Cognitive Sociology’s three blindspots: decisions, implicit measures and groups

Abstract

Cognitive sociology has made significant strides in recent years, prompting an exploration into the micro-level analysis of social phenomena. This article focuses on three aspects of cognitive sociology that remain problematic. A central theme involves the role of decision-making, mainly how cognitive schemata are linked to action and behaviour. Concurrently, there's an intensified focus on the representational forms of implicit and explicit cognition. However, there's a notable gap in aligning these studies with the extensive body of knowledge from behavioural science researchers, raising concerns about the caveats of using implicit measures for implicit schemata. In particular, we will discuss metrics issues, how well they capture unconscious processes, their automaticity, time-resistance, and purity.Additionally, the article delves into the complexities of the group detection problem, emphasising the challenges of identifying the heterogeneity of cognitive schemata and their attribution to groups. On the latter topic, the article introduces CART-based methods and a bottom-up and ecological use of heterogeneity in group detection.