Cognitive Migrations

This chapter explores the ways individuals account for cognitive migrations—significant changes of mind and consciousness that are often expressed as powerful discoveries, transformative experiences, and newly embraced worldviews. It outlines three ideal typical forms of cognitive migration: awakenings, self-actualizations, and ongoing quests. Building on prior approaches to such personal transformations, it develops the notion of cognitive migration to argue the following set of interrelated points. First, cognitive migrations take autobiographical form, which is to say they manifest as the narrative identity work of individuals who undergo them. Second, such narrative identity work provides a reflexive foundation for an individual’s understanding of self and identity in relation to other possible selves and identities—for seeing oneself as a relationally situated character. Third, individuals who articulate cognitive migrations use the plot structure and cultural coding at the root of their narratives to express their allegiance to a new sociomental community. They thereby take on new cognitive norms and identity-defining conventions while rejecting potential alternatives, locating themselves within a broader sociomental field. The spatial metaphor of cognitive migrations draws explicit attention to the broader sociomental field in which such radical changes of mind take place. Finally, such narrative identity work links self-understandings to the often-contested meanings of broadly relevant issues, events, and experiences; when individuals account for their cognitive migrations, they also advance claims that reach well-beyond their personal lives.

War Widows and Welfare Queens

This chapter examines the sociocognitive dimensions of cultural categorizations of deservingness. The social issue of poverty has been a persistent source of debate in the American system of policy development, influenced by conceptual distinctions between the “haves” and “have-nots,” “working moms” and “unemployed dads,” and the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.” Although there is a wealth of literature discussing the ideological underpinnings of stratification systems, these discussions often focus on categorical distinctions between the poor and the nonpoor, with much less discussion of distinctions made among the poor. Moreover, while scholars of culture and policy have long referenced the importance of cultural categories of worthiness in policy development, the theoretical significance of these distinctions has been largely understudied. I expand the discourse on the relationship between cultural representations of worth and social welfare policy by exploring how these categories are conceptualized. Drawing on analytical tools from a sociology of perception framework, I create a model that examines deservingness along continuums of morality and eligibility to highlight the taken-for-granted cultural subtleties that shape perceptions of the poor. I focus on social filters created by norms of poverty, welfare, and the family to explore how the deserving are differentiated from the undeserving.

Social Mindscapes and the Self

While the relationship between culture and cognition has long-standing roots in sociological thought, scholars face the issue regarding how to “do” cognitive sociology. This chapter discusses the methodological approach of social pattern analysis (SPA) from Zerubavel’s social mindscapes tradition or culturalist cognitive sociology (SM/CCS), which encourages researchers to move away from content-driven inquiries toward those that explore processes across time, context, and even disciplinary boundaries. Using the specific example of virginity studies, the chapter then demonstrates how the flexible nature of SPA may serve as an asset in understanding generic identity processes more broadly.

Cognitive Sociology

Following in the rich intellectual footsteps of Emile Durkheim, Karl Mannheim, Alfred Schutz, and Ludwik Fleck, this chapter lays out the foundations for the sociology of thinking, or “cognitive sociology.” Focusing on the impersonal, normative, and conventional dimensions of the way we think (and, as such, on its distinctness from both cognitive individualism and universalism), it highlights the distinctly sociological concern with intersubjectivity as well as epistemic commitment to the study of thought communities, cognitive traditions, cognitive norms, cognitive socialization, cognitive conventions, and the politics of cognition.

Getting a Foot in the Door

This chapter explores sociocultural frames of metaphor in the case of door metaphors to highlight the cognitive sociology of access. Bridging and building on insights in cognitive linguistics and cognitive sociology, it contends that metaphorical projection involves generic sociomental processes. To illustrate this theoretical claim, the chapter analyzes how social structures of relevance and markedness in the built environment pattern the conceptual structures of door metaphors. It also analyzes individuals’ strategic use of door metaphors to shape metaphorical politics of access in the abstract. Attempting to broaden both the cognitive sociology of metaphor and the sociology of access, it concludes with a discussion of the promise of a distinctly cognitive sociology of access.

