Thought and Society

Not thinking about society, but how society and culture shape thought. Especially collective cognition: accomplishing cognitive taskes en masse. ("Thought" is broader than "cognition," which has connotations of knowledge; but thought can be arbitrarily mangled and wrong and senseless, and frequently is.)

Fundamental attribution error vs. cultural change. Social psychologists speak of the "fundamental attribution error", which people's tendency, when explaining human behavior, to give too much weight to relatively permanent personal characteristics (honesty, courage, lasciviousness, rationality), and not enough to the particular situation of the actors. Query: how much apparent change in culture, "mentalities", etc., is really due to changes in the type and distribution of the situations people find themselves in? Consider e.g. the common claim that modernity (or industrial society, capitalism, etc.) makes people see themselves as self-regarding individuals, whereas those in traditional agrarian societies saw themselves as members of a community. Even granting that there is a genuine behavioral difference, might this not be because, under modern conditions, people have more occasion to act individualistically? --- Might this provide a non-mysterious mechanism for social structure to (appear to) influence culture?

J. M. Balkin, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology [Full text free online]
Albert J. Bergesen, "Durkheim's Theory of Mental Categories: A Review of the Evidence", Annual Review of Sociology 30 (395--408) [Discussed elsewhere. For Durkheim's works, see Religion.]
Raymond Boudon
- The Analysis of Ideology
- The Art of Self-Persuasion
- Theories of Social Change: A Critical Appraisal [Contains an insightful critique of the "sociology of knowledge" tradition, or at least that part of it which tries to show how people's beliefs are effects of their place in the social structure.]
Donald Brown, Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness
Rochel Gelman and R. C. Gallistel, "Language and the Origin of Numerical Concepts", Science 306 (2004): 441--443 [And the related articles it refers to in the same issue.]
Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild [and, if I may say so, my review thereof]
A. R. Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations [ch. 1 is online; my comments]
Stephen Turner
- The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions
- Brains/Practices/Relativism: Social Theory after Cognitive Science
Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language [Vygotsky gets his own page]

Margaret S. Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation [Blurb]
Paul B. Bates and Ursula M. Staudinger (eds.), Interactive Minds: Life-Span Perspectives on the Social Foundation of Cognition
Leslie Brothers, Friday's Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind
Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity
Karen Cerulo
- Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst [Blurb]
- (ed.), Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition
Aaron V. Cicourel, Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction
Michael Cole, Cultural Psychology
Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change [Blurb]
Keith Dixon, The Sociology of Belief: Fallacy and Foundation
Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality
Heidi Keller et al. (eds.), Between Culture and Biology: Perspectives on Ontogenetic Development ["Cambridge Studies in Cognitive and Perceptual Development"]
Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation [blurb]
Arthur Lupia, Matthew D. McCubbins and Samuel L. Popkin, Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality
George Herbert Mead
- Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist
- (ed. Anselm Strauss), The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead
Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: The Emergence of the Mediated Mind
Ute Schöpflug (ed.), Cultural transmission : psychological, developmental, social, and methodological aspects [blurb]
Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture and the Problem of Meaning
James P. Spradley (ed.), Culture and Cognition: Rules, Maps, and Plans
Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meanings
Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition [Blurb]
Jaan Valsiner and Rene van der Veer, The Social Mind: Construction of the Idea [blurb]
Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode, "The Psychological Consequences of Money", Science 314 (2006): 1154--1156
Eviatar Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology [Blurb]

Notebooks

Thought and Society