Active Intuition: The Patterned Spontaneity of Decision-Making

Abstract

Sociologists have been split between explaining individual thought and action in terms of factors internal and external to any given individual. In this paper, I argue that while these two explanations may often be complementary, they do not amount to a complete account of how people actually think or act. Using secondary interviews conducted with individuals tasked to think about death and dying, I demonstrate how individuals actively intuit their surroundings using complex mixtures of both the environment that they have internalized as well as the environment (s) that they are currently in. Using the terms cognitive field and active intuition to describe this process of meaning-making, I assert that existing sociological explanations could benefit from taking into consideration both the emergent nature of individuals' perception of the worlds they live in as well as the iterative nature of the interview process.

Thinking through death and employment: The automatic yet temporary use of schemata in everyday reasoning

“…Such uncontrolled, spontaneous expansion of the meaning of particular schemata in these cases (see Williams, 2016a) thus signals a very different operational quality for mental representations. Rather than guiding thought or action in clear ways given the parameters of a particular representation, representations – at least as used by respondents in these two studies – appeared to serve more as loose outlines for solving a problem individuals were confronted with (see D’Andrade, 1995).…”

“…This argument has implications for cultural inquiry by redirecting research away from searching for discrete schemata which serve as solutions to problems, to focusing on how and why certain schemata are used as they are. In doing so, it extends research in the traditions of cultural studies and discursive psychology which focus on how and why schemata – as ‘worn out patterns of identification’ (Wekker, 2016: 170) – are used as they are by demonstrating how widely shared norms and cultural ideas serve simultaneously as anchors and launching pads for deeper reflection and deliberation; schemata about dying and employment shape respondents’ answers in shared ways while also enabling them to forge answers using their own personal proclivities, emotions and sense of spontaneity (see Leschziner, 2015; Vaisey, 2009; Williams, 2016a, 2016b). Framing automatically used identification patterns (Morrison, 1992; Wekker, 2016) as cognitive schemata enables scholars of culture to more fully utilize the insights and findings of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists while keeping the discursive nature of these mental representations at the foreground (see Billig, 2009; Lester, 2014).…”