Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Culture and Cognition

Item

Title

Culture and Cognition

Author

Cerulo, Karen A.

Research Area

Culture

Topic

Culture and Cognition

Abstract

Culture and cognition is a rapidly growing subfield within sociology. Scholars working in this area address how aspects of both social structure and culture impact the ways in which social actors think. From the literature, one learns about specific processes and styles that individuals adopt when engaged in thought, cognitive patterns that characterize certain groups or communities, and thought styles that emerge in specific situations and social contexts. New works pay special attention to the links between mind, body, and sociocultural context. In this essay, I define the general focus of the field, review its intellectual roots, discuss recent turns in its literature, and identify issues for future research.

Related Essays

Models of Revealed Preference (Economics), Abi Adams and Ian Crawford

Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman

History and Epistemology of Anthropology (Anthropology), Arjun Appadurai

Intersectionality and the Development of Self and Identity (Psychology), Margarita Azmitia and Virginia Thomas

Agency as an Explanatory Key: Theoretical Issues (Sociology), Richard Biernacki and Tad Skotnicki

Mental Models (Psychology), Ruth M. J. Byrne

Authenticity: Attribution, Value, and Meaning (Sociology), Glenn R. Carroll

The Inherence Heuristic: Generating Everyday Explanations (Psychology), Andrei Cimpian

Misinformation and How to Correct It (Psychology), John Cook et al.

Self‐Fulfilling Prophesies, Placebo Effects, and the Social‐Psychological Creation of Reality (Sociology), Alia Crum and Damon J. Phillips

Cultural Differences in Emotions (Psychology), Jozefien De Leersnyder et al.

Understanding the Adaptive Functions of Morality from a Cognitive Psychological Perspective (Psychology), James Dungan and Liane Young

Micro‐Cultures (Sociology), Gary Alan Fine

Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske and Cydney H. Dupree

Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One's Thoughts (Psychology), Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine

Culture and Social Networks (Sociology), Jan A. Fuhse

Ambivalence and Inbetweeness (Sociology), Bernhard Giesen

Ethnic Enclaves (Sociology), Steven J. Gold

Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation (Anthropology), Richard Handler

Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen Hawkes and James Coxworth

Biology and Culture (Psychology), Robert Peter Hobson

Behavioral Economics (Sociology), Guy Hochman and Dan Ariely

Normal Negative Emotions and Mental Disorders (Sociology), Allan V. Horwitz

Emotion and Decision Making (Psychology), Jeff R. Huntsinger and Cara Ray

The Development of Social Trust (Psychology), Vikram K. Jaswal and Marissa B. Drell

History and Materiality (Anthropology), Rosemary A. Joyce

Cultural Neuroscience: Connecting Culture, Brain, and Genes (Psychology), Shinobu Kitayama and Sarah Huff

Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity (Political Science), David D. Laitin and Sangick Jeon

Complexity: An Emerging Trend in Social Sciences (Anthropology), J. Stephen Lansing

From Individual Rationality to Socially Embedded Self‐Regulation (Sociology), Siegwart Lindenberg

Two‐Systems View of Children's Theory‐of‐Mind Understanding (Psychology), Jason Low

Against Game Theory (Political Science), Gale M. Lucas et al.

Media and the development of Identity (Psychology), Adriana M. Manago

Culture, Diffusion, and Networks in Social Animals (Anthropology), Janet Mann and Lisa Singh

Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick

The Material Turn (Communications & Media), Chandra Mukerji

A Bio‐Social‐Cultural Approach to Early Cognitive Development: Entering the Community of Minds (Psychology), Katherine Nelson

Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts (Psychology), Bethany Ojalehto and Douglas Medin

Culture as Situated Cognition (Psychology), Daphna Oyserman

Culture and Movements (Sociology), Francesca Polletta and Beth Gharrity Gardner

Social Classification (Sociology), Elizabeth G. Pontikes

The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora

Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.

Economics and Culture (Economics), Gérard Roland

Born This Way: Thinking Sociologically about Essentialism (Sociology), Kristen Schilt

Stereotype Threat (Psychology), Toni Schmader and William M. Hall

Production of Culture (Sociology), Vaughn Schmutz and Candace N. Miller

Social Neuroendocrine Approaches to Relationships (Anthropology), Sari M. van Anders and Peter B. Gray

The Intrinsic Dynamics of Development (Psychology), Paul van Geert and Marijn van Dijk

Theory of Mind (Psychology), Henry Wellman

Culture and Globalization (Sociology), Frederick F. Wherry

Identifier

etrds0063

extracted text

Culture and Cognition
KAREN A. CERULO

Abstract
Culture and cognition is a rapidly growing subfield within sociology. Scholars working in this area address how aspects of both social structure and culture impact the
ways in which social actors think. From the literature, one learns about specific processes and styles that individuals adopt when engaged in thought, cognitive patterns
that characterize certain groups or communities, and thought styles that emerge in
specific situations and social contexts. New works pay special attention to the links
between mind, body, and sociocultural context. In this essay, I define the general
focus of the field, review its intellectual roots, discuss recent turns in its literature,
and identify issues for future research.

CULTURE AND COGNITION
Culture and cognition is a rapidly growing subfield within sociology.
Scholars working in this area address how aspects of culture (e.g., beliefs,
norms, practices, frames, schemata, symbols, and values) as well as various
elements of social structure (e.g., network configurations, power arrangements, and the organization of institutions) impact the ways in which
social actors think. Researchers identify specific processes and styles that
individuals adopt when engaged in thought. They also study the cognitive
patterns that characterize certain groups or communities, and the thought
styles that emerge in specific situations and social contexts. New works in
culture and cognition do not isolate the mind, but rather problematize the
connection between body, mind, and environment.
The theoretical roots of culture and cognition can be traced to various sociological literatures, including symbolic interactionism, social constructionism,
the sociology of knowledge, ethnomethodology, and sociolinguistics. While
contemporary works build on this diverse theoretical history, scholars are
also entering into cross-disciplinary dialog, engaging works from cognitive
anthropology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. As such, the most
exciting research in the contemporary literature resides at the intersection
of several academic fields.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

In this essay, I review in more detail the intellectual roots of culture and
cognition studies, recent turns in the literature, and issues for future research.
THE ROOTS OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
AND COGNITION RESEARCH
Culture and cognition, as a sociological concern, grew from theories specifically designed to conceptualize and understand the mind. But the works that
form the core foundation of contemporary research are those that move us
away from treating mind as a distinct entity and closer to considering cognition as a sociophysiological phenomenon—a joint product of mind, body,
and environment.
Central to the history of culture and cognition is the work of George
Herbert Mead. Mead was primarily concerned with mind, its formation, and
its contribution to the development of self. In a challenge to Dualism, which
conceived of mind and body as separate entities, and materialism, which
equated the mind with the physiological properties of the brain, Mead
brought a uniquely sociological lens to the study of cognition. He argued
that minds exist only “in relation to other minds with shared meanings”
(1982, p. 5), making consciousness a product of the social—specifically, the
interaction and communication between social actors, and actors’ simultaneous engagement with the surrounding social environment. Note that
bodies were an important element of Mead’s conception of mind. He saw
bodies as vehicles of interaction, and thus, necessary enablers of mind.
Many scholars elaborated elements of Mead’s work, adding new but solely
social considerations to discussions of mind. Karl Mannheim (1936), for
example, expanded on the important link between interaction and mind
formation, particularly the collective mind and the building of shared
knowledge. Manheim argued that a group or community’s thoughts and
understandings were formed by their members’ social positions—that is,
social class, context or situation, and generation. He urged us to study
mind formation and thinking as a relational phenomenon—a product
of multiple perspectives that traverse space and time. In another line of
research, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann sought to understand how
mind becomes culturally shared. Leaning heavily on philosopher Alfred
Schutz, Berger and Luckmann argued that a collective mind emerges from
a group or society’s “stock of knowledge … the facts a group recognizes,
the beliefs it espouses, and the routine performances, logics, and symbols by
which these facts and beliefs are created and sustained” (1967, pp. 41–46).
For Berger and Luckmann, the stock of knowledge functions as a pocket
dictionary of culture used to negotiate our mental images of the everyday
world. Still other scholars began exploring the ways in which the social and

Culture and Cognition

3

cultural organize the mind. For example, Erving Goffman’s classic Frame
Analysis (1974) approached frames as conceptual tools derived from one’s
local cultural context. These frames become mechanisms that define and
arrange individuals’ awareness and understanding of social experience.
Similarly, Eviatar Zerubavel’s Social Mindscapes (1997) identifies and maps
the interpretative procedures (e.g., lumping, splitting) and cultural tools
(e.g., cognitive lenses) by which members of cultural communities organize
thought and give meaning to situations.
SOMETHING WAS MISSING
These works, while establishing a distinctively sociological approach to
understanding the cultural aspects of cognition, leave an important component of Mead’s theory behind—namely, the mind-body-environment link.
One must look to a different group of scholars for theories that sustain—even
prioritize—this important relationship.
Noam Chomsky’s work (1968, 1978) on transformational and generative
grammar provides a good starting point. In these theories, Chomsky centralizes the brain. He contends that brains hold a set of innate linguistic competences that channel cognition, communication, and comprehension. These
competences, called deep structures, represent a set of rules that guide how
words can be combined to create grammatically correct and sensible ideas.
For Chomsky, these rules emerge from a universal grammar that is common
to all spoken and written language forms. As such, deep structures, the physiological components that build mind, are critical to the cognitive activity of
human beings. When we move beyond deep structures, we also find room in
Chomsky’s theory for the role of culture and environment in language and
thought. Chomsky contends that these factors prove relevant in the “performance” of language. In performance, individuals transform deep structures
by rearranging a sentence’s outward form, creating more variable surface
structures that coincide with cultural contexts of action and community traditions.
Aaron Cicourel (1974) also foregrounds the mind-body-environment link
in studying cognition. While language is an important part of his thinking,
Cicourel also considers the role of human senses in the process of thought.
He argues that social actors’ sight, touch, gestures, and body movements
often take control of the communication experience—particularly when language is unavailable; he contends people use these interpretive procedures
to develop a “sense” of social structure—one that organizes their perceptions
and ultimately their actions. Thus, Cicourel too builds a model that simultaneously recognizes mind, body, and environment. The mind is a product of
the senses, and the senses are contingent on the body’s situation.

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on “habitus” represent the most recent and
perhaps the most currently influential theory of cognition. Bourdieu defines
the habitus as a system of “durable, transposable dispositions” that are
products of a culturally situated mind-body. The habitus organizes social
fields of action, enables individuals, groups, or communities to perceive
and understand their environment, and to negotiate and recreate action.
In essence, the habitus allows individuals to practice culture without “in
any way being the product of obedience to rules” … to be “collectively
orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor” (1977, p. 72; see also 2000). Bourdieu’s theory draws an important
connection between mind and body—one that, like Chomsky or Cicourel’s
vision, describes a connection more intimate than that posited by Mead.
Bourdieu’s body is not simply a vehicle of action. Rather, he views thought
and action as embodied—internalized through our material physical being.
In this way, the structures of the habitus are physically grounded and
pre-reflexive.
Mead, Chomsky, Cicourel, and Bourdieu are especially important to contemporary works in culture and cognition. By recognizing the physicality of
thought in tandem with its culturally situated nature, these theorists encouraged scholars of culture and cognition to explore new links between mind,
body, and environment—links that ultimately beckoned cross-disciplinary
ideas to the sociological terrain.
NEW DIRECTIONS
Throughout most of the twentieth century, cognitive scientists dominated
discourse on thought. In large measure, this was due to PET scans, CT scans,
fMRIs, and related technologies which, in essence, made the brain visible.
But beginning in the mid-1980s, psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and even economists began engaging the new science of the mind.
Among social scientists, only sociologists clung to the sidelines of discussion.
Then came a turning point. In his classic essay “Culture and Cognition,”
Paul DiMaggio urged sociologists to take a fresh look at cognitive science:
“Cognitivists have developed ingenious empirical techniques that permit
strong inferences about mental structures, going far toward closing the
observability gap between external and subjective aspects of culture” (1997,
p. 266). Others joined DiMaggio in passionately pleading for disciplinary
cross talk (see, e.g., Bergesen, 2004a, 2004b; Cerulo, 2002, 2006, 2010;
Howard & Renfrow, 2003). The result is an exciting line of new research
that brings sociology toe-to-toe with cognitive science. Sociologists are
“continuing” stories that focus solely on the brain, elaborating them by
linking the brain to a mind situated in varying cultural contexts.

Culture and Cognition

5

CONTINUING THE STORY: SCHEMAS
Schemas are the first chapter of any culture and cognition story. These mental structures—abstract generalizations or composites—are built from exposures and experiences and aid in our understanding of the world. Sitting in a
restaurant, for example, we develop a general notion of restaurants based on
various attributes of the different eateries we frequent. Individuals use such
restaurant schemas to interpret new encounters, remember past experiences,
help in sense-making and problem solving, or steer action.
Cognitive scientists study schematic operations in the brain, showing
that schemas do not function in isolation. Rather, schemas cluster in the
brain, forming associated networks. When one schema is activated, it
creates a neural “charge” that triggers other schemas in the network. How
are schemas activated? Cognitive scientists believe that our routines and
experiences repeatedly elicit certain schemas, keeping them “in the ready”
within our brains. Schemas can also be deliberately activated via a process
called priming—that is, presenting a concept (often subliminally) in order to
steer individuals toward related or similar ideas. In this way, schemas have
important effects on perception and behavior. As knowledge structures, they
allow us to “fill in the blanks” and make sense of new experiences; they also
filter our perception, making some of the things we encounter more germane
to us than others. Schemas may even create perceptual biases, committing
to memory “facts” more elaborate than those we actually experience. Thus,
our memory of a restaurant may include tables, cutlery, or foods to which
we were never exposed. We mistakenly remember such things because our
restaurant schemas dictate that such objects belong in that setting (Solso,
MacLin, & MacLin, 2008).
Sociologists acknowledge both the brain’s schema “library” and its
physiological workings. However, sociologists also expand our knowledge
of schematic operations in important ways. Some, for example, identify
schemas particular to certain status groups or subcultures and track the
ways in which they steer group members’ attentions, perceptions, and
behaviors. Much of this work addresses schemas that influence perceptions
of class, ethnic and racial identities, gender, or power inequalities (see, e.g.,
Auyero, 2010; Brekhus, Brunsma, Platts, & Dua, 2010; Brubaker, Loveman, &
Stamanov, 2004; Harding, 2007; Hoffman & Bartkowski, 2008; Miller, 1995;
Rosenfield, Lennon, & White, 2005).
Others have explored how schemas order group discourse and subsequent
action. Gabriel Ignatow (2004), for example, used sequence and metaphor
analysis to investigate the meeting transcripts of striking Scottish shipyard
workers. Not surprisingly, he found that the group’s discourse was shaped
by historical context, situational factors, and elements of social structure.

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Yet Ignatow also showed that the strikers’ group interactions gave rise to
schemas that influenced the coherence of the groups’ discourse as well.
This finding was important because it showed that cognitions arising from
strikers’ interactions impinged on group planning and became critical to
the strikers’ strategies and goals. In another venue, Johnson, Dowd, and
Ridgeway (2006) studied the ways in which social objects gain legitimacy in
groups and organizations. Here too, schemas proved central. The authors
discovered that a group’s local expectations are often formed by tapping
widespread consensual schemas as they exist in the broader society. Johnson
and colleagues suggest that bringing the general to the local can prove
damaging, for such schemas often organize local action in ways that
encourage both nonoptimal group practices and erroneous expectations
of future action. [Also see Zuckerman (2004).] Recently, Pescosoliudo and
Olafsdottir (2010) explored the role of schemas in public perceptions of
disease and treatment. The authors noted a consistent mismatch between
people’s endorsements for mental health treatment and their actual usage
rates. They found that the ways in which researchers question people about
the liklihood of seeking treatment can invoke schemas that influence usage
of mis-reports. Specifically, close-ended questions about mental health problems and treatments trigger widespread consensual schemas addressing the
efficacy of modern medicine. Such questions target tacit agreement with the
medical model and organize thinking in ways that encourage individuals to
overestimate the likelihood of seeking mental health treatment.
Organizational sociologists are doing promising work on the sociocultural
dimensions of schematic transfer. Studying organizational sense-making,
for example, Elsbach, Barr, and Hargadon (2005, p. 423) explored the ways
in which ’’cognitive schemas and cultural contexts come together to form
“situated cognition.” Situated cognition, a term developed by Lave and
Wenger (1991), refers to transitory thought embedded in the interactive
context of the moment. The study of situated cognition is important because
it challenges the notion of schemas as stable units inextricably tied to certain
situations or events. Instead, this work suggests that interaction patterns
are critical triggers of schemas, with different patterns activating different
schemas and different interpretive and behavioral outcomes. Viewing
schemas as dynamic and transferable helps us understand unexpected
decisions and outcomes that heretofore seemed unpredictable or unlikely.
[See also Haynie, Shepherd, Mosakowski, and Earley (2010), Mezias and
Lant (2010), and Ocasio (2012).] These themes also are being explored by
those studying dyadic relationships—especially within the family (see, e.g.,
Beach, Fincham, & Stanley, 2007; Howe, 2007).
In another arena, Chung, McLarney, and Gillen (2008) use elder care
organizations to identify ways of triggering schematic transfer. They suggest

Culture and Cognition

7

several changes to managerial interaction patterns, changes that might
effectively switch individuals’ attention from “line-of-sight management
schema” (schemas that tie definitions of success to employee presence)
to “target-based schema” (those tying definitions of success to treatment
results). The authors discuss how this particular schematic transfer could
encourage strategies that make elder care less stressful and more effective. In
a related piece, Gough and Hick (2009) address the role of schematic transfer
in self-help behaviors. Studying ethnic minorities and their retirement plans
and strategies, the authors identify practices that prompt schematic transfer
in ways that increase productive investment activity.
CONTINUING THE STORY: COGNITIVE STYLES
Cognitive styles and their variations represent another promising line of culture and cognition research.
AUTOMATIC VERSUS DELIBERATE COGNITION
The dual processes of automatic and deliberate cognition have become a
central issue in culture and cognition research. Automatic cognition involves
rapid, effortless, unintentional thought; it ties experience to existing schemas
and allows us to quickly process information without extended review.
Deliberate cognition, in contrast, refers to slow, considered, and measured
thought. Individuals engaged in deliberate cognition may reject or override
their schemas, actively searching for characteristics, connections, relations,
and expectations rather than assuming them.
Cognitive scientists have explored conditions under which automatic
cognition might dominate deliberate cognition and vice versa. For example,
automatic cognition can occur outside of consciousness, while deliberate
thought demands consciousness; automatic cognition is more likely to occur
when we are under stress; deliberate cognition can be triggered by the
disruption of well-established routines (Solso, MacLin, & MacLin, 2008). But
such findings simply begin the story of dual processing. What chapters can
sociologists contribute?
DiMaggio (1997, p. 272) suggested one possible trajectory. He argued that
including cognitive styles in our studies of cultural patterns and practices
could help us better understand how culture enables or constrains and when
social action is simultaneously institutionalized and agentic. Acting on
DiMaggio’s suggestion, Karen Danna-Lynch (2007, 2009, 2010) incorporated
automatic versus deliberate cognition in her studies of multiple role enactments. Danna-Lynch attempts to explicate what she calls the “chameleon

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

factor”—that is, switching between social roles without becoming incapacitated by confusion or role conflict. While prior answers to this puzzle
focused primarily on behavior, Danna-Lynch brings cognition into the mix.
She recreates the meaning of role performance to include four ideal types of
role states—types based on the interaction of automatic versus deliberate
cognition and automatic versus deliberate behavior. Using interviews with
parents working in various occupations, Danna-Lynch itemizes the cultural
practices that help people establish role positions and continually switch
between them. Her culture and cognition lens provides a new approach
to role theory, presenting roles as a product of both physical and mental
space. Vaisey (2009) provides another important response to DiMaggio.
He tested the dual-processing model using survey and interview data that
address morality in decision making. In analyzing respondents’ reflections
on moral circumstances, Vaisey documents the presence of automatic and
deliberate cognition. He shows that these two cognitive styles can function
independently or together, and he urges sociologists to further explore the
cultural conditions associated with each cognitive style.
A number of recent works explore such associations, unpacking the contextual nature of cognitive styles. Javier Auyero and Debora Swistun (2008,
2009a, 2009b) examined cognitive styles among individuals facing uncertainty and risk—residents of an Argentine shantytown exposed to high levels
of environmental pollutants. The authors addressed processes and practices
that both sustained peoples’ uncertainty and resulted in mis-assessments
of environmental risks. Of particular interest were links between cultural
routines and cognitive styles. Auyero and Swistun argue that when polluters
avoid major disruptions to residents’ daily routines (i.e., getting to work, getting children to school, preparing meals), the routines themselves encourage
individuals to adopt an “automatic pilot” approach to their surroundings. In
essence, familiar routines combine with automatic cognition to restrict deliberate attention to surrounding dangers; this process, in turn, suspends any
initiatives toward organized actions against such dangers. It is worth noting,
however, that levels of routinization must be considered when linking routines to cognitive styles. Carol Heimer (2001) approaches routines as existing
on a density continuum—that is, situations vary from being abundantly or
over-routinized to being scarcely or under-routinized. Heimer argues that
over or under-routinization beckons deliberate cognition, while moderate
routinization is associated with automatic cognition. According to Heimer,
over-routinization triggers deliberate cognition because “people are so
overloaded with routines that routines become noise rather than signal and
cease to focus attention” (2001, p. 72). In under-routinized contexts, thought
must be inductive, as people examine and reexamine the evidence of novel
scenarios.

