Feb 4, 2011
Culture, Context, and Moral Action
Assessing how current neuroscientific discoveries affect sociological thinking about cultural and contextual factors and the influences of values, habits, practices, and situations in shaping moral action.
Main readings:
Carbonaro, W. and J. Collett. 2009. Pushing the Man: Moral Judgments in Group Settings. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA.
Cerulo, Karen. 2010. Mining the intersections of cognitive sociology and neuroscience. Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts 38(2): 115-132
Lizardo, O. and M. Strand. 2010. Skills, toolkits, contexts and institutions: clarifying the relationship between different approaches to cognition in cultural sociology. Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts 38: 204-227.
Vaisey, S. 2009. Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology 114(6): 1675-1715.
Recommended reading:
Clark, A. 1995 Connectionism, Moral Cognition, and Collaborative Problem Solving. In Mind and morals: essays on cognitive science and ethics. Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, Andy Clark (eds.) Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 109-128.
DiMaggio, P. 1997. Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology 23:263-285.
Evans, J. S.B. 2008. Dual-processes accounts of reasoning. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 255–278
Hitlin, S. and J.A. Piliavin. 2004. Values: Reviving a Dormant Concept. Annual Review of Sociology 30:359-93.
Lizardo, O. 2007. ‘Mirror neurons,’ collective objects and the problem of transmission: reconsidering Stephen Turner’s critique of practice theory. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37: 319-350.
Bloom, P. 2010. How do morals change? Nature 464: 490. 25 March 2010.
Fraser, B. and M.D. Hauser. 2010. The argument from disagreement and the role of cross-cultural empirical data. Mind and Language (in press).
Narvaez, D., and D. Lapsley. 2009. Moral identity and the development of moral character. In D. Medin, L. Skitka, D. Bartels, & C. Bauman (Eds.), Moral cognition and decision making, Vol. 50 of the Psychology of Learning and Motivation series (pp. 237-274). Elsevier.
Narvaez, D. & J. Vaydich. 2008. Moral development and behaviour under the spotlight of the neurobiological sciences. Journal of Moral Education, 37(3), 289-313.