Culture and Cognition Author(s): Paul DiMaggio Source: Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 23 (1997), pp. 263-287 Published by: Annual Reviews Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2952552 Accessed: 18/10/2010 10:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=annrevs. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Annual Reviews is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Annual Review of Sociology. http://www.jstor.org Annu.Rev. Sociol. 1997. 23:263-87 Copyright? 1997 byAnnual Reviews Inc. All rightsreserved CULTURE AND COGNITION Paul DiMaggio Departmentof Sociology,2-N-2 Green Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey08544; e-mail:[email protected] KEY WORDS: sociologyof culture, social classification,social cognition,schemata ABSTRACT Recentwork in cognitivepsychology and social cognition bears heavily on con- cernsof sociologistsof culture. Cognitive research confirms views of cultureas fragmented;clarifies the roles of institutions and agency;and illuminates supra- individualaspects of culture.Individuals experience culture as disparatebits of informationand as schematicstructures that organize that information. Culture carriedby institutions,networks, and social movementsdiffuses, activates, and selectsamong available schemata. Implications for the study of identity, collective memory,social classification,and logics of action are developed. INTRODUCTION The studyof culturein everydaylife remains a virtuosoaffair. Interpretive studiesoffer great insight but fail to buildon one another.Cultural theory has becomehighly sophisticated but not fully operational. These riches ready the fieldfor takeoff, like the study of social stratificationin Sorokin's day (1957 [1927]). But beforethe study of livedculture can becomea cumulativeenter- prise,scholars must clarify the cognitive presuppositions behind their theories ofwhat culture does andwhat people do withit, and the fundamental concepts andunits of analysis (Jepperson & Swidler1994, Wuthnow 1987). Recentwork in cognitive psychology and social cognition provides resources forboth tasks. Afterdescribing recent convergence between cultural sociol- ogyand psychology, this chapter considers lessons of recent work on cognition forpresuppositions about the nature of culture;develops implications of these lessonsfor sociological work on identity,collective memory, social classifi- cation,logics of action,and framing;and pointsto keyproblems that remain unsolved. 263 0360-0572/97/0815-0263$08.00 264 DiMAGGIO Ratherthan offer an exhaustivereview of cognitivesociology per se (see Zerubavel1997) or workin psychologyrelevant to culture(see D'Andrade 1995), I emphasizetensions and affinitiesbetween recent cognitive research andwork in the sociology of culture with the aim of bringing the former into the serviceof the latter. I focus on how people use culture, rather than the production of culture,ideology, or cultureembedded in thephysical environment. The pointis notto psychologizethe study of culture,but to lay a foundationfor a viewof culture as workingthrough the interaction of sharedcognitive structures andsupra-individual cultural phenomena (material culture, media messages, or conversation,for example) that activate those structures to varyingdegrees. SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY: POINTS OF CONVERGENCE A handfulof sociologistshave appreciatedthe potential of cognitivescience to informsociological work on culture(Carley 1989, Cicourel 1973, Schwartz 1981,White 1992), and some social constructionistshave anticipated impor- tantresults of cognitiveresearch (Berger & Luckman1967, Garfinkel1987 [1967], Zerubavel1991). For themost part, however, sociologists of culture have ignoredrelevant work by cognitivepsychologists, social psychologists, and public-opinionresearchers. This omissionreflects a mismatchbetween themodal intellectual styles of humanistic, interpretively oriented cultural so- ciologistsand experimentally oriented positivistic psychologists, as wellas the disappointinglegacy of Parsons' efforts at disciplinaryfusion, which psychol- ogizedculture, reducing it to sharedvalues, norms, and attitudes. Sociology:More ComplexViews of Culture In recentyears, however, common ground between sociology of cultureand psychologyhas grown. The majordevelopment within sociology has been a shiftto a morecomplex understanding of culture.Thirty years ago, most sociologistsviewed culture as a "seamlessweb" (Swidler1997), unitary and internallycoherent across groups and situations.In effect,culture was por- trayedas a latentvariable influencing incommon such manifestations as media images,responses to attitudequestionnaires, and thevalues embodied in ev- erydaypractices. Individuals were presumed to acquire culture in the course of socializationand, in thepopular oversocialized view (Wrong 1961), to enactit unproblematically.It followed from this perspective that there was littlereason to worryabout constructs used to studyculture, for any kind of "cultural stuff" couldserve as an indicatorof the underlying latent variable. By contrast,recent work depicts culture as fragmentedacross groups and inconsistentacross its manifestations(Martin 1992). The view of cultureas CULTURE AND COGNITION 265 values thatsuffuse other aspects of belief,intention, and collectivelife has succumbedto one of cultureas complexrule-like structures that constitute resourcesthat can be putto strategic use (Bourdieu1990, Sewell 1992,Swidler 1986). This shiftmakes studying culture much more complicated. Once we ac- knowledgethat culture is inconsistent-thatpeople's norms may deviate from whatthe media represent as normal,or thatour preconscious images and dis- cursiveaccounts of a phenomenonmay differ-it becomes crucial to identify unitsof cultural analysis and to focus attention upon the relations among them. In effect,our measures stop being indicators of a latentvariable (culture), and theirrelationship to culturebecomes analogous to thatof education,income, andplace of residence to social stratification: separate phenomena, analytically relatedto a commontheoretical construct, the relations among them a matterfor empiricalinvestigation (D'Andrade 1995 notes similar trends in anthropology). Similarly,once we acknowledgethat people behave as if theyuse culture strategically,itfollows that the cultures into which people are socialized leave muchopportunity for choice and variation. Thus our attention turns to waysin whichdiffering cultural frames or understandingsmay be situationallycued. Addressingsuch issues requires more elaborate and contestable psychological presuppositionsthan did theculture-as-latent-variable view. Psychology:More ComplexViews of Cognition Suchquestions make it sensible for sociologists of culture to turn to psychology forinsight into the mechanisms through which shared culture enters into cog- nition.Yet nothing guarantees that psychologists, who have their own research agendas,can helpus. Thirtyyears ago, behaviorismmade psychology essen- tiallyirrelevant to thestudy of culture. Twenty years ago, psychologists casting offthe yoke of behaviorismfocused primarily on theacquisition of skillsand capacitiesof littleinterest to mostsociologists of culture.Even a dozenyears ago, theimplications for cultural sociology of manyof the ideas and research traditionsthat are most useful today were still unclear. Whathas happenedto makepsychology useful to sociologistsof culture? First,psychologists have rejected behaviorism, accepted and demonstrated the existenceof mentalstructures used to perceive,process, and retrieve informa- tion,and foundways to makeinferences about such structures. Second, just as sociologicalresearch has demonstratedculture's complexity and fragmenta- tion,psychological research has demonstratedthe complexity of memoryand providedglimpses of thepartitioning of mentalstructures by domain.Third, recentfoci of psychologicalresearch (schemata, categories, mental models, andso on) aremuch richer in culturalcontent than the formal operations or in- tellectualcapacities that once preoccupiedcognitivists and developmentalists 266 DiMAGGIO (Rogoff& Chavajay1995). Fourth,some psychologists have taken notice of suchsociological topics as cross-culturaldifferences in cognition(Shweder & Bourne1991, Markus & Kitayama1991), elite/popular interaction in cultural change(Moscovici 1984), and "distributedcognition" (i.e. thesocial division of cognitivelabor) (Resnick et al 1991,Salomon 1993). In additionto expanding the grounds of shared interest between the