Culture and Cognition

9

Still others are exploring the associations between cognitive styles and
cultural contexts. Hana Shepherd (2011) reinterpreted several social psychological studies to illustrate how external elements of culture—for
example, symbols, elements of physical settings, situational interactions,
and networks—guide individuals’ cognitive styles. In another venue,
Cerulo (1998) described associations between media contexts and cognitive
styles. Studying visual and verbal depictions of violence, she identified four
temporal sequences that drive narrators’ accounts of violence: victim, performer, contextual, and doublecasting sequences. She found that narrators’
sequence selections reflect institutionalized communication conventions
based on assumptions of audience morality. Moreover, she documented
that certain sequences trigger automatic cognitive responses that lead
readers/viewers to systematically judge the rightness or wrongness of
violence with little deliberation. Cerulo noted that this pattern was not
universal, and she identified substantive and contextual elements—that is,
the type of violence described, moral consensus surrounding the act, social
instability surrounding the act—that temper the decision-making process.
[See Altheide (2002, 2006) for related work.] Organizational researchers
Srivastava and Banaji (2011) found important associations between cognitive styles, self-assessments of worth, and collaboration patterns in
organizations—particularly in settings that value cross-boundary collaboration. They showed that cognitive styles greatly impact how people
view themselves. When people engage in deliberative cognition, they view
their worth more positively than they do when engaged in automatic
cognition. Further, the less inflated views of self-worth that emerge from
automatic cognition make people more likely to enlist and be enlisted to
collaborate with colleagues who are organizationally distant. Counter to
expectation, Srivastava and Baldassarri show that collaborative choices in
organizations—particularly those governed by social desirability—are often
guided by automatic, less conscious thought. Finally, Daina Harvey (2010)
takes discussions of automatic and deliberate cognition in a promising new
direction. Harvey explores the links between the configuration of social
spaces and the ways in which these configurations beckon cognitive styles.
He suggests that structured spaces tend to facilitate deliberative cognition,
while unstructured spaces promote automatic cognition. Harvey’s development of these connections has important implications for how and, perhaps,
why we use culture in the process of thought.
HOT AND COLD COGNITION
Hot and cold cognition refers to another dual-process model of thought.
Emotions distinguish the hot–cold continuum from the automatic-deliberate

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

model. Hot cognition involves a heightened response to stimuli, one
largely driven by emotion. In contrast, cold cognition refers to unemotional,
painstaking thought that involves rational analysis.
Technological advances play a major role in cognitive scientists’ increasing
interest in emotional cognition. Using fMRI, researchers watch thoughts and
emotions as they develop in the brain; they then track the areas of the brain
that seem most active in information processing. In this regard, Jonathan
Cohen and colleagues research the links between moral dilemmas, emotions,
and cognition, studying fMRI images that track subjects’ reactions to different moral dilemmas (see, e.g., Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, &
Cohen, 2001; Cohen, 2005). The experimenters typically present subjects with
two moral dilemmas. In the “trolley dilemma,” a runaway trolley speeds
directly toward five people. To save the group, subjects must agree to hit
a switch, diverting the trolley to a side track where it will kill only one person. Contrast this scenario with the “footbridge dilemma.” Here too, a trolley
threatens five people. But here, the quintet can be saved only if subjects agree
to push an adjacent stranger off a bridge and into the trolley’s path. While the
stranger is killed, the body will prevent the trolley from reaching the larger
group.
In presenting the two dilemmas, researchers ask: Are subjects willing to flip
the switch or push a stranger, and what cognitive style informs their decisions?’’ fMRI images show that subjects’ reactions to each scenario activate
different parts of their brains. The impersonal “switch flipping” taps the dorsolateral areas of the prefrontal cortex—areas associated with cold cognitive
processes (i.e., working memory, abstract reasoning, and problem solving). In
contrast, the personal “pushing” taps the medial frontal cortex, an area associated with emotional processing. These pictures suggest that switch-flipping
feels more rational and reasoned—and perhaps more doable—than pushing
another human onto the tracks.
Similar findings appear in studies addressing fear and self-protection.
When faced with images of dangerous objects, Ohman and Mineka (2001)
found that individuals process the images in different ways. “Natural”
dangers—for example, pictures of spiders, snakes, or crocodiles—activate
the brain’s emotional centers, while “modern” dangers—for example, guns
or electrical outlets—activate the brain’s decision-making areas. Here, as in
much cognitive science, evolution seems critical to the field’s understanding
of neural differences. Researchers argue that fear toward natural dangers is
ingrained in the human body by centuries of survival needs; thus, natural
dangers elicit a physiological response. In contrast, the fear of modern
dangers has developed through learning and reflection, eliciting rational
considerations.

Culture and Cognition

11

Sociologists can add much to this explanation. Different reactions to natural and modern dangers may involve evolution. But these differences may
be just as powerfully explained by situating these objects in social interaction. Consider snake versus gun. When it comes to a snake, one likely sees
the encounter in terms of a simple, limited dyadic exchange. The two meet,
consider finite options for attack, with one the victor … or entity who cleverly (luckily?) escapes harm. The gun, however, presents a more complicated story. Is it my gun or someone else’s? Am I aiming it or is it aimed
at me? How skilled is the shooter … how willing … how far away? Is the
gun in good working order? Is it real or a good facsimile? Will the shot be
heard by someone nearby? If so, how will that affect the shooter’s willingness to use the gun? In essence, the gun is part of a broader interactive scenario. Actor-network theorists such as Bruno Latour (2005) would say that
the gun is an equal participant in social interaction—an “actant” that can
make things happen. But a full understanding of this actant’s role demands
cold cognition—careful, painstaking thought that considers the nuances and
options presented by the interaction in which the gun is embedded.
Several social movement scholars are exploring hot and cold cognition
within the interactive history of certain collective actions (see, e.g., Gamson, 1992; Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001a; Hercus, 1999; Jasper, 1998;
Parker & Hackett, 2012; Robnett, 2004; Taylor, 2000; Taylor & Rupp, 2002).
These scholars delineate the path from hot cognition to action. Because
certain cultural events or arrangements may initially trigger hot cognition,
while successful movement organizers must create the strategies and processes that will transform feeling into action (see, e.g., Goodwin, Jasper, &
Polletta, 2001b; Reger, 2004). Often, this involves redirecting attentions of
movement participants’ from hot, emotional triggers to cold, deliberative
triggers, as emotionally hot cognitions can escalate rather than overcome
social conflict (Harcourt, 2002).
Beyond social movements, those studying decision making explore the
role of hot–cold cognition in evaluation and subsequent action. In this
regard, some researchers find that entities triggering hot cognition are
better remembered and more readily applied than those triggering cold
cognition. This finding proves important to those constructing surveys
and questionnaires, as cognitive styles may significantly influence subjects’
evaluative responses (van de Veld & Saris, 2004). It also proves important to
our understanding of people’s judgments and evaluations in areas as varied
as criminal behavior (Van Gelder & De Vries, 2012), social justice decisions
(Kunda, 1999; Stapel, 2003), management decisions (Kennedy & Vining,
2007), organizational sense-making (Weick, 2005), advertising effectiveness
(Cerulo, 1995a), symbol acceptance (Cerulo, 1995b) and mathematical
calculations (Roth, 2007).

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

GRADED MEMBERSHIP
Concepts are building blocks of thought, and many cognitive scientists
believe that they exist as prototypes. Prototypes amplify or exaggerate the
critical features of categories, focusing our brains exclusively on category
“ideals.” When we encounter something, we use mental prototypes and
perform a process called graded membership. Using this cognitive style, we
rank or place entities with reference to others in their class. Thus, when
you shop for apples, your brain rapidly compares every apple you see to
an ideal prototype. The more attributes the apple-in-hand shares with the
prototype in your brain, the more likely you are to include what you see in
the category apple and the closer you will rank it to the category’s core ideal.
For cognitive scientists, graded membership has obvious results for the
way we evaluate everyday life. The process forcefully establishes asymmetry as one of the brain’s prominent modus operandi. Best case examples of
a concept are overemphasized and highly detailed; anything less becomes
increasingly nondescript, released, or distanced by the brain from active consideration.
Cerulo (2006) continues the story of graded membership, illuminating
its social implications. She argues that the process contributes to a sociocultural phenomenon she calls positive asymmetry. Positive asymmetry is
blind optimism—a tunnel-vision directed to best-case scenarios and an
accompanying disregard for worst-case scenarios. Cerulo’s work documents
the widespread nature of positive asymmetry, tracking its influence in key
events in the life cycle, the sites of work and play, and in the organizations
and bureaucracies that structure social life. Using interviews, fictional
accounts, survey data, media reports, journalistic commentaries, and official
records, she illustrates the frequency with which individuals, groups, and
communities blatantly disregard worst-case scenarios. While definitions of
best and worst change over time and place, Cerulo shows that the tendency
to prioritize the best is rather constant.
How is positive asymmetry connected to the brain? Clearly, the brain
has prototypes for worst-cases—that is the perfect storm, the unspeakable
murder. Thus, how can one argue that graded membership and positive
asymmetry are somehow connected? Cerulo shows that most communities
maintain cultural practices that background half of what is in the brain
(e.g., materials dealing with worst-cases or negative concepts). These
practices harness the brain’s propensity toward asymmetrical thinking—the
mechanic or way we think—and encode that process into a much more
targeted and specialized experiential bias. Asymmetry—the tendency
to emphasize only best-case examples of any concept, is transformed to
positive asymmetry—the tendency to emphasize only examples of the

Culture and Cognition

13

best-quality cases. Cerulo unpacks three sets of practices that function in this
regard: eclipsing, clouding, and recasting. She also identifies certain structural
conditions under which these practices are more or less effective. These
ideas have been applied by others to the study of educational aspirations
(Reynolds & Baird, 2010), environmental disasters (Auyero & Swistun,
2009b), health risks (Armstrong, 2003; Fedson & Dunhill, 2007; Senier,
2008), leadership patterns (Hollander, 2009), political power (Freudenberg &
Alario, 2007), privacy (Nippert-Eng, 2010), and surveillance (Monahan,
2010). By extending cognitive science with a culture and cognition perspective, these works show us exactly how social and cultural practices can
complement, alter, or elaborate neural processes.
FUTURE ISSUES
The works reviewed here forward our understanding of culture, cognition, and the mind-body-environment link. However, further progress
may demand a more dramatic paradigm shift, one that revisits current
assumptions about cultural acquisition and redefines enculturation as a
sociophysiological phenomenon.
Toward that end, Albert Bergesen (2004b, 2012) reviewed neuroscientific
studies of language acquisition among babies. This research suggests that
language skills precede humans’ interactive capacities, with a finite number
of mental rules driving our understanding of the social world well before
enculturation and socialization begin. Bergesen contends that this makes
enculturation “a more Chomskyan than Meadian process” (2004b, p. 368). At
the same time, we must remain mindful that individuals regularly transform
these finite mental rules into an infinite number of interaction possibilities,
all occurring between different people with different goals and agendas,
interacting across various times, places, and situations. For Bergesen, the
mission of culture and cognition scholars is to explicate this intricate process
and to understand the variable ways and conditions under which finite
mental possibilities expand.
Several sociologists are taking promising steps in this regard. Like Bergesen, David Peterson (2012) accepts that certain universal capacities allow
individuals to grasp the categories so necessary to social existence. However,
he underscores the fact that the representation of these capacities varies by
culture. Peterson contends that sociologists must do more than acknowledge
this variation. They must attempt to identify and explain the mechanisms
and conditions associated with specific forms of cognitive variation. Peterson offers a paradigm by which to accomplish this task, forwarding four
specific roles that social and cultural elements may play in the development

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of mind: (i) social facilitation—does culture provides conditions for flexible expressions of categories … if so, under what circumstances? (ii) Social
divisions—by what mechanisms does culture create variable divisions and
boundaries in continua of experience? (iii) Social specification—can we track
and compare the culturally specific expression of native intelligence and presuppositions? (4) Social construction—how does culture develop new concepts that establish systems of references and mechanisms of transmission?
In pursuing questions of enculturation, some have tied their theories to specific neurological processes. Omar Lizardo (2007, 2012), for example, merged
neuroscientific work on “mirror neurons” with sociological work on “habitus.” In so doing, he provides an exciting new perspective on enculturation.
Neuroscientists tell us that mirror neurons form a network located in the prefrontal motor cortex of humans and other primates. They “fire” in response
to visual stimuli that require motor response from such beings. They also fire
when one simply witnesses or hears others making motor responses. (For
example, the same neurons fire when I clap my hands or I simply see/hear
another clap their hands.) Thus, mirror neurons take practical information
based on specific observations and create generalized conceptual knowledge
about the way objects “work.” “Instead of knowing what objects are in a
decontextualized sense,” writes Lizardo, “mirror neurons allow us to know
what objects are good for” (2007, p. 22). Understanding mirror neurons fills
critical gaps in practice theory. Recall that Bourdieu rejected imitation as the
means by which we acquire practical knowledge—but he had no satisfying
alternative. If neuroscientists are right, mirror neurons provide social actors
with two things: “the practical capacities productive of action” and “the practical, representation, coding, and comprehension of practical action—both
for the self and others” (Lizardo, 2007, pp. 13, 14). This means that Bourdieu’s
habitus and the practical competences that form it need not be the product of
explicit instructions or imitation. Rather, competences are activated by virtue
of being surrounded by others who display the same competencies (Lizardo,
2007, pp. 17, 19).
Gabriel Ignatow (2007, 2009) also used cognitive science research to
productively modify Bourdieu’s work on enculturation. Ignatow taps
studies that, in contradiction to Bourdieu, treat the habitus’ cognitive and
somatic components as inseparable and in constant reciprocal interaction. To
illustrate the importance of centering mind–body connections in research on
thought and enculturation, Ignatow compared individual’s use of and reaction to embodied metaphors verses abstract language. Building on cognitive
science research addressing schematic activation, Ignatow hypothesized
that culture’s effects on cognition and behavior is strongest when cognitive
schemas are “understood to be embodied and when discourses are seen as
containing bodily information that interacts with those cognitive schema”

Culture and Cognition

15

(2009, p. 643). Ignatow tested his ideas with data from messages posted on
two Internet support group sites—one identified as religious/orthodox and
one as secular/modern. Ignatow expected both groups to vary significantly
in their use of discursive tools. In tune with each group’s moral culture, he
expected religious/orthodox group members to favor embodied metaphors
and secular/modern group members to favor abstractions. He also reasoned
that the use of embodied metaphors would be more effective than abstractions in generating high group solidarity, allowing for a greater sense of
cohesion in the religious/orthodox site. Following extensive content analysis
of over 2000 posts, Ignatow found support for his hypotheses, concluding
that “culture’s effects on social bonding can be identified more readily when
cultural structures are conceived as embodied cognitive structures, rather
than as purely mental or behavioral patterns that operate both within the
individual habitus and at the level of small-group discourse” (2009, p. 687).
CONCLUSION
Sociologists of culture and cognition are posing new questions—questions
that need to be asked in louder and louder voices. What are the links
between mind, body, and the contexts in which they are situated? Where
does thought reside … where and how is it initiated, developed, and
transmitted? Sociologists are now beginning to explore these issues with
a wider analytic lens, simultaneously mapping the neural, emotional,
and sensory elements of thought as well as the patterns that characterize
the sociocultural contexts in which thought occurs. Exciting answers are
rapidly emerging, with sociologists now decidedly a part of this important
interdisciplinary crosstalk. Stay tuned.
REFERENCES
Altheide, D. (2002). Tracking discourse. In K. A. Cerulo (Ed.), Culture in Mind: Toward
a Sociology of Culture and Cognition (pp. 172–186). New York, NY: Routledge.
Altheide, D. (2006). Terrorism and the Politics of Fear. Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press.
Armstrong, E. (2003). Conceiving risk, bearing responsibility: Fetal alcohol syndrome and
the diagnosis of moral disorder. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Auyero, J. (2010). Chuck and Pierre at the welfare office. Sociological Forum, 25(4),
851–860.
Auyero, J., & Swistun, D. (2008). The social production of toxic uncertainty. American
Sociological Review, 73, 357–379.
Auyero, J., & Swistun, D. (2009a). Tiresias in flammable shantytown: Toward a tempography of domination. Sociological Forum, 24, 1–21.
Auyero, J., & Swistun, D. (2009b). Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentinian
Shantytown. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

16

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Beach, S. R. H., Fincham, F. D., & Stanley, S. M. (2007). Contextualizing the study of
marital transformation: Points of convergence. Journal of Marriage and the Family,
69(2), 315–319.
Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the
sociology of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
Bergesen, A. (2004a). Durkheim’s theory of mental categories: A review of the evidence. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 395–408.
Bergesen, A. (2004b). Chomsky vs. mead. Sociological Theory, 22, 257–370.
Bergesen, A. (2012). Turning Durkheim on his head: A reply to Peterson and Bjerre.
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 4(4), 485–495.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brekhus, W. H., Brunsma, D. L., Platts, T., & Dua, P. (2010). On the contributions
of cognitive sociology to the sociological study of race. Sociology Compass, 4(1),
61–76.
Brubaker, R., Loveman, M., & Stamanov, P. (2004). Ethnicity as cognition. Theory and
Society, 33, 31–64.
Cerulo, K. A. (1995a). Designs on the White House: TV ads, message structure, and
election outcome. Research in Political Sociology, 7, 63–88.
Cerulo, K. A. (1995b). Identity designs: The sights and sounds of a nation. The Arnold
and Caroline Rose Book Series. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Cerulo, K. A. (1998). Deciphering violence: The cognitive structure of right and wrong.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Cerulo, K. A. (2002). Culture in mind: Toward a sociology of culture and cognition. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Cerulo, K. A. (2006). Never saw it coming: Cultural challenges to envisioning the worst.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Cerulo, K. A. (2010). Mining the intersections of cognitive sociology and neuroscience. Poetics, 38(2), 115–132.
Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and mind. Boston, MA: M.I.T./Harcourt, Brace &
World.
Chomsky, N. (1978). Topics in the theory of generative grammar. Boston, MA: Mouton
De Gruyter.
Chung, E., McLarney, C., & Gillen, M. C. (2008). Social policy recommendations to
alleviate stress among informal providers of elder care. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 28(9–10), 340–350.
Cicourel, A. (1974). Cognitive sociology: Language and meaning in social interaction. New
York, NY: Free Press.
Cohen, J. D. (2005). The vulcanization of the human brain: A neural perspective on
interactions between cognition and emotion. The Journal of Economic Perspectives,
19, 3–24.
Danna-Lynch, K. (2007). Modeling role enactment: Linking role theory and social
cognition. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 37, 379–399.

