Bridging Social Psychologies
Biology, Sociology, and Understanding Human Society
Biology and structural sociology are crucial for understanding human society.
Cognitive psychologists map behavioral processes in the brain.
Social network researchers model dynamic networks with non-relational data.
Psychologists and sociologists can model stereotype diffusion or racial prejudice.
This modeling is based on assumptions about outgroup information processing and intergroup interaction likelihood.
Independent research streams can jointly develop a structural theory of action.
This theory explains the reciprocal changes between neural and social networks.
This is where the future understanding of inequality lies.
Culture and Social Psychology
Views of culture in psychology and sociology have converged significantly in the past two decades.
Both fields have rejected the "entity" conception of culture.
The entity conception views culture as coherent, stable, and located in the heads of collectivities' members.
The new view of culture involves dynamic interactions between mind and environment.
Each serves as a selection regime for the other.
Mental structures select aspects of the environment as salient.
Environments selectively reinforce mental representations (DiMaggio 1997).
Because environments vary, people know more culture.
They have a larger stock of representations that enable them to function in multiple environments.
These representations are less coherent, with many elements specific to particular domains or settings.
Culture is not isomorphic with groups.
This perspective raises the salience of:
Identities: self-schemata that serve as organizational foci for cultural material characterizing the self and its relationships.
Institutions: environmental scaffolds that organize cultural material around places and symbol systems.
Networks: replace groups as the social carriers of cultural elements.
The study of culture focuses on the reproduction, maintenance, and modification of cultural patterns (Adams and Markus 2004: 344).
Less emphasis is placed on the content of culture.
More emphasis is placed on the processes or mechanisms (cognitive and social).
These mechanisms explain how cultural elements are acquired, rendered salient, linked to broader patterns of meaning, and displaced.
Culture and Social Psychology in Psychology
The emerging analysis of culture provides an opportunity to reclaim and extend several key social psychological theoretical insights.
People everywhere exist in social networks, in groups, in communities, and in relationships.
Being a person is fundamentally a social transaction.
Social formations and psychological formations are fully interdependent, both contemporaneously and historically.
Despite early powerful theorizing about how people and their sociocultural environments mutually constitute one another (e.g., Lewin 1948; Mead 1934), the majority of social psychology’s empirical attention has been directed to the power of the immediate situation.
Studies reveal that people are chronically and powerfully sensitive to others in every aspect of behavior.
Some of this influence is explicit, but much of it is implicit or automatic and outside the span of conscious analysis or control (Fiske, Gilbert, and Lindzey 2010).
A focus on culture puts a wide-angle lens on the situation and expands what social psychologists examine when they consider the social environment.
Culture inheres in the ideas and practices of particular immediate social situations that afford and constrain psychological tendencies.
These situations are nested within and organized by networks and institutions that give form and structure to these situations.
These social systems are animated by a variety of often tacit, taken-for-granted ideas about what is good, what is moral, and what is self that provide a normative orientation for both self-systems and the social systems.
Psychological experience and the social systems with which self-systems are interdependent are continually shaped by ecological, economic, and historical forces (Markus and Kitayama 2010).
Culture is not a bundle of traits or a stable set of norms but implicit and explicit patterns of representations, actions, and artifacts.
These patterns are distributed or spread through networks of social interaction (Atran, Medin, and Ross 2005; Kashima 2000; Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952).
Social situations or contexts are the products of human activity, the repository of previous psychological activity.
Social situations do more than influence behavior; they constitute these psychological tendencies.
The situation, the context, or the environment is not just an overlay on a set of basic psychological processes that provides the content for the processes.
People think, feel, and act in culture-specific ways—ways that are shaped by particular patterns of historically derived meanings, practices, products, and institutions (Kitayama and Cohen 2007; Heine 2008).
Approaches to culture within social psychology vary (Markus and Hamedani 2007).
Some theorists have sought to specify certain key dimensions of culture or cultural syndromes.
Examples include individualism/collectivism, autonomy, hierarchy, egalitarian commitment (e.g., Triandis 1995).
Others locate the sources of cultural variation in the cultural toolkits that reflect a culture’s intellectual history and guide the way individuals perceive and construct meaning (Nisbett et al. 2001).
