about epistemic claims…However, ontic claims usually have implications for epistemic claims.” That is, inquiring about the best ways to study culture (epistemology) involves at least some prior assumptions about what that culture is made of and what it is like (ontology).

This post—based on my recently published article (Rotolo 2019)—discusses the ontic compositional claim that humans’ most basic conceptual structures consist of “image schemas,” which exist independently of language and constrain understanding and reasoning to a basic set of schematic concepts derived from sensorimotor experience. In the full paper, I show the importance (and gain) of starting from ontological claims—in this case, well-established, scientific theories about the cognitive structures involved in meaning-construction—rather than working backward to them or ignoring them when making claims about culture. Doing so leads to better claims about how culture works and is patterned. It also avoids problems arising from focusing solely on explicit discourse without concern for the cognitive scaffolding and processes that shape discursive expression.

What are Image Schemas?

Image schemas are “recurring, dynamic pattern[s] of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that [give] coherence and structure to our experience” (Johnson 1987: xiv). Arising from recurring perceptions and embodied experiences, image schemas represent the most basic forms and relations we sense and perceive. Repeated types of sensory experience and spatiotemporal information, like the perception of near and far, give us image schemas (NEAR-FAR), which can then be used to provide the logic of abstract concepts and ideas (e.g., “Our relationship is not very close.”)

Cognitive scientists across subfields agree that a relatively small number of image schemas about space, force, motion, and relations between entities combine in nearly infinite ways to structure everything from unique personal meanings to even our most complex philosophical ideas. Cultural knowledge, then, “can be thought of as an assemblage and elaboration of these basic, prelinguistic images” (Rotolo 2019: 4). Image schemas are something like the “physics” of cultural knowledge.

While there is no definitive list of image schemas, 14 image schemas compose “the core of the standard inventory,” based on their recurrence in a wide variety of studies over the past three decades—CONTAINMENT/CONTAINER, PATH/SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, LINK, PART-WHOLE, CENTER-PERIPHERY, BALANCE, ENABLEMENT, BLOCKAGE, COUNTERFORCE, ATTRACTION, COMPULSION, RESTRAINT, REMOVAL, DIVERSION (Hampe 2005: 2).

In my article, I identify a total of 5 image schemas used by the 50 adults in my interview sample to explain their understanding of religion’s role in life—PATH, SOURCE, CENTER, CONTAINER, and LINK (visualized above). These image schemas provide the underlying logic for inferences and reasoning about religion, including respondents’ explanations of their motivations and self-reported action. For example, one Conservative Protestant described religion as “taking a journey, “following God,” and “going down the right path” to “get further in the Lord’s work,” demonstrating a frequent and exclusive reliance on the PATH schema to explain his views.

Does it Matter that People Use Image Schemas?

Image schemas alone provide a somewhat skeletal analysis—they do not account for emotion (but see Kövecses 2003), interaction, speech-act conditions, and so on (Johnson 2005: 24-5). So do they really improve cultural analyses? Here, I outline three benefits of using image schemas to study the link between culture and cognition:

