The Promise of Affective Science and the Sociology of Emotions

The sociology of emotions is a curious subfield. On the one hand, the recognition that the study of emotions (and their dynamics) overlap with nearly every single thing sociologists care to study suggests they deserve central casting in the myriad studies that fill journals and monographs (Turner and Stets 2006). On the other hand, the sociology of emotions remains stuck in neutral, waiting for the sort of “renaissance” experienced by cognition when cultural sociology “discovered” schemas (DiMaggio 1997) and dual-process models (Lizardo et al. 2016, Vaisey 2009). This sort of paradox makes some sense, for emotions, or what founding sociologists like Cooley called sentiments, have nearly always been a part of the discipline. Weber’s most important typologies included affectual action and charismatic authority; as early as The Division of Labour, Durkheim had emotions front and center in his theory of deviance and crime; and, the aforementioned Cooley premised his entire social psychology on pride and shame transforming self into a moral thing. But, simultaneously, the study or use of emotions in sociological analysis remained mired in false Cartesian binaries (see Damasio 1994) that propped up misogynistic commitments to dichotomizing cognition (masculine) and affect (feminine), while also being tainted by association with Freudian psychoanalysis.

The 1970s saw these old barriers erode, as social psychologists—especially symbolic interactionists of a variety of flavors—began to mine the emotional veins of self (Shott 1979), roles/identities (Burke and Reitzes 1981), situations (Heise 1977), structure (Kemper 1978), and performance/expectations (Hochschild 1979—for the sake of argument, I put Hochschild here even though she [so far as I know] nor I would really call her a symbolic interactionist). Over the course of the next few decades, the most important theoretical and empirical work explaining how and why solidarity between individuals, as well as between individuals and groups, is produced and maintained centered emotions (Collins 1988, 2004, Lawler 1992, Lawler et al. 2009, Turner 2007). These works drew from Durkheim and picked up threads of Goffman’s (1956, 1967) that “felt” more important than sometimes even Goffman let on, while often like Turner’s evolutionary work on emotions or Collin’s interaction ritual chains, borrowing from nascent brain science. But, beyond these, work in the sociology of emotions remained relatively the same as it had in the earliest innovative days while its contribution beyond the sociology of emotions was held back.

Omar and I (2020) have argued previously that one of the glaring problems is that the sociology of emotions remains rooted in the Cartesian separation of mind and body that haunts social science. Emotions are, generally speaking, treated as mediating variables—e.g., signals that one’s cognitive appraisal of a situation does not match the information received about the situation (Burke and Stets 2009, Robinson 2014)—or dependent variables—e.g., emotions are things to be managed through cognitive or linguistic work (Hochschild 1983). A third option, which also treats emotions as dependent variables, posits that relational patterns like superordinate-subordinate constrain emotions either by structural fiat (Kemper 1978) or via cultural beliefs about what incumbents in these positions should and can do (Ridgeway 2006). What if the next frontier for emotions scholarship considers emotions and affect (the sociocultural labels we learn and the neurophysiological/biological response to stimuli) as independent variables?

Some Important Facts

Studying an intrapersonal force or dynamic is not radical, as cultural sociology has largely accepted the fact that cognitive mechanisms are at the root of a theory of action (Vaisey 2009). Action is caused, at least in some way, shape, or form by cognition without doing violence to the social factors beyond the organism. Affect, however, remains on the sidelines despite several key facts.

  1. Affect, as a motivating force of motor response, is older than cognition (Panskepp 1998). Evolution appears to have worked heavily on the subcortical emotion centers in mammals to encourage both the active pursuit of life-sustaining resources and the avoidance/aversion to painful life-destroying resources. And, given the exceptionally enlarged emotional architecture in our brains (in comparison to our closest cousins, gorillas and chimps), it is plausible to suggest emotions played an outsized role in humans developing and expanding their cultural repertoire for language, kinship, social organization, and so forth. In other words, emotions have been causal, historically speaking.
  2. Undoubtedly, they are causal still today. First, the subcortical areas of the brain play an important role in memory (which is the root of a social self, for instance) (LeDoux 2000). Second, human brain imaging reveals that affect is not resigned to subcortical areas of the brain, but is actually deeply integrated with areas usually reserved for cognition (Davidson 2003). Emotions, then, can control our cognition and behavior, command it in some cases (e.g., a panic attack), and, at the very least coordinate with cognitive functions. Any theory of action that fails to account for affect is dubious is unable to realistically explain social or solitary behavior cognition (Blakemore and Vuilleumier 2017).
  3. Consequently, the vast majority of social psychological processes such as comparison, appraisal, or reflection as well as the vast majority of “causal” explanations sociologists employ like values, interests, or ideology are inextricably tied to affect. If we can no more make a decision about which toothpaste to buy without affect then we should not be surprised that comparing and choosing social objects requires affect as well.
  4. A point Lizardo and I make is that sociologists too often rely on cognitive appraisals of emotions, focusing on self-reports about valence (negative/positive), intensity, mood (longer lasting feelings), and psychologized language like loneliness. However, emotions are visceral, bodily things (Adolphs et al. 2003), and sociologists cannot only borrow from psychological research and methods on emotions.
  5. Emotions may be “social constructs” in so far as a given group of people produce and reproduce labels for different bodily feelings experienced in different situations and which carry different meanings about the (a) appropriateness of those feelings, (b) expectations for their expression or suppression, and (c) “rules” about the duration and intensity of situationally-triggered emotions. However, much of this applies to either highly institutionalized settings, like formal ceremonies (e.g., funerals), where ritual participants approach the “center” of the community and the center must be protected from moral transgression (Shils 1975) or routinized encounters where interaction itself is ritualized (Goffman 1967, Collins 2004). But the need for rules and expectations implies that affect, if left to its own devices, can wreak havoc. Moreover, it ignores the diverse array of solitary actions that consume a significant portion of our daily lives (Cohen 2015), as well as ignores the fact that emotions are often things others “use” as means of affecting others’ feelings, thoughts, and actions (Thoits 1996).

Implications

If my argument that emotion’s scholarship has largely stalled is correct, but emotions are central to individual and social life, what are we to do? Of the myriad directions one could suggest, I will emphasize four that feel most consanguine to sociological inquiry.

  1. The first suggestion picks up on a larger set of questions being raised recently by sociologists of youth and education around the largely abandoned conceptual process of socialization (Guhin et al. 2021). Once a central explanatory framework for understanding how a society “out there” could find its way inside each of us, socialization, like most bits and pieces of functionalism, was tossed out with the icky water. Prematurely, it would seem because it has not been replaced meaningfully, which has subsequently constrained a once-vibrant area of interest: child (and adolescent) development from a sociological perspective. Studying emotions and emotional socialization seems fruitful for so many reasons. For one, the rules and the patterning of emotions-behaviors is really only an adult trait. Childhood and adolescence is a period of unbridled affect, as anyone with a toddler knows well. How do we teach emotion regulation? How is this teaching process distributed across classic demographic and socioeconomic categories? How effective are social forces versus natural brain development for emotion regulation? What about teaching emotion dysregulation? Finally, the most interesting set of questions revolve around social emotions like guilt, shame, pride, and empathy (Decety and Howard 2013). At this point, sociology has ceded these culturally-coded emotions to psychological research, despite the unique methodological tools sociologists possess. For example, studying a high school’s ecosystem and status hierarchy seems an incredibly important pathway to understanding shame and pride, empathy and sympathy. Here, kids are learning, supposedly, the rules of the affectual game. Rather than reduce their experiences to DSM labels like anxiety or depression, why not expand the lens through which we view mundane and spectacular youth experiences?
  2. A second related, implication centers on what I would call emotional styles or biographies. Sociologists are familiar with these sorts of metaphors, as groups have “styles” (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003) or biographies shaped by a collective memory. These sorts of styles or biographies shape many things like the ways parents and children interface with teachers and the educational system more generally (Lareau 2003). Research has suggested that different personality types appear to correlate with different affectual “styles,” which suggests there is something neurophysiological about doing emotions (Montag et al. 2021). My best guess is that there are social forces that play a role as well, but oddly, mainstream sociologists rarely bother to ask about emotions—likely a reflection of the ingrained Cartesian binary and not negligence on the part of social scientists.
  3. Shifting gears, a third implication builds on the dual processes models approach (Vaisey 2009, Lizardo et al. 2016) and the elephant-rider metaphor. The metaphor itself is designed to explain how implicit cultural knowledge (the elephant) is largely responsible for the direction the rider takes. Deliberate, conscious action is possible but less impactful. But, what guides the elephant? To date, the answer has largely been deeply internalized values or nondeclarative knowledge, but how do we acquire those? How does the brain sort through the variety of potential ideas, scripts, frames, or schema available? And, once internalized, how does the brain choose between different schema or knowledge? Emotions are part of the answer, as affectually tagged memories are most intensely, most readily, and quickly recalled (Catani et al. 2013). But, the rider’s level of effort in directing the elephant is no less shaped by affect. In fact, emotions appear to have a dual process related to deliberate, intentional action as well (Blakemore and Vuilleumier 2017). On the one hand, internal, affectual sensations can become associated with patterned behavior, That is, recognizable affectual sensations signals “action readiness [in order to] prepare and guide the body for action” (p. 300). On the other hand, there are preconscious motivation systems that evolved to seek positive resources and avoid their negative counterparts. A child touches a hot stove and does not need their parents to teach them never to touch that stove again. Whenever they get near a stove they will become more alert and cautious. Of course, these aversions can become pathological (and no less conscious), leading to all sorts of strange phobias and disorders. The point, however, is that emotions are causal in two different ways for the rider, which seems an important addition to the dual-process models perspective, as does the consideration of how affect coordinates, controls, and sometimes commands the so-called automatic cognition that is the elephant.
  4. The final implication speaks directly to the methodological tools we use. For the most part, emotions are measured through self-report (Stets and Carter 2012), which often conflate cognitive appraisals of emotions with emotions and affect. I would point the reader towards highly innovative efforts, like those found in Katz (1999), Collins’ (2004), and Scheff’s (1990) work, respectively. All of these use some form of ultra-micro methods that make employ audio-visual technology, careful observation, and in some cases, linguistic analyses. But, these are simply a starting point, sources of inspired analytic strategy. Ethnographic techniques are easily repurposed to include emotions and affect, as careful observation of bodily display, language, and situational cues are hallmarks of good ethnographic work (Summers-Effler 2009). Even users of quantitative methods should think more carefully about how to ask about emotions, even if that means including basic questions for the sake of explorative social science.

In short, emotions remain central to understanding and explaining how we think and act, but also remain mired in antiquated notions of mind-body, rationality-irrationality, and masculine-feminine. Moreover, old insecurities surrounding the differences between psychological and sociological social psychology—which are simply microcosms of broader insecurities writ large in sociology—have generally prohibited the conceptualization of emotions as independent, causal variables, delimiting the directions the sociology of emotion may go. The next frontier, arguably, is incorporating affective sciences into the study of emotions, and allowing brain science to speak to sociology and vice versa.

References

Abrutyn, Seth and Omar Lizardo. 2020. “Grief, Care, and Play: Theorizing the Affective Roots of the Social Self.” Advances in Group Processes 37:79-108.

Adolphs, Ralph, Daniel Tranel and Antonio R. Damasio. 2003. “Dissociable Neural Systems for Recognizing Emotions.” Brain and Cognition 52:61-69.

Blakemore, Rebekah L. and Patrik Vuilleumier. 2017. “An Emotional Call to Action: Integrating Affective Neuroscience in Models of Motor Control.” Emotion Review 9(4):299-309.

Burke, Peter J. and Donald C. Reitzes. 1981. “The Link between Identities and Role Performance.” Social Psychology Quarterly 44(2):83-92.

Burke, Peter J. and Jan E. Stets. 2009. Identity Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Catani, Marco, Flavio Dell’Acqua and Michel Thiebaut De Schotten. 2013. “A Revised Limbic System Model for Memory, Emotion and Behaviour.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 37(8):1724-37.

Cohen, Ira J. 2015. Solitary Action: Acting on Our Own in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Collins, Randall. 1988. “The Micro Contribution to Macro Sociology.” Sociological Theory 6(2):242-53.

—. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books.

Davidson, Richard J. 2003. “Seven Sins in the Study of Emotion: Correctives from Affective Neuroscience.” Brain and Cognition 52:129-32.

Decety, Jean and Lauren H. Howard. 2013. “The Role of Affect in the Neurodevelopment of Morality.” Child Development Perspectives 7(1):49-54.

