Two traditions of cognitive sociology : an analysis and assessment of their cognitive and methodological assumptions

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Two traditions of cognitive sociology : an analysis and assessment of their cognitive and methodological assumptions © 2022 the Authors Published version Kaidesoja, Tuukka; Hyyryläinen, Mikko; Puustinen, Ronny Kaidesoja, T., Hyyryläinen, M., & Puustinen, R. (2022). Two traditions of cognitive sociology : an analysis and assessment of their cognitive and methodological assumptions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 52(3), 528-547. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12341 2022 1University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland 2University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland Correspondence Tuukka Kaidesoja, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. Email: [email protected] Funding information Koneen Säätiö; Emil Aaltosen Säätiö Abstract Cognitive sociology has been split into cultural and interdisciplinary traditions that position themselves differently in relation to the cognitive sciences and make incompatible assumptions about cognition. This article provides an analysis and assessment of the cognitive and methodological assumptions of these two traditions from the perspective of the mechanistic theory of explanation. We argue that while the cultural tradition of cognitive sociology has provided important descriptions about how human cognition varies across cultural groups and historical periods, it has not opened up the black box of cognitive mechanisms that produce and sustain this variation. This means that its explanations for the described phenomena have remained weak. By contrast, the interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology has sought to integrate cognitive scientific concepts and methods into explanatory research on how culture influences action and how culture is stored in memory. Although we grant that interdisciplinary cognitive sociologists have brought many fresh ideas, concepts and methods to cultural sociology from the cognitive sciences, they have not always clarified their assumptions about cognition and their models have ORIGINAL ARTICLE Two traditions of cognitive sociology: An analysis and assessment of their cognitive and methodological assumptions Tuukka Kaidesoja1 | Mikko Hyyryläinen1 | Ronny Puustinen2 DOI: 10.1111/jtsb.12341 Received: 17 December 2021 Revised: 1 February 2022 Accepted: 18 February 2022 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2022 The Authors. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. J Theory Soc Behav. 2022;1–20. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jtsb 1 1 | INTRODUCTION Cognitive sociology is a relatively recent phenomenon in sociology, since systematic research at the intersection of culture and cognition began in the late 1990s. Since then this research field has been split into two research programs: the cultural tradition of cognitive sociology (hereafter: CT) and the interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology (hereafter: IT). CT has built upon and extended Zerubavel's (e.g. 1991, 1997, 2019) pioneering work that has sought to develop a sociological approach to mental phenomena (Brekhus,2007). Instead of seeking to integrate cultural sociology with the cognitive sciences, CT has aimed to complement cognitive sciences with sociological studies on the socially variable patterns of cultural cognition, while assuming that cognitive scientists focus exclusively on the universal foundations of human cognition (e.g. Brekhus,2007, 2015; Zerubavel,1997, 2019). By contrast, IT has been influenced by DiMaggio's(1997) influential review article in which he argues that the cognitive sciences (broadly understood) provide conceptual tools and empirical findings for clarifying and resolving theoretical and meta-theoretical debates in cultural sociology. IT has embraced DiMaggio's early interdisciplinary vision, according to which “cognitive sociology involves studying the mechanisms by which cultural processes enter into individual minds and shape the microfoundations of social action” (Brekhus & Ignatow,2019, p. 2). We assume that the twofold distinction between CT and IT is suitable for the main objective of this article, which is to analyze and assess the cognitive and methodological assumptions of cognitive sociologists from the perspective of the mechanistic theory of explanation. 