The Categorization of Human Experience in Experimental Social Science

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

Abstract

One of the central contributions of the cognitive revolution has been to highlight how humans use categories to understand their world and structure their behavior. Using a human-as-computer metaphor, cognitive scientists have theorized human thought as a form of symbol-processing. Although the computer metaphor may make sense in domains like basic human cognition about numbers or spatial relations, it becomes more challenging in complex areas of “thick” social meaning. Although the difficulty of the scientific categorization of human experience has been a central topic in philosophy, these issues represent a practical challenge to psychologists engaged in the experimental study of social life. Based upon an 18-months of ethnographic research and interviews with social psychologists, this study investigates how psychologists confront the complexity of everyday concepts and establish categories for research.

Author

• David Peterson, Northwestern University