DiMaggio, Paul. 1997. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23:268-87.

Eliasoph, Nina and Paul Lichterman. 2003. “Culture in Interaction.” American Journal of Sociology 108(4):735-94.

Goffman, Erving. 1956. “Embarrassment and Social Organization.” American Journal of Sociology 22(3):264-71.

—. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon Books.

Guhin, Jeff, Jessica McCrory Calacro and Cynthia Miller-Idriss. 2021. “Whatever Happened to Socialization?”. Annual Review of Sociology 47:109-29.

Heise, David. 1977. “Social Action as the Control of Affect.” Behavioral Sciences 22(3):163-77.

Hochschild, Arlie. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85(3):551-72.

—. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Katz, Jack. 1999. How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Kemper, Theodore. 1978. A Social Interactional Theory of Emotions. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lawler, Edward J. 1992. “Affective Attachments to Nested Groups: Choice-Process Theory.” American Sociological Review 57(3):327-39.

Lawler, Edward J., Shane Thye and Jeongkoo Yoon. 2009. Social Commitments in a Depersonalized World. New York: Russell Sage.

LeDoux, Joseph. 2000. “Cognitive-Emotional Interactions: Listening to the Brain.” Pp. 129-55 in Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, edited by R. D. Lane and L. Nadel. New York: Oxford University Press.

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

Montag, Christian, Jon D. Elhai and Kenneth L. Davis. 2021. “A Comprehensive Review of Studies Using the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales in the Psychological and Psychiatric Sciences.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 125:160-67.

Panskepp, Jaak. 1998. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ridgeway, Cecilia L. 2006. “Expectation States Theory and Emotion.” Pp. 374-67 in Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, edited by J. E. Stets and J. H. Turner. New York: Springer.

Robinson, Dawn, T. 2014. “The Role of Cultural Meanings and Situated Interaction in Shaping Emotion.” Emotion Review 8(3):189-95.

Scheff, Thomas. 1990. Microsociology: Discourse, Emotion and Social Structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Shils, Edward. 1975. “Ritual and Crisis.” Pp. 153-63 in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology, edited by E. Shils. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shott, Susan. 1979. “Emotion and Social Life: A Symbolic Interactionist Analysis.” American Journal of Sociology 84(6):1317-34.

Stets, Jan E. and Michael J. Carter. 2012. “A Theory of the Self for the Sociology of Morality.” American Sociological Review 77(1):120-40.

Summers-Effler, Erika. 2009. Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thoits, Peggy A. 1996. “Managing the Emotions of Others.” Symbolic Interaction 19(2):85-109.

Turner, Jonathan H. 2007. Human Emotions: A Sociological Theory. New York: Routledge.

Turner, Jonathan H. and Jan E. Stets, eds. 2006. Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions. New York: Springer.

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

 

 

What is an intuition?

Steve Vaisey’s 2009 American Journal of Sociology paper is, deservedly, one of the most (if not the most) influential pieces in contemporary work on culture and cognition in sociology. It is single-handedly responsible for the efflorescence of interest in the study of cognitive processes by sociologists in general, and more specifically it introduced work on dual-process models and dual-process theorizing to the field (see Leschziner, 2019 for a recent review of this work).

Yet, like many broadly influential pieces in science, there’s an odd disconnect between the initial theoretical innovations (and inspirations) of the original piece and the way that the article figures in contemporary citation practices by sociologists. There are also some key misrepresentations of the original argument that have become baked into sociological lore. One of the most common ones is the idea that Vaisey introduced the dual-process model to sociologists or the “sociological dual-process model” (see Leschziner, 2019).

However, as my co-authors and I pointed out in a 2016 piece in Sociological Theory, the use of the singular to refer to dual-process models in social and cognitive psychology is a mistake. From the beginning, dual-process theorizing has consisted of a family of models and theories designed to explain a wide variety of phenomena, from stereotyping to persuasion, biases in reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making, categorization and impression-formation, individual differences in personality, trust, and so forth. As noted in the title of the two most influential collections on the subject (Chaiken & Trope, 1999 and its sequel Sherman, Gawronski & Trope, 2014), social psychologists refer to “dual process theories” and comment on their variety and compatibility with one another. In the paper, we proposed seeing dual-process theorizing as united by a broad meta-theoretical grammar (which we called the “dual process framework”) from which specific dual-process models can be built. In fact, Vanina Leschziner in the aforementioned piece follows this practice and refers to “dual-process models” in sociology.

We also noted that another generator of variety among dual-process theories is the actual aspect of cognition they focus on. Thus, there are dual-process models of learning, memory, action, and so forth, and these need to be analytically kept distinct from one another, so that their interconnections (or lack thereof) can be properly theorized. Although all dual-process models share a family resemblance, they have different emphases and propose different mechanisms, and core imageries depending on what aspect of cognition they aim to make sense of.

As we pointed out in the Sociological Theory piece, this means that the particular dual-process model Vaisey used as inspiration in his original piece becomes relevant. This was Jonathan Haidt’s (2001) “social intuitionist” model of moral judgment. Vaisey (correctly) framed his paper as a contribution to the “culture in action” debate in cultural sociology inaugurated by Ann Swidler (1986) in her own classic paper. Yet, the dual-process model that served as inspiration was really about judgment (what we called culture in “thinking”) and not action (although you can make a non-controversial proposal that judgment impacts action). Moreover, Haidt’s model was not about judgment in general, but about judgment in a restricted domain: Morality. Regardless, the key point to keep in mind is that the core construct in Haidt’s social intuitionist model was intuition, not action. Haidt’s basic point is that most judgments of right and wrong result from an intuitive and not a reflective “reasoning” process, and that post hoc moral “reasoning” emerges after the fact to justify and make sense of our intuitively derived judgments.

Oddly, and perhaps due to the fact that Vaisey’s paper has mostly been interpreted with regard to action theory and research in sociology, the fact that it built on a key construct in social and cognitive psychology, namely, intuition, has essentially dropped out of the picture for sociologists today. For instance, despite its wide influence, Vaisey’s piece has not resulted in sociologists thinking about or theorizing about intuition in judgment and decision-making, developing a sociological approach to intuition (or a “sociology of intuition”), or even thinking seriously about what intuition is, and about the theoretical and empirical implications of the fact that a lot of time we reason via intuition. This is despite the fact that intuition is a going concern across a wide range of fields (Epstein, 2010).

Here I argue that this is something that needs to be corrected. Intuition is a rich and fascinating topic, cutting across a variety of areas of concern in the cognitive, social, and behavioral sciences (see Hodgkinson et al. 2008) and one that could benefit from more concerted sociological attention and theorizing both inside and outside the moral domain. But this means going back to Vaisey’s article (or Jonathan Haidt’s 2001 piece for that matter) and re-reading it in a different theoretical context, one focused on the very idea of what intuition is in the first place, the theoretical implications that a good chunk of our judgments and beliefs come to us via intuition, while revisiting the question of where intuitions come from in the first place.

What are Intuitions?

So, what are intuitions? The basic idea is deceptively simple, but as we will see, the devil is in the details. First, as already noted, “intuition” is best thought of as a quality or a property of certain judgments or reasoning processes (Dewey, 1925, p. 300). Although sometimes people use intuition as a noun, to refer to the product of such an intuitive reasoning process (e.g., “an intuition”). In what follows I stick to the process conception, with the caveat that usually we are dealing with a process/product couplet.

So, we say a given judgment is “intuitive” instead of what? The usual complement is something like “reasoned” or “analytic.” That is, when trying to solve a problem or come up with a judgment, it seems like we can go through the problem step by step in some kind of logical, effortful, or reasoned way, or we can just let the solution “come to us” without experiencing any phenomenological signature of having gone through a reasoned process. This last is an intuition.

Thus, according to the social and cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman (2000, p. 109), “phenomenologically, intuition seems to lack the logical structure of information processing. When one relies on intuition, one has no sense of alternatives being weighted algebraically or a cost-benefit analysis being undertaken.” Jerome Bruner, provides a similar formulation, noting that intuition is “…the intellectual technique of arriving at plausible but tentative conclusions without going through the analytic steps by which such formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions” (1960, p. 13). When applied to beliefs, the quality of being intuitive is thus connected to the fact that judgments regarding their truth or falsity are arrived at “automatically” without going through a long deductive chain of reasoning from first principles (Baumard & Boyer, 2013; Sperber, 1997). In the original case of moral reasoning (Haidt, 2001), these are beliefs that particular practices or actions are just “wrong,” but where the actor cannot quite tell you where the judgment of wrongness comes from.

Notably, there appears to be a convergence among various dual-process theorists that “intuition” could be the best global descriptor of what would otherwise be referred to with the uninformative label of “Type I cognition.”  For instance, the cognitive psychologist Steve Sloman (2014) in an update to a classic dual-process theory piece on “two systems of reasoning” (Sloman, 1996) complains about the proliferation of terms that emerged in the interim to refer to the ideal-typical types of cognition in dual-process models (e.g., “…associative-rule based, tacit-explicit thought implicit-explicit, experiential-rational, intuitive-analytical…” 2014, p. 70), while also rejecting the usefulness of the uninformative numerical labels proposed by Stanovich and West, as these lack descriptive power. To solve the problem, Sloman recommends abandoning his previous (1996) distinction of “associative versus rule-based processing” in favor of the distinction between intuition and deliberation. These folk terms are apposite according to Sloman because they provide a minimal set of theoretical commitments for the dual-process theorist centered on the idea that “…in English, an intuition is a thought whose source one is not conscious of, and deliberation involves sequential consideration of symbolic strings in some form” (ibid, p. 170).

These definitions should already give a sense that intuition is a rich and multifaceted phenomenon, which makes it even more of a shame that no sociological approach to intuitive judgment, intuitive reasoning, or even intuitive belief (as it exists, for instance, in the cognitive science of religion) has been developed in the field in the wake of Vaisey’s influential article. One exception to this, noted in a previous post, is Gordon Brett’s and Andrew Miles’s call to study socially contextualized variation in “thinking dispositions.” Clearly, reliance on intuition to solve problems, make judgments, and arrive at decisions is something that varies systematically across people, such that an intuitive disposition is one such individual attribute worthy of sociological consideration.

In the remaining, I will comment on one core issue related to intuition, ripe for future consideration in culture and cognition studies in sociology, that follows naturally from the idea that people exercise intuitive judgment relatively frequently across a wide variety of arenas and domains, namely, the question of the origins of intuitions.

Intuition and Implicit Learning

Where do intuitions come from in the first place? Surprisingly, there is actually now a well-developed consensus that intuitions develop in life as a result of implicit learning (Epstein, 2010; Lieberman, 2000). This is a substantive theoretical linkage between two sets of dual-process models developed for two distinct aspects of cognition (reasoning and learning). In our 2016 Sociological Theory piece, we made the point that different flavors of the dual-process model result from whether you focused on four distinct aspects of cognition (learning, memory, thinking, or action). However, this work shows that there is a systematic linkage between intuitive reasoning and implicit learning (see Reber, 1993) so that we reason intuitively about domains for which we have acquired experience via implicit learning mechanisms. The linkage between intuition and implicit learning in recent work (e.g., Epstein, 2010) thus speaks to the advantages of distinguishing the different flavors of dual-process theories rather than putting them all into a non-distinct clump.

What is implicit learning? The modern theory of implicit learning has been developed by the psychologist Arthur Reber (1993) who connects it to Michael Polanyi’s (1966) reflections on tacit and explicit knowledge as well as work by the American pragmatists like William James. Reber defines implicit learning as “the acquisition of knowledge that takes place largely independently of conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired” (1993, p. 5). Essentially, implicit learning leads to the acquisition of tacit knowledge, which operates differently from the explicit knowledge acquired via traditional learning mechanisms. Importantly, implicit learning is involved in the extraction of “rule-like” patterns that are encoded in environmental regularities. As Vaisey (2009) noted in his original paper, this is precisely the sort of learning mechanism required by habitus-type theories like Bourdieu’s (1990) where rule-like patterns are acquired from enculturation processes keyed to experience without the internalization of explicit rules.