1 We recognize that, for example, Brekhus (2015, pp. 9–18) has proposed more fine-graded distinctions between “contemporary traditions in the sociology of culture and cognition”. However, his categories include research programs, such as symbolic interactionism, whose advocates are not typically interested in the relations between sociology and the cognitive sciences. It is also possible to distinguish other varieties of cognitive sociology, or cognitive social theory, in the context of European sociology (see Strydom,2007). In this article, we focus on cognitive sociology in the US. We will use the mechanistic theory of explanation to evaluate theoretical assumptions and explanations developed in two traditions of cognitive sociology. This theory is relevant for the assessment of CT and IT because it provides a systematic framework for analyzing interdisciplinary relations and evaluating cognitive explanations for social and cultural phenomena (e.g. Sarkia etal.,2020). It enables us to identify problematic theoretical assumptions and areas of research where more work is required in both traditions of cognitive sociology. In addition, the idea of mechanistic explanation is already present in many empirical studies by the advocates of KAIDESOJA et al. 2 sketched only a few specific cognitive mechanisms through which culture influences action, meaning that they have not yet provided a comprehensive explanatory understanding of the interactions between culture, cognition and action. KEYWORDS cognitive sociology, cultural cognition, cultural sociology, interdisciplinarity, mechanisms, social cognition IT and we suggest below that CT would benefit if it would focus more on cognitive mechanisms pertaining to those phenomena that are studied by its advocates. Although we are interested in assumptions that cognitive sociologists make about human cognition, we do not begin our article by defining the concept of cognition for two reasons. First, as we shall see, one of the controversies between CT and IT concerns their understanding of human cognition. Second, there is no generally accepted definition for the concept of cognition in the cognitive sciences either, given the ongoing controversies between the representationalist and the anti-representationalist accounts of cognition as well as between the intra-cranial and the distributed or extended approaches to cognitive processes (e.g. Bechtel,2008; Clark,1997; Hutchins,1995; Turner,2018). For these reasons, our argumentation strategy is to analyze the cognitive assumptions in CT and IT and to assess them from the viewpoint of the mechanistic theory of explanation and some recent developments in the cognitive sciences. Hence, our aim is not to provide a comprehensive account of the recent developments in the cognitive sciences nor to defend any specific definition of cognition. The structure of our article is as follows. We will begin by formulating our analytical framework. It includes accounts of the concepts of social and cultural cognition and a brief description of the basic ideas and concepts of the mechanistic theory of explanation. Then we will discuss and assess the cognitive assumptions of CT and IT respectively by focusing on three questions: (i) What are the cognitive mechanisms through which culture influences action? (ii) What constitutes cultural cognition and how it relates to social cognition? (iii) What form “internalized culture” takes in the cognitive processing of individuals? We do not aim to provide a comprehensive review of the empirical work done in these traditions (for more comprehensive reviews, see Brekhus,2015; Cerulo etal.,2021). Instead, we use the previous questions and our analytical framework to identify some constitutive theoretical and methodological assumptions of these traditions, with the aim of evaluating and comparing them. We will close the paper by summarizing our main points and suggesting new research topics for cognitive sociology. 2 | ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK 2.1 | Social cognition and cultural cognition In order to analyze phenomena studied in two traditions of cognitive sociology, we make a distinction between the concepts of social and cultural cognition. By the concept of social cognition, we refer to information processing 2 about other people, social situations and social relations that enables us to understand and interact with each other. Social cognition in this broad sense may take place in social interactions in which we actively engage in either face-to-face or in a technologically mediated manner, or in isolation from immediate social interactions. One of the most important capacities pertaining to both types of social cognition is our ability to understand other people as intentional agents with mental states, such as beliefs, desires and emotions, of their own. While it is generally accepted that humans have this kind of capacity for “mindreading” or “mentalizing”, there has recently been much debate about its exact nature and underlying mechanisms (e.g. Turner,2018, chap. 3; Veissière etal.,2020). We use the concept of cultural cognition to refer to those types and aspects of human cognition that vary between groups and historical periods since this has been the primary way in which this concept has been understood in cognitive sociology (e.g. Brekhus,2015). In other words, cognitive sociologists are interested in cognitive elements that are (at least to some extent) KAIDESOJA et al. 3 shared by the members of one or more groups and that are different from