CHAPTER 15

Why Cognitive (and Cultural) Sociology Needs Cognitive Psychology Paul DiMaggio
Cognitive sociology is a grow ing field. Growth leads to differentiation, and cognitive sociology is no exception. Within cognitive sociology, w e can distinguish tw o dimensions. The first dimension (horizontal in Figure 15-1) counterposes w ork that focuses on how w e think to w ork that focuses on the content of thought. Work on how we think includes much organization theory in the Carnegie School tradition, as well as much of Eviatar Zerubavels (1997) recent trail-blazing work and much other research on social classification and memory (e.g., Durkheim 1915). Work on what we think dominates most of the sociology of culturefor example, research on individualism, on how people make sense of love, on cross-national differences in trust, and so on (e.g., Fine, this volume; Gamson 1992; Mohr 1994; Schwartz 1991; this volume; Sw idler 1986;2001). Clearly, both kinds of w ork are valuable. The second dimension (vertical on Figure 15-1) has to do w ith the strategy one employs for the development of cognitive sociology: Whether w e want it to be autochthonous w hether we as sociologists think we can go it aloneor w hether we believe it is more productive to build on the w ork of cognitive and social psychologists (March and Simon 1958; Schuman 1986; White 2000). This dimension does not entail a forced choice any more than does the first. Zerubavel (1997) has demonstrated that a sociological approach can explain a great deal about the social mindscape: that is, about the ways in which social institutions organize cognitive processes at the macro -274Q ue stia, a pa rt of Ga le , Ce ngage Le a rning. www.questia.com Publication Information: Book Title: C ulture in Mind: Towa rd a Sociology of C ulture a nd Cognition. C ontributors: Ka re n A. Ce rulo - editor. Publisher: Routledge. P lace of P ublication: Ne w York. P ublica tion Yea r: 2001. Pa ge Num ber: 274. This m a teria l is prote cte d by copyright a nd, with the e x ce ption of fa ir use , m ay not be furthe r copie d, distribute d or transm itte d in any form or by any m e a ns.

Fig. 15-1
Cognitive Sociology Autochthonous

Studies of memory (Fine, Schwartz) Classification as content (Mohr) Tool kit studies (Swidler) Collective action frames (Gamson)

Studies of memory (Zerubavel) Social classification as processes (Durkheim, Zerubavel)

Focus on the content of cognition

Focus on styles or mechanisms of cognition

Networks and sociolinguistics (H. White) Organizational cognition (March and Simon)

Public opinion research (Increasingly) (Schuman)

Cognitive Sociology Builds on Cognitive Psychology

level. Many other scholars have demonstrated the self-sufficiency of the sociological approach inexplicating the shifting content of particular ideas or systems of classification. I would argue that both cognitive psychology and social psychology have become indispensable for sociologists who are interested both in how cultural processes enter into individual lives and how such processes enter into some kinds of collective behavior. Cognitive psychology and social psychology have also become indispensable for sociologists interested in microfoundational theories of action. For these purposes, I believe, familiarity with recent work in these fields is increasingly useful, for such work has become more consistent with sociological intuitions. Recent work in psychology is helpful to sociologists of culture for several reasons. First, it has the capacity to take debates over presuppositions and render them empirical. I have believed Swidlers tool kit theory of culture (1986) from the start, but not until I familiarized myself with recent work on cognition could I defend that preference on empirical grounds (DiMaggio 1997). Second, work on social cognition helps to fill in the blanks where sociological work is misleading or incomplete. For example, Diane Vaughans contribution to this volume suggests that Bourdieu underestimates the extent to which intersecting social circles create separate cognitive cultures indifferent life domains. In another arena, Kathleen Carley (1999) has drawn on cognitive psychology for a microfoundational approach to knowledge organization. Finally, research on social cognition can help sociologists who study cognition and culture in a less obvious way: by helping us understand the sort of biases that are likely to be built into the way we collect, perceive, and interpret our data. In the rest of this chapter, I try to make these assertions more concrete, first, by describing four generic lessons that psychology can teach sociologists who study cognition and culture, and second, by focusing in somewhat more depth on two of them. -275-

