Modeling the Role of the Physical in Social Construction Processes

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 01. Culture and Cognition

Abstract

This paper builds on prior work (Shaw, 2015) which showed how cultural dynamics can be modeled as emerging from nonrational, cognitive processes responsible for mental representation in order to explore how the physical world can influence social construction processes. It goes about this task by taking as its baseline the purely socially-caused dynamics considered previously and seeing how the inclusion of different types of constant, non-social (i.e. physical) feedbacks in the representation confirmation process can alter such emergent cultural dynamics. Different sets of modeling scenarios are used to look at the difference in what happens when all individuals receive the same set of feedbacks from the physical world, when subgroups of individuals in the system have the same feedback, and when there are no patterns in who receives which sort of physical feedback and who one interacts with. Another set of models also looks at how changes or “shocks” in the physical environment at different times in the cultural system’s evolution can affect the emergent dynamics of social construction. The results of these models will help to show how the physical world can act as an “anchor” in cultural meanings, how social influence can overcome physical facts in the creation and reinforcement of our background assumptions of the world, how timing plays a critical role in this process, and how the physical world, even when it is being inaccurately represented in cultures, can still increase the overall susceptibility of cultural systems to critical moments of rapid change and upheaval.

Author

• Lynette Shaw, University of Michigan