Culture and Cognition

17

Danna-Lynch, K. (2009). Objects, meanings, and role identities: The practices that
establish association in the care of home-based employment. Sociological Forum,
24, 76–103.
Danna-Lynch, K. (2010). Culture and cognition in the performance of multiple roles:
The process of mental weighing. Poetics, 38(2), 166–184.
DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.
Elsbach, K. D., Barr, P. S., & Hargadon, A. B. (2005). Identifying situated cognitions
in organizations. Organization Science, 16(4), 422–433.
Fedson, D. S., & Dunhill, P. (2007). New approaches to confronting an immanent
influenza pandemic. The Permanente Journal, 11(3), 63–69.
Freudenberg, W. R., & Alario, M. (2007). Weapons of mass distraction: Magicianship,
misdirection, and the dark side of legitimation. Sociological Forum, 22, 146–173.
Gamson, W. A. (1992). Talking politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. London,
England: Harper and Row.
Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M., & Polletta, F. (Eds.) (2001a). Passionate Politics: Emotions and
Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M., & Polletta, F. (2001b). Introduction: Why emotions matter.
In J. Goodwin, J. M. Jasper & F. Polletta (Eds.), Passionate politics: Emotions and social
movements (pp. 1–26). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gough, O., & Hick, R. (2009). Ethnic minorities, retirement planning and personal
accounts. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 29(9), 488–497.
Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001).
An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293,
2105–108.
Harcourt, E. J. (2002). The whipping of Richard Moore: Reading emotion in reconstruction America. Journal of Social History, 36, 261–282.
Harding, D. J. (2007). Cultural context, sexual behavior, and romantic relationships
in disadvantaged neighborhoods. American Sociological Review, 72(3), 341–364.
Harvey, D. (2010). The space for culture and cognition. Poetics, 38(2), 185–204.
Haynie, J. M., Shepherd, D., Mosakowski, E., & Earley, P. C. (2010). A situated
metacognitive model of the entrepreneurial mindset. Journal of Business Venturing,
25(2), 217–229.
Heimer, C. A. (2001). Cases and biographies: An essay on routinization and the
nature of comparison. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 47–76.
Hercus, C. (1999). Identity, emotion and feminist collective action. Gender and Society,
13, 34–55.
Hoffman, J. P., & Bartkowski, J. P. (2008). Gender, religious tradition, and biblical
literalism. Social Forces, 86(3), 1245–1272.
Hollander, E. P. (2009). Inclusive leadership: The essential leader-follower relationship.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Howard, J. A., & Renfrow, D. G. (2003). “Social cognition”. In J. Delamater (Ed.),
Handbook of social psychology (pp. 259–281). New York, NY: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

18

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Howe, G. W. (2007). Socially situated cognition and the couple as a dynamic system:
A commentary. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 69(2), 299–304.
Ignatow, G. (2004). Speaking together, thinking together? Exploring metaphor and
cognition in a shipyard union dispute. Sociological Forum, 19(3), 405–433.
Ignatow, G. (2007). Theories of embodied knowledge: New directions for cultural
and cognitive sociology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37(2), 115–135.
Ignatow, G. (2009). Culture and embodied cognition: Moral discourses in Internet
support groups for overeaters. Social Forces, 88(2), 643–669.
Jasper, J. M. (1998). The emotions of protest: Affective and reactive emotions in and
around social movements. Sociological Forum, 13(3), 397–424.
Johnson, C., Dowd, T. J., & Ridgeway, C. L. (2006). Legitimacy as a social process.
Annual Review of Sociology, 32, 53–78.
Kennedy, J., & Vining, J. (2007). Why do emotions matter? Natural resources conflicts
and the role of manager’s emotions. Journal of Sustainable Forestry, 24, 23–50.
Kunda, Z. (1999). Social cognition: Making sense of people. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Lizardo, O. (2007). ’Mirror neurons,’ collective objects and the problem of transmission: Reconsidering Stephen Turner’s critique of practice theory. Journal for the
Theory of Social Behaviour, 37, 319–350.
Lizardo, O. (2012). Embodied culture as procedure: Cognitive science and the link
between subjective and objective culture. In A. Warde & D. Southerton (Eds.),
The habits of consumption. COLLeGIUM: Studies across disciplines in the humanities
and social sciences (Vol. 12, pp. 70–86). Helsinki, Finland: Helsinki Collegium of
Advanced Studies.
Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology and Utopia. London, England: Routledge.
Mead, G. H. (1982). In D. L. Miller (Ed.), The individual and the social self: Unpublished
essays by G. H. mead. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Mezias, S., & Lant, T. (2010). Situated learning and brokerage as keys to successful
knowledge production: An experiential review. In C. B. Schoonhoven & F. Dobbin
(Eds.), Stanford’s organization theory renaissance, 1970–2000 research in the sociology of
organizations (Vol. 28, pp. 351–357). Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing
Limited.
Miller, J. L. (1995). Variation in judgments of criminal sanctions: An application of
‘schema theory’. Sociological Focus, 27(3), 257–279.
Monahan, T. (2010). Surveillance in the time of insecurity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Nippert-Eng, C. (2010). Islands of privacy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ocasio, W. (2012). Situated attention, lose and tight coupling, and the garbage can
model. In J. Lomi & J. R. Harrison (Eds.), The garbage can model of organizational
choice: Looking forward at forty. (Research in the sociology of organizations (Vol. 36, pp.
293–317). Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Culture and Cognition

19

Ohman, A., & Mineka, S. (2001). Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an
evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review, 108, 483–522.
Parker, J. N., & Hackett, E. J. (2012). Hot spots and hopt moments in scientific collaborations and social movements. American Sociological Review, 77(1), 21–44.
Pescosoliudo, B. A., & Olafsdottir, S. (2010). “The cultural turn in sociology: Can it
help us resolve an age-old problem in understanding decision making for health
care?”. Sociological Forum, 25(4), 665–676.
Peterson, D. (2012). Where the sidewalk ends: The limits of social constructionism.
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 42(4), 465–478.
Reger, J. (2004). Organizational “emotion work” through consciousness-raising: An
analysis of a feminist organization. Qualitative Sociology, 27, 205–222.
Reynolds, J. R., & Baird, C. L. (2010). “Is there a downside to shooting for the stars?”.
American Sociological Review, 75(1), 151–172.
Robnett, B. (2004). Emotional resonance, social location, and strategic framing. Sociological Focus, 37, 196–212.
Rosenfield, S., Lennon, M. C., & White, H. R. (2005). The self and mental health:
Self-salience and the emergence of internalizing and externalizing problems. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 46, 323–340.
Roth, W. M. (2007). Mathematical modeling ‘in the wild’: A case of hot cognition. In
R. A. Lesh, E. Hamilton & J. J. Kaput (Eds.), Foundations for the future in mathematics
education (pp. 77–98). New York, NY: Routledge.
Senier, L. (2008). It’s your most precious thing: Worst-case thinking, trust, and
parental decision making about vaccines. Sociological Inquiry, 78, 207–229.
Shepherd, H. (2011). The cultural context of cognition: What the Implicit Association
test tells us about how culture works. Sociological Forum, 26(1), 121–143.
Solso, R., MacLin, M. K., & Maclin, O. H. (2008). Cognitive psychology (8th ed.). Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Srivastava, S. B., & Banaji, M. R. (2011). Culture, cognition, and collaborative networks in organizations. American Sociological Review, 76(2), 207–233.
Stapel, D. A. (2003). Hot cognition and social judgments: When and why do descriptions influence our feelings?. In J. P. Forgas, K. P. Williams & W. Von Hippel (Eds.),
Social judgments: Implicit and explicit processes (pp. 227–250). Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, V. (2000). Emotions and identity in women’s self-help movements. In S.
Striker, T. J. Owens & R. W. White (Eds.), Self, identity and social movements (pp.
271–299). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Taylor, V., & Rupp, L. J. (2002). Loving internationalism: The emotion culture
of transnationalwomen’s organizations, 1888–1945. Mobilization: An International
Journal of Research and Theory about Social Movements, Protest, and Collective Behavior,
7, 141–158.
Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and justification: A dual-process model of culture in
action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.
van de Veld, W., & Saris, W. E. (2004). Separation of error, method effects, instabiltiy
and attitude strength. In W. E. Saris & P. M. Sniderman (Eds.), Studies in public

20

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

opinion: Attitudes, nonattitudes, measurement error and change (pp. 37–62). Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Van Gelder, J. L., & De Vries, R. (2012). Traits and states: Integrating personality and
affect into a model of criminal decision making. Criminology, 50(3), 637–671.
Weick, K. (2005). Making sense of the organization. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Zerubavel, E. (1997). Social mindscapes: An invitation to cognitive sociology. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Zuckerman, E. W. (2004). Structural incoherence and stock market activity. American
Sociological Review, 69, 405–432.

FURTHER READING
Bergesen, A. (2004). Chomsky vs. mead. Sociological Theory, 22, 257–370.
Cerulo, K. A. (2002). Culture in mind: Toward a sociology of culture and cognition. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Cerulo, K. A. (2010). Mining the intersections of cognitive sociology and neuroscience. Poetics, 38(2), 115–132.
DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.
Ignatow, G. (2007). Theories of embodied knowledge: New directions for cultural
and cognitive sociology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37(2), 115–135.

KAREN A. CERULO SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Karen A. Cerulo (PhD Princeton University) is a Full Professor and former
Chair of the Rutgers University Sociology Department. Her research interests include culture and cognition, symbolic communication, media and
technology, social change, comparative historical studies, and measurement
techniques. Cerulo’s articles appear in a wide variety of journals, including
the American Sociological Review, the Annual Review of Sociology, Contemporary
Sociology, Poetics, Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Sociological Inquiry, and
Communication Research. She is the author of three books: Identity Designs:
The Sights and Sounds of a Nation, winner of the American Sociological
Association’s 1996 Culture Section Best Book Award (The Rose Book Series
of the ASA, Rutgers University Press); Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive
Order of Right and Wrong (Routledge); and Never Saw It Coming: Cultural
Challenges to Envisioning the Worst (University of Chicago Press). She also
has edited a collection entitled Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture
and Cognition (Routledge) and coauthored a book entitled Second Thoughts:
Seeing Conventional Wisdom through the Sociological Eye (Pine Forge/Sage).
Cerulo is a past Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society, past Chair
of the American Sociological Association’s Culture Section and the 2012
Robin Williams Distinguished Lecturer.

Culture and Cognition

21

RELATED ESSAYS
Models of Revealed Preference (Economics), Abi Adams and Ian Crawford
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
History and Epistemology of Anthropology (Anthropology), Arjun
Appadurai
Intersectionality and the Development of Self and Identity (Psychology),
Margarita Azmitia and Virginia Thomas
Agency as an Explanatory Key: Theoretical Issues (Sociology), Richard
Biernacki and Tad Skotnicki
Mental Models (Psychology), Ruth M. J. Byrne
Authenticity: Attribution, Value, and Meaning (Sociology), Glenn R. Carroll
The Inherence Heuristic: Generating Everyday Explanations (Psychology),
Andrei Cimpian
Misinformation and How to Correct It (Psychology), John Cook et al.
Self-Fulfilling Prophesies, Placebo Effects, and the Social-Psychological
Creation of Reality (Sociology), Alia Crum and Damon J. Phillips
Cultural Differences in Emotions (Psychology), Jozefien De Leersnyder et al.
Understanding the Adaptive Functions of Morality from a Cognitive Psychological Perspective (Psychology), James Dungan and Liane Young
Micro-Cultures (Sociology), Gary Alan Fine
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske
and Cydney H. Dupree
Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One’s Thoughts (Psychology),
Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine
Culture and Social Networks (Sociology), Jan A. Fuhse
Ambivalence and Inbetweeness (Sociology), Bernhard Giesen
Ethnic Enclaves (Sociology), Steven J. Gold
Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation (Anthropology), Richard
Handler
Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen
Hawkes and James Coxworth
Biology and Culture (Psychology), Robert Peter Hobson
Behavioral Economics (Sociology), Guy Hochman and Dan Ariely
Normal Negative Emotions and Mental Disorders (Sociology), Allan V.
Horwitz
Emotion and Decision Making (Psychology), Jeff R. Huntsinger and Cara Ray
The Development of Social Trust (Psychology), Vikram K. Jaswal and Marissa
B. Drell
History and Materiality (Anthropology), Rosemary A. Joyce
Cultural Neuroscience: Connecting Culture, Brain, and Genes (Psychology),
Shinobu Kitayama and Sarah Huff

22

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity (Political Science), David D.
Laitin and Sangick Jeon
Complexity: An Emerging Trend in Social Sciences (Anthropology), J. Stephen
Lansing
From Individual Rationality to Socially Embedded Self-Regulation (Sociology), Siegwart Lindenberg
Two-Systems View of Children’s Theory-of-Mind Understanding (Psychology), Jason Low
Against Game Theory (Political Science), Gale M. Lucas et al.
Media and the development of Identity (Psychology), Adriana M. Manago
Culture, Diffusion, and Networks in Social Animals (Anthropology), Janet
Mann and Lisa Singh
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Material Turn (Communications & Media), Chandra Mukerji
A Bio-Social-Cultural Approach to Early Cognitive Development: Entering
the Community of Minds (Psychology), Katherine Nelson
Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts (Psychology), Bethany Ojalehto
and Douglas Medin
Culture as Situated Cognition (Psychology), Daphna Oyserman
Culture and Movements (Sociology), Francesca Polletta and Beth Gharrity
Gardner
Social Classification (Sociology), Elizabeth G. Pontikes
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Economics and Culture (Economics), Gérard Roland
Born This Way: Thinking Sociologically about Essentialism (Sociology),
Kristen Schilt
Stereotype Threat (Psychology), Toni Schmader and William M. Hall
Production of Culture (Sociology), Vaughn Schmutz and Candace N. Miller
Social Neuroendocrine Approaches to Relationships (Anthropology), Sari M.
van Anders and Peter B. Gray
The Intrinsic Dynamics of Development (Psychology), Paul van Geert and
Marijn van Dijk
Theory of Mind (Psychology), Henry Wellman
Culture and Globalization (Sociology), Frederick F. Wherry



Culture and Cognition
KAREN A. CERULO

Abstract
Culture and cognition is a rapidly growing subfield within sociology. Scholars working in this area address how aspects of both social structure and culture impact the
ways in which social actors think. From the literature, one learns about specific processes and styles that individuals adopt when engaged in thought, cognitive patterns
that characterize certain groups or communities, and thought styles that emerge in
specific situations and social contexts. New works pay special attention to the links
between mind, body, and sociocultural context. In this essay, I define the general
focus of the field, review its intellectual roots, discuss recent turns in its literature,
and identify issues for future research.

CULTURE AND COGNITION
Culture and cognition is a rapidly growing subfield within sociology.
Scholars working in this area address how aspects of culture (e.g., beliefs,
norms, practices, frames, schemata, symbols, and values) as well as various
elements of social structure (e.g., network configurations, power arrangements, and the organization of institutions) impact the ways in which
social actors think. Researchers identify specific processes and styles that
individuals adopt when engaged in thought. They also study the cognitive
patterns that characterize certain groups or communities, and the thought
styles that emerge in specific situations and social contexts. New works in
culture and cognition do not isolate the mind, but rather problematize the
connection between body, mind, and environment.
The theoretical roots of culture and cognition can be traced to various sociological literatures, including symbolic interactionism, social constructionism,
the sociology of knowledge, ethnomethodology, and sociolinguistics. While
contemporary works build on this diverse theoretical history, scholars are
also entering into cross-disciplinary dialog, engaging works from cognitive
anthropology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. As such, the most
exciting research in the contemporary literature resides at the intersection
of several academic fields.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

In this essay, I review in more detail the intellectual roots of culture and
cognition studies, recent turns in the literature, and issues for future research.
THE ROOTS OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
AND COGNITION RESEARCH
Culture and cognition, as a sociological concern, grew from theories specifically designed to conceptualize and understand the mind. But the works that
form the core foundation of contemporary research are those that move us
away from treating mind as a distinct entity and closer to considering cognition as a sociophysiological phenomenon—a joint product of mind, body,
and environment.
Central to the history of culture and cognition is the work of George
Herbert Mead. Mead was primarily concerned with mind, its formation, and
its contribution to the development of self. In a challenge to Dualism, which
conceived of mind and body as separate entities, and materialism, which
equated the mind with the physiological properties of the brain, Mead
brought a uniquely sociological lens to the study of cognition. He argued
that minds exist only “in relation to other minds with shared meanings”
(1982, p. 5), making consciousness a product of the social—specifically, the
interaction and communication between social actors, and actors’ simultaneous engagement with the surrounding social environment. Note that
bodies were an important element of Mead’s conception of mind. He saw
bodies as vehicles of interaction, and thus, necessary enablers of mind.
Many scholars elaborated elements of Mead’s work, adding new but solely
social considerations to discussions of mind. Karl Mannheim (1936), for
example, expanded on the important link between interaction and mind
formation, particularly the collective mind and the building of shared
knowledge. Manheim argued that a group or community’s thoughts and
understandings were formed by their members’ social positions—that is,
social class, context or situation, and generation. He urged us to study
mind formation and thinking as a relational phenomenon—a product
of multiple perspectives that traverse space and time. In another line of
research, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann sought to understand how
mind becomes culturally shared. Leaning heavily on philosopher Alfred
Schutz, Berger and Luckmann argued that a collective mind emerges from
a group or society’s “stock of knowledge … the facts a group recognizes,
the beliefs it espouses, and the routine performances, logics, and symbols by
which these facts and beliefs are created and sustained” (1967, pp. 41–46).
For Berger and Luckmann, the stock of knowledge functions as a pocket
dictionary of culture used to negotiate our mental images of the everyday
world. Still other scholars began exploring the ways in which the social and

Culture and Cognition

3

cultural organize the mind. For example, Erving Goffman’s classic Frame
Analysis (1974) approached frames as conceptual tools derived from one’s
local cultural context. These frames become mechanisms that define and
arrange individuals’ awareness and understanding of social experience.
Similarly, Eviatar Zerubavel’s Social Mindscapes (1997) identifies and maps
the interpretative procedures (e.g., lumping, splitting) and cultural tools
(e.g., cognitive lenses) by which members of cultural communities organize
thought and give meaning to situations.
SOMETHING WAS MISSING
These works, while establishing a distinctively sociological approach to
understanding the cultural aspects of cognition, leave an important component of Mead’s theory behind—namely, the mind-body-environment link.
One must look to a different group of scholars for theories that sustain—even
prioritize—this important relationship.
Noam Chomsky’s work (1968, 1978) on transformational and generative
grammar provides a good starting point. In these theories, Chomsky centralizes the brain. He contends that brains hold a set of innate linguistic competences that channel cognition, communication, and comprehension. These
competences, called deep structures, represent a set of rules that guide how
words can be combined to create grammatically correct and sensible ideas.
For Chomsky, these rules emerge from a universal grammar that is common
to all spoken and written language forms. As such, deep structures, the physiological components that build mind, are critical to the cognitive activity of
human beings. When we move beyond deep structures, we also find room in
Chomsky’s theory for the role of culture and environment in language and
thought. Chomsky contends that these factors prove relevant in the “performance” of language. In performance, individuals transform deep structures
by rearranging a sentence’s outward form, creating more variable surface
structures that coincide with cultural contexts of action and community traditions.
Aaron Cicourel (1974) also foregrounds the mind-body-environment link
in studying cognition. While language is an important part of his thinking,
Cicourel also considers the role of human senses in the process of thought.
He argues that social actors’ sight, touch, gestures, and body movements
often take control of the communication experience—particularly when language is unavailable; he contends people use these interpretive procedures
to develop a “sense” of social structure—one that organizes their perceptions
and ultimately their actions. Thus, Cicourel too builds a model that simultaneously recognizes mind, body, and environment. The mind is a product of
the senses, and the senses are contingent on the body’s situation.