  1. As the basic building blocks of conceptual knowledge, image schemas pinpoint the conceptual meaning in people’s understandings and discourse. They help us identify both the where and the how of ideas, rather than a selective focus on surface patterns of discourse. For example, Lizardo (2013) uses image schema analysis to explain and compare conceptions of the structure/agency relationship in different social theories. He concludes, “When it comes to the conceptualization of social structure, some version of the organicist PART-WHOLE + ENTITY + LINK CIS appears to be the only game in town” (Lizardo 2013: 166). The same is true for my analysis of religious understandings. By focusing on image schemas, I was able to recognize that much of my respondents’ prolix, complicated, unique, and often inarticulate discourse about religion drew on the PATH schema. They primarily understand religion’s role in life in terms of paths, tracks, journeys, quests, and walks with different directions, routes, and obstacles. The PATH schema also oriented their thinking on action related to religion, like “not veering from the path,” giving their children “a compass,” and “guiding their steps.”
  2. Image schemas illuminate another level at which cultural knowledge may be uniquely patterned. In my analysis of religious understandings, I used principal factor and regression analysis to identify patterns of variation in image schema use and established that these patterns had statistically significant associations with key demographic variables. I found that women and those with higher educational attainment were more likely to use the CENTER and LINK and less likely to use the PATH schema. Black Protestants used the PATH and SOURCE schemas more frequently, and Muslims and other religious minorities in America used the CONTAINER schema more regularly. Upon reexamining the interviews in light of these findings, it became clear that these image schema patterns related to substantively different understandings and reasoning about religion’s role in life that were not obvious at first glance. For example, those who scored very high on the first factor exemplified a highly metaphysical understanding of the religion, in which religion serves as a CENTER identity and a LINK to reality to keep one from floating in meaninglessness. On the other hand, those who scored very low on this factor expressed a very practical understanding of religion, in which religion is a PATH tied to everyday decision-making. This first pattern, then, indicates a continuum between metaphysical and practical understandings of faith that varies significantly by gender and education level. As another example, the use of the CONTAINER image schema by Muslims and other religious minorities was associated with a conception of religion as a framework, structure, or set of boundaries, often involving set rules, observances, and restraints. These respondents often prefaced statements with, “Within our faith…” as a way of distinguishing their religion from others. This difference (which is mostly implicit) stems from perceptions of their religion as significantly different from other religions in America.
  3. Image schema analysis also improves our understanding of “how culture works” by grounding studies in established theories about human cognition. Much debate in sociology and anthropology has revolved around questions about the coherence, consistency, and sharedness of culture. However, these arguments have often relied solely on patterns in explicit discourse and sometimes on respondents’ speaking abilities, articulacy, and demeanor. These standards alone can be highly misleading, as “we can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi [1966] 2009: 4), and our cultural knowledge is more elaborate than what we can consciously express. On the other hand, by focusing on image schemas, we can detect implicit patterns of consistency, coherence, and/or sharedness in cultural understandings, in spite of the challenges and biases that explicit discourse analysis presents. The religious discourse in my study was often disorganized, idiosyncratic, and scattered, which could imply conceptual incoherence and difference among respondents. However, at the level of implicit image schemas, respondents exemplified highly coherent and similar religious understandings with only 5 image schemas structuring their thoughts on religion. The 5 image schemas were also found among respondents of nearly every demographic category, indicating that they are widely shared ways of understanding religion, even if certain groups rely on particular schemas more than others.

To bring to the surface, the image schemas implicit in my own argument: image schemas are just one PART of the WHOLE of cultural knowledge. However, they are the SOURCE of the conceptual dynamics that give meaning to our thoughts and reasonings, typically UNDER the SURFACE of conscious thinking. By working FORWARD from them (and other ontological claims about culture and human cognition), we can better understand the PROCESS of cultural knowledge construction and avoid some of the conceptual DIVERSIONs brought about by attempting to work BACKWARD.

 

References

Hampe, Beate. 2005. “Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: Introduction.” In Beate Hampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: pp. 1-11. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Johnson, Mark. 2005. “The Philosophical Significance of Image Schemas.” In Beate Hampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: pp. 15-33. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kövecses, Zoltán. 2003. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge University Press.

Lizardo, Omar. 2013. “Re-conceptualizing Abstract Conceptualization in Social Theory: The Case of the ‘Structure’ Concept.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43: 2: 55-80.

Polanyi, Michael. [1966] 2009. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Rotolo, Michael. 2019. “Religion Imagined: The Conceptual Substructures of American Religious Understandings.” Sociological Forum 35(1).

Identifying Cultural Variation in Thinking

What does it mean to identify cultural variation in thought? Sociologists routinely identify differences in the way people think or reason about things (e.g., Young 2004), but what does it mean to think differently, and how are differences identified? In this post, I introduce a way of thinking about this question that moves beyond traditional “frame-like” concepts.

The Frame Approach to Thinking about Thinking

Frame-like concepts are often used to denote different ways of thinking, referring to monolithic cognitive objects— “mental fences” (Zerubavel 1997:37)—which “filter” (Small 2004:70) cognition by “[highlighting] certain facts while [excluding] others (Fligstein, Brundage, and Schultz 2017:881).” Frame-like concepts are treated both as durable ways of thinking (Zerubavel 1997) and situationally-variable frames of thought (Goffman 1974), but in either case, they are generally interpreted as mutually exclusive categories, with only one active at any given time.

