Towards Reconciling the Sociology of Knowledge and Cognitive Psychology

Abstract

This social theory essay prospects for pathways for bringing together two seemingly unrelated traditions of thought: the sociology of knowledge and cognitive psychology. Such an endeavor is pursued at two different levels. First, I lay out three general assumptions underlying the sociology of knowledge, as conceived by several authors from Karl Mannheim onwards, examining whether and to what extent they are compatible with contemporary cognitive psychology studies, especially in heuristics and biases research program. Second, I bring under the same roof some of Georg Simmel’s ideas about the cognitive assumptions that render social life possible and some contemporary findings on heuristics and biases by connecting a thought experiment built upon Simmel’s ideas to a set of real-life experiments conducted in cognitive psychology.