Thinking Through Dilemmas

Schemas, Frames, and Difficult Decisions

Lawrence H. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367511654
• eBook ISBN: 9781000178685
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

Departing from the sociological dual process model that divides thoughts into automatic and unconscious, or deliberate and conscious occurrences, this book draws on empirical cases to demonstrate the existence of "automatic deliberation." Through research into the ways in which people address difficult subjects, such as death and dying, pedophilia, and career decision-making, the author sheds light on a mode of thinking which is both habitual and effortful, displaying a combination of habituated understandings and conscious deliberation. Advancing a blended view of cognition by which individuals draw on schemas and frames to think through complex topics, this volume will appeal to sociologists and psychologists with interests in cognition and the ways in which we make decisions.

1 Introduction

Introduction

Sociologists have long been interested in how individuals make decisions. These efforts can be seen in the long and checkered history of Parsons’ (1949) infamous theory of action. His theory of action was an attempt to unite hitherto disparate accounts of how and why individuals make the decisions that they do and, more broadly, come to think and act as they do (see Gerhardt 2011). Many sociologists increasingly came to see Parsons’ account as overly value-driven and deterministic, however, and the discipline began to splinter between accounts which emphasize the relatively automatic, tacit, and habitual on the one hand – such as everyday habits of dress and work – and those which emphasize the more effortful, conscious, and deliberate on the other hand – such as engaging in a verbal argument, solving a complicated math equation, or reflecting on a topic (see Cerulo 2018; Leschziner 2019; Patterson 2014; Vaisey 2009). In short, sociologists moved away from a view of normatively determined action toward perspectives which assume either that the bulk of our behavior is habitual and unconscious or that it is deliberate and conscious (see Patterson 2014).¹

Moreover, the cognizance that individuals think and act using either habit or deliberation in any given moment has led to a growing debate among sociologists regarding the role that each of these factors plays in any actual decision or action an individual makes (see Cerulo 2018; DiMaggio 1997; Leschziner 2019; Mische 2014; Moore 2017; Patterson 2014; Vila-Henninger 2015). Scholars tend to emphasize either habitual thought and action as influenced by internalized values and mental representations or schemas (e.g., Bourgois and Schonberg 2009; Martin and Desmond 2010; Miles 2014; Vaisey 2009), or to emphasize effortful deliberation as influenced by reflexivity, situational constraint, and context (e.g., Archer 2007; Swidler 1986, 2001). While proponents of both views share the same underlying assumptions about thought and action – namely, that thought and action can be conceived of as the interplay between (a) internalized mental structures that individuals accumulate throughout their lives which enable the perception of their surroundings (Mead 1934) and (b) growing self-concepts that, while informed by individuals’ experiences, are not fully reducible to them (Leschziner 2015; Winchester and Green 2019) – they differ in regard to which of these factors they emphasize in their explanations (see Lizardo and Strand 2010).

This division between the habitual and effortful qualities of thought and action can be seen most saliently in the recent widespread use of the sociological dual process model (SDPM) (see Cerulo 2018; DiMaggio 1997; Lizardo and Strand 2010; Vaisey 2009; Vila-Henninger 2015). According to the SDPM, individuals think and act automatically and unconsciously, or deliberately and consciously (Leschziner 2019; Lizardo et al. 2016). The core of this model is based on psychological dual process models, which assume that cognitions occur either unconsciously and automatically, relying on what are called Type 1 processes, or consciously and deliberately, relying on what are called Type 2 processes (Evans 2010; Vaisey 2009).² The SDPM arguably gained traction in sociology after Vaisey (2009) leveled criticism against many sociologists for privileging situational aspects of individual action over more dispositional and ingrained elements (see Leschziner 2019; Vaisey 2009; Winchester and Green 2019).³ Vaisey (2009) argued that interview methods typically only allow access to individuals’ post hoc justifications of why they think and act as they do, and instead advocated for the examination of more deep-seated drivers of motivation. This involved longitudinal survey research which could examine how responses to questions at one point in time could indicate the presence of dispositions or worldviews which were predictive of individuals’ future behavior (see Winchester and Green 2019).

However, a recent but robust line of sociological work has challenged the SDPM in regard to its assumptions that Type 1 and Type 2 processes are sharply divided and that Type 2 processes typically are engaged when Type 1 processes fail to enable individuals to solve problems (e.g., Cerulo 2018; Leschziner 2015; Leschziner and Green 2013; McDonnell 2014; Winchester 2016; Winchester and Green 2019). This view of SDPM placing too much emphasis on the division between Type 1 and Type 2 cognition is shared by sociologists studying topics ranging from chefs (Leschziner 2015), to AIDS campaigns (McDonnell 2014), to religious belief (Winchester 2016). Common among scholars in this camp – and indeed, in what appears to be a growing reaction to much of the use of the SDPM – is the belief that the distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 processes often blurs as individuals muddle their way through situations in ways which appear to be shaped by both routine and effortful processing, such as instances where an individual relies on tried-and-true methods for solving novel math equations (De Neys 2018), develops new culinary dishes when tasked to be innovative (Leschziner 2015), or deciphers and explains responses to scents and fragrances (Cerulo 2018).

