Cognitive Sociology

Cognitive sociology is a field that studies how social contexts shape the ways people perceive, classify, remember, and interpret the world, and how shared cognitive patterns in turn structure social life. It draws on the classic work of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, who argued in Primitive Classification that basic categories of thought originate in social organization, and on Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology of the commonsense world and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s social construction of reality emphasized that shared stocks of knowledge underpin everyday life. Aaron Cicourel pioneered the application of cognitive approaches to social research, and Eviatar Zerubavel developed the field in works such as Social Mindscapes, examining how social norms of attention, memory, time, and classification are learned within thought communities. Paul DiMaggio has drawn on cognitive science to analyze culture and schemas, while Karen Cerulo and others study how cultural categories shape perception. Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus offers a related account of embodied dispositions. Critics warn against reducing social structure to individual mental processes. Cognitive sociology remains important for research on culture, classification, memory, identity, and the social organization of knowledge.