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

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the word schema has become increasingly used by scholars studying culture. Viewed largely as a kind of mental shortcut that individuals internalize by means of their various experiences, the concept enables researchers to study how societal-level factors such as norms and values impact individual action by way of shaping individuals’ cognitive structures. However, little attention is given to how and why particular schemata are used in particular situations. Through comparative analysis of two sets of in-depth interviews on the topics of dying and careers, I find that individuals alternate through various schemata as they attempt to answer questions posed to them. I argue that the presence of this alternation weakens assumptions regarding the automaticity of the deployment of schemata in the decision-making process by signaling that schemata may be triggered automatically but used temporarily. In extension, this argument supports the work of cultural scholars and discursive psychologists who both implicitly and explicitly see schemata as flexible, personalized heuristics rather than impersonal, statically shared determinants of thought and action.

How Career Identity Shapes the Meaning of Work for Referred Employees

“…Importantly, dispositions become augmented in light of situational contingencies. Dispositions still matter, however, as they impact how situations are initially perceived (see Williams, 2017c). That is, the information a referred employee brings into a job shapes what they expect from that job, but having one's referrer suddenly quit could impact just how much those expectations impact one's decision to stick around.…”

“…Sociologists have long been torn between how to best conceive of individual thought and action: Currents have flowed between crediting much of this to social structure or to some idea of personal choice or agency not fully reducible to any context outside of individuals, be it psychological in nature or even more ephemeral (see Fromm, 1969;Smelser, 2014;Williams, 2017a,c). While proponents of both views share the same basic assumptions about thought and action-namely that thought and action can be conceived of as the interplay between (a) internalized mental structures that individuals collect or build up as they live their lives which enable the perception of their surroundings (Mead, 1934;Williams, 2017c) and (b) or some sense of emerging personality that, while informed by individual experiences, is not fully reducible to these experiences (Archer, 2007)-they differ in regards to which of these factors they emphasize in their explanations.…”

Doctor Distrust: Pragmatism, Intersectionality, and the Confluence of Expertise and Interests

“…Rather than having clear conceptions of doctors' roles, motives, and interests, the interviews I analyzed demonstrated respondents' open and evolving conceptions of these factors (see Williams, 2016aWilliams, , 2017bWilliams, , 2017c. Again, while certain features remained somewhat stable across respondents -such as a general sense of reverence for medical expertise and a shared assumption that doctors tend to have patients' interests -the fact that respondents deliberated between their ideas about doctors based on their own experiences with and deliberations about them signals a more ongoing interpretative process.…”

Synthesizing Proximate and Distal Levels of Explanation: Toward an Evolution-Informed Sociology

“…While not rejecting the idea that there are indeed socialized aspects of human behavior, sociologists following Swidler's lead tended to take a more implicitly pragmatist approach to social life by focusing on its practical, routine, and situated nature. Though aligned with much of what Bourdieu wrote about social life, the primary difference between him and these scholars was the influence of internalized culture on action (see Swidler, 2008;Lizardo and Strand, 2010;Williams, 2017c).…”