the same kind of cognitive elements of other groups. In different approaches in cognitive sociology, cultural cognition has been assumed to include one or more of the following elements: 1. the contents of perceptions, memories, beliefs, classifications or mental representations (e.g. schemas, scripts, mental models or conceptual metaphors) that vary between cultural groups; 2. socially learned cognitive skills (e.g. skills for reading, writing and arithmetic), dispositions and habits; 3. heuristics, judgements and decision-making processes that depend on cultural commitments; 4. the cognitive affordances of artifacts (e.g. material signs, maps and texts) and culturally constructed material environments (e.g. assembly lines, supermarkets and classrooms) 5. conventions, norms and traditions that shape cognitive processes 6. the cognitive aspects of norms, institutions and rituals that vary between cultural groups. The controversies surrounding the concept of cultural cognition concern the extent of which human cognition varies culturally, the relation between the concepts of cultural and social cognition, the extent of which people who belong to the same group share cognitive elements, and the location of cultural cognition. Hence, not all cognitive sociologists accept or analyze these all six types of cultural cognition and their controversies also relate to differences in the ways in which they understand the concept of culture (e.g. Lizardo,2017). 2.2 | Mechanistic theory of explanation According to the mechanistic theory of explanation, the primary way in which cognitive and social scientists explain phenomena is by developing models (broadly understood) of mechanisms that are responsible for the phenomenon of their interest — often in combination with enabling conditions and causally relevant contextual factors (e.g. Bechtel,2008; Glennan,2017; Hedström & Ylikoski,2010; Sarkia et al., 2020). In this article, we employ Glennan's (2017, p. 17; see also Illari & Williamson,2012, p. 120) minimal account of mechanisms, according to which a mechanism for a phenomenon “consists of entities (or parts) whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for the phenomenon.” The minimal account is not only compatible with the idea that mechanisms form hierarchies in the sense that lower-level mechanisms operate as parts of higher level mechanisms. It also applies to the most prominent definitions of cognitive (or mental) mechanisms (e.g. Bechtel,2008) and social mechanisms (e.g. Hedström & Ylikoski,2010) that are more detailed. Scientists' main objective for developing mechanistic models is to represent mechanisms that underlie, maintain or produce the phenomena that they have empirically established in their research. When they use mechanistic models for explanatory purposes, scientists ultimately aim to answer how phenomena are generated in terms of their component entities and their organized activities and interactions (e.g. Bechtel,2008; Craver & Darden,2013; Glennan,2017). This implies that mechanistic models used for explanatory purposes are not abstract and universal law statements or mere instruments for generating predictions about observable phenomena. Although scientists typically aim to make their mechanistic models more comprehensive over time, in particular experimental and quasi-experimental studies they may focus on explaining specific aspects of phenomena by posing contrastive explanatory questions that may include counterfactuals. In order to answer these questions, they often abstract away from those mechanism KAIDESOJA et al. 4 parts that are causally irrelevant to the specific aspect of the phenomenon under study or make idealized assumptions about them. Hence, answering the contrastive questions of this kind does not require them to use a comprehensive mechanistic model although their explanatory studies presuppose the existence of the mechanism of interest. In any case, mechanistic models used for explanatory purposes are inherently multilevel, reflecting more or less abstractly and accurately the intersecting hierarchies of mechanisms in the world (e.g. Bechtel,2008; Glennan,2017). This means that mechanistic models by definition include at least a representation of the phenomenon to be explained and a (more or less comprehensive) representation of the mechanism that is responsible for the phenomenon. Mechanistic models in different research fields take many different forms, such as qualitative propositions, diagrams, equations or computational simulations. We analyze and evaluate the cognitive and methodological assumptions of the cultural and interdisciplinary traditions in cognitive sociology by applying Craver and Darden’s (2013, pp. 31–34) distinction between three types of mechanistic models in terms of their degree of comprehensiveness. The least demanding are black box sketches of mechanisms that can be understood as placeholders for proper mechanistic models that have not yet been developed. As such, they may either mislead empirical research