Frame-like concepts are intuitive but also bring important challenges and limitations. First, frame-like concepts denote differences in thought without explaining what it means to think differently. Frame theory is not so much a theory of how people think as much as an assertion that people think differently. Because of this, frame analysis often lies on shaky ground empirically, with analysts intuiting differences without objective criteria. Person A is said to think about Y using a different frame than Person B because the analyst intuits that their thinking is different. This sounds bad, but is it really? How hard can it be to evaluate differences in thought?

Suppose that we asked two professors for their thoughts about a certain graduate student. The first says “she’s turning out lots of ideas,” and the second says “she’s had a mental breakdown.” These statements are obviously different, yet they are nonetheless instantiations of the same conceptual metaphor—THE MIND IS A MACHINE—identified by Lakoff and Johnson (1999:247). Statements which appear different, even opposite, on the surface may actually be evidence of identical thinking.

And yet, those teachers’ statements are different, which leads to a second major limitation of frame-like concepts—the assumption of monolithicity. Frame-like concepts treat thinking as a unitary process which either is or isn’t the same across persons. More accurately, thinking is a complex cascade of neural activations, such that thinking could be both similar and different across persons, in different ways. For example, persons with different positions on a moral issue and different vocabularies of justification may nonetheless share certain “background” assumptions about the meaning of morality (Abend 2014).

Regarding frame-like concepts, Turner (2018:33–34) notes:

Cognitive science exposes the inadequacy of many of the clichéd extensions of common sense talk about mind used in social theory and elsewhere, notably notions that are useful for interpretation, such as “frame” ideas. Either these can be given an interpretation in terms of actual cognitive mechanisms or they need to be discarded and replaced.

In the next section, I outline an alternative approach for analyzing variation in thought that begins by considering the different cognitive associations responsible for producing observed responses. The primary advantage of this approach is it allows for sameness and difference to coexist in different forms and at different degrees of schematicity. In this way, differences are not established with all-or-nothing catch-all codes like “frames,” but located to particular associations which may have their own distinct causal histories. More generally, this entails rethinking thought as the activation of cascades of associations rather than single “frames.”

Beyond Frames

Moving beyond frame analysis requires a different theory of thinking. When researchers ask participants to perform some cognitive task, they are directing participants to create a response, rather than requesting the delivery of fully-formed ideas:

Our data don’t tell us about the static organization of others’ minds—they tell us about a potentiality that others have that can be used to accomplish certain tasks in certain environments. But that’s fine, since that’s what a mind is—it’s a set of potentialities, and not a cluster of statements, and our questions are tasks that can, if properly designed, evoke these potentials… People don’t necessarily have ready-made opinions. Instead, they often have an inchoate mass of ideas; the question you ask creates a task that requires the respondent to marshal her faculties and thoughts (Martin 2017:78).

These tasks may be understood as evoking bundles of associations. Some associations belong to the general task itself (such as categorization), and others belong to the domain in question (such as “sexuality”). The analytic approach I propose consists of identifying these different associations and observing the similarity or difference for each. Here I identify three kinds of associations common to interviewing tasks—schemas associated with the general task, objects associated with the domain, and object qualities associated with the domain—and discuss each. I use Brekhus’s (1996) findings on sexual identity as a case study.

Brekhus (1996) finds that Americans mark sexual identity along six dimensions: (1) quantity of sex, (2) timing of sex, (3) level of perceived enjoyment, (4) degree of consent, (5) orientation, and (6) the social value of the agents. Brekhus (1997) is primarily interested in identifying general dimensions of sexual identity and understanding the process by which these are constructed, but suppose we are interested in variation in thinking about sexual identities? To this end, we can identify the different kinds of associations activated when marking sexual identities.

Brekhus’s six dimensions of sexual identity are specific combinations of schemas, objects, and object qualities. Each of these three things may vary independently of the others, though they may be associated to a certain extent.

1. Schemas associated with the task

Marking sexual identity is a common kind of task, in that all marking entails assigning an object to a category. In terms of cognitive linguistics, this involves the activation of the CONTAINER image schema (Boot and Pecher 2011). Whether we are talking about identities, classification (Bowker and Star 2000), or boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002), we are referring to the same general schematic process—putting things in containers. At this level, we would expect no variation.

