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Widespread reliance on representationalist understandings commit social scientists to either partially or totally decouple belief from reality, limiting the domain of phenomena that can be treated by belief as an analytic concept. Developing the contrastive notion of practical belief, we introduce the hysteresis effect as a situational phenomenon involving the systematic production of agent-environment mismatches and argue for its placement as a central problem for the theory of action. Revealing the dynamic, embodied conservation of belief in the temporality of practice, hysteresis appears when environmental contexts change in a way that leaves actors without an ontologically complicit relationship to institutions as scaffolds of action. Under these circumstances, a past-inflected reflexiveness replaces a forward-inflecting practical belief in the actor's temporal relation to the world. Drawing from a variety of historical case studies, we locate hysteresis in routine disjunctures between the temporality of practice and the temporality of environments. Our analysis reveals four distinct types of reflexiveness produced the hysteresis effect, each with a unique dispositional impact on actors and extensions to group-level phenomena. We conclude the article by emphasizing the non-eliminativist relationship between belief as disposition and belief as representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I argue that the very form of the grammatical construction 'a sociology of culture and cognition' (which is a specification of the more general schema 'a sociology of [X]') is symptomatic of a deeply entrenched form of 'Primitive Classification' (which I will refer to as the 'Comtean schema') that governs the way in which sociologists conceive of their place in, and engage with other denizens of, the social science landscape. I will also argue that while this style of disciplinary engagement might have worked in the past when it came to dealing with the standard (nineteenth-century) social science disciplines and even some late-twentieth-century upstarts, it will not work as a way to engage the now-sprawling postdisciplinary field that I will refer to as 'Cognitive Social Science' ( CSS). The takeaway point is that if sociologists want to be part of CSS (and it is in their interest to be part of it because this constitutes the future of the behavioral sciences), then they will have to give up the Comtean-schematic thought style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional theories of culture and socialization in the social and behavioral sciences have concentrated on how attitudes and values come to be "internalized" and thus shared by members of a collectivity. The emergence of practice theory challenges the classical theory of socialization and acculturation by shifting the focus of analysis away from explicit symbolic representations and towards tacit,motor-schematic procedures. In this paper I argue that even as they reject the traditional object of older socialization-based accounts, most practice theorists continue to operate with the same outmoded theory of socialization and acculturation inherited from classical sociology. I useWacquant's (2004) "carnal ethnography" of becoming a boxer to outline an alternative approach--grounded in recent research in cognitive neuroscience--which provides a more adequate explanation of how practices come to be acquired and transmitted from person to person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them (Bourdieu, 1996b[1989], p. 1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding why people join, stay, or leave social groups is a central question in the social sciences, including computational social systems, while modeling these processes is a challenge in complex networks. Yet, the current empirical studies rarely focus on group dynamics for lack of data relating opinions to group membership. In the NetSense data, we find hundreds of face-to-face groups whose members make thousands of changes of memberships and opinions. We also observe two trends: opinion homogeneity grows over time, and individuals holding unpopular opinions frequently change groups. These observations and data provide us with the basis on which we model the underlying dynamics of human behavior. We formally define the utility that members gain from ingroup interactions as a function of the levels of homophily of opinions of group members with opinions of a given individual in this group. We demonstrate that so-defined utility applied to our empirical data increases after each observed change. We then introduce an analytical model and show that it accurately recreates the trends observed in the NetSense data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]