In this way, the connection between implicit learning and intuition links naturally with recent work in culture and cognition studies dealing with socialization, internalization, and enculturation (see Lizardo, 2021). This also clarifies an aspect of Vaisey’s (2009) argument that remained somewhat fuzzy, especially when making the link between Haidt’s social intuitionist approach and the work of Bourdieu and Giddens. In the original piece, Vaisey noted that Bourdieu’s habitus could be a sociological equivalent of the “intuitive mind” described in terms of the dual-process framework (and contrasted with the conscious or reflective mind in charge or “justifications”). The intuitive mind was usually in charge and the reflective mind provide conscious confabulations that made it look like it was in charge. In this respect, the link between Bourdieu and cognitive science Vaisey made was with respect to content: The contents of the intuitive mind described by social and cognitive psychologists were equivalent to the “unconscious dispositions” that Bourdieu thought made up the habitus.

But in linking implicit learning to intuition, we can make a more substantive linkage between the process via which habitus develops and the penchant to engage particular life domains via intuition. This is something that is closer to the dynamic enculturation model of habitus that Vaisey noted was developed by the anthropologists Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn when they explicitly liked  “habitus to the set of unconscious schemas that people develop through life experience” (Vaisey, 2009, p. 1685).

Thus, intuitions (product conception), as (one of the) contemporaneous contents of the “implicit mind” have their origin in an implicit learning process of abstraction of consistent patterns from the regularities of experience (social and otherwise). As Hodgkinson et al. note, “[i]mplicit learning and implicit knowledge contribute to the knowledge structures upon which individuals draw when making intuitive judgments” (2008, p. 2). If you think this is an unwarranted or forced conceptual linkage, note that the equation between implicit learning and intuition was even made by Reber in the original statement of the modern theory of implicit learning and tacit knowledge. According to Hodgkinson et al. (2008, p. 6; paraphrasing Reber, 1989, p. 232):

Intuition may be the direct result of implicit, unconscious learning: through the gradual process of implicit learning, tacit implicit representations emerge that capture environmental regularities and are used in direct coping with the world (without the involvement of any introspective process). Intuition is the end product of this process of unconscious and bottom-up learning, to engage in particular classes of action.

Note that an implication of this is that we cannot have “intuitions” about domains for which have not had consistent histories of implicit learning. Instead, absent such history, we will tend to default to coming up with judgments and decisions using explicit reasoning mechanisms (“type 2 cognition”). This means that experts in a given domain will likely have more intuitions about that domain than non-experts (Hodgkinson, et al. 2008).

Overall, the implications for the study of the link between enculturation processes and down-the-line outcomes and group differences in thinking and action of Vaisey’s original argument is one thread that sociologists would do well to pick up again. The aforementioned also speaks for the value of keeping different flavors of dual-process theorizing analytically distinct so that we can theorize their interconnections.

References

Baumard, N., & Boyer, P. (2013). Religious beliefs as reflective elaborations on intuitions: A modified dual-process model. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(4), 295-300.

Bruner, J. S. (1960). The Process of Education. Vintage Books.

Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (1999). Dual-process Theories in Social Psychology. Guilford Press.

Dewey, J. (1925). Experience and Nature. Open Court.

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834.

Hodgkinson, G. P., Langan‐Fox, J., & Sadler‐Smith, E. (2008). Intuition: A fundamental bridging construct in the behavioural sciences. British Journal of Psychology, 99(1), 1-27.

Leschziner, V. (2019). Dual-Process Models in Sociology. In W. Brekhus and Gabe Ignatow (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology. Oxford University Press.

Lieberman, M. D. (2000). Intuition: a social cognitive neuroscience approach. Psychological Bulletin, 126(1), 109–137.

Lizardo, O. (2021). Culture, cognition, and internalization. Sociological Forum , 36, 1177–1206.

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

Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Peter Smith.

Reber, A. S. (1989). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 118(3), 219–235.

Reber, A. S. (1993). Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious. Oxford University Press.

Sherman, J. W., Gawronski, B., & Trope, Y. (Eds.). (2014). Dual-process theories of the social mind. Guilford Publications.

Sloman, S. A. (2014). Two systems of reasoning: An update. In J. W. Sherman, B. Gawronski, & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual-process theories of the social mind (Vol. 624, pp. 69–79). The Guilford Press, xvi.

Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 3–22.

Sperber, D. (1997). Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind & Language, 12(1), 67–83.

Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review, 51(2), 273–286.

Power and thinking dispositions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cognitive Artifacts, Affordances, and External Representations: Implications for Cognitive Sociology

We use all kinds of artifacts in our everyday life to accomplish different types of cognitive tasks. We write scientific articles and blog posts by using word-processing programs. We prepare to-do lists to organize work tasks, and those of us who engage in statistical or computational analysis of data use computer programs to perform complex calculations that would be impossible to perform without them.

In this post, I argue that cognitive sociologists should pay more attention to cognitive artifacts and their affordances since many cognitive processes in our everyday lives cannot be properly understood and explained without taking them into account. I will proceed by first characterizing the concepts of cognitive artifact, affordance, and external representation. Then I will briefly discuss my recent paper which analyzes college and university rankings by utilizing these three concepts and the conceptual theory of metaphor.

Cognitive Artifacts

Donald Norman coined the concept of cognitive artifact in the early 1990s. According to his definition, a cognitive artifact is “an artificial device designed to maintain, display, or operate upon information in order to serve a representational function” (Norman 1990: 17). Richard Heersmink (2013) has more recently proposed a taxonomy of cognitive artifacts that includes non-representational cognitive artifacts in addition to representational cognitive artifacts. Here, I will rely on Norman’s definition and focus exclusively on representational cognitive artifacts.

Norman (1990) emphasized that the use of cognitive artifacts changes the nature of the cognitive tasks that a person performs—instead of just amplifying the person’s brain-based cognitive abilities—and, thereby, enhances the overall performance of the integrated system that is composed of the person and her artifact. For example, consider the case of organizing your daily work tasks by means of a to-do list, thereby transforming the cognitive task of remembering and planning your work tasks into the following cognitive tasks:

  1. writing a list of the relevant work tasks that may be ordered according to their relative priority or some other principle
  2. remembering to consult the list during the workday
  3. reading and interpreting the items written on the list one by one.

To-do lists enhance ones’ overall work performance during the workday, for example, by eliminating the moments in which the person thinks about what to do next.

From a cultural-historical and developmental viewpoint, it can also be argued that the uses of cognitive artifacts and technologies have transformed our cognitive lives in profound ways. Norman (1991; 1993) and many others (e.g., Donald 1991; Tomasello 1999) have emphasized that one of the distinctive features of our species is our ability to modify our environments by creating new artifacts, refining the artifacts that our ancestors have invented, and transmitting these artifacts to subsequent generations. Here is a relatively random list of some important types of cognitive artifacts that our species has invented: cave paintings, bookkeeping documents, handwritten texts, maps, calendars, clocks, compasses, printed texts, diagrams, thermometers, physical scale models, computers, computational models, GPS devices, and social media messages.

This list illuminates at least two facts. The first is that cognitive artifacts are not a recent innovation in human history since, for example, the earliest cave paintings date back to over 30 000 years and the earliest writing systems were developed over 5 millennia ago. The second is that most of these artifacts have developed gradually over many generations. Many researchers have also emphasized how new cognitive artifacts, tools, and technologies transform the embodied cognitive processes and capacities of people when they become integral parts of their everyday environments and cultural practices, including those pertaining to cognitive development (e.g., Clark 1997; 2003; Donald 1991; Hutchins 1995; 2008; Malafouris & Renfrew 2010; Menary & Gillett 2022; Kirsh 2010; Vygotsky 1978). Hence, cognitive artifacts and technologies are important for understanding historical and cultural variation in human cognition.

Affordances

The concept of affordance provides a useful tool for analyzing the properties of cognitive artifacts in the contexts where they are used. James J. Gibson (1979) introduced the notion of affordance as a part of his ecological theory of visual perception. Gibson writes that “[t]he affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (p. 127). Gibson’s theory addressed the question of how living organisms perceive their immediate natural environments and emphasized the action-relatedness of perceptual processes. Norman (1993: 106) extended the concept of affordance to the domain of human-made artifacts and technologies by arguing that “[d]ifferent technologies afford different operations” for their users, thereby making “some things easy to do, others difficult or impossible”. It is important to understand that the affordances of a particular technology or a cognitive artifact not only depend on its intrinsic properties but also on the user’s particular bodily and cognitive features, abilities, and skills. For example, a geographical map provides cognitive affordances for navigation only for those who can read cartographic symbols and compass points. In this sense, affordances are relational.

External Representations

Since cognitive artifacts serve representational functions, the notion of external representation can be used to analyze how the affordances of a cognitive artifact shape how its users process information. According to David Kirsh (2010: 441), external representations that are maintained, displayed, or operated by cognitive artifacts may transform our cognitive capacities in at least seven ways:

They change the cost structure of the inferential landscape; they provide a structure that can serve as a shareable object of thought; they create persistent referents; they facilitate re-representation; they are often a more natural representation of structure than mental representations; they facilitate the computation of more explicit encoding of information; they enable the construction of arbitrarily complex structure; and they lower the cost of controlling thought – they help coordinate thought.

Although not all cognitive artifacts do all these things, Kirsh’s list and his examples clarify that cognitive artifacts are not just external aids to internal cognitive processes. Instead, they tend to alter the cognitive processes of their users by enabling them to outsource cognitive tasks that they would otherwise have to (attempt to) perform internally and, in some cases, enable them to accomplish new cognitive tasks that would be impossible without using the cognitive artifact. In their recent article, Richard Menary and Alexander Gillett (2022) also emphasize that cognitive tools (or cognitive artifacts in my terminology) function as tools for enculturation, thereby transforming the embodied cognitive capacities of their users who participate in culturally specific cognitive practices (see also Hutchins 1995; 2008).

Implications: Explaining the Paradox of University Rankings

In my recent article (Kaidesoja 2022), I used Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder’s (e.g., 2016) case study of the U.S. News and World Report (shortly: USN) magazine’s law school ranking as a springboard to develop a theoretical framework for explaining the paradox of university rankings, by which I refer to the process where the impact of global and national university rankings has increased at the same time as a growing number of researchers has documented their methodological flaws and counterproductive consequences for university-based research and education (Kaidesoja 2022: 129-130). One aspect of the theoretical framework was my suggestion that the published league tables of university rankings can be understood as cognitive artifacts that provide specific affordances for their audiences to perform cognitive tasks. For example, the latest USN league table of law schools (see here) provides at least the following affordances to the decision-making of prospective law students who, it is plausible to assume, are all literate and numerate:

  • Affords them to perceive a hierarchical and transitive order represented by the spatial relations among the names of law schools such that highly ranked law schools are at the top;
  • Affords them to make unequivocal, quick, and easy comparisons between any two law schools in terms of their rank;
  • Affords them to coordinate information about the rank, location, tuition, and enrollment for each school;
  • Affords them to compare the rank of a university to its ranks in the previously published tables;
  • Affords them to share the ranking results with others (e.g., through social media);
  • Provides them with a stable object that affords joint attention and references in conversations (either in web-mediated or face-to-face communication) (Kaidesoja 2022: 144–145).

These affordances relate both to the visual features of the league tables and their functional properties as parts of the socially distributed cognitive processes that involve more than one actor. An example of the latter could be a situation where a prospective student justifies her decision to apply to Yale University to her parents by showing them that it is the best law school in the league table.

However, my argument was not that the USN ranking of law schools is the only factor that affects the decision-making of prospective students, since it is obvious that other things also influence this process, such as law schools’ distance to home, the financial resources of their parents, their career plans, and their own LSAT scores. Despite this, there is evidence that the USN ranking of law schools is an important factor that influences how many prospective students end up with their choices between law schools (see Espeland & Sauder 2016: chapter 3). It seemed to me that one reason for this is that the published league tables afford such perceptions, comparisons, and communications to prospective students that would be difficult or impossible without the league table. Hence, I hypothesized that the affordances of these cognitive artifacts are part of the explanation of why and how many prospective law students use the USN league tables to outsource part of their decision-making to the USN rankings.

I also argued that we must consider the embodied cognitive processes of prospective law students through which they interpret the ranking results since these processes motivate them to integrate the USN rankings as a part of their decision-making. By relying on Lakoff and Johnson’s (e.g., 2003) conceptual theory of metaphor, I proposed that prospective law students use the league tables of team sports as a source system for a metaphorical analogy guiding their understanding of the law schools rankings (that are also published in the league table format by the USN). My hypothesis was that the league table metaphor of this kind leads many prospective students to assume that – just like the competition between teams in a sports league – the competition between law schools for ranking scores is a zero-sum game, in which excellent quality is a scarce resource, and in which the quality is objectively measured by the ranking scores that determine the law school’s ranking position (Kaidesoja 2022, 141–142). Although these assumptions provide prospective students a way of making sense of the ranking results, they are quite problematic given the methodological problems and biases that are involved in the USN rankings, such as the fact that they overlook contextual differences between law schools, overemphasize competitive relations between law schools, and include arbitrary value judgments concerning the quality of law education (Espeland & Sauder 2016: chapter 1; Kaidesoja 2022: 143).