or guide it to fruitful directions, depending on whether the black box sketches help scientists in developing more demanding mechanistic models. The second type of mechanistic models consist of gray box sketches of mechanisms that identify some of their constitutive entities, activities and interactions but leave many gaps to be filled in by the subsequent research. One of their functions is to help scientists to develop new research designs and methods that would help to fill in the gaps of these models. Finally, glass box schemas of mechanisms are the most comprehensive mechanistic models that describe all entities, activities and interactions that are relevant for addressing the explanatory question how the phenomenon of interest is generated. They open up the black box underlying the phenomenon by showing the inner constitution and functioning of the mechanism responsible for the phenomenon in a specific environment. However, scientists' explanatory interests and pragmatic contexts are relevant for the evaluation of particular explanations since there are no perfect models that would serve equally well to all explanatory tasks (e.g. Sarkia etal.,2020). In many research contexts, there are also trade-offs between the generality and comprehensiveness of specific mechanistic models that should be taken into account when these models are evaluated (e.g. Glennan,2017, pp. 62–64). However, when we assess the two traditions of cognitive sociology, we assume that two indicators for the explanatory success of a research tradition are that its mechanistic models about specific phenomena become more accurate and comprehensive over time. 3 | COGNITIVE AND METHODOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS IN COGNITIVE SOCIOLOGY With these conceptual distinctions in mind, we will now move on to analyze and evaluate the cognitive and methodological assumptions of the cultural tradition in cognitive sociology (CT) and the interdisciplinary tradition in cognitive sociology (IT). We will mostly focus on their answers to the three interrelated questions: (i) What are the cognitive mechanisms through which culture influences action? (ii) What constitutes cultural cognition and how it relates to social cognition? (iii) What form “internalized culture” takes in the cognitive processing of individuals? KAIDESOJA et al. 5 3.1 | The cultural tradition of cognitive sociology The cognitive and methodological assumptions in CT stem from how its representatives see the division of labor between cognitive science and cognitive sociology. Following Zerubavel (1997, 2019), cultural cognitive sociologists consider their work as conceptually and methodologically distinct, but complementary to cognitive science. Accordingly, they assume that cognitive science studies exclusively the universal foundations of human cognition by using experimental and computational methods. Hence, advocates of CT do not usually openly challenge the cognitive sciences, since they consider their research questions and methods different from those of cognitive scientists. Instead, they aim to complement cognitive scientific explanations by describing how the contents of mental representations or meanings vary across groups, cultures and historical periods, how they are shaped by social and moral norms, and how they guide the cognitive processes of the groups of individuals in their real-life contexts (e.g. Brekhus,2007; Zerubavel,1997, pp. 21–22). For a recent example, DeGloma(2015) analyzed mnemonic battles related to child sex abuse, the Vietnam war and American slavery. His study identified a general pattern in these three cases in which mnemonic battles emerged when subversive agents began to "combat default (and relatively unseen) cultural and sociomental norms, whether those norms principally involved mechanisms of denial, moral coding or mnemonic closure" (DeGloma,2015, p. 182). DeGloma's (2015, p. 183) conclusions highlighted the way in which cultural cognitive sociologists position themselves in relation to cognitive processes: "it is the underlying cultural forms – the patterns of memory and mnemonic battle – that determine how we relate to the past and how actors connect autobiographical memories to collective memory and, thereby, the self to community". In addition, Friedman (2013, p. 20) employed “a cognitive sociological approach, emphasizing the link between perception and cognition and highlighting the sociocultural organization of both” in a study on the social construction of sex. Applying Zerubavellian pattern analysis to her interview data, she argued that female and male bodies are socially constructed by perceptual processes that involve filtering and conventional classifications that are shared by groups of people. Interestingly, this kind of understanding of cultural cognition is also present in the recent research of Dan Kahan and his colleagues in the fields of risk perception and the psychology of law. Although not directly building on the sociological work of Zerubavel, Kahan has founded