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on “habitus” represent the most recent and
perhaps the most currently influential theory of cognition. Bourdieu defines
the habitus as a system of “durable, transposable dispositions” that are
products of a culturally situated mind-body. The habitus organizes social
fields of action, enables individuals, groups, or communities to perceive
and understand their environment, and to negotiate and recreate action.
In essence, the habitus allows individuals to practice culture without “in
any way being the product of obedience to rules” … to be “collectively
orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor” (1977, p. 72; see also 2000). Bourdieu’s theory draws an important
connection between mind and body—one that, like Chomsky or Cicourel’s
vision, describes a connection more intimate than that posited by Mead.
Bourdieu’s body is not simply a vehicle of action. Rather, he views thought
and action as embodied—internalized through our material physical being.
In this way, the structures of the habitus are physically grounded and
pre-reflexive.
Mead, Chomsky, Cicourel, and Bourdieu are especially important to contemporary works in culture and cognition. By recognizing the physicality of
thought in tandem with its culturally situated nature, these theorists encouraged scholars of culture and cognition to explore new links between mind,
body, and environment—links that ultimately beckoned cross-disciplinary
ideas to the sociological terrain.
NEW DIRECTIONS
Throughout most of the twentieth century, cognitive scientists dominated
discourse on thought. In large measure, this was due to PET scans, CT scans,
fMRIs, and related technologies which, in essence, made the brain visible.
But beginning in the mid-1980s, psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and even economists began engaging the new science of the mind.
Among social scientists, only sociologists clung to the sidelines of discussion.
Then came a turning point. In his classic essay “Culture and Cognition,”
Paul DiMaggio urged sociologists to take a fresh look at cognitive science:
“Cognitivists have developed ingenious empirical techniques that permit
strong inferences about mental structures, going far toward closing the
observability gap between external and subjective aspects of culture” (1997,
p. 266). Others joined DiMaggio in passionately pleading for disciplinary
cross talk (see, e.g., Bergesen, 2004a, 2004b; Cerulo, 2002, 2006, 2010;
Howard & Renfrow, 2003). The result is an exciting line of new research
that brings sociology toe-to-toe with cognitive science. Sociologists are
“continuing” stories that focus solely on the brain, elaborating them by
linking the brain to a mind situated in varying cultural contexts.

Culture and Cognition

5

CONTINUING THE STORY: SCHEMAS
Schemas are the first chapter of any culture and cognition story. These mental structures—abstract generalizations or composites—are built from exposures and experiences and aid in our understanding of the world. Sitting in a
restaurant, for example, we develop a general notion of restaurants based on
various attributes of the different eateries we frequent. Individuals use such
restaurant schemas to interpret new encounters, remember past experiences,
help in sense-making and problem solving, or steer action.
Cognitive scientists study schematic operations in the brain, showing
that schemas do not function in isolation. Rather, schemas cluster in the
brain, forming associated networks. When one schema is activated, it
creates a neural “charge” that triggers other schemas in the network. How
are schemas activated? Cognitive scientists believe that our routines and
experiences repeatedly elicit certain schemas, keeping them “in the ready”
within our brains. Schemas can also be deliberately activated via a process
called priming—that is, presenting a concept (often subliminally) in order to
steer individuals toward related or similar ideas. In this way, schemas have
important effects on perception and behavior. As knowledge structures, they
allow us to “fill in the blanks” and make sense of new experiences; they also
filter our perception, making some of the things we encounter more germane
to us than others. Schemas may even create perceptual biases, committing
to memory “facts” more elaborate than those we actually experience. Thus,
our memory of a restaurant may include tables, cutlery, or foods to which
we were never exposed. We mistakenly remember such things because our
restaurant schemas dictate that such objects belong in that setting (Solso,
MacLin, & MacLin, 2008).
Sociologists acknowledge both the brain’s schema “library” and its
physiological workings. However, sociologists also expand our knowledge
of schematic operations in important ways. Some, for example, identify
schemas particular to certain status groups or subcultures and track the
ways in which they steer group members’ attentions, perceptions, and
behaviors. Much of this work addresses schemas that influence perceptions
of class, ethnic and racial identities, gender, or power inequalities (see, e.g.,
Auyero, 2010; Brekhus, Brunsma, Platts, & Dua, 2010; Brubaker, Loveman, &
Stamanov, 2004; Harding, 2007; Hoffman & Bartkowski, 2008; Miller, 1995;
Rosenfield, Lennon, & White, 2005).
Others have explored how schemas order group discourse and subsequent
action. Gabriel Ignatow (2004), for example, used sequence and metaphor
analysis to investigate the meeting transcripts of striking Scottish shipyard
workers. Not surprisingly, he found that the group’s discourse was shaped
by historical context, situational factors, and elements of social structure.

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Yet Ignatow also showed that the strikers’ group interactions gave rise to
schemas that influenced the coherence of the groups’ discourse as well.
This finding was important because it showed that cognitions arising from
strikers’ interactions impinged on group planning and became critical to
the strikers’ strategies and goals. In another venue, Johnson, Dowd, and
Ridgeway (2006) studied the ways in which social objects gain legitimacy in
groups and organizations. Here too, schemas proved central. The authors
discovered that a group’s local expectations are often formed by tapping
widespread consensual schemas as they exist in the broader society. Johnson
and colleagues suggest that bringing the general to the local can prove
damaging, for such schemas often organize local action in ways that
encourage both nonoptimal group practices and erroneous expectations
of future action. [Also see Zuckerman (2004).] Recently, Pescosoliudo and
Olafsdottir (2010) explored the role of schemas in public perceptions of
disease and treatment. The authors noted a consistent mismatch between
people’s endorsements for mental health treatment and their actual usage
rates. They found that the ways in which researchers question people about
the liklihood of seeking treatment can invoke schemas that influence usage
of mis-reports. Specifically, close-ended questions about mental health problems and treatments trigger widespread consensual schemas addressing the
efficacy of modern medicine. Such questions target tacit agreement with the
medical model and organize thinking in ways that encourage individuals to
overestimate the likelihood of seeking mental health treatment.
Organizational sociologists are doing promising work on the sociocultural
dimensions of schematic transfer. Studying organizational sense-making,
for example, Elsbach, Barr, and Hargadon (2005, p. 423) explored the ways
in which ’’cognitive schemas and cultural contexts come together to form
“situated cognition.” Situated cognition, a term developed by Lave and
Wenger (1991), refers to transitory thought embedded in the interactive
context of the moment. The study of situated cognition is important because
it challenges the notion of schemas as stable units inextricably tied to certain
situations or events. Instead, this work suggests that interaction patterns
are critical triggers of schemas, with different patterns activating different
schemas and different interpretive and behavioral outcomes. Viewing
schemas as dynamic and transferable helps us understand unexpected
decisions and outcomes that heretofore seemed unpredictable or unlikely.
[See also Haynie, Shepherd, Mosakowski, and Earley (2010), Mezias and
Lant (2010), and Ocasio (2012).] These themes also are being explored by
those studying dyadic relationships—especially within the family (see, e.g.,
Beach, Fincham, & Stanley, 2007; Howe, 2007).
In another arena, Chung, McLarney, and Gillen (2008) use elder care
organizations to identify ways of triggering schematic transfer. They suggest

Culture and Cognition

7

several changes to managerial interaction patterns, changes that might
effectively switch individuals’ attention from “line-of-sight management
schema” (schemas that tie definitions of success to employee presence)
to “target-based schema” (those tying definitions of success to treatment
results). The authors discuss how this particular schematic transfer could
encourage strategies that make elder care less stressful and more effective. In
a related piece, Gough and Hick (2009) address the role of schematic transfer
in self-help behaviors. Studying ethnic minorities and their retirement plans
and strategies, the authors identify practices that prompt schematic transfer
in ways that increase productive investment activity.
CONTINUING THE STORY: COGNITIVE STYLES
Cognitive styles and their variations represent another promising line of culture and cognition research.
AUTOMATIC VERSUS DELIBERATE COGNITION
The dual processes of automatic and deliberate cognition have become a
central issue in culture and cognition research. Automatic cognition involves
rapid, effortless, unintentional thought; it ties experience to existing schemas
and allows us to quickly process information without extended review.
Deliberate cognition, in contrast, refers to slow, considered, and measured
thought. Individuals engaged in deliberate cognition may reject or override
their schemas, actively searching for characteristics, connections, relations,
and expectations rather than assuming them.
Cognitive scientists have explored conditions under which automatic
cognition might dominate deliberate cognition and vice versa. For example,
automatic cognition can occur outside of consciousness, while deliberate
thought demands consciousness; automatic cognition is more likely to occur
when we are under stress; deliberate cognition can be triggered by the
disruption of well-established routines (Solso, MacLin, & MacLin, 2008). But
such findings simply begin the story of dual processing. What chapters can
sociologists contribute?
DiMaggio (1997, p. 272) suggested one possible trajectory. He argued that
including cognitive styles in our studies of cultural patterns and practices
could help us better understand how culture enables or constrains and when
social action is simultaneously institutionalized and agentic. Acting on
DiMaggio’s suggestion, Karen Danna-Lynch (2007, 2009, 2010) incorporated
automatic versus deliberate cognition in her studies of multiple role enactments. Danna-Lynch attempts to explicate what she calls the “chameleon

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

factor”—that is, switching between social roles without becoming incapacitated by confusion or role conflict. While prior answers to this puzzle
focused primarily on behavior, Danna-Lynch brings cognition into the mix.
She recreates the meaning of role performance to include four ideal types of
role states—types based on the interaction of automatic versus deliberate
cognition and automatic versus deliberate behavior. Using interviews with
parents working in various occupations, Danna-Lynch itemizes the cultural
practices that help people establish role positions and continually switch
between them. Her culture and cognition lens provides a new approach
to role theory, presenting roles as a product of both physical and mental
space. Vaisey (2009) provides another important response to DiMaggio.
He tested the dual-processing model using survey and interview data that
address morality in decision making. In analyzing respondents’ reflections
on moral circumstances, Vaisey documents the presence of automatic and
deliberate cognition. He shows that these two cognitive styles can function
independently or together, and he urges sociologists to further explore the
cultural conditions associated with each cognitive style.
A number of recent works explore such associations, unpacking the contextual nature of cognitive styles. Javier Auyero and Debora Swistun (2008,
2009a, 2009b) examined cognitive styles among individuals facing uncertainty and risk—residents of an Argentine shantytown exposed to high levels
of environmental pollutants. The authors addressed processes and practices
that both sustained peoples’ uncertainty and resulted in mis-assessments
of environmental risks. Of particular interest were links between cultural
routines and cognitive styles. Auyero and Swistun argue that when polluters
avoid major disruptions to residents’ daily routines (i.e., getting to work, getting children to school, preparing meals), the routines themselves encourage
individuals to adopt an “automatic pilot” approach to their surroundings. In
essence, familiar routines combine with automatic cognition to restrict deliberate attention to surrounding dangers; this process, in turn, suspends any
initiatives toward organized actions against such dangers. It is worth noting,
however, that levels of routinization must be considered when linking routines to cognitive styles. Carol Heimer (2001) approaches routines as existing
on a density continuum—that is, situations vary from being abundantly or
over-routinized to being scarcely or under-routinized. Heimer argues that
over or under-routinization beckons deliberate cognition, while moderate
routinization is associated with automatic cognition. According to Heimer,
over-routinization triggers deliberate cognition because “people are so
overloaded with routines that routines become noise rather than signal and
cease to focus attention” (2001, p. 72). In under-routinized contexts, thought
must be inductive, as people examine and reexamine the evidence of novel
scenarios.

Culture and Cognition

9

Still others are exploring the associations between cognitive styles and
cultural contexts. Hana Shepherd (2011) reinterpreted several social psychological studies to illustrate how external elements of culture—for
example, symbols, elements of physical settings, situational interactions,
and networks—guide individuals’ cognitive styles. In another venue,
Cerulo (1998) described associations between media contexts and cognitive
styles. Studying visual and verbal depictions of violence, she identified four
temporal sequences that drive narrators’ accounts of violence: victim, performer, contextual, and doublecasting sequences. She found that narrators’
sequence selections reflect institutionalized communication conventions
based on assumptions of audience morality. Moreover, she documented
that certain sequences trigger automatic cognitive responses that lead
readers/viewers to systematically judge the rightness or wrongness of
violence with little deliberation. Cerulo noted that this pattern was not
universal, and she identified substantive and contextual elements—that is,
the type of violence described, moral consensus surrounding the act, social
instability surrounding the act—that temper the decision-making process.
[See Altheide (2002, 2006) for related work.] Organizational researchers
Srivastava and Banaji (2011) found important associations between cognitive styles, self-assessments of worth, and collaboration patterns in
organizations—particularly in settings that value cross-boundary collaboration. They showed that cognitive styles greatly impact how people
view themselves. When people engage in deliberative cognition, they view
their worth more positively than they do when engaged in automatic
cognition. Further, the less inflated views of self-worth that emerge from
automatic cognition make people more likely to enlist and be enlisted to
collaborate with colleagues who are organizationally distant. Counter to
expectation, Srivastava and Baldassarri show that collaborative choices in
organizations—particularly those governed by social desirability—are often
guided by automatic, less conscious thought. Finally, Daina Harvey (2010)
takes discussions of automatic and deliberate cognition in a promising new
direction. Harvey explores the links between the configuration of social
spaces and the ways in which these configurations beckon cognitive styles.
He suggests that structured spaces tend to facilitate deliberative cognition,
while unstructured spaces promote automatic cognition. Harvey’s development of these connections has important implications for how and, perhaps,
why we use culture in the process of thought.
HOT AND COLD COGNITION
Hot and cold cognition refers to another dual-process model of thought.
Emotions distinguish the hot–cold continuum from the automatic-deliberate

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

model. Hot cognition involves a heightened response to stimuli, one
largely driven by emotion. In contrast, cold cognition refers to unemotional,
painstaking thought that involves rational analysis.
Technological advances play a major role in cognitive scientists’ increasing
interest in emotional cognition. Using fMRI, researchers watch thoughts and
emotions as they develop in the brain; they then track the areas of the brain
that seem most active in information processing. In this regard, Jonathan
Cohen and colleagues research the links between moral dilemmas, emotions,
and cognition, studying fMRI images that track subjects’ reactions to different moral dilemmas (see, e.g., Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, &
Cohen, 2001; Cohen, 2005). The experimenters typically present subjects with
two moral dilemmas. In the “trolley dilemma,” a runaway trolley speeds
directly toward five people. To save the group, subjects must agree to hit
a switch, diverting the trolley to a side track where it will kill only one person. Contrast this scenario with the “footbridge dilemma.” Here too, a trolley
threatens five people. But here, the quintet can be saved only if subjects agree
to push an adjacent stranger off a bridge and into the trolley’s path. While the
stranger is killed, the body will prevent the trolley from reaching the larger
group.
In presenting the two dilemmas, researchers ask: Are subjects willing to flip
the switch or push a stranger, and what cognitive style informs their decisions?’’ fMRI images show that subjects’ reactions to each scenario activate
different parts of their brains. The impersonal “switch flipping” taps the dorsolateral areas of the prefrontal cortex—areas associated with cold cognitive
processes (i.e., working memory, abstract reasoning, and problem solving). In
contrast, the personal “pushing” taps the medial frontal cortex, an area associated with emotional processing. These pictures suggest that switch-flipping
feels more rational and reasoned—and perhaps more doable—than pushing
another human onto the tracks.
Similar findings appear in studies addressing fear and self-protection.
When faced with images of dangerous objects, Ohman and Mineka (2001)
found that individuals process the images in different ways. “Natural”
dangers—for example, pictures of spiders, snakes, or crocodiles—activate
the brain’s emotional centers, while “modern” dangers—for example, guns
or electrical outlets—activate the brain’s decision-making areas. Here, as in
much cognitive science, evolution seems critical to the field’s understanding
of neural differences. Researchers argue that fear toward natural dangers is
ingrained in the human body by centuries of survival needs; thus, natural
dangers elicit a physiological response. In contrast, the fear of modern
dangers has developed through learning and reflection, eliciting rational
considerations.