Some conceptualize culture as a loose network of knowledge structures, mental constructs, and representations that guide information when activated (Hong et al. 2000).
Still others index culture through cultural models, which are widely shared ideas and practices about how to behave and which give form and direction to individual experience (Markus and Kitayama 2003).
Sociocultural psychologists have recently ventured beyond WEIRD contexts (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010).
WEIRD = Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.
Many processes previously thought to be basic, universal, and natural to human functioning have been found to be strikingly different in non-WEIRD contexts.
This empirically documented cultural variation reveals that it is human nature to shape and be shaped by one’s sociocultural contexts.
The study of culture is renewing psychology’s understanding of the self, identity, or agency as central to the analysis and interpretation of behavior.
Experience is socioculturally patterned, and the self or identity reflects the individual’s engagement with the world that is the source of this patterning.
A self or an identity is the "me" at the center of experience—a continually developing sense of awareness and agency that guides action and takes shape as the individual, both brain and body, becomes attuned to the various environments it inhabits.
Selves are psychological realities that are both biologically (LeDoux 1996) and socioculturally (Markus and Kitayama 1991) produced.
Selves and identities are schemas of past behavior as well as patterns for current and future behavior.
They are always situated and, as a consequence, they always reflect their contexts in significant ways.
Culture and Social Psychology in Sociology
The sociological case is complicated by the fact that self-identified sociologists of culture were long indifferent to psychology, whereas social psychologists rarely recognized the connection.
Fortunately, the walls separating these fields have begun to crumble (DiMaggio 1997; Cerulo 2002).
Sociology’s trajectory has been similar to that of psychology.
Sociologists once viewed culture as comprising internally coherent and largely stable sets of guiding principles (values) and behavioral prescriptions (norms), ordinarily understood to map neatly onto societies (cultures) or groups within them (subcultures).
They increasingly have come to understand culture as comprising social representations, mental models, and ordering schemata (Ridgeway 2006) and the environmental conditions that sustain or challenge them.
Sociologists also increasingly perceive culture as contingent, domain-specific, and often incoherent, a repertoire of meanings and competencies among which persons shift depending on context and environmental cues.
Understanding culture in this way enables us to apprehend such phenomena as the socialist world’s transition to capitalism or sudden flare-ups of intergroup tension that resist explanation given the traditional view.
The duality of mind and environment suggests questions about the match between individual repertoires and external representations, regularities in priming mechanisms that evoke particular schemata, and the distribution of rules and representations across groups and throughout material, institutional, and symbolic environments.
Increasingly, students of culture look to social psychology to illuminate the mechanisms that articulate systems of meaning across person, time, and place.
Without psychology, sociology of culture is given to strong assumptions and weak theory.
Dualistic approaches to culture that depict culture as organized around a few enduring binary oppositions have persisted in the absence of empirical support.
More complex models of culture that posit correspondences between different life spheres have likewise tended to underestimate domain independence and undertheorize mechanisms generating correspondence.
Kohn, Miller, and Schooler’s [1986] research program on cognitive effects of work on family life was an admirable exception that most cultural sociologists ignored.
Berger and Luckmann (1967) emphasized the institutional scaffolding of cognition and challenged prevailing views of culture as intrinsically coherent.
Fine and Kleinman (1979) challenged conventional approaches to ‘‘subcultures,’’ presenting a more dynamic view of cultural formation and diffusion.
Swidler (1986) argued that humans’ cultural repertoires consist of inconsistent representations, ideas, and models, among which they shift as conditions and surroundings change.
These authors’ intuitions would soon be affirmed empirically by psychologists studying the acquisition of representations, the inferential nature of source and credibility monitoring (Gilbert 1991; Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay 1993), domain specificity (Hirschfeld and Gelman 2004), and the relationship between automatic (system 1) and controlled (system 2) cognition (Lieberman et al. 2002; Kahneman 2003).
Fine’s work on such topics as subcultures (1979), interpersonal diffusion (Fine and Turner 2001), and collective memory (Fine and McDonnell 2007) has uniquely influenced both cultural sociology and social psychology, introducing linkages between these fields, especially around the study of microcultures.
The influence of research by social psychologists on institutional scaffolding, identity, and the social psychology of networks should spread within sociology of culture as well.
