Tag Archives | Cognitive Style

Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition

Gordon Brett, Andrew Miles

Sociological Science May 10, 2021
10.15195/v8.a6


Sociologists increasingly use insights from dual-process models to explain how people think and act. These discussions generally emphasize the influence of cultural knowledge mobilized through automatic cognition, or else show how the use of automatic and deliberate processes vary according to the task at hand or the context. Drawing on insights from sociological theory and suggestive research from social and cognitive psychology, we argue that socially structured experiences also shape general, individual-level preferences (or propensities) for automatic and deliberate thinking. Using a meta-analysis of 63 psychological studies (N = 25,074) and a new multivariate analysis of nationally representative data, we test the hypothesis that the use of automatic and deliberate cognitive processes is socially patterned. We find that education consistently predicts preferences for deliberate processing and that gender predicts preferences for both automatic and deliberate processing. We find that age is a significant but likely nonlinear predictor of preferences for automatic and deliberate cognition, and we find weaker evidence for differences by income, marital status, and religion. These results underscore the need to consider group differences in cognitive processing in sociological explanations of culture, action, and inequality.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Gordon Brett: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
E-mail: gordon.brett@utoronto.ca

Andrew Miles: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
E-mail: andrew.miles@utoronto.ca

Acknowledgments: We thank Vanina Leschziner, Martin Lukk, Lance Stewart, and Lawrence Williams for their very helpful feedback on an early draft of this article.

  • Citation: Brett, Gordon, and Andrew Miles. 2021. “Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition.” Sociological Science 8: 96-118.
  • Received: February 10, 2021
  • Accepted: March 10, 2021
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v8.a6


0
SiteLock