The task of marking sexual identity (and classification more generally) may simply involve putting someone within a container (e.g. “gay”), but it may also involve putting someone on a SCALE (Johnson 1987:122). For example, Brekhus notes that sexual identities are marked by quantity, degree of consent, level of perceived enjoyment, the timing of sex, and social value of the agents. Each of these is an instantiation of the SCALE schema. Thus, we may observe variation in the marking of sexual identity based on differences in the schema associated with the task. This variation is not the result of possessing or lacking SCALE and CONTAINER schemas, which are universal but result from a habitual association between a schema and the thing being marked (Casasanto 2017).

2. Objects associated with the domain

Brekhus’s (1996) dimensions of sexuality focus on three kinds of objects: the agent (e.g. their age, history, and social value), the agent’s partner (e.g. their gender relative to the agent), and the interactions between them (e.g. the duration of their relationship and degree of consent). Marking sexual identity may vary in by focusing on one or more of these objects rather than the other, but for this domain, these are the primary objects. If we were talking about some other domain of identity, the associated objects might be different.

3. Object qualities associated with the domain

Brekhus’s (1996) dimensions of sexual identity are based on specific qualities of the different associated objects. For example, an agent’s identity is marked based on how much they enjoy sex, or how much sex they’ve had. There is more room for variation here, and we can imagine even other potential object-qualities. For example, sexual identity could be marked based on the LOCATION of sex, whether it happens in the bedroom, or in a public space (e.g. “exhibitionist”). LOCATION, in this case, is a quality of the people engaging in sexual acts (“a person in this kind of space”).

Additionally, we can imagine new object-qualities by applying the SCALE schema in new places. For example, Brekhus discusses orientation in terms of CONTAINERS—what kind of person or thing you are attracted to—but orientation can also be marked in terms of quantity—how many kinds of persons are you attracted to? (e.g. pansexual). Similarly, sexual identity could be marked not only by the kind of partner in the relationship but the number of partners in the relationship (e.g. polyamorous).

Concluding Remarks

Taken together, this short exercise suggests the following:

  • Thinking tasks, like marking identities, activate multiple kinds of associations which may be analyzed as distinct processes working together.
  • Similarity and difference in thinking may occur in different ways (e.g. at the level of schemas, objects, and object qualities).
  • Similarity and difference may coexist. Responses that appear different may nonetheless be manifestations of the same basic structure (e.g. all instantiated by the same schemas and focusing on the same objects).
  • Cognitive difference may be established either by introducing new associations from other domains or recombining associations in new or different ways.

In addition to pinpointing where there is more or less similarity in thought, analyzing thinking in this way opens new questions for analysis. For example, If certain schemas are dominant for a certain task, why, and to what extent does this vary across persons? Why are certain schemas, such as SCALE, more commonly associated with certain objects over others? How does a person’s individual experience influence which bundles of associations are activated when ascribing sexual identities? The takeaway is that thinking does not happen via filtering frames, but the activation of multiple associations working together, and that by recognizing this fact and incorporating it into the analysis, we get a better understanding of culture and thinking and are better prepared to think about how thinking varies across persons, times, and situations.

References

Abend, Gabriel. 2014. The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics. Princeton University Press.

Boot, Inge and Diane Pecher. 2011. “Representation of Categories: Metaphorical Use of the Container Schema.” Experimental Psychology 58(2):162.

Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star. 2000. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press.

Brekhus, Wayne. 1996. “Social Marking and the Mental Coloring of Identity: Sexual Identity Construction and Maintenance in the United States.” Sociological Forum 11(3):497–522.

Casasanto, Daniel. 2017. “The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors.” Metaphor: Embodied Cognition and Discourse 46–61.

Fligstein, Neil, Jonah Stuart Brundage, and Michael Schultz. 2017. “Seeing Like the Fed: Culture, Cognition, and Framing in the Failure to Anticipate the Financial Crisis of 2008.” American Sociological Review 82(5):879–909.

Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harvard University Press.

Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy In The Flesh. Basic Books.

Lamont, Michèle and Virág Molnár. 2002. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28(1):167–95.

Martin, John Levi. 2017. Thinking Through Methods: A Social Science Primer. University of Chicago Press.

Small, Mario Luis. 2004. Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio. University of Chicago Press.

Young, Alford. 2004. “The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility.” Opportunity and Future Life Chances 23.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1997. “Social Mindscapes: An Introduction to Cognitive Sociology.” Cambrdge, MA. : Harvard University Press. 連結.