Culture and Cognition

11

Sociologists can add much to this explanation. Different reactions to natural and modern dangers may involve evolution. But these differences may
be just as powerfully explained by situating these objects in social interaction. Consider snake versus gun. When it comes to a snake, one likely sees
the encounter in terms of a simple, limited dyadic exchange. The two meet,
consider finite options for attack, with one the victor … or entity who cleverly (luckily?) escapes harm. The gun, however, presents a more complicated story. Is it my gun or someone else’s? Am I aiming it or is it aimed
at me? How skilled is the shooter … how willing … how far away? Is the
gun in good working order? Is it real or a good facsimile? Will the shot be
heard by someone nearby? If so, how will that affect the shooter’s willingness to use the gun? In essence, the gun is part of a broader interactive scenario. Actor-network theorists such as Bruno Latour (2005) would say that
the gun is an equal participant in social interaction—an “actant” that can
make things happen. But a full understanding of this actant’s role demands
cold cognition—careful, painstaking thought that considers the nuances and
options presented by the interaction in which the gun is embedded.
Several social movement scholars are exploring hot and cold cognition
within the interactive history of certain collective actions (see, e.g., Gamson, 1992; Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001a; Hercus, 1999; Jasper, 1998;
Parker & Hackett, 2012; Robnett, 2004; Taylor, 2000; Taylor & Rupp, 2002).
These scholars delineate the path from hot cognition to action. Because
certain cultural events or arrangements may initially trigger hot cognition,
while successful movement organizers must create the strategies and processes that will transform feeling into action (see, e.g., Goodwin, Jasper, &
Polletta, 2001b; Reger, 2004). Often, this involves redirecting attentions of
movement participants’ from hot, emotional triggers to cold, deliberative
triggers, as emotionally hot cognitions can escalate rather than overcome
social conflict (Harcourt, 2002).
Beyond social movements, those studying decision making explore the
role of hot–cold cognition in evaluation and subsequent action. In this
regard, some researchers find that entities triggering hot cognition are
better remembered and more readily applied than those triggering cold
cognition. This finding proves important to those constructing surveys
and questionnaires, as cognitive styles may significantly influence subjects’
evaluative responses (van de Veld & Saris, 2004). It also proves important to
our understanding of people’s judgments and evaluations in areas as varied
as criminal behavior (Van Gelder & De Vries, 2012), social justice decisions
(Kunda, 1999; Stapel, 2003), management decisions (Kennedy & Vining,
2007), organizational sense-making (Weick, 2005), advertising effectiveness
(Cerulo, 1995a), symbol acceptance (Cerulo, 1995b) and mathematical
calculations (Roth, 2007).

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

GRADED MEMBERSHIP
Concepts are building blocks of thought, and many cognitive scientists
believe that they exist as prototypes. Prototypes amplify or exaggerate the
critical features of categories, focusing our brains exclusively on category
“ideals.” When we encounter something, we use mental prototypes and
perform a process called graded membership. Using this cognitive style, we
rank or place entities with reference to others in their class. Thus, when
you shop for apples, your brain rapidly compares every apple you see to
an ideal prototype. The more attributes the apple-in-hand shares with the
prototype in your brain, the more likely you are to include what you see in
the category apple and the closer you will rank it to the category’s core ideal.
For cognitive scientists, graded membership has obvious results for the
way we evaluate everyday life. The process forcefully establishes asymmetry as one of the brain’s prominent modus operandi. Best case examples of
a concept are overemphasized and highly detailed; anything less becomes
increasingly nondescript, released, or distanced by the brain from active consideration.
Cerulo (2006) continues the story of graded membership, illuminating
its social implications. She argues that the process contributes to a sociocultural phenomenon she calls positive asymmetry. Positive asymmetry is
blind optimism—a tunnel-vision directed to best-case scenarios and an
accompanying disregard for worst-case scenarios. Cerulo’s work documents
the widespread nature of positive asymmetry, tracking its influence in key
events in the life cycle, the sites of work and play, and in the organizations
and bureaucracies that structure social life. Using interviews, fictional
accounts, survey data, media reports, journalistic commentaries, and official
records, she illustrates the frequency with which individuals, groups, and
communities blatantly disregard worst-case scenarios. While definitions of
best and worst change over time and place, Cerulo shows that the tendency
to prioritize the best is rather constant.
How is positive asymmetry connected to the brain? Clearly, the brain
has prototypes for worst-cases—that is the perfect storm, the unspeakable
murder. Thus, how can one argue that graded membership and positive
asymmetry are somehow connected? Cerulo shows that most communities
maintain cultural practices that background half of what is in the brain
(e.g., materials dealing with worst-cases or negative concepts). These
practices harness the brain’s propensity toward asymmetrical thinking—the
mechanic or way we think—and encode that process into a much more
targeted and specialized experiential bias. Asymmetry—the tendency
to emphasize only best-case examples of any concept, is transformed to
positive asymmetry—the tendency to emphasize only examples of the

Culture and Cognition

13

best-quality cases. Cerulo unpacks three sets of practices that function in this
regard: eclipsing, clouding, and recasting. She also identifies certain structural
conditions under which these practices are more or less effective. These
ideas have been applied by others to the study of educational aspirations
(Reynolds & Baird, 2010), environmental disasters (Auyero & Swistun,
2009b), health risks (Armstrong, 2003; Fedson & Dunhill, 2007; Senier,
2008), leadership patterns (Hollander, 2009), political power (Freudenberg &
Alario, 2007), privacy (Nippert-Eng, 2010), and surveillance (Monahan,
2010). By extending cognitive science with a culture and cognition perspective, these works show us exactly how social and cultural practices can
complement, alter, or elaborate neural processes.
FUTURE ISSUES
The works reviewed here forward our understanding of culture, cognition, and the mind-body-environment link. However, further progress
may demand a more dramatic paradigm shift, one that revisits current
assumptions about cultural acquisition and redefines enculturation as a
sociophysiological phenomenon.
Toward that end, Albert Bergesen (2004b, 2012) reviewed neuroscientific
studies of language acquisition among babies. This research suggests that
language skills precede humans’ interactive capacities, with a finite number
of mental rules driving our understanding of the social world well before
enculturation and socialization begin. Bergesen contends that this makes
enculturation “a more Chomskyan than Meadian process” (2004b, p. 368). At
the same time, we must remain mindful that individuals regularly transform
these finite mental rules into an infinite number of interaction possibilities,
all occurring between different people with different goals and agendas,
interacting across various times, places, and situations. For Bergesen, the
mission of culture and cognition scholars is to explicate this intricate process
and to understand the variable ways and conditions under which finite
mental possibilities expand.
Several sociologists are taking promising steps in this regard. Like Bergesen, David Peterson (2012) accepts that certain universal capacities allow
individuals to grasp the categories so necessary to social existence. However,
he underscores the fact that the representation of these capacities varies by
culture. Peterson contends that sociologists must do more than acknowledge
this variation. They must attempt to identify and explain the mechanisms
and conditions associated with specific forms of cognitive variation. Peterson offers a paradigm by which to accomplish this task, forwarding four
specific roles that social and cultural elements may play in the development

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of mind: (i) social facilitation—does culture provides conditions for flexible expressions of categories … if so, under what circumstances? (ii) Social
divisions—by what mechanisms does culture create variable divisions and
boundaries in continua of experience? (iii) Social specification—can we track
and compare the culturally specific expression of native intelligence and presuppositions? (4) Social construction—how does culture develop new concepts that establish systems of references and mechanisms of transmission?
In pursuing questions of enculturation, some have tied their theories to specific neurological processes. Omar Lizardo (2007, 2012), for example, merged
neuroscientific work on “mirror neurons” with sociological work on “habitus.” In so doing, he provides an exciting new perspective on enculturation.
Neuroscientists tell us that mirror neurons form a network located in the prefrontal motor cortex of humans and other primates. They “fire” in response
to visual stimuli that require motor response from such beings. They also fire
when one simply witnesses or hears others making motor responses. (For
example, the same neurons fire when I clap my hands or I simply see/hear
another clap their hands.) Thus, mirror neurons take practical information
based on specific observations and create generalized conceptual knowledge
about the way objects “work.” “Instead of knowing what objects are in a
decontextualized sense,” writes Lizardo, “mirror neurons allow us to know
what objects are good for” (2007, p. 22). Understanding mirror neurons fills
critical gaps in practice theory. Recall that Bourdieu rejected imitation as the
means by which we acquire practical knowledge—but he had no satisfying
alternative. If neuroscientists are right, mirror neurons provide social actors
with two things: “the practical capacities productive of action” and “the practical, representation, coding, and comprehension of practical action—both
for the self and others” (Lizardo, 2007, pp. 13, 14). This means that Bourdieu’s
habitus and the practical competences that form it need not be the product of
explicit instructions or imitation. Rather, competences are activated by virtue
of being surrounded by others who display the same competencies (Lizardo,
2007, pp. 17, 19).
Gabriel Ignatow (2007, 2009) also used cognitive science research to
productively modify Bourdieu’s work on enculturation. Ignatow taps
studies that, in contradiction to Bourdieu, treat the habitus’ cognitive and
somatic components as inseparable and in constant reciprocal interaction. To
illustrate the importance of centering mind–body connections in research on
thought and enculturation, Ignatow compared individual’s use of and reaction to embodied metaphors verses abstract language. Building on cognitive
science research addressing schematic activation, Ignatow hypothesized
that culture’s effects on cognition and behavior is strongest when cognitive
schemas are “understood to be embodied and when discourses are seen as
containing bodily information that interacts with those cognitive schema”

Culture and Cognition

15

(2009, p. 643). Ignatow tested his ideas with data from messages posted on
two Internet support group sites—one identified as religious/orthodox and
one as secular/modern. Ignatow expected both groups to vary significantly
in their use of discursive tools. In tune with each group’s moral culture, he
expected religious/orthodox group members to favor embodied metaphors
and secular/modern group members to favor abstractions. He also reasoned
that the use of embodied metaphors would be more effective than abstractions in generating high group solidarity, allowing for a greater sense of
cohesion in the religious/orthodox site. Following extensive content analysis
of over 2000 posts, Ignatow found support for his hypotheses, concluding
that “culture’s effects on social bonding can be identified more readily when
cultural structures are conceived as embodied cognitive structures, rather
than as purely mental or behavioral patterns that operate both within the
individual habitus and at the level of small-group discourse” (2009, p. 687).
CONCLUSION
Sociologists of culture and cognition are posing new questions—questions
that need to be asked in louder and louder voices. What are the links
between mind, body, and the contexts in which they are situated? Where
does thought reside … where and how is it initiated, developed, and
transmitted? Sociologists are now beginning to explore these issues with
a wider analytic lens, simultaneously mapping the neural, emotional,
and sensory elements of thought as well as the patterns that characterize
the sociocultural contexts in which thought occurs. Exciting answers are
rapidly emerging, with sociologists now decidedly a part of this important
interdisciplinary crosstalk. Stay tuned.
REFERENCES
Altheide, D. (2002). Tracking discourse. In K. A. Cerulo (Ed.), Culture in Mind: Toward
a Sociology of Culture and Cognition (pp. 172–186). New York, NY: Routledge.
Altheide, D. (2006). Terrorism and the Politics of Fear. Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press.
Armstrong, E. (2003). Conceiving risk, bearing responsibility: Fetal alcohol syndrome and
the diagnosis of moral disorder. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Auyero, J. (2010). Chuck and Pierre at the welfare office. Sociological Forum, 25(4),
851–860.
Auyero, J., & Swistun, D. (2008). The social production of toxic uncertainty. American
Sociological Review, 73, 357–379.
Auyero, J., & Swistun, D. (2009a). Tiresias in flammable shantytown: Toward a tempography of domination. Sociological Forum, 24, 1–21.
Auyero, J., & Swistun, D. (2009b). Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentinian
Shantytown. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

16

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Beach, S. R. H., Fincham, F. D., & Stanley, S. M. (2007). Contextualizing the study of
marital transformation: Points of convergence. Journal of Marriage and the Family,
69(2), 315–319.
Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the
sociology of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
Bergesen, A. (2004a). Durkheim’s theory of mental categories: A review of the evidence. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 395–408.
Bergesen, A. (2004b). Chomsky vs. mead. Sociological Theory, 22, 257–370.
Bergesen, A. (2012). Turning Durkheim on his head: A reply to Peterson and Bjerre.
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 4(4), 485–495.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brekhus, W. H., Brunsma, D. L., Platts, T., & Dua, P. (2010). On the contributions
of cognitive sociology to the sociological study of race. Sociology Compass, 4(1),
61–76.
Brubaker, R., Loveman, M., & Stamanov, P. (2004). Ethnicity as cognition. Theory and
Society, 33, 31–64.
Cerulo, K. A. (1995a). Designs on the White House: TV ads, message structure, and
election outcome. Research in Political Sociology, 7, 63–88.
Cerulo, K. A. (1995b). Identity designs: The sights and sounds of a nation. The Arnold
and Caroline Rose Book Series. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Cerulo, K. A. (1998). Deciphering violence: The cognitive structure of right and wrong.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Cerulo, K. A. (2002). Culture in mind: Toward a sociology of culture and cognition. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Cerulo, K. A. (2006). Never saw it coming: Cultural challenges to envisioning the worst.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Cerulo, K. A. (2010). Mining the intersections of cognitive sociology and neuroscience. Poetics, 38(2), 115–132.
Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and mind. Boston, MA: M.I.T./Harcourt, Brace &
World.
Chomsky, N. (1978). Topics in the theory of generative grammar. Boston, MA: Mouton
De Gruyter.
Chung, E., McLarney, C., & Gillen, M. C. (2008). Social policy recommendations to
alleviate stress among informal providers of elder care. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 28(9–10), 340–350.
Cicourel, A. (1974). Cognitive sociology: Language and meaning in social interaction. New
York, NY: Free Press.
Cohen, J. D. (2005). The vulcanization of the human brain: A neural perspective on
interactions between cognition and emotion. The Journal of Economic Perspectives,
19, 3–24.
Danna-Lynch, K. (2007). Modeling role enactment: Linking role theory and social
cognition. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 37, 379–399.

Culture and Cognition

17

Danna-Lynch, K. (2009). Objects, meanings, and role identities: The practices that
establish association in the care of home-based employment. Sociological Forum,
24, 76–103.
Danna-Lynch, K. (2010). Culture and cognition in the performance of multiple roles:
The process of mental weighing. Poetics, 38(2), 166–184.
DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.
Elsbach, K. D., Barr, P. S., & Hargadon, A. B. (2005). Identifying situated cognitions
in organizations. Organization Science, 16(4), 422–433.
Fedson, D. S., & Dunhill, P. (2007). New approaches to confronting an immanent
influenza pandemic. The Permanente Journal, 11(3), 63–69.
Freudenberg, W. R., & Alario, M. (2007). Weapons of mass distraction: Magicianship,
misdirection, and the dark side of legitimation. Sociological Forum, 22, 146–173.
Gamson, W. A. (1992). Talking politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. London,
England: Harper and Row.
Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M., & Polletta, F. (Eds.) (2001a). Passionate Politics: Emotions and
Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M., & Polletta, F. (2001b). Introduction: Why emotions matter.
In J. Goodwin, J. M. Jasper & F. Polletta (Eds.), Passionate politics: Emotions and social
movements (pp. 1–26). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gough, O., & Hick, R. (2009). Ethnic minorities, retirement planning and personal
accounts. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 29(9), 488–497.
Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001).
An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293,
2105–108.
Harcourt, E. J. (2002). The whipping of Richard Moore: Reading emotion in reconstruction America. Journal of Social History, 36, 261–282.
Harding, D. J. (2007). Cultural context, sexual behavior, and romantic relationships
in disadvantaged neighborhoods. American Sociological Review, 72(3), 341–364.
Harvey, D. (2010). The space for culture and cognition. Poetics, 38(2), 185–204.
Haynie, J. M., Shepherd, D., Mosakowski, E., & Earley, P. C. (2010). A situated
metacognitive model of the entrepreneurial mindset. Journal of Business Venturing,
25(2), 217–229.
Heimer, C. A. (2001). Cases and biographies: An essay on routinization and the
nature of comparison. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 47–76.
Hercus, C. (1999). Identity, emotion and feminist collective action. Gender and Society,
13, 34–55.
Hoffman, J. P., & Bartkowski, J. P. (2008). Gender, religious tradition, and biblical
literalism. Social Forces, 86(3), 1245–1272.
Hollander, E. P. (2009). Inclusive leadership: The essential leader-follower relationship.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Howard, J. A., & Renfrow, D. G. (2003). “Social cognition”. In J. Delamater (Ed.),
Handbook of social psychology (pp. 259–281). New York, NY: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

18

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Howe, G. W. (2007). Socially situated cognition and the couple as a dynamic system:
A commentary. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 69(2), 299–304.
Ignatow, G. (2004). Speaking together, thinking together? Exploring metaphor and
cognition in a shipyard union dispute. Sociological Forum, 19(3), 405–433.
Ignatow, G. (2007). Theories of embodied knowledge: New directions for cultural
and cognitive sociology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37(2), 115–135.
Ignatow, G. (2009). Culture and embodied cognition: Moral discourses in Internet
support groups for overeaters. Social Forces, 88(2), 643–669.
Jasper, J. M. (1998). The emotions of protest: Affective and reactive emotions in and
around social movements. Sociological Forum, 13(3), 397–424.
Johnson, C., Dowd, T. J., & Ridgeway, C. L. (2006). Legitimacy as a social process.
Annual Review of Sociology, 32, 53–78.
Kennedy, J., & Vining, J. (2007). Why do emotions matter? Natural resources conflicts
and the role of manager’s emotions. Journal of Sustainable Forestry, 24, 23–50.
Kunda, Z. (1999). Social cognition: Making sense of people. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Lizardo, O. (2007). ’Mirror neurons,’ collective objects and the problem of transmission: Reconsidering Stephen Turner’s critique of practice theory. Journal for the
Theory of Social Behaviour, 37, 319–350.
Lizardo, O. (2012). Embodied culture as procedure: Cognitive science and the link
between subjective and objective culture. In A. Warde & D. Southerton (Eds.),
The habits of consumption. COLLeGIUM: Studies across disciplines in the humanities
and social sciences (Vol. 12, pp. 70–86). Helsinki, Finland: Helsinki Collegium of
Advanced Studies.
Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology and Utopia. London, England: Routledge.
Mead, G. H. (1982). In D. L. Miller (Ed.), The individual and the social self: Unpublished
essays by G. H. mead. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Mezias, S., & Lant, T. (2010). Situated learning and brokerage as keys to successful
knowledge production: An experiential review. In C. B. Schoonhoven & F. Dobbin
(Eds.), Stanford’s organization theory renaissance, 1970–2000 research in the sociology of
organizations (Vol. 28, pp. 351–357). Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing
Limited.
Miller, J. L. (1995). Variation in judgments of criminal sanctions: An application of
‘schema theory’. Sociological Focus, 27(3), 257–279.
Monahan, T. (2010). Surveillance in the time of insecurity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Nippert-Eng, C. (2010). Islands of privacy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ocasio, W. (2012). Situated attention, lose and tight coupling, and the garbage can
model. In J. Lomi & J. R. Harrison (Eds.), The garbage can model of organizational
choice: Looking forward at forty. (Research in the sociology of organizations (Vol. 36, pp.
293–317). Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Culture and Cognition

19

Ohman, A., & Mineka, S. (2001). Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an
evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review, 108, 483–522.
Parker, J. N., & Hackett, E. J. (2012). Hot spots and hopt moments in scientific collaborations and social movements. American Sociological Review, 77(1), 21–44.
Pescosoliudo, B. A., & Olafsdottir, S. (2010). “The cultural turn in sociology: Can it
help us resolve an age-old problem in understanding decision making for health
care?”. Sociological Forum, 25(4), 665–676.
Peterson, D. (2012). Where the sidewalk ends: The limits of social constructionism.
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 42(4), 465–478.
Reger, J. (2004). Organizational “emotion work” through consciousness-raising: An
analysis of a feminist organization. Qualitative Sociology, 27, 205–222.
Reynolds, J. R., & Baird, C. L. (2010). “Is there a downside to shooting for the stars?”.
American Sociological Review, 75(1), 151–172.
Robnett, B. (2004). Emotional resonance, social location, and strategic framing. Sociological Focus, 37, 196–212.
Rosenfield, S., Lennon, M. C., & White, H. R. (2005). The self and mental health:
Self-salience and the emergence of internalizing and externalizing problems. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 46, 323–340.
Roth, W. M. (2007). Mathematical modeling ‘in the wild’: A case of hot cognition. In
R. A. Lesh, E. Hamilton & J. J. Kaput (Eds.), Foundations for the future in mathematics
education (pp. 77–98). New York, NY: Routledge.
Senier, L. (2008). It’s your most precious thing: Worst-case thinking, trust, and
parental decision making about vaccines. Sociological Inquiry, 78, 207–229.
Shepherd, H. (2011). The cultural context of cognition: What the Implicit Association
test tells us about how culture works. Sociological Forum, 26(1), 121–143.
Solso, R., MacLin, M. K., & Maclin, O. H. (2008). Cognitive psychology (8th ed.). Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Srivastava, S. B., & Banaji, M. R. (2011). Culture, cognition, and collaborative networks in organizations. American Sociological Review, 76(2), 207–233.
Stapel, D. A. (2003). Hot cognition and social judgments: When and why do descriptions influence our feelings?. In J. P. Forgas, K. P. Williams & W. Von Hippel (Eds.),
Social judgments: Implicit and explicit processes (pp. 227–250). Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, V. (2000). Emotions and identity in women’s self-help movements. In S.
Striker, T. J. Owens & R. W. White (Eds.), Self, identity and social movements (pp.
271–299). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Taylor, V., & Rupp, L. J. (2002). Loving internationalism: The emotion culture
of transnationalwomen’s organizations, 1888–1945. Mobilization: An International
Journal of Research and Theory about Social Movements, Protest, and Collective Behavior,
7, 141–158.
Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and justification: A dual-process model of culture in
action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.
van de Veld, W., & Saris, W. E. (2004). Separation of error, method effects, instabiltiy
and attitude strength. In W. E. Saris & P. M. Sniderman (Eds.), Studies in public

20

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

opinion: Attitudes, nonattitudes, measurement error and change (pp. 37–62). Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Van Gelder, J. L., & De Vries, R. (2012). Traits and states: Integrating personality and
affect into a model of criminal decision making. Criminology, 50(3), 637–671.
Weick, K. (2005). Making sense of the organization. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Zerubavel, E. (1997). Social mindscapes: An invitation to cognitive sociology. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Zuckerman, E. W. (2004). Structural incoherence and stock market activity. American
Sociological Review, 69, 405–432.

