Dueling with Dual-Process Models: Cognition, Creativity, and Context

Abstract

Sociologists increasingly draw on dual-process models of cognition to account for the ways context, cognition, and action interrelate. Drawing from 40 interviews with improvisers and observations from improvisational theater, I find that dual-process model scholarship is limited in three respects: It does not consider how cognition operates in situations where order and disruption are concurrent, it fails to realize there is interindividual variation in cognitive processing, and it underestimates the creativity emerging through automatic processes. Interactions in improv contain elements of both order and disruption, and they place demands on automatic and deliberate cognition simultaneously. Improvisers respond to these competing demands through either automatic or deliberate thinking dispositions, which are engendered through explicit instruction, practical experience, and artistic commitments. These dispositions, in turn, shape creative decision-making, predicting interindividual differences in how improvisers respond to contingencies on stage. I conclude by discussing the implications for culture, cognition, and action.

Dual-process theory, behavioral research and the explanation of social inequalities

“…For instance, the distinction between analytic and holistic styles of reasoning traced by anthropologists comparing western and eastern societies refers to different modes of T2P (Brett 2022).…”

“…DPT made its way to sociology quite recently, following the seminal contributions by Di Maggio (1997) and Vaisey (2009). In particular, several studies have stressed the affinities between automatic cognition and the notion of habitus (Bourdieu1979), understood as an embodied and pre-reflective system of dispositions (Brett 2022;Hayes 2020;Vaisey 2009;Miles et al 2019;Abramson 2012). At odds with the reading of DPT prevalent in economics, this view asserts that individuals are primarily guided by unconscious cultural schemas (their 'practical consciousness' reflecting T1P) that they may rationalize ex post (their 'discursive consciousness' reflecting T2P).…”

Cultural Objects, Material Culture, and Materiality

“…Certainly, human action helps to stabilize the meanings of objects, but so too do objects stabilize. Cultural objects' concrete material enables events to coalesce and take shape (Wagner-Pacifici 2017) and provides an infrastructure for classification systems (Bowker & Star 2000). Systems of classification powerfully structure action (Douglas 1996) but require objects to make such classifications manifest and relevant (here again, material tokens are essential to cognitive types).…”

The Sociocognitive Origins of Personal Mastery

“…While everyone has the capacity to think using automatic and deliberate cognition, there are systematic differences in how often people use these processes. One of the primary reasons for these differences is that some people develop a habit for more automatic or deliberate thinking, which, through frequent repetition over time, becomes their default mode of information processing (see Brett 2022). These differences are what psychologists refer to as thinking dispositions or cognitive styles: general propensities in the reliance on either automatic or deliberate cognition (Cacioppo et al 1984; Epstein et al 1996; Frederick 2005).…”