Work on institutional scaffolding (Zerubavel and Smith, this volume) emerged from constructivism and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1964), which emphasized the precariousness of intersubjectivity and the dependence of interactants on background knowledge and visible cues.
Zucker’s (1977) extension of the Asch experiments demonstrated that symbols of institutional authority increased the persistence of judgmental errors.
Vohs et al. (2006) found that the mere presence of images of currency in an experimental setting reduced cooperative behavior, apparently cueing schemata associated with market institutions.
Social psychologists have done critical work on how identities shape individual behavior.
The status-expectations-states tradition in sociology complements research on stereotyping in psychology, demonstrating how marked identities in task-focused groups elicit behaviors that reinforce intergroup boundaries and prejudices.
Recent work in this tradition engages issues of culture directly (Ridgeway 2006).
Role-based identity theories entail examination both of meaning systems (the set of salient roles in a community) and mechanisms (through which alternative identities are combined and shape interaction) (Owens, Robinson, and Smith-Lovin 2010).
Studies of both cultural diffusion and identity construction have highlighted the role of networks in enacting, triggering, and defining identities (Deaux and Martin 2003).
Interaction between similar persons affirms and standardizes ingroup identities (e.g., White 2008 on identities as equivalence classes facilitating network formation).
Interaction between dissimilar actors imposes identities through categorization (Hogg and Ridgeway 2003).
Differences and Directions
Psychology and sociology typically have different endgames; thus, social psychologists of different disciplinary persuasions sail past each other in the night.
The current convergence between psychological and sociological social psychologists in definitions and approaches to culture, as well as their shared view that cultures and selves/identities constitute each other in a cycle of mutual constitution, suggests that the time may be right for sustained interdisciplinary work.
Psychologists could benefit from sociological theorizing on roles, networks, institutions, and on how ideas and practices diffuse and cultures change.
Sociologists could benefit from psychological research on when and how specific psychological tendencies vary with specific features of context.
Sociology’s emphasis on culture as domain-specific, contingent, and often incoherent and psychology’s emphasis that both cultures and selves are dynamic can productively deflect the charge of stereotyping that is an ongoing concern for psychologists.
Culture is dynamic in that the sociocultural ideas, practices, institutions, products, artifacts, economic factors, and ecological factors that constitute it are constantly invented, accumulated, and changed over time.
Selves are dynamic in that they change as the various cultural contexts they engage in change.
A focus on the sociocultural grounding of the self does not deny the individuality and idiosyncrasy observable in even the most tight-knit and coherent collectives.
Even those inhabiting similar configurations of cultural contexts or similar social spaces will diverge in the specifics of their everyday experiences and will differentially attend to features of these experiences.
A gathering of wisdoms among social psychologists of various persuasions is clearly needed.
The economic model of individual behavior in both its rational and less rational forms is well-developed, as is the individual psychological model and the medical or biological model of behavior.
The social psychological model of behavior, which points to the powerful role of distributions of relations, networks, norms, practices, and meanings, is not equally elaborated among social scientists or in the larger cultural imagination.
Research revealing a strong gradient between social class and health (Marmot 2005), or a relationship between threats in the social environment and academic performance (Steele 2010), will stimulate growing interest in how to index or capture the significant aspects and categories of sociocultural environments and their intersections, and how to theorize the specific mechanisms by which these aspects constitute psychological functioning.
The significant questions will include how much of the mind or the psyche is in the head and how much is in the world, and how best to account for persistence in behavior or, instead, for behavioral change and innovation.
Biology, Sociology, and Understanding Human Society
Biology and structural sociology are crucial for understanding human society, providing insights into the fundamental aspects of human behavior and social structures.
Cognitive psychologists map behavioral processes in the brain, detailing the neural mechanisms underlying human thought and action.
Social network researchers model dynamic networks with non-relational data, analyzing how relationships and interactions shape social phenomena.
Psychologists and sociologists can model stereotype diffusion or racial prejudice, examining the spread and impact of biases within society.
This modeling is based on assumptions about outgroup information processing and intergroup interaction likelihood, exploring how perceptions and interactions between different groups influence social dynamics.