his theory of “cultural cognition” on a similar sounding view of the primacy of the cultural commitments to factual beliefs. According to this theory, different individuals interpret factual evidence in ways that reinforce their connections to those with whom they share a worldview (Kahan & Braman,2006), which in turn affects their beliefs about the consequences of highly charged policies, such as those concerning gun control and environmental issues. However, the cognitive assumptions of CT can be best analyzed by focusing on Zerubavel's (1997) account of how culture or society influences the ways in which people think as members of distinct thought communities. In the introduction to his influential textbook, Social Mindscapes: An Introduction to Cognitive Sociology, Zerubavel (1997, p. 15) writes that: It is the process of cognitive socialization that allows us to enter the social, intersubjective world. Becoming social implies learning not only how to act but also how to think in a social manner. As we become socialized and learn to see the world through the mental lenses of particular thought communities, we come to assign to objects the same meaning that they have for others around us, to both ignore and remember the same things that they do, and to laugh at the same things they find funny. KAIDESOJA et al. 6 Learning to classify the world is perhaps the most important process in cognitive socialization according to CT. Zerubavel (1991, 1997) suggests that this process profoundly affects how we perceive the world and what we think and remember about it (see also Brekhus,2007, p. 454). According to Zerubavel's (1997, pp. 66–67) account, “[b]reaking up the world into discrete, quasi-insular mental chunks is accomplished largely through language” and the internalized categories of this “highly impersonal” language are conventional rather than natural. 3 Hence, he contends that we should “avoid the tendency to reify the conventional islands of meaning in which we organize the world in our minds and to remember that the gaps we envision separating them from one another are purely mental” (Zerubavel,1997, p. 67; see also pp. 41–42). This means that internalized “[m]ental divisions as well as the entities they help to delineate have no ontological status whatsoever” (p. 67). Hence, the socially variable patterns of cultural cognition are constituted by those “conventional islands of meaning” that people internalize via their “primary cognitive socialization” in childhood and during their “secondary cognitive socialization” when they enter new “thought communities” or “cognitive subcultures” later in their lives (p. 19). Although some of Zerubavel's statements sound radical (e.g. a claim that internalized conventional categories shape how we perceive the world and a claim that entities mentally classified by using language have no ontological status), it is not entirely clear to what extent he regards the nature of reality and mind as socially or linguistically constructed, which is a typical feature in many works by social constructionists (Elder-Vass,2012; Hacking,1999). Building upon the assumption that cultural cognition is a socially and linguistically constructed phenomenon that includes culturally variable perceptions, memories and thought processes, CT aims to identify and describe the socially variable patterns of cultural cognition by means of case studies and comparative research that mainly utilize qualitative methods (Brekhus,2007). Many cultural cognitive sociologists have also aimed to identify and unmask such conventional and contingent patterns of cultural cognition that are repressive but mistakenly treated as natural (or universal or normal) features of reality and, thereby, contributed to attempts to transform them into less repressive forms (Brekhus,2015; Friedman,2013; Zerubavel,1997). For example, advocates of CT have focused on “the socio-mental process of lumping and splitting that allows us to experience a racialized world wherein ‘islands of races’ are socially carved and continually reified as such in relation to other ‘islands of meaning’” (Brekhus etal.,2010, p. 64). In this way, CT emphasizes the contingent and socially constructed nature of “races” that can be overcome by means of transforming the racializing classifications of people and the racist practices that are based on them. In addition, advocates of CT underline that modern societies are cognitively pluralist, by which they mean that people belong to many intersecting thought communities and, therefore, “think somewhat differently in different social contexts” (Zerubavel,1997, p. 17). Examples of these thought communities include “churches, professions, political movements, generations, [and] nations” (Zerubavel,1997, p. 9). 