Some Lessons from Psychology

Here, I list four psychological findings that are fundamentally important for cognitive sociology. 1. We retain a huge amount of the information and attitudes to which we are exposed, and that information is stored w ithout tags for either source or truth value (Gilbert 1991; Johnson et al. 1993). As Swidler (1986) has w ritten, we know a lot more culture than we w ill ever use. Consequently, there is much less internal pressure for consistency than most people have thought. As Martin (2000) argues, pressure for consistency is social, not intrapsychic, and remembering requires active construal, which introduces much contingency into knowledge and belief. 2. Some of the vast store of information, opinion, and attitudes that w e retain is organized into schemata: images or representations of objects, actions, or events, and the linkages among these in stereotyped behavioral routines. People have varying degrees of access to these schemata, depending upon their centrality to self-image, their emotional w eight, their salience, and the frequency and recency with which the environment has activated them (DAndrade 1995). Social schemata provide frameworks that help us interpret new information. That is, they represent objects or events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information. People are more likely to perceive information that is consistent w ith existing schemata, quicker to recall it, more likely to recall it accurately, and more likely to use it once it is recalled (DiMaggio 1997). In fact, people even recall schematically embedded events that never happened (Freeman et al. 1987). Sociologists of culture who, as most of us do, rely heavily upon interpretationsour ow n or our informantsshould find this work cautionary. It demonstrates how natural it is to impose interpretive coherence on materials that are not intrinsically related and how important it is for cultural analysts to guard against this tendency. 3. Schemata are themselves organized into relatively independent domains, among which there are not necessarily homologic relations (DiMaggio 1997). Information and schemata about behavior at work may be organized quite separately from information and schemata about behavior at home, and there may be little correspondence betw een the two. This means that knowledge and dispositions are far less coherent (given the particular way in which we tend to understand coherence) than conventional understandings of culture would have us think. 4. Psychologists have learned that people do at least tw o very different kinds of cognition: one that is characterized (somew hat variously by different commentators) as deliberate, planful, critical, cool, and/or thoughtful, and another that is characterized as impulsive, constrained, hot, and/or based on stereotypes (Metcalfe and Mischel 1999). This work is significant for sociologists because it provides a microfoundational basis for revisiting the old Parsonian problem of multiple orientations to action (Parsons 1937). In the next sections, I discuss two of these areas of research in greater detail. -276Q ue stia, a pa rt of Ga le , Ce ngage Le a rning. www.questia.com Publication Information: Book Title: C ulture in Mind: Towa rd a Sociology of C ulture a nd Cognition. C ontributors: Ka re n A. Ce rulo - editor. Publisher: Routledge. P lace of P ublication: Ne w York. P ublica tion Yea r: 2001. Pa ge Num ber: 276. This m a teria l is prote cte d by copyright a nd, with the e x ce ption of fa ir use , m ay not be furthe r copie d, distribute d or transm itte d in any form or by any m e a ns.

Orientations toward Action

As I mentioned, psychologists empirical research on modes of cognition permits us to return to Parsonss classic work (Parsons 1937; Parsons and Shils 1951) and base it on a more up-to-date psychology. By this, I refer to a psychology that affirms Parsonss belief that orientations to action are variable, as against popular approaches such as rationalchoice theory, ethnomethodology, or even Bourdieus ([1980] 1990) praxis theory that seem to imply that particular orientations to action are characteristic of human behavior. Psychologists interpret the two modes of cognition in two rather different ways, but they tend to elide differences between them. One version emphasizes the distinction between automatic and deliberative cognitionbetween the efficient, scripted, routine form of everyday action and the calmer, more thoughtful form of thought of which we are capable when facing complex and important issues (Devine 1989). The other version emphasizes the distinction between hot and cold cognition, focusing on the more passionate, emotional tone of the former and the cooler, more detached form of the latter (Metcalfe and Mischel 1999). I would suggest that it might be worthwhile to consider the possibility that these are separate continua, that is, that there are two correlated but analytically distinct dimensions, one having to do with degree of affect, the other having to do with degree of planfulness and deliberation. Arraying these two dimensions as they are in Figure 15-2 below gives us a more complex typology of action orientations than psychologists ordinarily describe, but one that is largely consistent with work in this area. FIGURE 15-2 Space of orientations to action.