FURTHER READING
Bergesen, A. (2004). Chomsky vs. mead. Sociological Theory, 22, 257–370.
Cerulo, K. A. (2002). Culture in mind: Toward a sociology of culture and cognition. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Cerulo, K. A. (2010). Mining the intersections of cognitive sociology and neuroscience. Poetics, 38(2), 115–132.
DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.
Ignatow, G. (2007). Theories of embodied knowledge: New directions for cultural
and cognitive sociology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37(2), 115–135.

KAREN A. CERULO SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Karen A. Cerulo (PhD Princeton University) is a Full Professor and former
Chair of the Rutgers University Sociology Department. Her research interests include culture and cognition, symbolic communication, media and
technology, social change, comparative historical studies, and measurement
techniques. Cerulo’s articles appear in a wide variety of journals, including
the American Sociological Review, the Annual Review of Sociology, Contemporary
Sociology, Poetics, Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Sociological Inquiry, and
Communication Research. She is the author of three books: Identity Designs:
The Sights and Sounds of a Nation, winner of the American Sociological
Association’s 1996 Culture Section Best Book Award (The Rose Book Series
of the ASA, Rutgers University Press); Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive
Order of Right and Wrong (Routledge); and Never Saw It Coming: Cultural
Challenges to Envisioning the Worst (University of Chicago Press). She also
has edited a collection entitled Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture
and Cognition (Routledge) and coauthored a book entitled Second Thoughts:
Seeing Conventional Wisdom through the Sociological Eye (Pine Forge/Sage).
Cerulo is a past Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society, past Chair
of the American Sociological Association’s Culture Section and the 2012
Robin Williams Distinguished Lecturer.

Culture and Cognition

21

RELATED ESSAYS
Models of Revealed Preference (Economics), Abi Adams and Ian Crawford
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
History and Epistemology of Anthropology (Anthropology), Arjun
Appadurai
Intersectionality and the Development of Self and Identity (Psychology),
Margarita Azmitia and Virginia Thomas
Agency as an Explanatory Key: Theoretical Issues (Sociology), Richard
Biernacki and Tad Skotnicki
Mental Models (Psychology), Ruth M. J. Byrne
Authenticity: Attribution, Value, and Meaning (Sociology), Glenn R. Carroll
The Inherence Heuristic: Generating Everyday Explanations (Psychology),
Andrei Cimpian
Misinformation and How to Correct It (Psychology), John Cook et al.
Self-Fulfilling Prophesies, Placebo Effects, and the Social-Psychological
Creation of Reality (Sociology), Alia Crum and Damon J. Phillips
Cultural Differences in Emotions (Psychology), Jozefien De Leersnyder et al.
Understanding the Adaptive Functions of Morality from a Cognitive Psychological Perspective (Psychology), James Dungan and Liane Young
Micro-Cultures (Sociology), Gary Alan Fine
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske
and Cydney H. Dupree
Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One’s Thoughts (Psychology),
Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine
Culture and Social Networks (Sociology), Jan A. Fuhse
Ambivalence and Inbetweeness (Sociology), Bernhard Giesen
Ethnic Enclaves (Sociology), Steven J. Gold
Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation (Anthropology), Richard
Handler
Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen
Hawkes and James Coxworth
Biology and Culture (Psychology), Robert Peter Hobson
Behavioral Economics (Sociology), Guy Hochman and Dan Ariely
Normal Negative Emotions and Mental Disorders (Sociology), Allan V.
Horwitz
Emotion and Decision Making (Psychology), Jeff R. Huntsinger and Cara Ray
The Development of Social Trust (Psychology), Vikram K. Jaswal and Marissa
B. Drell
History and Materiality (Anthropology), Rosemary A. Joyce
Cultural Neuroscience: Connecting Culture, Brain, and Genes (Psychology),
Shinobu Kitayama and Sarah Huff

22

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity (Political Science), David D.
Laitin and Sangick Jeon
Complexity: An Emerging Trend in Social Sciences (Anthropology), J. Stephen
Lansing
From Individual Rationality to Socially Embedded Self-Regulation (Sociology), Siegwart Lindenberg
Two-Systems View of Children’s Theory-of-Mind Understanding (Psychology), Jason Low
Against Game Theory (Political Science), Gale M. Lucas et al.
Media and the development of Identity (Psychology), Adriana M. Manago
Culture, Diffusion, and Networks in Social Animals (Anthropology), Janet
Mann and Lisa Singh
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Material Turn (Communications & Media), Chandra Mukerji
A Bio-Social-Cultural Approach to Early Cognitive Development: Entering
the Community of Minds (Psychology), Katherine Nelson
Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts (Psychology), Bethany Ojalehto
and Douglas Medin
Culture as Situated Cognition (Psychology), Daphna Oyserman
Culture and Movements (Sociology), Francesca Polletta and Beth Gharrity
Gardner
Social Classification (Sociology), Elizabeth G. Pontikes
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Economics and Culture (Economics), Gérard Roland
Born This Way: Thinking Sociologically about Essentialism (Sociology),
Kristen Schilt
Stereotype Threat (Psychology), Toni Schmader and William M. Hall
Production of Culture (Sociology), Vaughn Schmutz and Candace N. Miller
Social Neuroendocrine Approaches to Relationships (Anthropology), Sari M.
van Anders and Peter B. Gray
The Intrinsic Dynamics of Development (Psychology), Paul van Geert and
Marijn van Dijk
Theory of Mind (Psychology), Henry Wellman
Culture and Globalization (Sociology), Frederick F. Wherry


Culture and Cognition
KAREN A. CERULO

Abstract
Culture and cognition is a rapidly growing subfield within sociology. Scholars working in this area address how aspects of both social structure and culture impact the
ways in which social actors think. From the literature, one learns about specific processes and styles that individuals adopt when engaged in thought, cognitive patterns
that characterize certain groups or communities, and thought styles that emerge in
specific situations and social contexts. New works pay special attention to the links
between mind, body, and sociocultural context. In this essay, I define the general
focus of the field, review its intellectual roots, discuss recent turns in its literature,
and identify issues for future research.

CULTURE AND COGNITION
Culture and cognition is a rapidly growing subfield within sociology.
Scholars working in this area address how aspects of culture (e.g., beliefs,
norms, practices, frames, schemata, symbols, and values) as well as various
elements of social structure (e.g., network configurations, power arrangements, and the organization of institutions) impact the ways in which
social actors think. Researchers identify specific processes and styles that
individuals adopt when engaged in thought. They also study the cognitive
patterns that characterize certain groups or communities, and the thought
styles that emerge in specific situations and social contexts. New works in
culture and cognition do not isolate the mind, but rather problematize the
connection between body, mind, and environment.
The theoretical roots of culture and cognition can be traced to various sociological literatures, including symbolic interactionism, social constructionism,
the sociology of knowledge, ethnomethodology, and sociolinguistics. While
contemporary works build on this diverse theoretical history, scholars are
also entering into cross-disciplinary dialog, engaging works from cognitive
anthropology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. As such, the most
exciting research in the contemporary literature resides at the intersection
of several academic fields.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

In this essay, I review in more detail the intellectual roots of culture and
cognition studies, recent turns in the literature, and issues for future research.
THE ROOTS OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
AND COGNITION RESEARCH
Culture and cognition, as a sociological concern, grew from theories specifically designed to conceptualize and understand the mind. But the works that
form the core foundation of contemporary research are those that move us
away from treating mind as a distinct entity and closer to considering cognition as a sociophysiological phenomenon—a joint product of mind, body,
and environment.
Central to the history of culture and cognition is the work of George
Herbert Mead. Mead was primarily concerned with mind, its formation, and
its contribution to the development of self. In a challenge to Dualism, which
conceived of mind and body as separate entities, and materialism, which
equated the mind with the physiological properties of the brain, Mead
brought a uniquely sociological lens to the study of cognition. He argued
that minds exist only “in relation to other minds with shared meanings”
(1982, p. 5), making consciousness a product of the social—specifically, the
interaction and communication between social actors, and actors’ simultaneous engagement with the surrounding social environment. Note that
bodies were an important element of Mead’s conception of mind. He saw
bodies as vehicles of interaction, and thus, necessary enablers of mind.
Many scholars elaborated elements of Mead’s work, adding new but solely
social considerations to discussions of mind. Karl Mannheim (1936), for
example, expanded on the important link between interaction and mind
formation, particularly the collective mind and the building of shared
knowledge. Manheim argued that a group or community’s thoughts and
understandings were formed by their members’ social positions—that is,
social class, context or situation, and generation. He urged us to study
mind formation and thinking as a relational phenomenon—a product
of multiple perspectives that traverse space and time. In another line of
research, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann sought to understand how
mind becomes culturally shared. Leaning heavily on philosopher Alfred
Schutz, Berger and Luckmann argued that a collective mind emerges from
a group or society’s “stock of knowledge … the facts a group recognizes,
the beliefs it espouses, and the routine performances, logics, and symbols by
which these facts and beliefs are created and sustained” (1967, pp. 41–46).
For Berger and Luckmann, the stock of knowledge functions as a pocket
dictionary of culture used to negotiate our mental images of the everyday
world. Still other scholars began exploring the ways in which the social and

Culture and Cognition

3

cultural organize the mind. For example, Erving Goffman’s classic Frame
Analysis (1974) approached frames as conceptual tools derived from one’s
local cultural context. These frames become mechanisms that define and
arrange individuals’ awareness and understanding of social experience.
Similarly, Eviatar Zerubavel’s Social Mindscapes (1997) identifies and maps
the interpretative procedures (e.g., lumping, splitting) and cultural tools
(e.g., cognitive lenses) by which members of cultural communities organize
thought and give meaning to situations.
SOMETHING WAS MISSING
These works, while establishing a distinctively sociological approach to
understanding the cultural aspects of cognition, leave an important component of Mead’s theory behind—namely, the mind-body-environment link.
One must look to a different group of scholars for theories that sustain—even
prioritize—this important relationship.
Noam Chomsky’s work (1968, 1978) on transformational and generative
grammar provides a good starting point. In these theories, Chomsky centralizes the brain. He contends that brains hold a set of innate linguistic competences that channel cognition, communication, and comprehension. These
competences, called deep structures, represent a set of rules that guide how
words can be combined to create grammatically correct and sensible ideas.
For Chomsky, these rules emerge from a universal grammar that is common
to all spoken and written language forms. As such, deep structures, the physiological components that build mind, are critical to the cognitive activity of
human beings. When we move beyond deep structures, we also find room in
Chomsky’s theory for the role of culture and environment in language and
thought. Chomsky contends that these factors prove relevant in the “performance” of language. In performance, individuals transform deep structures
by rearranging a sentence’s outward form, creating more variable surface
structures that coincide with cultural contexts of action and community traditions.
Aaron Cicourel (1974) also foregrounds the mind-body-environment link
in studying cognition. While language is an important part of his thinking,
Cicourel also considers the role of human senses in the process of thought.
He argues that social actors’ sight, touch, gestures, and body movements
often take control of the communication experience—particularly when language is unavailable; he contends people use these interpretive procedures
to develop a “sense” of social structure—one that organizes their perceptions
and ultimately their actions. Thus, Cicourel too builds a model that simultaneously recognizes mind, body, and environment. The mind is a product of
the senses, and the senses are contingent on the body’s situation.

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on “habitus” represent the most recent and
perhaps the most currently influential theory of cognition. Bourdieu defines
the habitus as a system of “durable, transposable dispositions” that are
products of a culturally situated mind-body. The habitus organizes social
fields of action, enables individuals, groups, or communities to perceive
and understand their environment, and to negotiate and recreate action.
In essence, the habitus allows individuals to practice culture without “in
any way being the product of obedience to rules” … to be “collectively
orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor” (1977, p. 72; see also 2000). Bourdieu’s theory draws an important
connection between mind and body—one that, like Chomsky or Cicourel’s
vision, describes a connection more intimate than that posited by Mead.
Bourdieu’s body is not simply a vehicle of action. Rather, he views thought
and action as embodied—internalized through our material physical being.
In this way, the structures of the habitus are physically grounded and
pre-reflexive.
Mead, Chomsky, Cicourel, and Bourdieu are especially important to contemporary works in culture and cognition. By recognizing the physicality of
thought in tandem with its culturally situated nature, these theorists encouraged scholars of culture and cognition to explore new links between mind,
body, and environment—links that ultimately beckoned cross-disciplinary
ideas to the sociological terrain.
NEW DIRECTIONS
Throughout most of the twentieth century, cognitive scientists dominated
discourse on thought. In large measure, this was due to PET scans, CT scans,
fMRIs, and related technologies which, in essence, made the brain visible.
But beginning in the mid-1980s, psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and even economists began engaging the new science of the mind.
Among social scientists, only sociologists clung to the sidelines of discussion.
Then came a turning point. In his classic essay “Culture and Cognition,”
Paul DiMaggio urged sociologists to take a fresh look at cognitive science:
“Cognitivists have developed ingenious empirical techniques that permit
strong inferences about mental structures, going far toward closing the
observability gap between external and subjective aspects of culture” (1997,
p. 266). Others joined DiMaggio in passionately pleading for disciplinary
cross talk (see, e.g., Bergesen, 2004a, 2004b; Cerulo, 2002, 2006, 2010;
Howard & Renfrow, 2003). The result is an exciting line of new research
that brings sociology toe-to-toe with cognitive science. Sociologists are
“continuing” stories that focus solely on the brain, elaborating them by
linking the brain to a mind situated in varying cultural contexts.

Culture and Cognition

5

CONTINUING THE STORY: SCHEMAS
Schemas are the first chapter of any culture and cognition story. These mental structures—abstract generalizations or composites—are built from exposures and experiences and aid in our understanding of the world. Sitting in a
restaurant, for example, we develop a general notion of restaurants based on
various attributes of the different eateries we frequent. Individuals use such
restaurant schemas to interpret new encounters, remember past experiences,
help in sense-making and problem solving, or steer action.
Cognitive scientists study schematic operations in the brain, showing
that schemas do not function in isolation. Rather, schemas cluster in the
brain, forming associated networks. When one schema is activated, it
creates a neural “charge” that triggers other schemas in the network. How
are schemas activated? Cognitive scientists believe that our routines and
experiences repeatedly elicit certain schemas, keeping them “in the ready”
within our brains. Schemas can also be deliberately activated via a process
called priming—that is, presenting a concept (often subliminally) in order to
steer individuals toward related or similar ideas. In this way, schemas have
important effects on perception and behavior. As knowledge structures, they
allow us to “fill in the blanks” and make sense of new experiences; they also
filter our perception, making some of the things we encounter more germane
to us than others. Schemas may even create perceptual biases, committing
to memory “facts” more elaborate than those we actually experience. Thus,
our memory of a restaurant may include tables, cutlery, or foods to which
we were never exposed. We mistakenly remember such things because our
restaurant schemas dictate that such objects belong in that setting (Solso,
MacLin, & MacLin, 2008).
Sociologists acknowledge both the brain’s schema “library” and its
physiological workings. However, sociologists also expand our knowledge
of schematic operations in important ways. Some, for example, identify
schemas particular to certain status groups or subcultures and track the
ways in which they steer group members’ attentions, perceptions, and
behaviors. Much of this work addresses schemas that influence perceptions
of class, ethnic and racial identities, gender, or power inequalities (see, e.g.,
Auyero, 2010; Brekhus, Brunsma, Platts, & Dua, 2010; Brubaker, Loveman, &
Stamanov, 2004; Harding, 2007; Hoffman & Bartkowski, 2008; Miller, 1995;
Rosenfield, Lennon, & White, 2005).
Others have explored how schemas order group discourse and subsequent
action. Gabriel Ignatow (2004), for example, used sequence and metaphor
analysis to investigate the meeting transcripts of striking Scottish shipyard
workers. Not surprisingly, he found that the group’s discourse was shaped
by historical context, situational factors, and elements of social structure.

