70 enactment and maintenance of existing macro-structures. As Ridgeway 2006
argues, it is in the coupling of socio-cognitive theories with sociological theories that we can begin to better understand, explain, and explore how individuals
internalize, reproduce, modify, and alter macro-level social patterns, such as dimensions of stratification, social institutions, or widely shared cultural norms
and values.
2.4 A Schematic Reconciliation
Developments in the fields of socio-cognition and cognitive psychology offer a middle ground that can help to resolve the consciousnessunconsciousness
dilemma that is left unresolved by the available sociological theories of social reproduction. To wit, while the French and German theorists thus far discussed
took seriously the role that the unconscious plays in social reproduction, the cognitive dimension of social reproduction remains under-theorized in their work.
For instance, Althusser never elaborated on his cognitive theoretical presuppositions, while Bourdieu seemingly underplays the conscious dimensions
of agentic practice Gerans, 2005, and the Frankfurt School adopted a largely unfalsifiable and overtly classical Freudian psychosexual approach that reduces
consciousness to economic and biological determinants. To move beyond these limitations, the concept of schemaschemata also known as schemas, mental
modelsmodulesrepresentationsstates, scripts, frames, and domains developed by cognitive and social psychologists offers a theoretical solution that accounts for
both conscious and unconscious cognition, and can also help to provide a more thorough explanation of what a habitus actually is and how it works. Schemata,
according to cognitive and social psychologists, refer to subjective, generative,
and mentally stored knowledge frameworks that provide a means to organize memories, and ideas about a concept, its attributes, and its relationship to other
concepts, as well as facilitate learning by enabling the rapid integration of new associations linked to incoming information. These are stored in episodic, working,
and long- term memory, are acquired throughout a person’s life via their exposure
to socio-environmental experiences and stimuli, and function as heuristics that help guide the way individuals consciously and unconsciously perceive, interpret,
synthesize, and react to all of the various forms of socio-environmental stimuli that they encounter as they navigate through their daily lives Baars Franklin,
71 2003; DiMaggio, 2002; Maqsood et al., 2004; Ren et al., 2013; van Kesteren et al.,
2012.
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Moreover, schemata also embody an individual’s cognitive
representations of hisher self-awareness, on the one hand, and the shared beliefs, norms, and values of hishers respective social group on the other Hull et al.,
1988. Congruently, these culturally shared cognitive representations can be networked with and activated by other schemata, which can thereby contribute to
cultural reproduction and stability. As Sperber Hirschfeld 2004, p. 6 note: Representations belonging to a complex system such as a religion
which involves not only representations but also practices, artifacts and institutions need not be all anchored in one and the same
cognitive module [or schema]. On the contrary, multiple anchoring in several cognitive mechanisms may contribute to the cultural system’s
stability. Schemata also incorporate or consist of elaborate networks of event
structures, discourse processing structures, semantic structures, situationalcontext structures, emotionaffect structures, and motivation structures Izzard, 2007;
Salzman Fusi, 2010; Sutton, 2006; Van Dijk, 1997; Zemack-Rugar et al., 2007, which in an aggregate form, generate and contain sets of corresponding, embodied,
and transposable dispositions. Dispositions, in the socio-cognitive context, refer to
an individual’s unconscious or implicit yet context-specific attitudes, emotions, orientations, expectations, and behaviours which have been learned or acquired
via exposure to specific socio-environmental experiences and stimuli, and which manifest automatically according to specific stimuli Cerulo, 2010; Edwards et al.,
2002; Fishbach Shah, 2006; Raney, 2004; Sheperd, 2011, Swartz, 2003; Vaisey, 2009. As Baumeister Bushman 2008, pp. 151-152 note with reference to the
automaticity of dispositional schemata, “their pervasiveness, interconnectivity,
and accessibility are largely determined by the frequency by which they are encountered, imagined, and used. With great frequency, even complex knowledge
structures can become automatized - so over learned that they are applied automatically with little effort or awareness”. Moreover, dispositions are also, in
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Additionally, schemata are hypothesized to be mental correlates that are enabled and encoded in physiological and interconnected neural networks located in the pre-frontal cortex, medial temporal
lobe, and amygdala structures of the brain Salzman Fusi, 2010; van Kesteren et al., 2012.