Moving Forward

In a recent paper on two traditions of cognitive sociology co-authored with Mikko Hyyryläinen and Ronny Puustinen (2021), we argued, among other things, that interdisciplinary cognitive sociologists, who emphasize the importance of integrating cognitive scientific perspectives to cultural sociology, have not yet systematically addressed cognitive artifacts and their affordances. Rather, most of them have focused on how culture influences the intracranial cognition of individuals. Without denying the importance of this project, we argued that there are good reasons to also consider the extracranial elements of cognitive mechanisms and begin to develop new theoretical and methodological approaches for studying the role of cognitive artifacts and technologies in social actions and cognitive development (cf. Norton 2020; Lizardo 2022; Turner 2018). I hope that my paper on university rankings provides some ideas about how one could develop mechanistic explanations that include both extracranial and intracranial cognitive elements.

References

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

Clark, A. (2003) Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Intelligence. Oxford University Press.

Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press.

Espeland, W.N. & Sauder M. (2016) Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability. Russell Sage Foundation.

Gibson, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Heersmink, R. (2013). A Taxonomy of Cognitive Artifacts: Function, Information, and Categories. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(3), 465–481. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-013-0148-1

Hutchins, E. (1995) Cognition in the Wild. The MIT Press.

Hutchins, E. (2008) The Role of Cultural Practices in the Emergence of Modern Human Intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363 (1499): 2011–2019.

Kaidesoja, T. (2022) A Theoretical Framework for Explaining the Paradox of University Rankings. Social Science Information. 61(1) 128–153. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/05390184221079470

Kaidesoja, T., Hyyryläinen, M. & Puustinen, R. (2021) 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/full/10.1111/jtsb.12341

Kirsh, D. (2010) Thinking with External Representations. AI & Society 25: 441–454.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003) Metaphors We Live by (With a New Afterword). The University of Chicago Press.

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

Malafouris, L., & Renfrew, C. (Eds.). (2010). The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind. McDonald Institute Monographs.

Menary, R. & Gillett, A (2022) The Tools of Enculturation. Topics in Cognitive Science: 1–25. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tops.12604

Norman, D.A. (1991) Cognitive Artifacts. In: Carroll, J.M. (ed.) Designing Interaction. Cambridge University Press, pp.17–38.

Norman, D.A. (1993) Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Addison–Wesley.

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, 45–62. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00075-w

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. London: Harvard University Press.

Turner, S. P. (2018). Cognitive Science and the Social. Routledge.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.

 

The Lexical Semantics of Agency (Part I)

The concept of agency has been central in sociological theory at least since Parsons’s (selective) systematization of the late-nineteenth European tradition of social theory around the problematic of “action” (Parsons, 1937). Yet, since the dissolution of the sociological functionalist synthesis in the mid-1970s, anglophone social theory has been characterized by little agreement about what the proper conceptualization of agency should be (Joas, 1996; Campbell, 1996; Archer, 2000). The hope of consensus becomes even more tenuous (and the debate more acrimonious) when theorists try to join their preferred conceptualization of agency to their favorite conceptualization of structure in developing so-called “structure-agency” or “structuration” theories (Giddens, 1979; Sewell, 1992). Despite the difficulty of the overall endeavor, most analysts would agree that coming up with a coherent conceptualization of the nature of action/agency is a worthwhile endeavor (Emirbayer and Mische 1998; Hitlin & Elder, 2007). 

In this post, I argue that the hopes of developing a unitary conception of the notion of agency (and, by implication, of the relation between agency and structure) are indeed slim. Yet, this is not for the reasons that most theorists propose. Rather than being the product of the inherent ambiguity of all social science concepts or just the sheer difficulty of dealing with something as elusive as human subjectivity, a coherent account of the nature of action and agency is elusive because most social theorists misunderstand the nature of concepts and conceptualization. Drawing on an approach that takes seriously the embodied, embedded, and perceptual nature of concepts (see e.g., Lizardo, 2013, 2021). In this and following posts, I argue that the notions of action and agency in social theory are systematically organized according to underlying idealized cognitive models of agency, which include the grammatical category of agency concepts, their primary domain of instantiation, as well as various metaphorical extensions allowing agency to be expressed as an ᴏʙᴊᴇᴄᴛ or a ꜰᴏʀᴄᴇ possessed by actors or as a ᴅɪᴍᴇɴꜱɪᴏɴ of the actions people do. 

What (Kind of Concept) is Agency?

I will begin by asking a simple preliminary question. When contemporary sociological theorists use the concept of agency, what grammatical category does the lexeme agency fall under? Theorists who think of theory in purely propositional or sentential terms seldom ask this question. This is because they buy into the idea that we can separate the way that we use words from what words mean. Here I draw on work on cognitive grammar and cognitive semantics (e.g., Langacker, 1987, 1991) to suggest that conceptualization and grammatical symbolization are not separable: Grammatical symbolization tracks the underlying conceptual representation. Changing the grammatical category thus changes the underlying concept you are pointing to. Examining the grammatical status of the lexeme agency when social theorists use the concept thus gives a window as to what the underlying conceptualization—e.g., frames and folk idealized cognitive models—of this theoretical term is among them. It also sheds light on possible changes in its core meanings over time or even within the work of a single theorist or set of theorists. 

To answer the first question: When theorists use the concept of agency, they symbolize it as a noun (e.g., different from symbolizing as an adjective, such as “agentic”). Moreover, one thing that is particular about the work of contemporary social theorists is that agency is not just any noun; it is a mass noun. The mass noun status of agency in social theory today can be quickly verified by the impossibility of pluralizing it without changing the meaning (Langacker, 1987). For instance, “agencies” may refer to a series of government offices, but not to the hallowed concept developed by sociologists to deal with the element of “freedom from constraint” or “capacity to change structures” in human action. In cognitive linguistics, the grammatical category of noun, in the most general sense can be defined as a term that designates “a region in some domain, where a region is defined abstractly as a set of interconnected entities” (Langacker, 1991, p. 15).

Mass nouns—such as water, anxiety, or money—differ from count nouns (a glass of water, an anxiety attack, or a dollar bill) mainly because the region profiled by the lexical term is thought of as unbounded, although possibly “distributed” in uneven or disconnected regions in its domain of instantiation. What is the domain of instantiation of entities referred to by nouns? The domain of instantiation of a noun is the realm of basic experience (e.g., space, time, mental life, social life, and the like) where the entities the noun designates can be found. We will see that the domain of instantiation of the most popular contemporary versions of the concept of agency is time.  

As noted, a central semantic feature of mass nouns is that they cannot be precisely counted. However, they can, however, be quantified, using so-called “vague quantifiers.” Thus, it is possible to say “some agency,” “more/less agency,” and the like. Construing an entity as a mass noun also imposes a series of other restrictions on the relevant conceptual content. The most important of these (see Langacker, 1991, p. 15), in addition to bounding, are homogeneity (all the “interconnected entities” that compose the unbounded region are thought of as interchangeable), contractibility (any sub-part of the abstract “substance” of agency is generally equivalent to any other subpart), and replicability (it is possible to produce more of the substance and the entity remains the same). A key conclusion of the analysis is that the “curiously abstract” (see Hitlin & Elder, 2007) concept of agency in social theory inherits all these properties, and acquires its curiously abstract status because it is largely conceived by theorists as a mass noun. 

Examples of the Mass Noun Conception of Agency

I have claimed that the “technical” concept of agency in contemporary social theory has two semantic characteristics that make it idiosyncratic; first, it is conceived as a mass noun; second, it is conceived as being instantiated in the temporal domain. Let us see some textual evidence that this is indeed the case in natural instances of conceptual usage among prominent theorists. 

Conceptualizations of agency as a mass noun, and the conceptual contrast between this construal and that of agency as a “count noun” are most clearly articulated in Giddens’s influential rendering of the concept:

‘Action’ or agency, as I use it, thus does not refer to a series of discrete acts combined together [sic] but to a continuous flow of conduct…involving a ‘stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the world’ (Giddens 1979: 55, italics added). 

First, analysts may find Giddens’s effort to note that agency is not a “series of discrete acts” but instead a “continuous flow of conduct” obscure, elusive, and unnecessary. Yet, this is a key conceptual move from the perspective of cognitive semantics; in terms of the ontology of abstract nouns in conceptual semantics, what Giddens is trying to say here is that agency is not a (countable) bounded ᴛʜɪɴɢ or object-like ᴇɴᴛɪᴛʏ (like a “discrete act”). Instead, agency is an abstract, unbounded ꜱᴜʙꜱᴛᴀɴᴄᴇ. This substance is continuously distributed (hence the reference to a “continuous flow”). Contrasting the “discrete act” and “continuous flow” cognitive models of agency is thus crucial for the point Giddens wants to make here.

This brings up a second question that is seldom explicitly posed by propositional analysts of agency: what is the domain of instantiation of agency as a mass noun? In other words, where does the unbounded, continuously distributed substance called “agency” reside? Giddens (1979) proposes an answer: The natural (prototypical) domain of instantiation of the concept of agency is time. Agency occurs in time. 

The intimate conceptual relation between agency and time is also clear in Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) classic article on the subject:

…[O]ur central contribution is to begin to reconceptualize human agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment). The agentic dimension of social action can only be captured in its full complexity, we argue, if it is analytically situated within the flow of time (963, italics added). 

Note that here, Emirbayer & Mische give us three distinct construals of the concept of agency: (1) agency as process, (2) agency as capacity, and (3) agency as dimension. Their conceptualization of agency is, therefore, not unitary, but combines different ways of conceiving the idea. These construals are incompatible concerning the underlying cognitive models they presuppose, and therefore, the definition of agency Emirbayer & Mische provide can best be thought of as a “conceptual federation” of the idea rather than a unitary construct. This is something that has not been explicitly noted in the secondary literature.

Nevertheless, Emirbayer & Mische’s process construal of agency is compatible with Giddens’s temporally distributed substance concept of agency as involving properties of a “flow” or “stream” of conduct (in time). For Giddens, the basic idea is that this flow of intended or contemplated acts can “change” the causal flow of events in the world. Just like Emirbayer and Mische (1998), Giddens sees time (the realm of process and change) as the primary domain of instantiation of agency as an abstract substance. 

Giddens elaborates as follows:

…it is a necessary feature of action that, at any point in time, the agent ‘could have acted otherwise’: either positively in terms of attempted intervention in the process of ‘events in the world’, or negatively in terms of forbearance (1979: 56, italics added).

Compare to Emirbayer and Mische (1998) who note that:

The key to grasping the dynamic possibilities of human agency is to view it as composed of variable and changing orientations within the flow of time (964, italics added). 

Thus, a key conclusion from this preliminary analysis is that there seems to be at least one “technical” concept of agency shared across various influential theorists in the contemporary scene, especially those subscribing to a “structuration” perspective. This is the idea of agency as a continuous abstract substance distributed in time. In a future post, I will examine other conceptions.

Why the Process Conception of Agency is Unbearably Abstract

Agency as an unbounded substance instantiated in time functions as a pleasing, even aesthetic theoretical “solution.” Yet, when theorists attempt to use this notion for the practical job of theorizing, they find it “curiously abstract” and thus conceptually unusable (Hitlin & Elder, 2007). 

The curiously abstract nature of the mass noun agency concept, as well as its limitations as a resource to “think with” should not surprise us. Abstract concepts have a direct or indirect grounding in embodied concepts (Grady, 1997; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), and mass nouns, especially those denoting material substances or fluids such liquids, gases, and so forth serve as the image-schematic experiential grounding for many abstract concepts and grammatical categories (Janda, 2004; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Thus, the mass noun status of agency builds abstraction by default. Count nouns, on the other hand, tend to point toward conceptual entities at the concrete end of the construal spectrum; contrast for instance money (mass noun) with a dollar (count noun). In addition, as work by Lera Boroditsky (2001) and others have shown, the target domain of time conceived on its own is hard to conceptualize without resorting to more concrete source domains. Instead, most “objective” conceptualizations of the temporal dimension rely on conceptual metaphors from the spatial and physical movement source domains to conceive of time, its passage, duration, calendrical, and the like. 