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Yet Ignatow also showed that the strikers’ group interactions gave rise to
schemas that influenced the coherence of the groups’ discourse as well.
This finding was important because it showed that cognitions arising from
strikers’ interactions impinged on group planning and became critical to
the strikers’ strategies and goals. In another venue, Johnson, Dowd, and
Ridgeway (2006) studied the ways in which social objects gain legitimacy in
groups and organizations. Here too, schemas proved central. The authors
discovered that a group’s local expectations are often formed by tapping
widespread consensual schemas as they exist in the broader society. Johnson
and colleagues suggest that bringing the general to the local can prove
damaging, for such schemas often organize local action in ways that
encourage both nonoptimal group practices and erroneous expectations
of future action. [Also see Zuckerman (2004).] Recently, Pescosoliudo and
Olafsdottir (2010) explored the role of schemas in public perceptions of
disease and treatment. The authors noted a consistent mismatch between
people’s endorsements for mental health treatment and their actual usage
rates. They found that the ways in which researchers question people about
the liklihood of seeking treatment can invoke schemas that influence usage
of mis-reports. Specifically, close-ended questions about mental health problems and treatments trigger widespread consensual schemas addressing the
efficacy of modern medicine. Such questions target tacit agreement with the
medical model and organize thinking in ways that encourage individuals to
overestimate the likelihood of seeking mental health treatment.
Organizational sociologists are doing promising work on the sociocultural
dimensions of schematic transfer. Studying organizational sense-making,
for example, Elsbach, Barr, and Hargadon (2005, p. 423) explored the ways
in which ’’cognitive schemas and cultural contexts come together to form
“situated cognition.” Situated cognition, a term developed by Lave and
Wenger (1991), refers to transitory thought embedded in the interactive
context of the moment. The study of situated cognition is important because
it challenges the notion of schemas as stable units inextricably tied to certain
situations or events. Instead, this work suggests that interaction patterns
are critical triggers of schemas, with different patterns activating different
schemas and different interpretive and behavioral outcomes. Viewing
schemas as dynamic and transferable helps us understand unexpected
decisions and outcomes that heretofore seemed unpredictable or unlikely.
[See also Haynie, Shepherd, Mosakowski, and Earley (2010), Mezias and
Lant (2010), and Ocasio (2012).] These themes also are being explored by
those studying dyadic relationships—especially within the family (see, e.g.,
Beach, Fincham, & Stanley, 2007; Howe, 2007).
In another arena, Chung, McLarney, and Gillen (2008) use elder care
organizations to identify ways of triggering schematic transfer. They suggest

Culture and Cognition

7

several changes to managerial interaction patterns, changes that might
effectively switch individuals’ attention from “line-of-sight management
schema” (schemas that tie definitions of success to employee presence)
to “target-based schema” (those tying definitions of success to treatment
results). The authors discuss how this particular schematic transfer could
encourage strategies that make elder care less stressful and more effective. In
a related piece, Gough and Hick (2009) address the role of schematic transfer
in self-help behaviors. Studying ethnic minorities and their retirement plans
and strategies, the authors identify practices that prompt schematic transfer
in ways that increase productive investment activity.
CONTINUING THE STORY: COGNITIVE STYLES
Cognitive styles and their variations represent another promising line of culture and cognition research.
AUTOMATIC VERSUS DELIBERATE COGNITION
The dual processes of automatic and deliberate cognition have become a
central issue in culture and cognition research. Automatic cognition involves
rapid, effortless, unintentional thought; it ties experience to existing schemas
and allows us to quickly process information without extended review.
Deliberate cognition, in contrast, refers to slow, considered, and measured
thought. Individuals engaged in deliberate cognition may reject or override
their schemas, actively searching for characteristics, connections, relations,
and expectations rather than assuming them.
Cognitive scientists have explored conditions under which automatic
cognition might dominate deliberate cognition and vice versa. For example,
automatic cognition can occur outside of consciousness, while deliberate
thought demands consciousness; automatic cognition is more likely to occur
when we are under stress; deliberate cognition can be triggered by the
disruption of well-established routines (Solso, MacLin, & MacLin, 2008). But
such findings simply begin the story of dual processing. What chapters can
sociologists contribute?
DiMaggio (1997, p. 272) suggested one possible trajectory. He argued that
including cognitive styles in our studies of cultural patterns and practices
could help us better understand how culture enables or constrains and when
social action is simultaneously institutionalized and agentic. Acting on
DiMaggio’s suggestion, Karen Danna-Lynch (2007, 2009, 2010) incorporated
automatic versus deliberate cognition in her studies of multiple role enactments. Danna-Lynch attempts to explicate what she calls the “chameleon

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

factor”—that is, switching between social roles without becoming incapacitated by confusion or role conflict. While prior answers to this puzzle
focused primarily on behavior, Danna-Lynch brings cognition into the mix.
She recreates the meaning of role performance to include four ideal types of
role states—types based on the interaction of automatic versus deliberate
cognition and automatic versus deliberate behavior. Using interviews with
parents working in various occupations, Danna-Lynch itemizes the cultural
practices that help people establish role positions and continually switch
between them. Her culture and cognition lens provides a new approach
to role theory, presenting roles as a product of both physical and mental
space. Vaisey (2009) provides another important response to DiMaggio.
He tested the dual-processing model using survey and interview data that
address morality in decision making. In analyzing respondents’ reflections
on moral circumstances, Vaisey documents the presence of automatic and
deliberate cognition. He shows that these two cognitive styles can function
independently or together, and he urges sociologists to further explore the
cultural conditions associated with each cognitive style.
A number of recent works explore such associations, unpacking the contextual nature of cognitive styles. Javier Auyero and Debora Swistun (2008,
2009a, 2009b) examined cognitive styles among individuals facing uncertainty and risk—residents of an Argentine shantytown exposed to high levels
of environmental pollutants. The authors addressed processes and practices
that both sustained peoples’ uncertainty and resulted in mis-assessments
of environmental risks. Of particular interest were links between cultural
routines and cognitive styles. Auyero and Swistun argue that when polluters
avoid major disruptions to residents’ daily routines (i.e., getting to work, getting children to school, preparing meals), the routines themselves encourage
individuals to adopt an “automatic pilot” approach to their surroundings. In
essence, familiar routines combine with automatic cognition to restrict deliberate attention to surrounding dangers; this process, in turn, suspends any
initiatives toward organized actions against such dangers. It is worth noting,
however, that levels of routinization must be considered when linking routines to cognitive styles. Carol Heimer (2001) approaches routines as existing
on a density continuum—that is, situations vary from being abundantly or
over-routinized to being scarcely or under-routinized. Heimer argues that
over or under-routinization beckons deliberate cognition, while moderate
routinization is associated with automatic cognition. According to Heimer,
over-routinization triggers deliberate cognition because “people are so
overloaded with routines that routines become noise rather than signal and
cease to focus attention” (2001, p. 72). In under-routinized contexts, thought
must be inductive, as people examine and reexamine the evidence of novel
scenarios.

Culture and Cognition

9

Still others are exploring the associations between cognitive styles and
cultural contexts. Hana Shepherd (2011) reinterpreted several social psychological studies to illustrate how external elements of culture—for
example, symbols, elements of physical settings, situational interactions,
and networks—guide individuals’ cognitive styles. In another venue,
Cerulo (1998) described associations between media contexts and cognitive
styles. Studying visual and verbal depictions of violence, she identified four
temporal sequences that drive narrators’ accounts of violence: victim, performer, contextual, and doublecasting sequences. She found that narrators’
sequence selections reflect institutionalized communication conventions
based on assumptions of audience morality. Moreover, she documented
that certain sequences trigger automatic cognitive responses that lead
readers/viewers to systematically judge the rightness or wrongness of
violence with little deliberation. Cerulo noted that this pattern was not
universal, and she identified substantive and contextual elements—that is,
the type of violence described, moral consensus surrounding the act, social
instability surrounding the act—that temper the decision-making process.
[See Altheide (2002, 2006) for related work.] Organizational researchers
Srivastava and Banaji (2011) found important associations between cognitive styles, self-assessments of worth, and collaboration patterns in
organizations—particularly in settings that value cross-boundary collaboration. They showed that cognitive styles greatly impact how people
view themselves. When people engage in deliberative cognition, they view
their worth more positively than they do when engaged in automatic
cognition. Further, the less inflated views of self-worth that emerge from
automatic cognition make people more likely to enlist and be enlisted to
collaborate with colleagues who are organizationally distant. Counter to
expectation, Srivastava and Baldassarri show that collaborative choices in
organizations—particularly those governed by social desirability—are often
guided by automatic, less conscious thought. Finally, Daina Harvey (2010)
takes discussions of automatic and deliberate cognition in a promising new
direction. Harvey explores the links between the configuration of social
spaces and the ways in which these configurations beckon cognitive styles.
He suggests that structured spaces tend to facilitate deliberative cognition,
while unstructured spaces promote automatic cognition. Harvey’s development of these connections has important implications for how and, perhaps,
why we use culture in the process of thought.
HOT AND COLD COGNITION
Hot and cold cognition refers to another dual-process model of thought.
Emotions distinguish the hot–cold continuum from the automatic-deliberate

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

model. Hot cognition involves a heightened response to stimuli, one
largely driven by emotion. In contrast, cold cognition refers to unemotional,
painstaking thought that involves rational analysis.
Technological advances play a major role in cognitive scientists’ increasing
interest in emotional cognition. Using fMRI, researchers watch thoughts and
emotions as they develop in the brain; they then track the areas of the brain
that seem most active in information processing. In this regard, Jonathan
Cohen and colleagues research the links between moral dilemmas, emotions,
and cognition, studying fMRI images that track subjects’ reactions to different moral dilemmas (see, e.g., Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, &
Cohen, 2001; Cohen, 2005). The experimenters typically present subjects with
two moral dilemmas. In the “trolley dilemma,” a runaway trolley speeds
directly toward five people. To save the group, subjects must agree to hit
a switch, diverting the trolley to a side track where it will kill only one person. Contrast this scenario with the “footbridge dilemma.” Here too, a trolley
threatens five people. But here, the quintet can be saved only if subjects agree
to push an adjacent stranger off a bridge and into the trolley’s path. While the
stranger is killed, the body will prevent the trolley from reaching the larger
group.
In presenting the two dilemmas, researchers ask: Are subjects willing to flip
the switch or push a stranger, and what cognitive style informs their decisions?’’ fMRI images show that subjects’ reactions to each scenario activate
different parts of their brains. The impersonal “switch flipping” taps the dorsolateral areas of the prefrontal cortex—areas associated with cold cognitive
processes (i.e., working memory, abstract reasoning, and problem solving). In
contrast, the personal “pushing” taps the medial frontal cortex, an area associated with emotional processing. These pictures suggest that switch-flipping
feels more rational and reasoned—and perhaps more doable—than pushing
another human onto the tracks.
Similar findings appear in studies addressing fear and self-protection.
When faced with images of dangerous objects, Ohman and Mineka (2001)
found that individuals process the images in different ways. “Natural”
dangers—for example, pictures of spiders, snakes, or crocodiles—activate
the brain’s emotional centers, while “modern” dangers—for example, guns
or electrical outlets—activate the brain’s decision-making areas. Here, as in
much cognitive science, evolution seems critical to the field’s understanding
of neural differences. Researchers argue that fear toward natural dangers is
ingrained in the human body by centuries of survival needs; thus, natural
dangers elicit a physiological response. In contrast, the fear of modern
dangers has developed through learning and reflection, eliciting rational
considerations.

Culture and Cognition

11

Sociologists can add much to this explanation. Different reactions to natural and modern dangers may involve evolution. But these differences may
be just as powerfully explained by situating these objects in social interaction. Consider snake versus gun. When it comes to a snake, one likely sees
the encounter in terms of a simple, limited dyadic exchange. The two meet,
consider finite options for attack, with one the victor … or entity who cleverly (luckily?) escapes harm. The gun, however, presents a more complicated story. Is it my gun or someone else’s? Am I aiming it or is it aimed
at me? How skilled is the shooter … how willing … how far away? Is the
gun in good working order? Is it real or a good facsimile? Will the shot be
heard by someone nearby? If so, how will that affect the shooter’s willingness to use the gun? In essence, the gun is part of a broader interactive scenario. Actor-network theorists such as Bruno Latour (2005) would say that
the gun is an equal participant in social interaction—an “actant” that can
make things happen. But a full understanding of this actant’s role demands
cold cognition—careful, painstaking thought that considers the nuances and
options presented by the interaction in which the gun is embedded.
Several social movement scholars are exploring hot and cold cognition
within the interactive history of certain collective actions (see, e.g., Gamson, 1992; Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001a; Hercus, 1999; Jasper, 1998;
Parker & Hackett, 2012; Robnett, 2004; Taylor, 2000; Taylor & Rupp, 2002).
These scholars delineate the path from hot cognition to action. Because
certain cultural events or arrangements may initially trigger hot cognition,
while successful movement organizers must create the strategies and processes that will transform feeling into action (see, e.g., Goodwin, Jasper, &
Polletta, 2001b; Reger, 2004). Often, this involves redirecting attentions of
movement participants’ from hot, emotional triggers to cold, deliberative
triggers, as emotionally hot cognitions can escalate rather than overcome
social conflict (Harcourt, 2002).
Beyond social movements, those studying decision making explore the
role of hot–cold cognition in evaluation and subsequent action. In this
regard, some researchers find that entities triggering hot cognition are
better remembered and more readily applied than those triggering cold
cognition. This finding proves important to those constructing surveys
and questionnaires, as cognitive styles may significantly influence subjects’
evaluative responses (van de Veld & Saris, 2004). It also proves important to
our understanding of people’s judgments and evaluations in areas as varied
as criminal behavior (Van Gelder & De Vries, 2012), social justice decisions
(Kunda, 1999; Stapel, 2003), management decisions (Kennedy & Vining,
2007), organizational sense-making (Weick, 2005), advertising effectiveness
(Cerulo, 1995a), symbol acceptance (Cerulo, 1995b) and mathematical
calculations (Roth, 2007).

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

GRADED MEMBERSHIP
Concepts are building blocks of thought, and many cognitive scientists
believe that they exist as prototypes. Prototypes amplify or exaggerate the
critical features of categories, focusing our brains exclusively on category
“ideals.” When we encounter something, we use mental prototypes and
perform a process called graded membership. Using this cognitive style, we
rank or place entities with reference to others in their class. Thus, when
you shop for apples, your brain rapidly compares every apple you see to
an ideal prototype. The more attributes the apple-in-hand shares with the
prototype in your brain, the more likely you are to include what you see in
the category apple and the closer you will rank it to the category’s core ideal.
For cognitive scientists, graded membership has obvious results for the
way we evaluate everyday life. The process forcefully establishes asymmetry as one of the brain’s prominent modus operandi. Best case examples of
a concept are overemphasized and highly detailed; anything less becomes
increasingly nondescript, released, or distanced by the brain from active consideration.
Cerulo (2006) continues the story of graded membership, illuminating
its social implications. She argues that the process contributes to a sociocultural phenomenon she calls positive asymmetry. Positive asymmetry is
blind optimism—a tunnel-vision directed to best-case scenarios and an
accompanying disregard for worst-case scenarios. Cerulo’s work documents
the widespread nature of positive asymmetry, tracking its influence in key
events in the life cycle, the sites of work and play, and in the organizations
and bureaucracies that structure social life. Using interviews, fictional
accounts, survey data, media reports, journalistic commentaries, and official
records, she illustrates the frequency with which individuals, groups, and
communities blatantly disregard worst-case scenarios. While definitions of
best and worst change over time and place, Cerulo shows that the tendency
to prioritize the best is rather constant.
How is positive asymmetry connected to the brain? Clearly, the brain
has prototypes for worst-cases—that is the perfect storm, the unspeakable
murder. Thus, how can one argue that graded membership and positive
asymmetry are somehow connected? Cerulo shows that most communities
maintain cultural practices that background half of what is in the brain
(e.g., materials dealing with worst-cases or negative concepts). These
practices harness the brain’s propensity toward asymmetrical thinking—the
mechanic or way we think—and encode that process into a much more
targeted and specialized experiential bias. Asymmetry—the tendency
to emphasize only best-case examples of any concept, is transformed to
positive asymmetry—the tendency to emphasize only examples of the

Culture and Cognition

13

best-quality cases. Cerulo unpacks three sets of practices that function in this
regard: eclipsing, clouding, and recasting. She also identifies certain structural
conditions under which these practices are more or less effective. These
ideas have been applied by others to the study of educational aspirations
(Reynolds & Baird, 2010), environmental disasters (Auyero & Swistun,
2009b), health risks (Armstrong, 2003; Fedson & Dunhill, 2007; Senier,
2008), leadership patterns (Hollander, 2009), political power (Freudenberg &
Alario, 2007), privacy (Nippert-Eng, 2010), and surveillance (Monahan,
2010). By extending cognitive science with a culture and cognition perspective, these works show us exactly how social and cultural practices can
complement, alter, or elaborate neural processes.
FUTURE ISSUES
The works reviewed here forward our understanding of culture, cognition, and the mind-body-environment link. However, further progress
may demand a more dramatic paradigm shift, one that revisits current
assumptions about cultural acquisition and redefines enculturation as a
sociophysiological phenomenon.
Toward that end, Albert Bergesen (2004b, 2012) reviewed neuroscientific
studies of language acquisition among babies. This research suggests that
language skills precede humans’ interactive capacities, with a finite number
of mental rules driving our understanding of the social world well before
enculturation and socialization begin. Bergesen contends that this makes
enculturation “a more Chomskyan than Meadian process” (2004b, p. 368). At
the same time, we must remain mindful that individuals regularly transform
these finite mental rules into an infinite number of interaction possibilities,
all occurring between different people with different goals and agendas,
interacting across various times, places, and situations. For Bergesen, the
mission of culture and cognition scholars is to explicate this intricate process
and to understand the variable ways and conditions under which finite
mental possibilities expand.
Several sociologists are taking promising steps in this regard. Like Bergesen, David Peterson (2012) accepts that certain universal capacities allow
individuals to grasp the categories so necessary to social existence. However,
he underscores the fact that the representation of these capacities varies by
culture. Peterson contends that sociologists must do more than acknowledge
this variation. They must attempt to identify and explain the mechanisms
and conditions associated with specific forms of cognitive variation. Peterson offers a paradigm by which to accomplish this task, forwarding four
specific roles that social and cultural elements may play in the development

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of mind: (i) social facilitation—does culture provides conditions for flexible expressions of categories … if so, under what circumstances? (ii) Social
divisions—by what mechanisms does culture create variable divisions and
boundaries in continua of experience? (iii) Social specification—can we track
and compare the culturally specific expression of native intelligence and presuppositions? (4) Social construction—how does culture develop new concepts that establish systems of references and mechanisms of transmission?
In pursuing questions of enculturation, some have tied their theories to specific neurological processes. Omar Lizardo (2007, 2012), for example, merged
neuroscientific work on “mirror neurons” with sociological work on “habitus.” In so doing, he provides an exciting new perspective on enculturation.
Neuroscientists tell us that mirror neurons form a network located in the prefrontal motor cortex of humans and other primates. They “fire” in response
to visual stimuli that require motor response from such beings. They also fire
when one simply witnesses or hears others making motor responses. (For
example, the same neurons fire when I clap my hands or I simply see/hear
another clap their hands.) Thus, mirror neurons take practical information
based on specific observations and create generalized conceptual knowledge
about the way objects “work.” “Instead of knowing what objects are in a
decontextualized sense,” writes Lizardo, “mirror neurons allow us to know
what objects are good for” (2007, p. 22). Understanding mirror neurons fills
critical gaps in practice theory. Recall that Bourdieu rejected imitation as the
means by which we acquire practical knowledge—but he had no satisfying
alternative. If neuroscientists are right, mirror neurons provide social actors
with two things: “the practical capacities productive of action” and “the practical, representation, coding, and comprehension of practical action—both
for the self and others” (Lizardo, 2007, pp. 13, 14). This means that Bourdieu’s
habitus and the practical competences that form it need not be the product of
explicit instructions or imitation. Rather, competences are activated by virtue
of being surrounded by others who display the same competencies (Lizardo,
2007, pp. 17, 19).
Gabriel Ignatow (2007, 2009) also used cognitive science research to
productively modify Bourdieu’s work on enculturation. Ignatow taps
studies that, in contradiction to Bourdieu, treat the habitus’ cognitive and
somatic components as inseparable and in constant reciprocal interaction. To
illustrate the importance of centering mind–body connections in research on
thought and enculturation, Ignatow compared individual’s use of and reaction to embodied metaphors verses abstract language. Building on cognitive
science research addressing schematic activation, Ignatow hypothesized
that culture’s effects on cognition and behavior is strongest when cognitive
schemas are “understood to be embodied and when discourses are seen as
containing bodily information that interacts with those cognitive schema”

