Lawrence H. Williams - Thinking Through Dilemmas: Schemas, Frames, and Difficult Decisions

First published 2021

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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2021 Lawrence H. Williams

The right of Lawrence H. Williams to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Names: Williams, Lawrence H., 1987 author.

Title: Thinking through dilemmas : schemas, frames, and difficult decisions / Lawrence H. Williams.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY, : Routledge, 2020. |

Series: Routledge advances in sociology | Includes bibliographical
references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020015757 (print) | LCCN 2020015758 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367511630 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003052654 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dilemma. | Decision making. | Thought and
thinking.

Classification: LCC BC185 .W555 2020 (print) | LCC BC185 (ebook) | DDC 302.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015757

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015758

Sociologists have long been interested in how individuals make

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 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 SDPMs 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-Henningers (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.