Cognitive Science and Social Theory

Approaches to cognitive science can be divided into two large groups: the standard model of the computational mind, usually associated with the idea of modularization, and extended to include a theory of mind, and rival and not-so-well-integrated approaches that replace its explanations with other mechanisms, the 4Es of cognition: the embedded, embodied, extended, and enactive movements, to which can be added the ecological approach based on Gibsonian affordances and Mark Bickhard’s interactivism. These approaches fit with very different social theories: the standard model with the social as understood by Durkheim, Parsons, and the early Bourdieu. The alternative, especially the idea of the extended mind, fits with a conception of society that replaces “the social” with a conception in which substitutable parts—routines and technology, take over its explanatory burdens.

Cognition and Social Meaning in Economic Sociology

This chapter reviews the literature on cognition and social meaning in economic sociology, with special attention to the case of money. The first part discusses subfields related to economic sociology that have carved space for attention to the role of cognitive processes, or cognitive embeddedness, including the institutional logics, conceptions of control, and classification/categorization perspectives. The second part takes up one central economic object, money, to compare and contrast the behavioral economics perspective on mental accounting with the research on the social meaning of money and relational work, which emphasizes how money’s multiple meanings and forms influence the negotiation of social-economic relations.

The Sacred, Profane, Pure, Impure, and Social Energization of Culture

In this chapter, I argue that the Durkheimian theory of the sacred is a crucial yet not fully recognized resource for cognitive sociology. It contains not only a theory of culture (which is acknowledged in contemporary sociology), but also a vision of culture-cognition relations. Thus, Durkheimian cultural sociology allows us to understand the crucial role the sacred/profane opposition plays in structuring culture, perception and thought. Based on a number of theories, I also show how another opposition—between the pure and impure modes of the sacred, allows us to explain dynamic features of the sacred and eventually provides a basic model of social change. While explicating this vision and resultant opportunities for sociological analysis I also criticize “cognition apart from culture” approaches established within cognitive sociology. I argue, thus, that culture not only participates in cognition but is an intrinsic ingredient of the human mind. Culture is not a chaotic and fragmented set of elements, as some sociologists imply to a greater or lesser degree, but a system; and as such it is an inner environment for human thought and social action. This system, however, is governed not by formal logic, as some critics of the autonomy of culture presuppose, but by concrete configurations of emotionally-charged categories, created and re-created in social interactions.

Risk, Culture, and Cognition

For many researchers, risk is objective, fixed, and measurable. Social scientists, however, have long worked under the belief that risk is a social construction and is culturally determined. This chapter follows Wilkinson’s use of the term “risk” and the goal of the chapter is to review and map out the ways social actors perceive and make sense of hazards and conditions of threatening uncertainty. Such a contribution is generally seen to lie in the area of risk perception, risk communication, and risk responsibility. This chapter explores key contributions in the study of risk in these three areas through the lens of a sociology of culture and cognition. The chapter ends with some observations on risk and cognition from ethnographic research on the long-term aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Dual-Process Models in Sociology

In the ongoing quest to find new analytical or methodological tools to explicate social action, cultural sociologists have recently turned to the dual-process models developed by cognitive and social psychologists. Designed to explain the two basic types of cognitive processing—one autonomous and the other requiring controlled attention, dual-process models became a natural partner for sociological theories of action, with their interest in parsing dispositional and deliberative types of action. This chapter offers an analytical review of the sociological literature that engages with dual-process models. It begins with an outline of the fundamentals of dual-process models in cognitive and social psychology, and follows with an examination of the premises that constitute what has come to be called the sociological dual-process model. It then reviews sociological research that applies dual-process models, dividing this literature into two distinct groups that are separated along sharp epistemological, methodological, and analytical lines. The first group is a largely consistent body of work that follows the premises of the sociological dual-process model, emphasizing the primacy of Type 1 processing, and investigating how this form of cognition shapes action. The second group comprises a more diverse body of work, examines Type 1 and Type 2 processing, and attempts to capture the processes that shape cognition and action. The chapter concludes with remarks about the critiques raised against dual-process models, along with their potential contributions to sociological analysis.