Independent research streams can jointly develop a structural theory of action, creating a comprehensive framework for understanding human behavior in social contexts.
This theory explains the reciprocal changes between neural and social networks, highlighting the interplay between biological and social factors in shaping human actions.
This is where the future understanding of inequality lies, suggesting that insights from biology, sociology, and psychology are essential for addressing social disparities.
Culture and Social Psychology
Views of culture in psychology and sociology have converged significantly in the past two decades, leading to a more integrated understanding of cultural influences on human behavior.
Both fields have rejected the "entity" conception of culture, moving away from the idea that culture is a fixed and uniform entity.
The entity conception views culture as coherent, stable, and located in the heads of collectivities' members.
The new view of culture involves dynamic interactions between mind and environment, emphasizing the reciprocal relationship between individual cognition and the surrounding context.
Each serves as a selection regime for the other.
Mental structures select aspects of the environment as salient, highlighting how cognitive processes determine what aspects of the environment are noticed.
Environments selectively reinforce mental representations (DiMaggio 1997), indicating how the environment shapes and reinforces mental models.
Because environments vary, people know more culture, resulting in a broader and more diverse understanding of cultural norms and practices.
They have a larger stock of representations that enable them to function in multiple environments.
These representations are less coherent, with many elements specific to particular domains or settings, leading to a fragmented and context-dependent understanding of culture.
Culture is not isomorphic with groups, suggesting that cultural influences extend beyond traditional group boundaries.
This perspective raises the salience of:
Identities: self-schemata that serve as organizational foci for cultural material characterizing the self and its relationships, highlighting the role of identity in shaping cultural understanding.
Institutions: environmental scaffolds that organize cultural material around places and symbol systems, emphasizing how institutions structure cultural practices.
Networks: replace groups as the social carriers of cultural elements, indicating that social networks play a key role in transmitting cultural information.
The study of culture focuses on the reproduction, maintenance, and modification of cultural patterns (Adams and Markus 2004: 344), emphasizing the dynamic nature of culture.
Less emphasis is placed on the content of culture. More emphasis is placed on the processes or mechanisms (cognitive and social).
These mechanisms explain how cultural elements are acquired, rendered salient, linked to broader patterns of meaning, and displaced, detailing the cognitive and social processes involved in cultural transmission and change.
Culture and Social Psychology in Psychology
The emerging analysis of culture provides an opportunity to reclaim and extend several key social psychological theoretical insights, enhancing the understanding of human behavior through the lens of culture.
People everywhere exist in social networks, in groups, in communities, and in relationships.
Being a person is fundamentally a social transaction, highlighting the social nature of human existence.
Social formations and psychological formations are fully interdependent, both contemporaneously and historically, suggesting that social and psychological processes are deeply intertwined.
Despite early powerful theorizing about how people and their sociocultural environments mutually constitute one another (e.g., Lewin 1948; Mead 1934), the majority of social psychology’s empirical attention has been directed to the power of the immediate situation.
Studies reveal that people are chronically and powerfully sensitive to others in every aspect of behavior.
Some of this influence is explicit, but much of it is implicit or automatic and outside the span of conscious analysis or control (Fiske, Gilbert, and Lindzey 2010).
A focus on culture puts a wide-angle lens on the situation and expands what social psychologists examine when they consider the social environment.
Culture inheres in the ideas and practices of particular immediate social situations that afford and constrain psychological tendencies.
These situations are nested within and organized by networks and institutions that give form and structure to these situations.
These social systems are animated by a variety of often tacit, taken-for-granted ideas about what is good, what is moral, and what is self that provide a normative orientation for both self-systems and the social systems.
Psychological experience and the social systems with which self-systems are interdependent are continually shaped by ecological, economic, and historical forces (Markus and Kitayama 2010).
Culture is not a bundle of traits or a stable set of norms but implicit and explicit patterns of representations, actions, and artifacts.
These patterns are distributed or spread through networks of social interaction (Atran, Medin, and Ross 2005; Kashima 2000; Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952).
Social situations or contexts are the products of human activity, the repository of previous psychological activity.
Social situations do more than influence behavior; they constitute these psychological tendencies.
The situation, the context, or the environment is not just an overlay on a set of basic psychological processes that provides the content for the processes.
