Culture and choice: Toward integrating cultural sociology with the judgment and decision-making sciences

Abstract

Cultural sociologists frequently theorize about choices and decisions, although we tend to shy away from this language, and from concepts that are used by the judgment and decision-making (JDM) sciences. We show that cultural sociology and JDM are compatible and complementary fields by dispelling some common misunderstandings about JDM. We advocate for a strategic assimilation approach in which cultural sociologists are able to translate their work into key JDM terms like beliefs, preferences, and endowments. Learning to speak the JDM language will allow cultural sociologists to make important, and uniquely sociological, contributions to social scientific explanations of choices and decisions. KEYWORDS: theory; cognition; interdisciplinarity HIGHLIGHTS: • Cultural sociologists theorize about choices and decisions • Integrating with other fields who study these phenomena can prove fruitful • Learning the terminology used in these fields will facilitate this intergration

Risky disciplining: On interdisciplinarity between sociology and cognitive neuroscience in the governing of morality

“…They therefore urged ‘building from both ends’ of interdisciplinary bridges, developing more sensitively attenuated theoretical models and empirical constructs, and finding ways in which ‘cultural repertoires’ of ‘the available schemas, frames, narratives, scripts, and boundaries that actors draw on in social situations’ could be better accommodated (p. 866). Such appeals are echoed by other cultural and cognitive sociologists who (tentatively) point to promising intersections, most notably in further developing dual-process models of meaning and action (see Vaisey, 2009; Lizardo et al, 2016, Vaisey and Valentino, 2018).…”

“…Abend (2008: 88) criticizes the ‘Weberian paradigm’ of much contemporary sociology of morality, which operates under two primary principles that ‘Moral judgments are not capable of objective truth or falsehood’ and ‘Sociology in general and the sociology of morality can and should be value-free’. Abend observes that, since the 1980s, there has been an abundance of metaethical theories that try to affix judgements of morality to empirical bases, and perhaps the only way to rebut or reframe such claims requires addressing them in commensurate terms (see also Vaisey and Valentino, 2018). Sociologists and social theorists are thus obliged to poke around within these empirical frameworks, deconstructing any circularities, hidden political inflections, or question-begging constructions.…”

“…Another promising path is the microsociological study of emotions and identity, which is somewhat accommodative to evolutionary and neurological models (see Turner and Stets, 2005: 261–83; Kalkhoff et al, 2016a; Stets, 2016). More broadly, Steven Hitlin and Stephen Vaisey (2010) encourage interdisciplinary engagement in reimagining the sociology of morality in ways better attuned to structure, power, and cultural repertoires of meaning-making (see also Vaisey and Valentino, 2018). Emerging concurrently is ‘neurosociology’ (Hitlin and Vaisey, 2010; Franks and Turner, 2013), which has been comparatively daring in drawing direct links between sociological theory – for example, symbolic interactionist models – with developments in social neuroscience (Franks, 2010: 85–104).…”

“…Through decisionism, we are urged to consider ‘What kinds of things are taken to be capable of making decisions? What kinds of things are understood and represented as decisions, choices, decision-makers, and decision-making?’ Through such conceptual proposals we can open up space for ‘strategic assimilation’ with the cognitive sciences (Vaisey and Valentino, 2018), discovering more conciliatory, pragmatic, and generous ways of translating our insights across disciplines.…”

“I Was Open to Anywhere, It’s Just This Was Easier:” Social Structure, Location Preferences, and the Geographic Concentration of Elite College Graduates

“…Recently, there has been a renewed focus on the process of decision-making itself (e.g. Bruch, Hammond, and Todd 2015;Dietz and Whitley 2018;Vaisey and Valentino 2018). These researchers have asked how people come up with possible options, evaluate them, and ultimately end up picking one over another.…”