Cognitive Sociology: Revisiting the Role of Cognition in Sociological Explanation

Abstract

This article presents an analytical review of the sociological tradition known as cognitive sociology. Following the Durkheimian injunction to explain the social by the social, sociology long tended to bracket questions of cognition, perception, and decision-making, placing them outside its explanatory frameworks. As a result, the discipline came to rely on simplified and insufficiently theorized assumptions about actors, their rationality, and their motivations, which have become increasingly difficult to reconcile with developments in the cognitive sciences. The article interprets cognitive sociology as a research project aimed at reworking the theoretical foundations of sociology in light of contemporary understandings of cognition, without reducing sociological explanation to a psychological one. It examines the historical formation of this field, the internal lines of tension that structure it, and the key theoretical components of which it is composed: the concept of schemas, dual-process models of cognition, and 4E approaches. Despite important differences among these perspectives, the article argues that they share a common orientation toward developing a more cognitively plausible model of social action. The central element, and the main theoretical move, of the proposed assembling in the article is the situation as an analytical unit in which cognitive processes, embodiment, environmental affordances, social interaction, and practical action are brought together. Such a situational move makes it possible to link internal cognitive mechanisms to the contexts in which they are enacted, to overcome the limitations of models that derive action from values, norms, or other abstract representations, and to develop explanations that are more sensitive to underlying mechanisms without being reductionist. In this sense, cognitive sociology is treated not only as a project of borrowing ideas from adjacent disciplines, but also as a framework for exporting sociological models into a broader interdisciplinary context. The further development of this approach opens up the possibility of integrating the analysis of cognitive mechanisms with the study of social structures, processes, and inequality, while also providing a shared language for dialogue with other human sciences.