3.2 | Evaluation of the cultural tradition In our assessment, cultural cognitive sociologists have produced important descriptions of the culturally variable and historically contingent meanings that people rely on in their understanding of many social and historical phenomena. They have also posed important questions concerning how social and cultural norms guide thinking, actions and interactions of people in different cultural contexts. However, since CT has focused on “the ubiquitous role of language in our lives” (Zerubavel,1997, p. 7) and “the sociomental conventions” that constitute the social KAIDESOJA et al. 7 patterns of cultural cognition, it has not adequately opened up the black box of the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie cognitive socialization and cultural cognition. This omission has limited the ways in which the advocates of CT have understood and explained particular cultural phenomena. For example, racist practices cannot be comprehensively explained by arguing that “races” are socially constructed by the linguistic classifications of racist thought communities that guide their members' thinking, actions and interactions. This is because social psychological studies have shown that racist attitudes may also be based on implicit cognitive biases that are not coded in linguistic format to our memories (e.g. Amodio & Devine,2006). Hence, CT cannot provide a satisfactory answer to all those research questions that it poses without extending its methodological repertoire to include methods developed in the cognitive sciences, such as implicit association tests and other experimental methods. In addition, CT has not adequately discussed empirical research in the cognitive sciences that is relevant to its claims regarding the extent of which language and culture influences perceptions, memories and thinking. In order to do this, Zerubavel's(1997) and others highly abstract claims should be transformed into hypotheses that can be tested empirically. The limitations and problems in CT's accounts of cognitive processes have also been addressed in Ignatow's (2007) and Lizardo's (2012, 2015) critiques of the cognitive assumptions of CT — or, more generally, what Lizardo (2015, p. 567) calls “the classical theory of culture and cognition”. Ignatow's (2007, pp. 120–124) arguments against CT draw on cognitive psychologist Barsalou's(1999) critique of the traditional amodal approaches to cognition in the cognitive sciences. Ignatow's critique employs Barsalou's(1999) notion of transduction, which refers to a process in which the human mind is assumed to disconnect mental representations from those multimodal perceptual processes (i.e. processes that involve information acquired via different sense modalities, such as vision, hearing and touch) that give rise to these representations. Thereby, the idea of transduction implies that the mind forms “amodal symbols” that can be stored in longterm memory and processed independently of sensory experiences of embodied human beings (see Barsalou,1999, pp. 578–580). Ignatow (2007, p. 120) interestingly notes that the contents of mental representations of this kind are not only amodal but also arbitrary in Ferdinand de Saussure's sense, meaning that these “representations typically have arbitrary relations to entities in the world.” Although Ignatow (2007, p. 120) does not mention Zerubavel's work in this context, it is clear that CT forms a paradigmatic example of “cultural and cognitive sociology” that assumes the idea of transduction. Ignatow's(2007) article reviews cognitive scientific critiques regarding transduction, according to which there is no empirical evidence for the existence of transduction nor a compelling account of the neural mechanisms that would link amodal representations with perceptions and actions of embodied individuals (see also Bechtel,2008, chap. 5). Lizardo's (2012, 2015, see also 2017) critique further develops some of Ignatow's(2007) and Turner's (1994, 2002) ideas. It is founded on the assumption that culture exists in two forms depending on whether it is externalized or internalized by individuals. External (or public) culture exists in the form of cultural products that are located outside the bodies of individuals. Internal (or personal) culture exists in the form of representations that are located within the minds of embodied individuals. Lizardo (2015, pp. 578–580) suggests that CT, following the classical theory of culture and cognition, assumes that both external and internal culture take the same form, which he describes by using the terms “cultural symbol” and “cultural meaning”. Hence, CT's account of cognitive socialization presupposes that people internalize the contents of external cultural symbols and meanings that they are then assumed to share with other people in their cultural groups — or their “thought communities” to use Zerubavel's(1997) terms. Lizardo (2015, p. 578) argues that this account is based on “the metaphorical imagery of the (format-preserving) KAIDESOJA et al. 8 shared and implicit presuppositions, or some other social shared cognitive elements postulated in practice theories, is not true. In our view, the debate concerning the mirror neuron systems shows at least that the advocates of IT should