72 effect, the empirically observable and articulated manifestations of unconscious
schemata in that they can to some extent be inferred from people’s automatically
manifested emotions, thoughts, practices, and body language Bohner Dickerl, 2012; Bourdieu, 1990; Danna-Lynch, 2010; Rydell et al., 2006; Van Dijk, 1997.
To put it more simply, all of our experiences, social understandings, and acquired knowledge lie at an unconscious or dispositional state, and are organized in
specific schemata. However when stimulated, and depending on the context of the stimulant and stimulation, these schemata can guide our emotions, thoughts, and
practices to manifestations that are either dispositional or reflective Lodge et al., 1991; Ridgeway, 2006; Rydell et al., 2006. As Damasio 1999, p. 332 puts it:
All our memory, inherited from evolution and available at birth, or acquired through learning thereafter, in short, all our memory of things,
of properties of things, of persons, of places, of events and relationships, of skills, of biological regulations, you name it, exists in
dispositional form [...] waiting to become an explicit image or action. Note that dispositions are not words. They are abstract records of
potentialities. Although schema theory informs
Bourdieu’s 1990 concept of habitus, and indeed an argument can be made that a habitus is simply the aggregate set of an
individual’s socially acquired schemata as I will suggest in Chapter 4, its application by cognitive and social-psychologists differs in that schema theory
distinguishes between, and explores both, automatic and deliberative forms of cognition DiMaggio, 1997; that is, cognition is seen as operating on an
automatic level when triggered by socio-environmental stimuli, but can also operate on a conscious level, e.g., in the form of reflective thought and the
conscious restructuring of existing schemata. This is especially the case when people are exposed to new information and experiences that run counter to their
established expectations or beliefs, which can trigger an instance of cognitive dissonance that pushes individuals to consciously engage with the expectations,
attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies that make up their pre-existing schemata, and which may then lead to the reification or modification of those pre-existing
73 schemata Briñol et al., 2009; Gawronski Strack 2004; Ramaprasad, 1993.
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As Allison Allison 1993, p. 132 explain:
As such they schemata can serve as mental templates for imposing conceptual order on complexity, for linking isolated pieces of information
together into more coherent wholes, and for recognizing non-obvious patterns in situations. Prolonged exposure to a given knowledge or action
domain can reasonably be expected to provide opportunities for individuals to acquire information about phenomena, processes, and
problems characteristic of that domain. Information captured through such experience forms the raw material, as it were, for the construction,
modification, or elaboration of schemata, which then function to guide future perception, interpretation, and action.
Schema theory, and more generally, the theorization and exploration of an individual’s cognitive processes of categorization, contextualization, framing,
perception, interpretation, meaning making, rationalization, and collective memory, which in turn guide individual identity-construction and behaviours
DiMaggio Markus, 2010; Van Dijk, 1996, are often ignored in contemporary social reproduction studies. Equally overlooked is the fact that social structures are
also cognitive structures, or what Zeruvabel Smith 2010 refer to as thought communities e.g., schools, nations, and political movements. These disseminate,
but are also structured, reproduced, and constrained by the prevalence and dominance of specific ideasdiscourses, within a specific socio-historical and
geographic context. While durable, they can be altered or changed through the volitional actions of groups and individuals who, in the first instance, reinterpret
and reframe a given set of specific ideas and discourses. I will argue that schema theory and other insights from the cognitive sciences e.g., cognitive dissonance
offer sociologists and other social scientists concerned with the phenomenom of social reproduction a more systematic way of making sense of the human mind
and how it has been influenced by the social world. More specifically, it offers, I
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Unlike the Freudian psychodynamic model of the unconscious, the unconscious as conceptualized by cognitive and social psychologists is conceived of as an information processing
centre made up of countless and interconnected schemata, as Riso et al., 2007, p. 12 note, “schemas exert their influence through unconscious information processing, rather than through
unconscious libidinal and instinctual drives”.
74 suggest,
a set of organizing principles from which to map out an individual’s interpellating experiences and corresponding practices in a way that is more open
to empirical investigation than standard and classical sociological conceptions e.g., false consciousness, interpellation, and habitus, but which can complement
and strengthen them, as I will attempt to briefly demonstrate in the following section, and in the empirical chapters of this thesis.
2.5 Political-Economic Formation: Habitus and Cognitive Dissonance