This means that the process conceptions of agency instantiated in the time domain are bound to be doubly abstract. Agency is conceptualized as an unbounded, continuous substance, and it is instantiated in time. This over-abstractness accounts for why this particular cognitive model of agency is of limited use to most social theorists (let alone applied researchers) despite the analytic elegance and seeming appeal of such formulations (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Giddens, 1979) and its status as an entrenched technical formulation in contemporary social theory.

Another key limitation is that the abstract substance version of the concept of agency is hard to compare, link or contrast to its favorite “opposite,” namely, the notion of structure, which is decidedly object-like at a conceptual level (Lizardo, 2013).  In other words, the mass noun status of the technical concept clashes conceptually with most default conceptualizations of social structure(s) which see the latter as  “concrete” (as in the standard social networks mantra), object-like, and countable. Accordingly, the process conception of agency embedded in time does not play well with conceptions of structure that try to keep these two abstract entities separable (Archer, 2000).

As noted, the reason the curiously abstract concept of agency is hard to mesh with the tremendously concrete concept of structure dominant in contemporary sociology is that the underlying conceptual bases of the (prototypical) notion of structure are not abstract substances, but concrete countable objects or ᴇɴᴛɪᴛɪᴇꜱ (Lizardo, 2013). This is the reason we can refer to social structures in the plural while preserving semantics (Martin, 2009), but not human “agencies.” In fact, this is the reason Emirbayer & Mische (1998, p. 966), after noting that in typical social theory structure “a spatial category rather than…a temporal construction,” attempted to recast the notion of structure—with mixed success—in temporal not spatial terms, essentially trying to shift the prototypical domain of instatiation of that notion so that it could fit with that of of agency. Accordingly, agency/structure theorists outside the structuration tradition (e.g., critical realists, symbolic interaction) reject conceptions of agency, such as Giddens’s but also by implication that of Emirbayer and Mische because these analysts construe agency as inherently embedded, and thus inseparable from an abstract temporal flow that cannot be “bounded” or cut into distinct, separable and countable “instances” (Archer, 2000; Hitlin & Elder, 2007). What is at stake here is precisely the conceptual status of agency as a mass or count noun. 

References

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

Archer, M. S., & Archer, M. S. (2000). Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge University Press.

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

Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023.

Giddens, A. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. University of California Press.

Hitlin, S., & Elder, G. H., Jr. (2007). Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency. Sociological Theory, 25(2), 170–191.

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

Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical prerequisites (Vol. 1). Stanford University Press.

Langacker, R. W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: descriptive application (Vol. 2). Stanford University Press.

Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Lizardo, O. (2013). R e‐conceptualizing Abstract Conceptualization in Social Theory: The Case of the “Structure” Concept. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.

Lizardo, O. (2021). The Cognitive-Historical Origins of Conceptual Ambiguity in Social Theory. In S. Abrutyn & O. Lizardo (Eds.), Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory (pp. 607–630). Springer International Publishing.

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

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.

Toward a Theory of Habitus Breakage

In the synthesis of theories of practice and predictive processing (here and here), it becomes clear that what concepts like habitus and agency mean cannot be separated from what prediction and objective probability mean. Habitus formation is just another word for learning probabilities and for making predictions accordingly. This implies that the more exposure we have to certain objective probabilities, as in a field configuration, the more objective will become our predictions, the more we will do what is expected, and the better we will anticipate what those similarly ensconced in the field as us can recognize as, appropriately, a “next thing to do.” But as, in this sense, our action becomes almost entirely a form of social action, it also loses its purely subjective imprint, which in probabilistic terms, can be redefined as its randomness, its unpredictability, and surprise. 

Rephrased this becomes the now classical question of whether a habitus can be broken or how, once acquired, habitus does not just become a determinative, “reproductive” mechanism. In probabilistic terms, this means that learned probabilities become limits of action and perception, which is not to say that action is fully predictable, only that we can find boundaries across which it will not go, perceptions which it will not perceive. For some, the fact that surprise is still possible negates the very presence of habitus (King 2000). For others, including Bourdieu (2000: 234) himself, the “relative autonomy of the symbolic order” is available to prevent the reproductive tendencies of habitus, by providing moments when objective probabilities themselves break and learned expectations no longer matter. This mimics objective situations (“critical moments”) when the loop really does break, and symbolic orders that have no specific grip on the world become just as likely as anything else to loop into the future. But we should not expect that this symbolic escape can be sustained as a replacement (Bourdieu 1988: chap. 5).

In this post, I want to suggest something different. In spaces of highly developed objective probability, “saturated with history” to such an extent that what can be done shows very little deviation from what has been done, an engagement with chance can allow for a form of habitus breakage. The space in question will be the field of art, which, so saturated with history, means that it is rife with reproduction and cliche. The interesting thing is that, in the examples below, some artists take note of this and engage chance in order to prevent themselves from being fully “objective” and therefore cliched. Such a standpoint on art-making can be described as follows, but this statement can easily be extrapolated toward a probabilistic theory of agency more generally:

If we consider a canvas before the painter begins working, all the places on it seem to be equivalent; they are all equally “probable.” And if they are not equivalent, it is because the canvas is a well- defined surface, with limits and a center. But even more so, it depends on what the painter wants to do, and what he has in his head: this or that place becomes privileged in relation to this or that project. The painter has a more or less precise idea of what he wants to do, and this pre-pictorial idea is enough to make the probabilities unequal. There is thus an entire order of equal and unequal probabilities on the canvas. And it is when the unequal probability becomes almost a certitude that I can begin to paint. But at that very moment, once I have begun, how do I proceed so that what I paint does not become a cliche? (Deleuze 2003: 93).

In the predictions that shape action, the artist will predict only what is already objective, which is to say, what is historical and has already been done. They will do this even as they try to do what is “improbable” as this is associated with artistic “worth” as the performance of creativity. As this suggests, to recognize an action as artistic requires some link to expectation: what one does is what is expected relative to those who are, likewise, oriented toward certain objective possibilities. More specifically, if we perceive only what we cannot predict, and if the experienced artist can predict most things about their own work, this means that they perceive less, which is a phenomenon that seems to follow from the acquisition of any form of expertise (Dreyfus 2004). Hence, art “experts” cannot help but fall into cliche and objective rationalization.

So how to break out of this? Consider the following description of what the art historian Yve-Alain Bois describes as “compositional art.” In this instance, the facts of composition are clear and speak directly to a specifically designed presence: 

Composition is an intended, ordered relationship of discrete parts, a relationship that suggests-that at once builds and needs-an interiority, a solid, plotted depth that fills both the artist as intentional actor and the visual field, however flat, that underpins the painting: one is an analogue for the other … Composition names the pictorial relationship of discrete parts across a field, parts arranged according to a visual order that both underlies the whole, and of which it-the painting as a whole-is an individual instance, proof of laws and orders … The composed object, the structured or designed one, appears right and it appears necessary and specific-because the ordered relationship between the parts of the object structure a relationship between the object and the viewer, and more, between vision as conception and the world (Singerman 2003: 131). 

Thus, what is composed is “flat,” “ordered,” “right” and “necessary.” It fulfills expectations. It can serve as proof of what art or a kind of art (a “style” or “genre”) should be. But all of this is exactly what non-composition attempts to work against, prevent and break. “Non-compositional art” is that which attempts to work against composition by finding its origin in what Bois calls the “motivation of the arbitrary.” 

For Bois, in the most prominent examples of this kind of art-making, the technique used serves as a direct analogue to inviting chance in, because it is precisely the inclusion of non-compositional, chance mechanisms (invited in) that make it possible to find this very peculiar kind of motivation. An example of this is the approach taken by the artist Ellsworth Kelly and his effort, in the 1950s, to “escape the weight of Picasso.”

What is there left to do in the wake of someone who has invented everything?  In this respect, at least, Kelly remains an American in Paris. Like Pollock and an entire generation along with him, he knows that, if he wants to accomplish anything, his first task is to escape the weight of Picasso. And since the latter cannot be outdone, the trick is not to try to outdo him. How? By eliminating the human figure, to start with which means not just refraining from producing effi­gies ex nihilo, but also not engendering them by displacement or condensation, since even at this little game, Picasso is unbeatable (he has a magician’s touch: not only does he have an infinite array of images in reserve, but he also has the ability to make something out of nothing) … But getting away from Picasso also en­tails renouncing all choice, all composition (Bois 1992: 16).

Thus, Kelly will set about evading Picasso by essentially trying to undermine his own compositional skills, or what we can appreciate as Kelly’s attempt to break his habitus as it can only reproduce objective possibilities that Picasso has done the most to define. Kelly first attempts a method of transfer, what he calls “transformed already-made” in which he simply sketches what is already there: “we are dealing here with a simple transfer—along the same lines as a photograph or an imprint … The raw material remains untransformed, but above all … it is almost untransformable: just try to make a human shape out of a grid!” (Bois 16). This includes sketching the lines of windows, seaweed, of objects seen in churches, of tennis courts, of street patterns, and most notably perhaps, of the awnings of a hotel (Awnings, Avenue Matignon). Thus in his answer to Picasso, Kelly can now say: “No need to play sor­cerer’s apprentice; the figurative intention is not a necessary con­dition of esthetic transubstantiation; art can be made without transforming anything, without having to re-baptise; anything goes.” The goal, as Rosalind Krauss (1977) put it, is to produce an “index” without a “referent” as the epitome of the figurative opacity of the modernist movement.

Awnings, Avenue Matignon, Ellsworth Kelly, 1950

Automatic Drawing: Pine Branches VI, Ellsworth Kelly, 1950

Yet everything is still too compositional for Kelly, and so his habitus breakage engages with a second stage. This includes a more forthright practice with chance mechanisms. He begins to sketch under conditions of sensory deprivation (with his eyes closed, not looking at the paper) a clear effort to not allow himself to predict his own perceptions (Automatic Drawing, Pine Branches VI). Yet the problem he encounters are that the drawings come out as “too perfect, testifying to an exemplary motor coordination, or they are illegible failures that Kelly is not willing to accept as such, first because they look more like straightforward clumsiness than the product of chance, and also because, a priori, there is nothing to prevent one from detecting ‘unconscious’ images in them, and thus falling back—the old surrealist saw—into figura­tion” (Bois 25). What he realizes is that the “aleatory as such does not so easily give itself up to the eye … for the strictest order of chance to manifest itself, it has to be opposed to the strictest possible order …” And so Kelly makes a third attempt at habitus breakage, now more systematic. In a series of collages, Kelly would use chance mechanisms for their composition: he would cut a drawing into identically-shaped squares and then glue them in an order that tries to reproduce the original composition. 

Cité, Ellsworth Kelly, 1951

As Bois puts it, “it is impossible not to notice the unpredictable character of the joints … the geometrical distribution ends up being ever so slightly disrupted …” (25). In arguably his most famous efforts in this direction, Kelly starts with a modular grid and, then, pulling numbers from a box and darkening the corresponding blocks in the grid, produces a representation of light flickering on the surface of the Seine River. In another engagement with chance, Kelly uses a stock of gummed papers he happened to discover in a stationary shop, and taking the small squares of color, arranges them intuitively within a modular grid, “using no system or scientific method except to proceed progressively from the grid’s lateral sides toward the center.” In still other collages he would number the grids randomly, number the colors, and then put the colored squares into their corresponding boxes. 

Study for Seine, Ellsworth Kelly, 1951

Seine, Ellsworth Kelly, 1951

Spectrum of Colors Arranged by Chance II, Ellsworth Kelly, 1951

Thus, in these works, “the system pre­siding over [them]  is in every case rigorous, but also conceived as a pure receptacle of chance. The notion of a systematic art flowed from the necessity of suppressing the arbi­trariness of composition, but the arbitrariness presiding over the choice of system remained. Kelly’s extraordinary insight was to counterbalance that of the system with the still greater arbitrari­ness of chance, so as best to eliminate all subjective determina­tion” (Bois (1999: 26). While this marks an attempt to get beyond and exterior to “subjectivity” in compositional decision-making, it is not an engagement with “end of author” approaches that would otherwise, in familiar fashion, emphasize structure or  signification, over hermeneutics and depth. Rather, as Bois’ emphasizes, non-composition appears in technique, as practice, and in this capacity directly engages with chance as the antithesis to “subjective decision-making” and its compositional effects. 

Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (on Light Ground), Francis Bacon, 1964

For other painters like Francis Bacon, the engagement with chance comes in the form of making “free marks” on the canvas, “so as to destroy the nascent figuration in it and to give the Figure a chance, which is the improbable itself. These marks are accidental, ‘by chance’; but clearly the same word, ‘chance,’ no longer designates probabilities, but now designates a type of choice or action without probability” (Deleuze 94). In the case of Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (on Light Ground), the white mark drawn to shape Dyer’s face and strewn across it, is exactly this kind of “free mark” that seems to prevent the painting, based on a photograph, from being figurative. In Painting, Bacon describes how he first tried to draw a bird in a yard, but it turned out to be a man with an umbrella: “Well, one of the pictures I did in 1946, the one like a butcher’s shop, came to me as an accident. I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field. … suddenly the lines that I’d drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion arose this picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another. … I don’t think the bird suggested the umbrella; it suddenly suggested this whole image.” In this case, the marks that Bacon made turn out to be free marks, as they seem to elude the initial predictions he was making of his own work, such that he would eventually produce what he set out to. And so he, instead, fills the canvas with free marks.

Painting, Francis Bacon, 1946

What is notable about each of these “non-compositions” is that, as examples of inviting chance in, they also demonstrate the evident connection between probability and action. Merleau-Ponty (1964) describes the painter Henri Matisse, having been captured painting with a slow motion camera, amazed at how deliberate his brushstrokes appeared to be from this vantage, when from his vantage they were anything but deliberate. Using this engagement with time, it became clear that while viewing the recorded brush-strokes, the viewer (and Matisse himself) could witness an “infinite number of data … an infinite number of options” as possible. “Matisse’s hand did hesitate,” as Merleau-Ponty put its, choosing among “twenty conditions which were unformulated or even informulable for anyone but Matisse, since they were only defined and imposed by the intention of executing this painting which did not yet exist” (46). 

It becomes evident that “art” or “painting” or “modernist painting” is not a structure of signification, though it still remains something that we can call objective. In this case, it is not Matisse’s creation; he, instead, works with it. But what he works with are probabilities, or historically-developed chances, ones that his hand transforms into something actual, that in some sense looks like it should, as he puts brush to canvas. This entire process, as Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, is not different from what happens when we write or speak. What we do not do with language is “dwell in already elaborated signs and in an already speaking world” and simply “reorganize our significations according to the indications of the signs.” In this rendering, there is no space for probability, because all possibilities have already been determined. In Bourdieu’s distinction, this is more accurately described as an apparatus that requires no motivation on the part of actors in order to use it, because objective rationalization so completely displaces all uncertainty.

This is a false picture, however, because a structure tends to ignore certain minor facts like what happens when we speak, and that as we do we engage not with pre-established signs the meaning of which is removed from probability. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “to speak is not to put a word under each thought; if it were, nothing would ever be said.” Instead, language constitutes a space of objective probabilities that our action (speaking, writing) can be oriented to and which, in this case, acquires its meaning at least partially through  the words we use to evoke our thought and make it actual (just as Matisse uses art to make his painting actual). Thus, the meaning of what we speak and write is at least partially determined by how probable or improbable our words are, what else we could have said given the objective probabilities of language at a given historical time, plus an interlocutor who has likewise learned those probabilities. 

Both language and art are objectively constituted by probability, and when we engage with them, we therefore “take chances” and engage with uncertainty. That uncertainty can widely vary both subjectively and objectively. When we have not (yet) formed expectations, or learned objective probabilities, we might experience lots of (subjective) uncertainty, even if what we are doing is not improbable (objectively speaking). By the same token, an objective uncertainty can apply to what we do because what we do is improbable (at least at the current moment). If we return to non-compositional art, we can better appreciate what it means to invite chance in as, in this case, a technique to interrupt a kind of self-feeding loop that occurs when expectations so perfectly match probabilities that it can only result in, as Bois puts it, “the communication of form.” To engage in non-compositional technique, then, breaks habitus by making chance decide what will happen next, where the hand will go next, what will be the next result, rather than a finely-attuned set of expectations that can, essentially, do nothing unexpected in relation to what is objectively probable.

 

References

Bois, Yve-Alain. (1992). “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti- Composition in its many Guises” in Ellsworth Kelly : the Years in France, 1948-1954. National Gallery of Art.

_____. (1999). “Kelly’s Trouvailles: Findings in France” in Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955. Harvard Art Museum.

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1988). Homo Academicus. Stanford UP.

_____. (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Stanford UP.

Deleuze, Gilles. (2003). Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Continuum.

Dreyfus, Stuart. (2004). “The Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 24: 177-181.

King, Antony. (2000). “Thinking with Bourdieu Against Bourdieu: A ‘Practical’ Critique of the Habitus.” Sociological Theory 18: 417-433.

Krauss, Rosalind. (1977). “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2.” October 4: 58-67.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964). “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” in Signs. Northwestern UP.

Singerman, Howard. (2003). “Non-Compositional Effects, or the Process of Painting in 1970.” Oxford Art Journal 26: 125-250.

From Dual-Process Theories to Cognitive-Process Taxonomies

Although having a history as old as the social and behavioral sciences (and for some, as old as philosophical reflections on the mind itself), dual-process models of cognition have been with us only for a bit over two decades, becoming established in cognitive and social psychology in the late 1990s (see Sloman, 1996 and Smith and DeCoster, 2000 for foundational reviews). The implicit measurement revolution provided the “data” side to the theoretical and computational modeling side, thus fomenting further theoretical and conceptual development (Strack & Deutsch, 2004; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Although not without its critics, the dual-process approach has now blossomed into an interdisciplinary framework useful for studying learning, perception, thinking, and action (Lizardo et al., 2016). In sociology, dual-process ideas were introduced by way of the specific dual-process model of moral reasoning developed by Jonathan Haidt (2001) in Steve Vaisey’s (2009) now classic and still heavily cited paper. Sociological applications of the dual-process framework for specific research problems now abound, with developments on both the substantive and measurement sides (Miles, 2015; Miles et al. 2019; Melamed et al. 2019; Srivastava & Banaji, 2011).

The dual-process framework revolves around the ideal-typical distinction between two “modes” or “styles” of cognition (Brett & Miles, 2021). These are now very familiar. One is the effortful, usually conscious, deliberate processing of serially presented information, potentially available for verbal report (as when reasoning through a deductive chain or doing a hard math problem in your head). The other is the seemingly effortless, automatic, usually unconscious, associative processing information (as when a solution to a problem just “comes” to you, or when you just “know” something without seemingly having gone through steps to reach the solution). This last is usually referred to as intuitive, automatic, or associative “Type 1” cognition, and the former is usually referred to as effortful, deliberate, or non-automatic “Type 2” cognition.

As with many hard and fast distinctions, there is the virtue of simplification and analytic power, but there is the limitation, evident to all, that the differentiation between Type 1 versus Type 2 cognition occludes as much as it reveals. For instance, people wonder about the existence of “mixed” types of cognition or iterative cycles between the two modes or the capacity of one mode (usually Type 2) to override the outputs of the other (usually Type 1). It seems like the answer to all these wonders is a general “yes.” We can define a construct like “automaticity” to admit various “in-between” types (Moors & De Houwer, 2006), suggesting that a pure dichotomy is too simple (Melnikoff & Bargh, 2018). And yes, the two types of cognition interact and cycle (Cunningham & Zelazo, 2007). The interactive perspective is even built into some measurement strategies, which rely on overloading or temporarily overwhelming the deliberate system to force people to respond with intuitive Type 1 cognition (as in so-called “cognitive load” techniques; see Miles, 2015 for a sociological application).

Another sort of wonder revolves around whether these are the only types of cognition that exist. Are there any more types? Accordingly, some analysts speak of “tri” or “quad” process models and the like (Stanovich, 2009). It seems, therefore, that field is moving toward a taxonomic approach to the study of cognitive processes. However, the criteria or “dimensions” around which such taxonomies are to be constructed are in a state of flux. As I noted in a previous post, moving toward a taxonomic approach is generally a good thing. Moreover, the field of memory research is a good model for how to build taxonomic theory in cognitive social science (CSS), especially since the “kinds” typically studied in CSS are usually “motley” (natural kinds that decompose into fuzzy subkinds). When studying motley kinds and organizing into fruitful taxonomies, it is essential to focus on the analytic dimensions and let the chips fall where they may. This is different from thinking up “new types” of cognition from the armchair in unprincipled ways, where the dimensions that define the types are ill-defined (as with previous attempts to talk about tri-process models of cognition and the like). Moreover, the dimensional approach leaves things open to discover surprising “subkinds” that join properties that we would consider counter-intuitive.

Accordingly, an upshot of everyone now accepting (even begrudgingly) some version of the dual-process theory is that we also agree that the cognitive-scientific kind “cognition” is itself motley! That is, whatever it is, cognition is not a single kind of thing. Right now, we kind of agree that it is at least two things (as I said, an insight that is as old as the Freudian distinction between primary and secondary process), but it is likely that it could be more than two. In this post, I’d like to propose one attempt to define the possible dimensional space from which a more differentiated typology of cognitive processes can be constructed.

Taxonomizing Cognition

So if we needed to choose dimensions to taxonomize cognition, where would we begin? I think a suitable candidate is to pick two closely aligned dimensions of cognition that people thought were fused or highly correlated but now are seen as partially orthogonal. For example, in a previous post on the varieties of “implictness” (which is arguably the core dimension of cognition that defines the core distinction in dual-process models), I noted that social and cognitive psychologists differentiate between two criteria for deeming something “implicit.” First, a-implicitness uses an “automaticity” criterion. Here, cognition is implicit if it is automatic and explicit if it is deliberate or effortful. Second, there is u-implicitness, which uses a(n) (un)consciousness criterion. Here, cognition is implicit if it occurs outside of consciousness, and it is explicit if it is conscious.

I implied (but did not explicitly argue) in that post that maybe these two dimensions of explicitness could come apart. If they can, these seem like pretty good criteria to build a taxonomy of cognitive process kinds that goes beyond two! This is precisely what the philosophers Nicholas Shea and Chris Frith did in a paper published in 2016 in Neuroscience of Consciousness. Cross-classifying the type of processing (deliberate v. automatic) against the type of representations over which the processing occurs (conscious v. unconscious), yields a new “type” of cognition which they refer to as “Type 0 cognition.”

In Shea and Frith’s taxonomy, our old friend Type 1 cognition refers to the automatic processing of initially conscious representations, typically resulting in conscious outputs. In their words, “[t]ype 1 cognition is characterized by automatic, load-insensitive processing of consciously represented inputs; outputs are typically also conscious.” (p.4). This definition is consistent with Evans’s (2019) more recent specification of Type 1 cognition as working-memory independent cognition that still uses working memory to “deposit” the output of associative processing. In Evans’s words,

While Type 1 processes do not require the resources of working memory or controlled attention for their operation (or they would be Type 2) they do post their products into working memory in a way that many autonomous processes of the brain do not. Specifically, they bring to mind judgements or candidate responses of some kind accompanied by a feeling of confidence or rightness in that judgement (p. 384).

For Shea and Frith (2016), on the other hand, our other good friend, Type 2 cognition, refers to the deliberate, effortful processing of conscious representations. In their words,

Type 2 cognition is characterized by deliberate, non-automatic processing of conscious representations. It is sensitive to cognitive load: type 2 processes interfere with one another. Type 2 cognition operates on conscious representations, typically in series, over a longer timescale than type 1 cognition. It can overcome some of the computational limitations of type 1 cognition, piecemeal, while retaining the advantage of being able to integrate information from previously unconnected domains. It is computation-heavy and learning-light: with its extended processing time, type 2 cognition can compute the correct answer or generate optimal actions without the benefit of extensive prior experience in a domain (p. 5).

By way of contrast with these familiar faces, our new friend Type 0 cognition refers to the automatic processing of non-conscious representations. Shea and Frith see isolating Type 0 cognition as a separate cognitive-process subkind as their primary contribution. Previous work, in their view, has run Type 0 and Type 1 cognition together, to their analytic detriment. Notably, they argue for the greater (domain-specific) efficiency and accuracy of Type 0 cognition over Type 1. They note that various deficiencies of Type 1 cognition identified in such research programs as the “heuristics and biases” literature come from the fact that, in Type 1 cognition, there is a mismatch between process and representation because automatic/associative processes are recruited to deal with conscious representational inputs.