specify how they see the relation between social and cultural cognition. Furthermore, in order to specify their ideas about how cultural cognition is socially learned, they could consult recent research in developmental psychology that has addressed the cognitive development of individuals, including the social learning mechanisms that operate in the cognitive development of cultural cognition (e.g. Karmiloff-Smith,1996; Tomasello,2019). Some recent articles have taken first steps into this direction (e.g. Cerulo etal.,2021; Lizardo,2017, 2021). For example, Lizardo's(2021) distinctions between the processes of socialization, internalization and enculturation seem to provide useful conceptual tools to address these issues but more work is still required. In addition, one could ask whether people can share cognitive elements that are partially located outside their skins. This question brings us to our final point. Third, many advocates of IT have accepted Lizardo's (2017) distinction between declarative and non-declarative personal culture, which can be understood as two forms of cultural cognition. However, it is not clear whether or to what extent advocates of IT accept the idea that cultural cognition may also be located in the cognitive affordances of artifacts and material environments. By cognitive affordances, we refer to those relational properties of artifacts and material environments that allow people with suitable cognitive skills to use them as external representations that help them to perform cognitive tasks (e.g. Hutchins,1995). Many advocates of IT tend to downplay the importance of the cognitive affordances of this kind since they seem to assume that all components of cognitive mechanisms are necessarily located within individuals' skins (Norton,2020). This is somewhat surprising since distributed cognitive mechanisms have been systematically theorized and empirical studied in ecological psychology, cognitive anthropology and cognitive archeology since 1990s (e.g. Hutchins,1995; Malafouris & Renfrew,2010; Norman,1993). These studies have relied mostly on ethnographic methods in order to show that the affordances of cognitive artifacts (e.g. navigation charts, physical scale models or diagrams) that are the objects of joint attention for many people at the same time (and in this sense “socially shared”) are important components of their materially and socially distributed cognitive mechanisms. The cognitive affordances of artifacts and culturally designed material environments also provide important developmental scaffolds for learning cognitive skills, such as writing, reading, navigation and arithmetic. More recently, the concept of affordance has also been incorporated into a predictive processing framework in cognitive neuroscience that aims to account for cultural cognition (e.g. Veissière etal.,2020). An interesting issue with respect to cognitive sociology is the question of to what extent outsourcing (or offloading) cognition to cognitive artifacts, information processing technologies and culturally built material environments saves us from the need to form detailed internal representations about our environments. It seems to us that distributed cognitive mechanisms have become more important to understanding of cultural phenomena as our societies have become more impregnated by information processing technologies. In conclusion, we summarize the previous discussion by describing IT's answers to the three questions that we posed above. Since the two main empirical research programs in IT provide slightly different answers to these questions, we describe their answers separately. However, we admit that these programs are partially overlapping and that their answers may be complementary rather than contradictory. KAIDESOJA et al. 15 3.5 | The dual-process research program 1. Culture influences action via two different types of cognitive mechanisms. The first is implicit cultural schemas that are socially learned and the second is conscious shaping of the explicit discursive accounts that people use to justify their actions. 2. Cultural cognition comes in two forms, implicit and explicit, and the most important element of implicit cultural cognition consists of cultural schemas. The relation between cultural and social cognition is not specified. 3. Internalized culture takes two forms, implicit and explicit, whose relations are described differently in different models. 3.6 | The embodied metaphors research program 1. Culture influences action through conceptual metaphors that utilize socially mediated experiences of embodied individuals in order to provide meanings for abstract concepts that are shared by the groups of individuals. 2. Cultural cognition consists of embodied conceptual metaphors that vary between groups. The relation between cultural and social cognition is not specified. 3. Internalized culture takes the form of embodied conceptual metaphors that vary between groups. 