People think, feel, and act in culture-specific ways—ways that are shaped by particular patterns of historically derived meanings, practices, products, and institutions (Kitayama and Cohen 2007; Heine 2008).
Approaches to culture within social psychology vary (Markus and Hamedani 2007).
Some theorists have sought to specify certain key dimensions of culture or cultural syndromes.
Examples include individualism/collectivism, autonomy, hierarchy, egalitarian commitment (e.g., Triandis 1995).
Others locate the sources of cultural variation in the cultural toolkits that reflect a culture’s intellectual history and guide the way individuals perceive and construct meaning (Nisbett et al. 2001).
Some conceptualize culture as a loose network of knowledge structures, mental constructs, and representations that guide information when activated (Hong et al. 2000).
Still others index culture through cultural models, which are widely shared ideas and practices about how to behave and which give form and direction to individual experience (Markus and Kitayama 2003).
Sociocultural psychologists have recently ventured beyond WEIRD contexts (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010).
WEIRD = Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.
Many processes previously thought to be basic, universal, and natural to human functioning have been found to be strikingly different in non-WEIRD contexts.
This empirically documented cultural variation reveals that it is human nature to shape and be shaped by one’s sociocultural contexts.
The study of culture is renewing psychology’s understanding of the self, identity, or agency as central to the analysis and interpretation of behavior.
Experience is socioculturally patterned, and the self or identity reflects the individual’s engagement with the world that is the source of this patterning.
A self or an identity is the "me" at the center of experience—a continually developing sense of awareness and agency that guides action and takes shape as the individual, both brain and body, becomes attuned to the various environments it inhabits.
Selves are psychological realities that are both biologically (LeDoux 1996) and socioculturally (Markus and Kitayama 1991) produced.
Selves and identities are schemas of past behavior as well as patterns for current and future behavior.
They are always situated and, as a consequence, they always reflect their contexts in significant ways.
Culture and Social Psychology in Sociology
The sociological case is complicated by the fact that self-identified sociologists of culture were long indifferent to psychology, whereas social psychologists rarely recognized the connection.
Fortunately, the walls separating these fields have begun to crumble (DiMaggio 1997; Cerulo 2002).
Sociology’s trajectory has been similar to that of psychology.
Sociologists once viewed culture as comprising internally coherent and largely stable sets of guiding principles (values) and behavioral prescriptions (norms), ordinarily understood to map neatly onto societies (cultures) or groups within them (subcultures).
They increasingly have come to understand culture as comprising social representations, mental models, and ordering schemata (Ridgeway 2006) and the environmental conditions that sustain or challenge them.
Sociologists also increasingly perceive culture as contingent, domain-specific, and often incoherent, a repertoire of meanings and competencies among which persons shift depending on context and environmental cues.
Understanding culture in this way enables us to apprehend such phenomena as the socialist world’s transition to capitalism or sudden flare-ups of intergroup tension that resist explanation given the traditional view.
The duality of mind and environment suggests questions about the match between individual repertoires and external representations, regularities in priming mechanisms that evoke particular schemata, and the distribution of rules and representations across groups and throughout material, institutional, and symbolic environments.
Increasingly, students of culture look to social psychology to illuminate the mechanisms that articulate systems of meaning across person, time, and place.
Without psychology, sociology of culture is given to strong assumptions and weak theory.
Dualistic approaches to culture that depict culture as organized around a few enduring binary oppositions have persisted in the absence of empirical support.
More complex models of culture that posit correspondences between different life spheres have likewise tended to underestimate domain independence and undertheorize mechanisms generating correspondence.
Kohn, Miller, and Schooler’s [1986] research program on cognitive effects of work on family life was an admirable exception that most cultural sociologists ignored.
Berger and Luckmann (1967) emphasized the institutional scaffolding of cognition and challenged prevailing views of culture as intrinsically coherent.
Fine and Kleinman (1979) challenged conventional approaches to ‘‘subcultures,’’ presenting a more dynamic view of cultural formation and diffusion.
Swidler (1986) argued that humans’ cultural repertoires consist of inconsistent representations, ideas, and models, among which they shift as conditions and surroundings change.