For instance, Type 1 cognition is at work when Haidt asks people whether they would wear Hitler’s t-shirt, and they say “ew, no way!” but are unable to come up with a morally reasonable reason why (or make up an implausible one on the spot). Type 1 moral cognition “misfires” here because the associative (“moral intuition”) system was recruited to process conscious inputs, relied on an associative/heuristic process to generate an answer (in this case, based on implicit contact, purity, and contagion considerations), and produced a conscious output, the origins of with subjects are completely unaware of (and is thus forced to retrospectively confabulate using Type 2 cognition). The same goes for judgment and decision-making producing answers to questions when engaging in the base-rate fallacy, using a representativeness heuristic, and the like (Kahneman, 2011). 

The types of cognition for which a match is made in heaven between process and representation (like Type 2 and their Type 0) result in adaptive cognitive processes that “get the right answer.” Type 2 cognition refers to domain-general problems requiring information integration and the careful weighing of alternatives. In Type 0 cognition, this refers to domain-specific problems requiring fast, adaptive cognitive processing and action control, where consciousness (if it were to rear its ugly head) would spoil the fun and impair the effectiveness of the cognitive system to do what is supposed to do, similar to athletes who “choke” when they become conscious of what they are doing (see Beilock, 2011).

So, what is Type 0 cognition good for? Shea and Frith point to things like the implicit learning of probabilistic action/reward contingencies after many exposures (e.g., reinforcement learning), where neither the probabilities nor the learning process is consciously represented, and the learning happens via associative steps. As they note, in “model-free reinforcement learning can generate optimal decisions when making choices for rewards, and feedback control can compute optimal action trajectories…non-conscious representation goes hand-in-hand with correct performance” (p. 3). In the same way, “Type 0 cognition is likely to play a large role in several other domains, for example in the rich inferences which occur automatically and without consciousness in the course of perception, language comprehension and language production” (ibid).

Organizing the Types

So, where does Shea and Frith’s taxonomy of cognitive process kinds leave us? Well, maybe something like the dimensional typology shown in Figure 1. It seems like at least three different cognitive process kinds are well-defined, especially if you are convinced that we should distinguish Type 0 from Type 1 cognition (and I think I am).

Figure 1.

However, as I argued earlier, a key advantage of beginning with dimensions in any taxonomical exercise is that we may end up with a surprise. Here, it is the fact that a fourth potential type of cognition now appears in the lower-right quadrant, one that no one has given much thought to before. Type ??? cognition: deliberate processing of unconscious representations. Can this even be a thing? Shea and Frith do note this implication of their taxonomic exercise but think it is too weird. They even point out that it may be a positive contribution of their approach to have discovered this “empty” slot in cognitive-process-kind space. In their words, “[w]hat of the fourth box? This would be the home of deliberate processes acting on non-conscious representations. It seems to us that there may well be no type of cognition that fits in this box. If so, that is an important discovery about the nature of consciousness” (p. 7).

Nevertheless, are things so simple? Maybe not. The Brains Blog dedicated a symposium to the paper in 2017 in which three authors provided commentaries. Not surprisingly, some of the commenters did not buy the “empty slot” argument. In their comment, Jacob Berger points to some plausible candidates for Shea and Frith’s Type ??? cognition (referred to as “Type 0.5 cognition”). This includes the (somewhat controversial) work of Dijksterhuis, Aarts, and collaborators (e.g., Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006; Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010) on “unconscious thought theory” (UTT) (see Bargh, 2011 for a friendly review). In the UTT paradigm, participants are asked to make seemingly deliberate choices between alternatives, with a “right” answer aimed at maximizing a set of quality dimensions. At the same time, conscious thinking is impaired via cognitive load. The key result is that participants who engage in this “unconscious thinking” end up making choices that are as optimal as people who think about it reflectively. So, this seems to be a case of a deliberate thinking process operating over unconscious representations.

Berger does anticipate an objection to UT as being a candidate for Type ??? cognition, which itself brings up an issue with critical taxonomic ramifications:

S&F might reply that such [UT] cases are not genuinely unconscious because, like examples of type-1 cognition, they involve conscious inputs and outputs. But if this processing is not type 0.5, then it is hard to see where S&F’s taxonomy accommodates it. The cognition does not seem automatic, akin to the processing of type 0 or type 1 of which one is unaware (it seems, for example, rather domain general); nor does it seem to be a case of type-2 cognition, since one is totally unaware of the processing that results in conscious outputs. Perhaps what is needed is an additional distinction between the inputs/outputs of a process’ being conscious and the consciousness of states in the intervening processing. In type-1 cognition, the inputs/outputs are conscious, but the states involved in the automatic processing are not; in type-2, both are conscious. We might therefore regard Dijksterhuis’ work as an instance of ‘type-1.5’ cognition: conscious inputs/outputs, but deliberative unconscious processing.

Thus, Berger proposes to dissociate not only conscious/unconscious representations from deliberate/automatic processing but also adds the dimension of whether the inputs and outputs of the cognitive process and its intervening steps are themselves conscious or unconscious. Berger’s implied taxonomy can thus be represented as in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Figure 2 clarifies that the actual mystery type does not connect conscious inputs and outputs with deliberate unconscious processing (UT), but a type linking unconscious inputs and outputs with deliberate unconscious processing (the new Type ???). Also, the figure makes clear that the proper empty slot is a type of cognition conjoining unconscious inputs and outputs with deliberate conscious processing; this bizarre and implausible combination can indeed be ruled out on a priori grounds. Note, in contrast, that if there is such a thing as deliberate unconscious processing (and the jury is still out on that), there is no reason to rule out the new Type ??? cognition shown in Figure 2 on a priori grounds (as Shea and Frith tried to do with Berger’s Type 1.5). For instance, Bargh (2011) argues that unconscious goal pursuit (a type of unconscious thought) can be triggered outside of awareness (unconscious input) and also has behavioral consequences (e.g., trying hard on a task) that subjects may also be unaware of (unconscious output). In this sense, Bargh’s unconscious goal pursuit would qualify as a candidate for Type ??? cognition. So, following Berger’s recommendation, we end up with five (I know an ugly prime) candidate cognition types. 

So, What?

Is all we are getting after all of this a more elaborate typology? Well, yes. And that is good! However, I think the more differentiated approach to carving the cognitive-process world also leads to some substantive insight. I refer in particular to Shea and Frith’s introduction of the Type 0/Type 1 distinction. For instance, in a recent review (and critique) of dual-process models of social cognition, Amodio proposes an “interactive memory systems” account of attitudes and impression formation (“Social Cognition 2.0”) that attempts to go beyond the limitations of the traditional dual-process model (“Social Cognition 1.0”).

Amodio’s argument is wide-ranging, but his primary point is that there are multiple memory systems and that a conception of Type 1 cognition as a single network of implicit concept/concept associations over which unconscious cognition operates is incomplete. In addition to concept/concept associations, Amodio points to other types of associative learning, including Pavlovian (affective) and instrumental (reinforcement learning). Amodio’s primary point is that something like an “implicit attitude,” insofar as it recruits multiple but distinct (and dissociable) forms of memory and learning subserved by different neural substrates, is not a single kind of thing (a taxonomical exercise for the future!). This dovetails nicely with the current effort to taxonomize cognitive processes. Thus, a standard conceptual association between categories of people and valenced traits operates via Type 1 cognition. However, it is likely that behavioral approach/avoid tendencies toward the same type of people, being the product of instrumental/reinforcement learning mechanisms, operate via Shea and Frith’s Type 0 cognition.

References

Bargh, J. A. (2011). Unconscious Thought Theory and Its Discontents: A Critique of the Critiques. Social Cognition, 29(6), 629–647.

Beilock, S. L. (2011). Choke. The secret of performing under pressure. London: Constable.

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

Cunningham, W. A., & Zelazo, P. D. (2007). Attitudes and evaluations: a social cognitive neuroscience perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(3), 97–104.

Dijksterhuis, A., & Aarts, H. (2010). Goals, attention, and (un)consciousness. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 467–490.

Evans, J. S. B. T. (2019). Reflections on reflection: the nature and function of type 2 processes in dual-process theories of reasoning. Thinking & Reasoning, 25(4), 383–415.

Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2006). Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: an integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change. Psychological Bulletin, 132(5), 692–731.

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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

Melamed, D., Munn, C. W., Barry, L., Montgomery, B., & Okuwobi, O. F. (2019). Status Characteristics, Implicit Bias, and the Production of Racial Inequality. American Sociological Review, 84(6), 1013–1036.

Melnikoff, D. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2018). The mythical number two. Trends in cognitive sciences, 22(4), 280-293.

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

Miles, A., Charron-Chénier, R., & Schleifer, C. (2019). Measuring Automatic Cognition: Advancing Dual-Process Research in Sociology. American Sociological Review, 84(2), 308–333.

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

Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 3.-22

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.

Srivastava, S. B., & Banaji, M. R. (2011). Culture, Cognition, and Collaborative Networks in Organizations. American Sociological Review, 76(2), 207–233.

Stanovich, K. E. (2009). Distinguishing the reflective, algorithmic, and autonomous minds: Is it time for a tri-process theory? In J. S. B. T. Evans (Ed.), In two minds: Dual processes and beyond , (pp (Vol. 369, pp. 55–88). Oxford University Press.

Strack, F., & Deutsch, R. (2004). Reflective and impulsive determinants of social behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review: An Official Journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, 8(3), 220–247.

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

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.

Beyond Cultural Clumps

Clumppity-Clump

Traditional approaches to the study of culture begin with “cultural clumps” and theorize from there. Like the devil, these clumps have been given many names throughout history. For instance, the unqualified use of the term “culture,” from Tylor’s famous definition onward, is usually meant to refer to such a mega clump. But others also use the term “system,” “pattern,” “worldview,” “national character,” and the like to refer to their favorite clump. The only difference is that sometimes the clumps are homogeneous (where the agglomerated parts are all the same kind, such as “beliefs,” or “symbols,”). Other times, as with Tylorian/Boasian definitions, the clumps are heterogeneous, including everything learned and made by people (e.g., “the cultural heritage”), whether mental or material (Bidney, 1968).

In previous posts, I have proposed a different approach: Rather than beginning with clumpy “culture concepts,” start your theorizing with cultural kinds, which are the component pieces out of which cultural clumps are made, not with the clumps. This makes the existence of cultural clumps into an empirical, not an analytic issue. It also shifts the analytic attention of cultural analysis to token examples of the kinds (e.g., a given belief, schema, practice, artifact). Following what is already standard practice in empirical work, we should study specific instances of cultural kinds (e.g., the belief in witches in seventeenth-century Salem), not (usually non-existent or spurious) cultural clumps.

The problems with the cultural clump approach are many and will not be rehearsed in detail here (see, e.g., Turner, 1994; Bourdieu, 1973). These include an ontologically incoherent holism, the unjustified projection of hard to establish (e.g., “downward”) causal power to such spurious cultural wholes, and the like. In this respect, the entire “culture concept” tradition has been an analytic failure to the extent that theorizing about holistic culture clumps (e.g., “systems,” “patterns,” worldviews,” and the like) was the point of departure rather than one possible endpoint. As noted before, most “culture concepts” are (usually doomed) packages of ontic claims not redeemable in any respectable sense. In this sense, “culture concepts” should be abandoned as a starting point for theorizing cultural analysis. Instead, we should stick to studying the actual things that we are interested in. Those things are cultural kinds, not culture concepts. Of course, we can always define the kinds if we like, but we could just point to them if we are stumped.

Does this mean that clumps do not exist? Of course not. Cultural kinds do have the dispositional capacity to come together into clumps. However, none of these clumps will ever be so gigantic as to meet the criteria of the “worldviews,” and “Weltanschauungen” of the old culture clump approach (e.g., encompassing populations in the thousands or millions). Although specific token kinds (e.g., the daily practice of salah among Muslims) can and do reach these distributional scales (Anderson, 1991). So cultural analysts in the social sciences do study clumps. Still, likely, such clumps will seldom go beyond the scale of the “mesolevel” (Rinaldo & Guhin, 2019). Most will be downright “micro” (Fine, 1979). Just like socialism, really existing cultural clumps are smaller, less powerful, and less all-pervasive than previously thought, but that also means we can study them.

