Cultural Schemas in Cognitive Sociology: Towards a Body of Cumulative Theory

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 8. Culture Section Network: Networks, Culture, and Cognition

Abstract

Cultural schemas have long been a central topic within cognitive sociology of culture. In recent years, engagements with this concept have become increasingly thoroughgoing, with emerging projects focusing on operationalization, formalization, and development of general theory. While older scholarship largely conceived of schemas as knowledge structures representing default characteristics, this newer work increasingly uses a connectionist-inspired conception of schemas as unconscious networks of associations. We critically examine this conception of schemas, and argue that it cannot support the weight sociologists of culture need it to carry. Rather than a functional statement about the role of schemas in cognition, or an algorithmic-representational description of ways schemas enable or constrain it, this conception is a rough characterization of the schemas’ implementation. It is thus pitched at too low a Marr level of analysis to sensitize sociologists to schematic cognition. Moreover, while cultural schemas can indeed be described as networks of associations, so can many non-schematic cognitive contents, as well as schemas that are not cultural—a range of phenomena that is too broad to have many interesting properties in common. It this fails to delimit an object of investigation for cognitive sociologists of culture, as well as serving as a poor vehicle for accumulated knowledge from cognitive science (indeed, past work in cognitive science has rejected similar conceptions as overly broad). To remedy these problems, we argue that cultural schemas are better thought of as socially shared heuristic representations deployable in implicit cognition. We develop the implications of this statement to outline a broader theory, which we demonstrate supports both inductive and deductive work. We then expand this into a “how-to guide” of concrete steps cognitive sociologists could take to make sure their empirical work on cultural schemas investigates cognitive contents that are both cultural and behaviorally relevant.

Authors

• Andrei G. Boutyline, University of Michigan

• Laura Soter, University of Michigan