-277-

I w ould not want to spend too much time defending the particulars of Figure 15-2, the value of which is largely heuristic. 1 For example, in ceding the lower left-hand quadrant (cool and deliberate) to Habermas, I smuggle in an additional dimension (collectivity orientation) that is orthogonal to the rest. Moreover, Figure 15-2 limits rational action to the lower right-hand quadrant. In fact, I suspect that there are several distinct varieties of rational action, including hot and deliberate, cool and calculating, and (consistent with Bourdieus [1990] approach) automatic (i.e., strategies embedded in the habitus). The important point is that these orientations differ both psychologically and sociologically, and the differences probably matter. This approach invites us to focus on an exceptionally important question that neither psychologists nor sociologists have resolved: Under w hat conditions do actors sw itch from one action orientation to another?

Domain Independence
The second lesson that I shall discuss here derives from the principle of domain independence, by which I refer to the relative independence of schematically organized knowledge and dispositions that pertain to different classes of life situations (for example, those related, respectively, to work and family). The phenomenon of domain independence makes people a lot less consistent than w e expect them to be. Because our perceptions of behavior are organized schematically, w e impose order by perceiving people as more consistent than they are. For cognitive and cultural sociologists in the business of interpreting and attributing meanings, this fact should send chills down the center of ones spine. To understand this problem better, consider research into the psychology of personality. Shw eder (1982) asked groups of experimental subjects to undertake a series of tasks, and also asked observers to rate them with respect to such behaviors as arguing, criticizing, agreeing, reinforcing, and so on. He found that correlations betw een schematically associated behaviorsfor example, arguing and criticizingwere much higher w hen participants were given global ratings after the fact than when associations w ere based on their actual observed behavior. Shweders conclusion: Much clinical research on personality is really about cultural constructions of personhood. Other studies of personality, based on insights about domain independence, underscore the tendency of both laypeople and social scientists to look for central tendencies in a w orld of interaction effects (I rely on Mischel and Shoda [1995] for this description). Perplexed by w eak-over-time correlations between personality indicatorsthe so-called personality paradoxBem speculated that people were consistent in traits that they cared about and felt w ere central to themselves, and inconsistent in traits that were more marginal to their self-concepts (Bem and Allen 1974). If you could only find out w hat traits people cared about, he argued, you w ould find that personality traits really are consistent over time. Taking conscientiousness as his trait, Bem followed Carleton College students around for several months, separated the ones w ho believed they were consistently conscientious (or consistently irresponsible) from the ones for whom this trait w as not very salient, and tested for consistency across situations. Much to his disappointment, he found no difference: Neither group was very consistent. -278Q ue stia, a pa rt of Ga le , Ce ngage Le a rning. www.questia.com Publication Information: Book Title: C ulture in Mind: Towa rd a Sociology of C ulture a nd Cognition. C ontributors: Ka re n A. Ce rulo - editor. Publisher: Routledge. P lace of P ublication: Ne w York. P ublica tion Yea r: 2001. Pa ge Num ber: 278. This m a teria l is prote cte d by copyright a nd, with the e x ce ption of fa ir use , m ay not be furthe r copie d, distribute d or transm itte d in any form or by any m e a ns.