Culture and Cognition

15

(2009, p. 643). Ignatow tested his ideas with data from messages posted on
two Internet support group sites—one identified as religious/orthodox and
one as secular/modern. Ignatow expected both groups to vary significantly
in their use of discursive tools. In tune with each group’s moral culture, he
expected religious/orthodox group members to favor embodied metaphors
and secular/modern group members to favor abstractions. He also reasoned
that the use of embodied metaphors would be more effective than abstractions in generating high group solidarity, allowing for a greater sense of
cohesion in the religious/orthodox site. Following extensive content analysis
of over 2000 posts, Ignatow found support for his hypotheses, concluding
that “culture’s effects on social bonding can be identified more readily when
cultural structures are conceived as embodied cognitive structures, rather
than as purely mental or behavioral patterns that operate both within the
individual habitus and at the level of small-group discourse” (2009, p. 687).
CONCLUSION
Sociologists of culture and cognition are posing new questions—questions
that need to be asked in louder and louder voices. What are the links
between mind, body, and the contexts in which they are situated? Where
does thought reside … where and how is it initiated, developed, and
transmitted? Sociologists are now beginning to explore these issues with
a wider analytic lens, simultaneously mapping the neural, emotional,
and sensory elements of thought as well as the patterns that characterize
the sociocultural contexts in which thought occurs. Exciting answers are
rapidly emerging, with sociologists now decidedly a part of this important
interdisciplinary crosstalk. Stay tuned.
REFERENCES
Altheide, D. (2002). Tracking discourse. In K. A. Cerulo (Ed.), Culture in Mind: Toward
a Sociology of Culture and Cognition (pp. 172–186). New York, NY: Routledge.
Altheide, D. (2006). Terrorism and the Politics of Fear. Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press.
Armstrong, E. (2003). Conceiving risk, bearing responsibility: Fetal alcohol syndrome and
the diagnosis of moral disorder. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Auyero, J. (2010). Chuck and Pierre at the welfare office. Sociological Forum, 25(4),
851–860.
Auyero, J., & Swistun, D. (2008). The social production of toxic uncertainty. American
Sociological Review, 73, 357–379.
Auyero, J., & Swistun, D. (2009a). Tiresias in flammable shantytown: Toward a tempography of domination. Sociological Forum, 24, 1–21.
Auyero, J., & Swistun, D. (2009b). Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentinian
Shantytown. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

16

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Beach, S. R. H., Fincham, F. D., & Stanley, S. M. (2007). Contextualizing the study of
marital transformation: Points of convergence. Journal of Marriage and the Family,
69(2), 315–319.
Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the
sociology of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
Bergesen, A. (2004a). Durkheim’s theory of mental categories: A review of the evidence. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 395–408.
Bergesen, A. (2004b). Chomsky vs. mead. Sociological Theory, 22, 257–370.
Bergesen, A. (2012). Turning Durkheim on his head: A reply to Peterson and Bjerre.
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 4(4), 485–495.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brekhus, W. H., Brunsma, D. L., Platts, T., & Dua, P. (2010). On the contributions
of cognitive sociology to the sociological study of race. Sociology Compass, 4(1),
61–76.
Brubaker, R., Loveman, M., & Stamanov, P. (2004). Ethnicity as cognition. Theory and
Society, 33, 31–64.
Cerulo, K. A. (1995a). Designs on the White House: TV ads, message structure, and
election outcome. Research in Political Sociology, 7, 63–88.
Cerulo, K. A. (1995b). Identity designs: The sights and sounds of a nation. The Arnold
and Caroline Rose Book Series. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Cerulo, K. A. (1998). Deciphering violence: The cognitive structure of right and wrong.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Cerulo, K. A. (2002). Culture in mind: Toward a sociology of culture and cognition. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Cerulo, K. A. (2006). Never saw it coming: Cultural challenges to envisioning the worst.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Cerulo, K. A. (2010). Mining the intersections of cognitive sociology and neuroscience. Poetics, 38(2), 115–132.
Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and mind. Boston, MA: M.I.T./Harcourt, Brace &
World.
Chomsky, N. (1978). Topics in the theory of generative grammar. Boston, MA: Mouton
De Gruyter.
Chung, E., McLarney, C., & Gillen, M. C. (2008). Social policy recommendations to
alleviate stress among informal providers of elder care. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 28(9–10), 340–350.
Cicourel, A. (1974). Cognitive sociology: Language and meaning in social interaction. New
York, NY: Free Press.
Cohen, J. D. (2005). The vulcanization of the human brain: A neural perspective on
interactions between cognition and emotion. The Journal of Economic Perspectives,
19, 3–24.
Danna-Lynch, K. (2007). Modeling role enactment: Linking role theory and social
cognition. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 37, 379–399.

Culture and Cognition

17

Danna-Lynch, K. (2009). Objects, meanings, and role identities: The practices that
establish association in the care of home-based employment. Sociological Forum,
24, 76–103.
Danna-Lynch, K. (2010). Culture and cognition in the performance of multiple roles:
The process of mental weighing. Poetics, 38(2), 166–184.
DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.
Elsbach, K. D., Barr, P. S., & Hargadon, A. B. (2005). Identifying situated cognitions
in organizations. Organization Science, 16(4), 422–433.
Fedson, D. S., & Dunhill, P. (2007). New approaches to confronting an immanent
influenza pandemic. The Permanente Journal, 11(3), 63–69.
Freudenberg, W. R., & Alario, M. (2007). Weapons of mass distraction: Magicianship,
misdirection, and the dark side of legitimation. Sociological Forum, 22, 146–173.
Gamson, W. A. (1992). Talking politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. London,
England: Harper and Row.
Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M., & Polletta, F. (Eds.) (2001a). Passionate Politics: Emotions and
Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M., & Polletta, F. (2001b). Introduction: Why emotions matter.
In J. Goodwin, J. M. Jasper & F. Polletta (Eds.), Passionate politics: Emotions and social
movements (pp. 1–26). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gough, O., & Hick, R. (2009). Ethnic minorities, retirement planning and personal
accounts. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 29(9), 488–497.
Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001).
An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293,
2105–108.
Harcourt, E. J. (2002). The whipping of Richard Moore: Reading emotion in reconstruction America. Journal of Social History, 36, 261–282.
Harding, D. J. (2007). Cultural context, sexual behavior, and romantic relationships
in disadvantaged neighborhoods. American Sociological Review, 72(3), 341–364.
Harvey, D. (2010). The space for culture and cognition. Poetics, 38(2), 185–204.
Haynie, J. M., Shepherd, D., Mosakowski, E., & Earley, P. C. (2010). A situated
metacognitive model of the entrepreneurial mindset. Journal of Business Venturing,
25(2), 217–229.
Heimer, C. A. (2001). Cases and biographies: An essay on routinization and the
nature of comparison. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 47–76.
Hercus, C. (1999). Identity, emotion and feminist collective action. Gender and Society,
13, 34–55.
Hoffman, J. P., & Bartkowski, J. P. (2008). Gender, religious tradition, and biblical
literalism. Social Forces, 86(3), 1245–1272.
Hollander, E. P. (2009). Inclusive leadership: The essential leader-follower relationship.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Howard, J. A., & Renfrow, D. G. (2003). “Social cognition”. In J. Delamater (Ed.),
Handbook of social psychology (pp. 259–281). New York, NY: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

18

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Howe, G. W. (2007). Socially situated cognition and the couple as a dynamic system:
A commentary. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 69(2), 299–304.
Ignatow, G. (2004). Speaking together, thinking together? Exploring metaphor and
cognition in a shipyard union dispute. Sociological Forum, 19(3), 405–433.
Ignatow, G. (2007). Theories of embodied knowledge: New directions for cultural
and cognitive sociology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37(2), 115–135.
Ignatow, G. (2009). Culture and embodied cognition: Moral discourses in Internet
support groups for overeaters. Social Forces, 88(2), 643–669.
Jasper, J. M. (1998). The emotions of protest: Affective and reactive emotions in and
around social movements. Sociological Forum, 13(3), 397–424.
Johnson, C., Dowd, T. J., & Ridgeway, C. L. (2006). Legitimacy as a social process.
Annual Review of Sociology, 32, 53–78.
Kennedy, J., & Vining, J. (2007). Why do emotions matter? Natural resources conflicts
and the role of manager’s emotions. Journal of Sustainable Forestry, 24, 23–50.
Kunda, Z. (1999). Social cognition: Making sense of people. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Lizardo, O. (2007). ’Mirror neurons,’ collective objects and the problem of transmission: Reconsidering Stephen Turner’s critique of practice theory. Journal for the
Theory of Social Behaviour, 37, 319–350.
Lizardo, O. (2012). Embodied culture as procedure: Cognitive science and the link
between subjective and objective culture. In A. Warde & D. Southerton (Eds.),
The habits of consumption. COLLeGIUM: Studies across disciplines in the humanities
and social sciences (Vol. 12, pp. 70–86). Helsinki, Finland: Helsinki Collegium of
Advanced Studies.
Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology and Utopia. London, England: Routledge.
Mead, G. H. (1982). In D. L. Miller (Ed.), The individual and the social self: Unpublished
essays by G. H. mead. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Mezias, S., & Lant, T. (2010). Situated learning and brokerage as keys to successful
knowledge production: An experiential review. In C. B. Schoonhoven & F. Dobbin
(Eds.), Stanford’s organization theory renaissance, 1970–2000 research in the sociology of
organizations (Vol. 28, pp. 351–357). Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing
Limited.
Miller, J. L. (1995). Variation in judgments of criminal sanctions: An application of
‘schema theory’. Sociological Focus, 27(3), 257–279.
Monahan, T. (2010). Surveillance in the time of insecurity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Nippert-Eng, C. (2010). Islands of privacy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ocasio, W. (2012). Situated attention, lose and tight coupling, and the garbage can
model. In J. Lomi & J. R. Harrison (Eds.), The garbage can model of organizational
choice: Looking forward at forty. (Research in the sociology of organizations (Vol. 36, pp.
293–317). Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Culture and Cognition

19

Ohman, A., & Mineka, S. (2001). Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an
evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review, 108, 483–522.
Parker, J. N., & Hackett, E. J. (2012). Hot spots and hopt moments in scientific collaborations and social movements. American Sociological Review, 77(1), 21–44.
Pescosoliudo, B. A., & Olafsdottir, S. (2010). “The cultural turn in sociology: Can it
help us resolve an age-old problem in understanding decision making for health
care?”. Sociological Forum, 25(4), 665–676.
Peterson, D. (2012). Where the sidewalk ends: The limits of social constructionism.
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 42(4), 465–478.
Reger, J. (2004). Organizational “emotion work” through consciousness-raising: An
analysis of a feminist organization. Qualitative Sociology, 27, 205–222.
Reynolds, J. R., & Baird, C. L. (2010). “Is there a downside to shooting for the stars?”.
American Sociological Review, 75(1), 151–172.
Robnett, B. (2004). Emotional resonance, social location, and strategic framing. Sociological Focus, 37, 196–212.
Rosenfield, S., Lennon, M. C., & White, H. R. (2005). The self and mental health:
Self-salience and the emergence of internalizing and externalizing problems. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 46, 323–340.
Roth, W. M. (2007). Mathematical modeling ‘in the wild’: A case of hot cognition. In
R. A. Lesh, E. Hamilton & J. J. Kaput (Eds.), Foundations for the future in mathematics
education (pp. 77–98). New York, NY: Routledge.
Senier, L. (2008). It’s your most precious thing: Worst-case thinking, trust, and
parental decision making about vaccines. Sociological Inquiry, 78, 207–229.
Shepherd, H. (2011). The cultural context of cognition: What the Implicit Association
test tells us about how culture works. Sociological Forum, 26(1), 121–143.
Solso, R., MacLin, M. K., & Maclin, O. H. (2008). Cognitive psychology (8th ed.). Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Srivastava, S. B., & Banaji, M. R. (2011). Culture, cognition, and collaborative networks in organizations. American Sociological Review, 76(2), 207–233.
Stapel, D. A. (2003). Hot cognition and social judgments: When and why do descriptions influence our feelings?. In J. P. Forgas, K. P. Williams & W. Von Hippel (Eds.),
Social judgments: Implicit and explicit processes (pp. 227–250). Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, V. (2000). Emotions and identity in women’s self-help movements. In S.
Striker, T. J. Owens & R. W. White (Eds.), Self, identity and social movements (pp.
271–299). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Taylor, V., & Rupp, L. J. (2002). Loving internationalism: The emotion culture
of transnationalwomen’s organizations, 1888–1945. Mobilization: An International
Journal of Research and Theory about Social Movements, Protest, and Collective Behavior,
7, 141–158.
Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and justification: A dual-process model of culture in
action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.
van de Veld, W., & Saris, W. E. (2004). Separation of error, method effects, instabiltiy
and attitude strength. In W. E. Saris & P. M. Sniderman (Eds.), Studies in public

20

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

opinion: Attitudes, nonattitudes, measurement error and change (pp. 37–62). Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Van Gelder, J. L., & De Vries, R. (2012). Traits and states: Integrating personality and
affect into a model of criminal decision making. Criminology, 50(3), 637–671.
Weick, K. (2005). Making sense of the organization. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Zerubavel, E. (1997). Social mindscapes: An invitation to cognitive sociology. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Zuckerman, E. W. (2004). Structural incoherence and stock market activity. American
Sociological Review, 69, 405–432.

FURTHER READING
Bergesen, A. (2004). Chomsky vs. mead. Sociological Theory, 22, 257–370.
Cerulo, K. A. (2002). Culture in mind: Toward a sociology of culture and cognition. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Cerulo, K. A. (2010). Mining the intersections of cognitive sociology and neuroscience. Poetics, 38(2), 115–132.
DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.
Ignatow, G. (2007). Theories of embodied knowledge: New directions for cultural
and cognitive sociology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37(2), 115–135.

KAREN A. CERULO SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Karen A. Cerulo (PhD Princeton University) is a Full Professor and former
Chair of the Rutgers University Sociology Department. Her research interests include culture and cognition, symbolic communication, media and
technology, social change, comparative historical studies, and measurement
techniques. Cerulo’s articles appear in a wide variety of journals, including
the American Sociological Review, the Annual Review of Sociology, Contemporary
Sociology, Poetics, Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Sociological Inquiry, and
Communication Research. She is the author of three books: Identity Designs:
The Sights and Sounds of a Nation, winner of the American Sociological
Association’s 1996 Culture Section Best Book Award (The Rose Book Series
of the ASA, Rutgers University Press); Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive
Order of Right and Wrong (Routledge); and Never Saw It Coming: Cultural
Challenges to Envisioning the Worst (University of Chicago Press). She also
has edited a collection entitled Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture
and Cognition (Routledge) and coauthored a book entitled Second Thoughts:
Seeing Conventional Wisdom through the Sociological Eye (Pine Forge/Sage).
Cerulo is a past Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society, past Chair
of the American Sociological Association’s Culture Section and the 2012
Robin Williams Distinguished Lecturer.

Culture and Cognition

21

RELATED ESSAYS
Models of Revealed Preference (Economics), Abi Adams and Ian Crawford
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
History and Epistemology of Anthropology (Anthropology), Arjun
Appadurai
Intersectionality and the Development of Self and Identity (Psychology),
Margarita Azmitia and Virginia Thomas
Agency as an Explanatory Key: Theoretical Issues (Sociology), Richard
Biernacki and Tad Skotnicki
Mental Models (Psychology), Ruth M. J. Byrne
Authenticity: Attribution, Value, and Meaning (Sociology), Glenn R. Carroll
The Inherence Heuristic: Generating Everyday Explanations (Psychology),
Andrei Cimpian
Misinformation and How to Correct It (Psychology), John Cook et al.
Self-Fulfilling Prophesies, Placebo Effects, and the Social-Psychological
Creation of Reality (Sociology), Alia Crum and Damon J. Phillips
Cultural Differences in Emotions (Psychology), Jozefien De Leersnyder et al.
Understanding the Adaptive Functions of Morality from a Cognitive Psychological Perspective (Psychology), James Dungan and Liane Young
Micro-Cultures (Sociology), Gary Alan Fine
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske
and Cydney H. Dupree
Controlling the Influence of Stereotypes on One’s Thoughts (Psychology),
Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine
Culture and Social Networks (Sociology), Jan A. Fuhse
Ambivalence and Inbetweeness (Sociology), Bernhard Giesen
Ethnic Enclaves (Sociology), Steven J. Gold
Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation (Anthropology), Richard
Handler
Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen
Hawkes and James Coxworth
Biology and Culture (Psychology), Robert Peter Hobson
Behavioral Economics (Sociology), Guy Hochman and Dan Ariely
Normal Negative Emotions and Mental Disorders (Sociology), Allan V.
Horwitz
Emotion and Decision Making (Psychology), Jeff R. Huntsinger and Cara Ray
The Development of Social Trust (Psychology), Vikram K. Jaswal and Marissa
B. Drell
History and Materiality (Anthropology), Rosemary A. Joyce
Cultural Neuroscience: Connecting Culture, Brain, and Genes (Psychology),
Shinobu Kitayama and Sarah Huff

22

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity (Political Science), David D.
Laitin and Sangick Jeon
Complexity: An Emerging Trend in Social Sciences (Anthropology), J. Stephen
Lansing
From Individual Rationality to Socially Embedded Self-Regulation (Sociology), Siegwart Lindenberg
Two-Systems View of Children’s Theory-of-Mind Understanding (Psychology), Jason Low
Against Game Theory (Political Science), Gale M. Lucas et al.
Media and the development of Identity (Psychology), Adriana M. Manago
Culture, Diffusion, and Networks in Social Animals (Anthropology), Janet
Mann and Lisa Singh
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Material Turn (Communications & Media), Chandra Mukerji
A Bio-Social-Cultural Approach to Early Cognitive Development: Entering
the Community of Minds (Psychology), Katherine Nelson
Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts (Psychology), Bethany Ojalehto
and Douglas Medin
Culture as Situated Cognition (Psychology), Daphna Oyserman
Culture and Movements (Sociology), Francesca Polletta and Beth Gharrity
Gardner
Social Classification (Sociology), Elizabeth G. Pontikes
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Economics and Culture (Economics), Gérard Roland
Born This Way: Thinking Sociologically about Essentialism (Sociology),
Kristen Schilt
Stereotype Threat (Psychology), Toni Schmader and William M. Hall
Production of Culture (Sociology), Vaughn Schmutz and Candace N. Miller
Social Neuroendocrine Approaches to Relationships (Anthropology), Sari M.
van Anders and Peter B. Gray
The Intrinsic Dynamics of Development (Psychology), Paul van Geert and
Marijn van Dijk
Theory of Mind (Psychology), Henry Wellman
Culture and Globalization (Sociology), Frederick F. Wherry



Media

Culture and Cognition