4 | CONCLUSION In this article, we analyzed the cultural and the interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology and evaluated their cognitive and methodological assumptions from the perspective of the mechanistic theory of explanation and some recent developments in the cognitive sciences. We have collected our main results in Table1. Our contention is that the interdisciplinary tradition is more promising, since its models about cognitive mechanisms have become more accurate and comprehensive over time. This tradition has also been methodologically innovative and included critical reflections about the methods used in cognitive sociology and, more generally, in cultural sociology. By contrast, the theoretical and methodological ideas of cultural tradition have not developed much since Zerubavel's(1997) textbook that largely synthesized earlier work in the sociology of knowledge and social constructionism. Since the cultural tradition has continued to keep distance from the cognitive sciences, it has not been able to open up the black box of cognitive mechanisms that are assumed by its theories. Moreover, as have been argued by the advocates of interdisciplinary tradition, the central problem in cultural tradition is that its basic cognitive assumptions are not compatible with the recent developments of the cognitive sciences that have increasingly addressed the embodied, social and cultural aspects of human cognition. This is not to deny that cultural cognitive sociologists have provided important empirical descriptions of various cultural phenomena. However, we also argued that there are certain conceptual inaccuracies and limitations in the interdisciplinary tradition. First, we noted that models about cognitive mechanisms in the interdisciplinary tradition can be characterized as gray box mechanism sketches rather than glass box mechanism schemas. Second, we argued that the interdisciplinary tradition has not yet provided a satisfactory account of the social learning and developmental mechanisms through which KAIDESOJA et al. 16 groups of people end up sharing the same elements of cultural cognition, such as cultural schemas or embodied metaphors. Third, the materially and socially distributed aspects of cognitive mechanisms have not yet been adequately addressed in the interdisciplinary tradition. Although these are all complex issues, we hope that our article encourages interdisciplinary cognitive sociologists to address them. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank two reviewers and Matti Sarkia for their valuable comments. We also benefitted comments by Omar Lizardo, Jacob Strandell and Petri Ylikoski who read the earlier version of this article. This study was funded by Koneen Säätiö and Emil Aaltosen Säätiö. ORCID Tuukka Kaidesoja https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9633-2944 ENDNOTES 1 A similar two-fold distinction has been often made in the literature on cognitive sociology. For example, in their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, Brekhus and Ignatow (2019, p. 1) refer to “a contrast between cultural cognitive sociology approaches and interdisciplinary cognitive social science approaches'' (see also Danna,2014; Lizardo,2015). KAIDESOJA et al. 17 Evaluation of the models about cognitive mechanisms Significant problems and unsolved questions Avenues for improvement Cultural tradition Black box sketches and no serious attempts to increase their transparency Black box sketches of cognitive mechanisms do not provide mechanistic explanations for cultural phenomena. Does not clearly distinguish between mechanisms for social and cultural cognition Becoming more informed by recent developments in the cognitive sciences could enable it to provide better explanations and more satisfactory answers to the questions it poses Interdisciplinary tradition Mostly gray box sketches in terms of cultural schemas and embodied metaphors Models about cognitive mechanisms are drawn from a few specific research programs in the cognitive sciences. Limited understanding of social learning processes and the distributed aspects of cognitive mechanisms. Does not clearly distinguish between mechanisms for social and cultural cognition By widening the scope of the relevant cognitive scientific research to include research on social learning and developmental mechanisms and distributed cognition TABLE 1 An assessment of two traditions of cognitive sociology from the perspective of mechanistic theory of explanation 2 We use the notion of “information processing” in a non-committal way, meaning that we leave it open what exactly it consists of and where it is located. The point of our distinction between social and cultural cognition is simply to specify two broad classes of cognitive phenomena that are relevant for cognitive sociological research. 3 Zerubavel(1997) relies on the structuralist semiology that is rooted in structuralist linguistics, where the meaning of a symbol is exhaustively determined by its relations to other symbols. 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