In this book, I follow this camp of scholars by showing how the SDPM’s assumptions about the discrete nature of automatic or Type 1 and deliberate or Type 2 processing do not account for moments of cognition which demonstrate what I term automatic deliberation: a kind of processing which is cognitively costly (effortful) but which is also rapid, often occurs over long spans of time and tends to occur seemingly unprompted (see De Neys 2018). I support my argument by integrating Vila-Henninger’s (2015) claim that motivations may at times be conceptualized as Type 2 with recent theorizing on the concepts of resonance (McDonnell et al. 2017) and accounts (Winchester and Green 2019). Together, this work enables me to conceptualize moments of deliberation which occur rapidly and without explicit prompting as demonstrating a blend of Type 1 and Type 2 processing, and as being the product of how schemas and frames – embodied and internalized mental representations which enable rapid and automatic perception of similar stimuli, and publicly available discursive understandings and/or material objects, respectively (see Kinder and Sanders 1990; Wood et al. 2018) – resonate with individuals when discussing a variety of topics.

Frames tend to drive social relations, as they serve as the foundations for social organization and classification, while schemas often are the tacit residues of these frames. Frames are publicly available, discursive understandings, while schemas are the internalized, mentally stored residues of these understandings (see Kinder and Sanders 1990; Wood et al. 2018). For example, gender operates as a “primary frame” in North American society by being a key marker of difference and social sorting (Ridgeway 2009). Living in a society with such a frame thus leads individuals to develop “gender schemas” based on their repeated exposure to a gender-based social organization (Bem 1981). Thus, throughout this book, frames will refer to the declarative culture that individuals can learn, talk, and think about, while schemas will refer to these cultural products’ internalized residues or the mental representations that they cause individuals to develop and, in turn, automatically use to navigate their worlds.⁴ Resonance is the experience of a message, discourse, or other cultural object fitting with an individual’s current worldview (McDonnell et al. 2017). This feeling of “fit” or resonance shapes the extent to which schemas or frames lead individuals to act or reflect in the effort to solve a problem (see McDonnell et al. 2017). For example, schemas about the importance of comfort and well-being tend to cause individuals to refine their claims about resuscitation and the end of life; frames around the developed and socially constructed nature of pedophilia often lead individuals to either seek therapy or “condemn the condemners” (Sykes and Matza 1957:668) by renouncing the reality of their sexual dysfunction; and schemas around personal responsibility and societal responsibility lead individuals to alternate between viewing their career experiences as part of a purposive path or as the product of largely unmet expectations.

Moreover, by mapping out the reasoning paths of individuals across my three cases, I demonstrate how non-declarative, embodied schemas give way to declarative, discursive frames as individuals attempt to work through topics that they find problematic. For individuals who perceive their respective topic as fundamentally dilemmatic, schemas are more likely to give way to frames, and frames are more likely to be desired to become schemas – individuals in dilemmatic situations are more likely to explain in detail the logic behind their largely Type 1-based beliefs and understandings, but are also more likely to speak or write with passion, anger, sadness, and other markers of emotional intensity when moving from framing topics generally to applying them to concrete situations in their attempts to resolve topics they view as problematic (see McDonnell et al. 2017). In turn, I demonstrate how individuals automatically deliberate by moving from schemas to frames, from frames to schemas, and in cycles between these two forms of culture in their broader attempts to solve the problems they are thinking through (see Cerulo 2018; Lizardo 2017; McDonnell et al. 2017; Wood et al. 2018).

Moreover, I demonstrate how the study of dilemmatic topics offers special insight into this process due to the emotionally laden and prolonged nature of individuals’ thoughts about these topics (see Ramvi et al. 2018; Van der Kolk 2014). Dilemmas can be differentiated from problems due to their protracted, enduring, and ambivalent nature; they may appear to be solved but then resurface, or they may appear to individuals as ongoing problems that cannot be solved at all (Ramvi et al. 2018). Indeed, common among many of the self-narrations presented in each set of data is the experience of great stress caused by the ambivalence involved in each case – enduring memories of the death and dying of loved ones bring about positive memories but also memories of unfortunate circumstances and failed attempts to prolong life; unrequited love and sexual desires spark both passion and disgust when the objects of these desires are minors; and careers and career decisions bring about memories of meaningful work but also of failed opportunities, bad bosses, and the elusive nature of vocations. Analyzing these narrations as vehicles through individuals attempt to think through deep-seated, embodied emotions (see Janet 1904; Van der Kolk 2014; Van der Kolk and Fisler 1995; Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 1991; Wood et al. 2018) will therefore contribute to current sociological theorizing on the differences in the use of declarative frames (those narrations somewhat distant from a person) and non-declarative schemas (those narrations which appear to be based on tacit understandings) (see Wood et al. 2018).

Following the lead of sociologists who view the use of schemas and frames as fundamentally interactional and problem-oriented (e.g., Leschziner 2015, 2019; McDonnell 2014; McDonnell et al. 2017; see also Winchester and Green 2019; Wood et al. 2018), I demonstrate the act of automatic deliberation using the empirical cases of death and dying, pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The patterned spontaneity of reasoning
• 3 The reflective management of desire
• 4 The automatic yet iterative use of schemas
• 5 Conclusion
• Index