These authors’ intuitions would soon be affirmed empirically by psychologists studying the acquisition of representations, the inferential nature of source and credibility monitoring (Gilbert 1991; Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay 1993), domain specificity (Hirschfeld and Gelman 2004), and the relationship between automatic (system 1) and controlled (system 2) cognition (Lieberman et al. 2002; Kahneman 2003).
Fine’s work on such topics as subcultures (1979), interpersonal diffusion (Fine and Turner 2001), and collective memory (Fine and McDonnell 2007) has uniquely influenced both cultural sociology and social psychology, introducing linkages between these fields, especially around the study of microcultures.
The influence of research by social psychologists on institutional scaffolding, identity, and the social psychology of networks should spread within sociology of culture as well.
Work on institutional scaffolding (Zerubavel and Smith, this volume) emerged from constructivism and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1964), which emphasized the precariousness of intersubjectivity and the dependence of interactants on background knowledge and visible cues.
Zucker’s (1977) extension of the Asch experiments demonstrated that symbols of institutional authority increased the persistence of judgmental errors.
Vohs et al. (2006) found that the mere presence of images of currency in an experimental setting reduced cooperative behavior, apparently cueing schemata associated with market institutions.
Social psychologists have done critical work on how identities shape individual behavior.
The status-expectations-states tradition in sociology complements research on stereotyping in psychology, demonstrating how marked identities in task-focused groups elicit behaviors that reinforce intergroup boundaries and prejudices.
Recent work in this tradition engages issues of culture directly (Ridgeway 2006).
Role-based identity theories entail examination both of meaning systems (the set of salient roles in a community) and mechanisms (through which alternative identities are combined and shape interaction) (Owens, Robinson, and Smith-Lovin 2010).
Studies of both cultural diffusion and identity construction have highlighted the role of networks in enacting, triggering, and defining identities (Deaux and Martin 2003).
Interaction between similar persons affirms and standardizes ingroup identities (e.g., White 2008 on identities as equivalence classes facilitating network formation).
Interaction between dissimilar actors imposes identities through categorization (Hogg and Ridgeway 2003).
Differences and Directions
Psychology and sociology typically have different endgames; thus, social psychologists of different disciplinary persuasions sail past each other in the night.
The current convergence between psychological and sociological social psychologists in definitions and approaches to culture, as well as their shared view that cultures and selves/identities constitute each other in a cycle of mutual constitution, suggests that the time may be right for sustained interdisciplinary work.
Psychologists could benefit from sociological theorizing on roles, networks, institutions, and on how ideas and practices diffuse and cultures change.
Sociologists could benefit from psychological research on when and how specific psychological tendencies vary with specific features of context.
Sociology’s emphasis on culture as domain-specific, contingent, and often incoherent and psychology’s emphasis that both cultures and selves are dynamic can productively deflect the charge of stereotyping that is an ongoing concern for psychologists.
Culture is dynamic in that the sociocultural ideas, practices, institutions, products, artifacts, economic factors, and ecological factors that constitute it are constantly invented, accumulated, and changed over time.
Selves are dynamic in that they change as the various cultural contexts they engage in change.
A focus on the sociocultural grounding of the self does not deny the individuality and idiosyncrasy observable in even the most tight-knit and coherent collectives.
Even those inhabiting similar configurations of cultural contexts or similar social spaces will diverge in the specifics of their everyday experiences and will differentially attend to features of these experiences.
A gathering of wisdoms among social psychologists of various persuasions is clearly needed.
The economic model of individual behavior in both its rational and less rational forms is well-developed, as is the individual psychological model and the medical or biological model of behavior.
The social psychological model of behavior, which points to the powerful role of distributions of relations, networks, norms, practices, and meanings, is not equally elaborated among social scientists or in the larger cultural imagination.
Research revealing a strong gradient between social class and health (Marmot 2005), or a relationship between threats in the social environment and academic performance (Steele 2010), will stimulate growing interest in how to index or capture the significant aspects and categories of sociocultural environments and their intersections, and how to theorize the specific mechanisms by which these aspects constitute psychological functioning.
The significant questions will include how much of the mind or the psyche is in the head and how much is in the world, and how best to account for persistence in behavior or, instead, for behavioral change and innovation.