A Neurosociological Theory of Culturally and Structurally Situated Cognition and Ethno-Racial Stress

Abstract

A longstanding body of literature reveals that experiences of discrimination and exclusion lead to health disadvantages by increasing physiological stress responses both in the body and the brain. However, a sociological view that takes into account structurally and culturally shaped biological processes is missing from the literature. Building on recent literature from the sociology of morality and values and the dual process model of culture, this paper proposes and provides preliminary evidence for an applied theory of culturally situated moral cognition as a coping mechanism with ethno-racial stress. I focus on values as they help cope with ethnicity and race related stress such as discrimination. Using functional neuroimaging data, I offer evidence that values operate through both explicit (controlled and conscious) processes recruiting brain regions like the dorsal prefrontal cortex, and implicit (automatic and non-conscious) processes recruiting regions like the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, to help cope with exclusion and discrimination.

Mechanisms in sociology—a critical intervention

“…Mechanisms were originally associated with the positivistic and pragmatist branches of sociology during the classical era, rose to theoretical prominence in the 1990s through the so-called social mechanisms program ( Elster, 1989 ; Hedström and Swedberg, 1996 , 1998 ; Hedström and Ylikoski, 2010 ; Edling and Rydgren, 2016 ), and nowadays find their way into research papers of both qualitative and quantitative sociologists of virtually any theoretical and methodological background. Glennan and Illari (2018) even argue that the social sciences were one of two major driving forces alongside several life sciences that are responsible for the resurgence of mechanistic philosophy in recent decades, and in articles that were recently published in this journal, sociologists reveal “different mechanisms of social network closure across generations” ( Windzio and Kaminski, 2023 ), claim that “speech-acts can be seen as a mechanism to connect the brainpower of many individuals into a single collective power” ( Van Langenhove, 2023 ), and find “preliminary evidence for an applied theory of culturally situated moral cognition as a coping mechanism with ethno-racial stress” ( Firat, 2021 ).…”