Some years later, Walter Mischel reanalyzed Bems data (Mischel and Shoda 1995). Mischel suspected that personality resides in interactions between behavioral dispositions and social situations. In other words, consistency lies not in behavior but in behavior I situation profiles. His analyses provided striking supportstudents who believed that they were consistent were outstandingly consistent in the w ay they responded to particular types of situations across time, but not across situations. For example, some were conscientious about relationships but irresponsible about academic deadlines; others w ere diligent scholars but fickle lovers. Consistent w ith Bems original intuition, the students for whom conscientiousness was not a salient characteristic w ere not consistent at all. Does sociology have an analog to personality? I w ould suggest that culture is that analog, and that we often make the same mistake that psychologists did. That is, sociologists often thematize culture as something that varies reliably among groups. In this view , some societies, organizations, or communities are more authoritarian, individualistic, communally oriented, or risk-averse than others. Such differences, so the story goes, are reflected in the distribution of persons with relevant personality traits. And such traits are expressed in behaviors consistent w ith the assessed personalities. The problem is that w e may look for culture at the w rong level. Rather than having values, groups may have predilections to act in certain ways in certain situations. Moreover, they (and we) may tell stories about such predilections that reflect the same person-centered bias that created the personality paradox in psychology, obscuring the fact that culture lies not in central tendencies but in interactions of disposition and domain. Take for example, differences between people in Japan, w ho are ordinarily portrayed as communally oriented, cooperative, and trusting, and those in the United States, w ho are often portrayed as individualistic, competitive, and wary. In a series of comparative studies, Yamagishi and Yamagishi (1994) demonstrated that Japanese and American culture differ not on the traits but on the interaction of trait and situation. Japanese people have closer in-group relationships than Americans; but Americans are actually more trusting of strangers than are Japanese. Consequently, they argue, Americans are better at forming new relationships and alliances and better at adapting to change. In other w ords, our understanding of Japanese and American cultures has been obscured both by the coherence of the stories that w e tell ourselves about ourselves and about each other, and by the conflation of situation-specific dispositions with global characterizations of cultural traits that obscure the independence of action domains.

Conclusion
Grounding theory in research on social cognition is useful for sociologists who want to study the ways in which culture enters into everyday life. Is it indispensable? Perhaps not for everyone. Sociologists w ho have challenged the view of culture as a monolithic set of values and dispositions shared across members of a group, who have emphasized the malleability of culture, and w ho have called attention to framing and narrativity, analogy and code-switching, have moved in parallel w ith w ork on cognition in psychology. Yet I would argue that, as a field, w e sociologists of culture and cognition need to engage w ith psychology. For one thing, all of us who are in the business of interpreting -279Q ue stia, a pa rt of Ga le , Ce ngage Le a rning. www.questia.com Publication Information: Book Title: C ulture in Mind: Towa rd a Sociology of C ulture a nd Cognition. C ontributors: Ka re n A. Ce rulo - editor. Publisher: Routledge. P lace of P ublication: Ne w York. P ublica tion Yea r: 2001. Pa ge Num ber: 279. This m a teria l is prote cte d by copyright a nd, with the e x ce ption of fa ir use , m ay not be furthe r copie d, distribute d or transm itte d in any form or by any m e a ns.

culture need to be inoculated against the perceptual biases hardwired into the way humans make sense of the w orld. Reflexivity aside, it seems to me that cognitive sociology and cognitive psychology have a lot to learn from one another. The convergence of perspectives is too striking and the complementarity of research questions and research skills too fortuitous to let such an opportunity for multidisciplinary synergy pass unexploited.

Endnotes
1. For a quite different approach that relies on similar insights, see Neuman et al. (1997).

References
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Schuman, H. 1986. Ordinary Questions, Survey Questions, and Policy Questions. Public Opinion Quarterly 50:432-42. Shw eder, R.A. 1982. Fact and Artifact in Trait Perception: the Systematic Distortion Hypothesis. Progress in Experimental Personality Research 2:65-100. Swidler, A. 1986. Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review 51:273-86. . 2001. Talk of Love. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. White, H.C. 2000. Where Do Languages Come From? Switching Talk. Preprint no. 201, Center for the Social Sciences, Columbia University. Yamagishi, T. and M. Yamagishi. 1994. Trust and Commitment in the United States and Japan. Motivation and Emotion 18:129-66. Zerubavel E. 1997. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. -281Q ue stia, a pa rt of Ga le , Ce ngage Le a rning. www.questia.com Publication Information: Book Title: C ulture in Mind: Towa rd a Sociology of C ulture a nd Cognition. C ontributors: Ka re n A. Ce rulo - editor. Publisher: Routledge. P lace of P ublication: Ne w York. P ublica tion Yea r: 2001. Pa ge Num ber: 281. This m a teria l is prote cte d by copyright a nd, with the e x ce ption of fa ir use , m ay not be furthe r copie d, distribute d or transm itte d in any form or by any m e a ns.