So, what are the different clumps? We can proceed to typologize the relevant kinds of clumps we are likely to encounter using our previous typology of cultural kinds. For instance, when it comes to the culture people can internalize, we can distinguish between declarative sentence-sized beliefs people can assent to (e.g., “in America, everyone can make it if they work hard enough”), and nondeclarative practices or skills. So, that means that ideally, there should be at least two types of culture clumps. Clumps made up of various pieces of “knowledge-that,” and clumps made up of multiple pieces of “knowledge-how.”

Belief Systems

The first kind of culture clump, belief systems made from propositions meshed into webs of implication, is a classic of cultural analysis (Archer, 1995). In fact, it may be the uber clump (e.g., the “prototypical” culture clump) having played a central role in some of the most influential (e.g., functionalist) lines of cultural theory in the mid-twentieth century. For instance, the idea of a belief system, still popular in both sociology and political science, is the culture-clump that emerges when various pieces of knowledge-that come to be linked together.

Today, the folk (and some analytic) conceptions of culture are based on the belief system imagery. So, when we say, “in this culture,” things are done this way or that, we mean something like “within the ambit of this particular belief system shared by these people here.” Other lines of cultural analysis reject sentence-like beliefs as the units and go for “word-sized” concepts instead, but retain the basic holistic culture clump imagery. For instance, Sausserian approaches to “symbol systems,” (e.g., Leach, 1976) conceive of culture as a set of semiotic elements (words, concepts) linked together by webs of semantic relations (e.g., antonymy, synonymy, hyponymy, and the like). So if a semiotic “cultural logic” reigns over a given collective (e.g., the American code of civil society), it is presumed to be coherent, shared, and the like, at scale.

As Turner (1994) has noted, there is also an entire tradition of cultural analysis positing various types of clumps (e.g., worldviews and the like), seemingly made up of interlinked sets of “assumptions” and “presuppositions,” except that they live in some (incoherent) “implicit” or “tacit” compartment of the collective mind. As I’ve argued before, this is also a non-starter. So, the whole “collective-presuppositional” tradition of analysis is just another version of the belief-system-style culture clump (but with even more extravagant and indefensible ontic claims), as are some lines of Weberian interpretation that rely on the “world image” concept (Strand & Lizardo, 2015).

Overall, it is unlikely that you are talking about anything if you are talking about any of these clumps. Empirical studies of belief systems in sociology, political science, and the cognitive science of religion show that consistent belief systems are scarce and hard to maintain. If they exist, it is not at the scale imagined by traditional culture clump theory. Instead, pristine, elaborate, and well-connected belief systems tend to exist among numerical minorities. These are usually motivated experts who have a lot of time and energy to invest in maintaining and making explicit all the logical links, expunging contradictions, and the like (e.g., in the Conversian tradition in political science, these are political elites, and in religious studies, these are religious professionals; in most empirical studies of “cultural logics” these are also shared within the ambit of particular professions like journalists). At the folk level, belief systems are fragmented and inconsistent, with any linkages (to the extent they exist) due not to deductive logic but to non-rational or a-rational factors like political identity, heuristics, or ingroup/outgroup dynamics (Boutyline & Vaisey, 2017). This frees up (survey, interview) researchers to just study the cultural kinds (e.g., the specific beliefs or attitudes) themselves à la carte without buying them wholesale as necessarily coherent sets of belief systems (e.g., Kiley & Vaisey, 2020; Vaisey & Lizardo, 2016).

Habitus

But what about clumps made of nondeclarative pieces of know-how? This kind of clump has not had as storied a career in cultural analysis as the belief system type. In fact, only one prominent theorist has argued for the existence of this type of clump. I refer to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which, as initially defined, was indeed proposed as a culture clump (Bourdieu, 1990). However, Bourdieu was self-consciously reacting against the anthropological versions of the clumps discussed earlier (both in its belief-systems functionalist form and its semiotic system Sausserian/Levi-Straussian forms). As an alternative, Bourdieu proposed a culture clump made of a different kind of cultural kind. Not sentence-sized beliefs or word-sized symbols, but action-sized pieces of bodily know-how, nondeclarative skills, and abilities linked together to form a clump-like system he called habitus; the culture clump everyone loves to hate.

There is some confusion whether the habitus is a culture clump at all because Bourdieu was so adamant about distinguishing his clump from the anthropologists’ clumps that he suggested that the habitus had nothing to do with the “culture concept” because he equated that to clumps made of beliefs and symbols (Lizardo, 2011). Today we are smart enough to recognize that practices, skills, and the like are bona fide cultural kinds (Reckwitz, 2002), so we can qualify Bourdieu’s proposal. Habitus is a culture clump, it is just a clump whose cultural components are habits, which is a bit counter-intuitive at first, but now we are used to it. However, as a culture clump, the habitus has all the defects and weaknesses of all culture clump concepts:

  1. It is a “holistic” concept, so people begin with the clump rather than study the kinds (e.g., the actual habits the habitus is made of).
  2. The concept takes the clumping for granted instead of giving us a story of where the clump from comes in the first place (habits are assumed to be clumped into a system ex ante).
  3. The clump is applied so that its scale ends up being way more extensive than the clump can credibly handle (so that entire classes and even nations (!!!) have a “habitus“).

Predictably, post-Bourdieusian theorists have just “deconstructed the clump,” pointing out that the habitus (within people) can be cleft, split, fragmented, clivé, and the like; in addition, across people, collectives seldom share a homogeneous habitus, with diversity in habits within-groups and cross-cutting overlaps between-groups being the rule rather than the exception (Lahire, 2011). So, we are left with the pieces (this or that habit or skill) without having to force them into coherent systems where they fit together harmoniously. Theoretically, this is not as dramatic as discovery or theoretical advance as some claim, since “deconstructing the clump” is precisely the story of post-functionalist theory in sociology and anthropology (e.g., Swidler, 2001; Hannerz, 1992).

The recipe is easy. Suppose you give me a culture clump (regardless of what it is made of). In that case, it is easier to show out that it is fragmented, inconsistent, and the like than to show that it is a highly structured holistic entity. The reason for that is that proposing a clump exists is always a stronger claim than suggesting a given standalone component’s existence and causal efficacy. At the end of the post, I will provide you with one reason why.

For instance, the proposition “Americans hate welfare because they believe that with hard work they can make it,” is much easier to defend empirically than saying, “Americans hate welfare because they have imbibed an entire neoliberal ideology composed of hundreds of beliefs linked together by chains of logical implication, and their hating of welfare follows as a strict deduction from the high-level principles up in the chain.” Of course, trying to establish the empirical validity of this last is a hopeless undertaking. But the first hypothesis has a fighting chance. This hypothesis will moreover be consistent with the fact that the same person who hates welfare because they think that with hard work they can make it can also tell you in the next breath that they believe the game is rigged for the little guy like themselves by college professors and other elites, without their hating of welfare because they think that with hard work they can make it, being in the least impinged by the fact that college professors, whose median salary is way smaller than this person’s, are standing in the way of their dreams. 

Note that in this last respect, any “critical” theory of “ideology,” in which this last is just a giant culture clump composed of a bunch of interlinked beliefs, will fail for the same analytic reasons as vanilla functionalist culture clump theory. Thus, regardless of whether you are a happy functionalist who likes the existing state of affairs, or an angry Jacobin who would like the revolution tomorrow, if you live by the clump, you die by the clump.

Regardless, deconstructing the habitus clump has been empirically liberating because it has allowed researchers to just study how particular skills and abilities are acquired in a social context without having to worry about fitting those specific pieces of know-how into a larger habitus-like clump (e.g., Cornelissen, 2016). Ultimately, habitus is a failed concept not because it proposed the (still generative!) idea that pieces of know-how could (theoretically) come together to form soft-assembled systems, but because it took such systems for granted and began their theorizing from there. Just like post-functionalist theory, it is better to follow the post-Bourdieusian clump-deconstructors and point out that splitting, fragmentation, and the like is the norm and that if you end up finding some very coherent set of skills and abilities clumped together into a giant coherent habitus, then you better explain how that happened because that is the actual puzzle.

Clumps versus Entropy

Given the vicissitudes of both know-that clumps and know-how clumps, it seems like we can derive a general lesson for why culture clumps have struggled so much in the history of cultural theorizing. Overall, the moral of the story seems to be to not take clumps as pre-existing analytic entities, take their clumpiness (if it exists) as a puzzle to be explained, and assume that the “normal” state is not clumpiness but disorganization, such that the clumping of cultural kinds into anything resembling a coherent system becomes the explanatory puzzle.

The general proposal goes as follows. Begin with the kinds themselves (more accurately specific tokens thereof) and follow them into the field (or the RStudio interface) to see if they do indeed clump together with others of their kind (or with different kinds altogether!). What we don’t want to do is begin with clumps or “clump concepts” that allegedly tell you about the clumps and their mystical powers over people via ex-ante argumentation. The primary point is that, even if the cultural kinds you follow don’t end up assembling into clumps, you still have something to study. It is a fallacy to think that culture can only be causally powerful, Power Rangers style, only when assembled into giant clumps. Instead, token cultural kinds by themselves have causal powers; whether they come together into clumps is incidental. A single belief or habit can be causally powerful on its own (think of your Twitter habit) independently of whether it is part of a more extensive belief system, cultural logic, or habitus. 

From this, it follows that even if you were to find and describe a coherent culture clump located at an appropriate mesolevel (e.g., the habitus of French humanities Professors who live in Paris), you should probably also consider all the centripetal forces operating to fragment, split, or otherwise bring disorganization to the clump in question so that the various pieces of the clump go all in their different ways (Cornelissen, 2016).

This last set of considerations give us a clue as to why it is not a good idea to take clumps for granted. Borrowing a generative idea from the work of Terry McDonnell (2016), it is time cultural analysts place the kinds they study within the context of entropy. Things, including cultural things, tend toward disorder and disorganization. That means it is always cheaper to say “this belief exists,” or “some percentage of Americans believe this,” than to say “Americans are under the sway of an individualist ideology.” Following the logic of entropy, the latter would be probabilistically less likely because to keep together a pristine ideology in which the number of logical or inferential links increases exponentially in the number of elements, shared in a population of hundreds, thousands, or millions, just sounds utterly insane and improbable. Too many factors are working against it. People are learning and unlearning that, forgetting this, motivated-reasoning their way to this other thing (Sperber, 2011).

That means that pockets of coherence and clumpiness, where they exist, are deserving of study because there you will have both a causal genetic story to tell (how did this set of beliefs clump emerge from a disorganized collection of considerations?) and a synchronic entropy-negating story to tell (how is this belief maintained so that its clumpiness and organization persist?). Note that both questions also apply to habitus-style know-how clumps. Moreover, both questions play to the comparative strengths of sociological work, since we know that while a given individual may struggle to sustain a coherent belief system or a coherent habitus on their own, this becomes easier when embedded in fields endowed with institutional structures, authority figures, interpersonal relationships and the like (Rawlings, 2020).

Outside-in versus Inside-out (Again)

Here I want to reiterate that this outside-in story is not a general-purpose story of the causal power of culture. Instead, it is a special-purpose story of where cultural clumps (if they exist) might come from and what social mechanisms help sustain them (Sewell, 2005; Swidler, 2001). It has been an analytic mistake to sell these special-purpose outside-in stories as general substitutes for how “culture” (in general) works. The problem is that this over-generalization of the outside-in story takes away all causal power from internalized cultural kinds (Vaisey, 2008). As noted earlier, this is a fallacy; cultural kinds can be causally powerful on their own, so that a single belief, attitude, or nondeclarative disposition links to action (from the inside-out) without having to be part of a larger clump and without having to fit with or be consistent with the other cultural kinds the same person has internalized (Lizardo, 2017).

So whether “cultural kinds affect action,” is an entirely disjoint question from “what are the mechanisms by which cultural kinds come to form coherent clumps.” For the former, a pure outside-in story is an overreach; for the latter, it is an excellent place to start. As noted, there are now well-established, and long-running lines of work in cultural analysis showing that cultural kinds (specific beliefs, attitudes, or know-how) can affect action from the inside-out independently of their membership in clumps, so answering this question in the affirmative is not a negation of the idea that outside-in mechanisms might be essential for the formation and maintenance of entropy-defying culture clumps at micro and mesolevels.

However, questions remain. Are belief systems made of sentence-sized kinds and habituses made up action-sized habits the only culture clumps that exist? Are all culture clumps affected by entropic forces to the same extent? Do we need to postulate distinct mechanisms keeping the different clumps together? These will be the subject of future posts.

References

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