Theorists as Arbitrageurs: How Cognitive Neuroscience Entered Sociology
摘要
Since the 1990s several influential publications have explored the implications of cognitive neuroscience concepts and methods for sociology. Rather than argue for the relevance of specific concepts such as schemas, implicit attitudes, dual process theory or embodied knowledge for sociology, this chapter reflects on the success of neurosociology (and with it cognitive sociology and research on culture and cognition) since the 1990s and contrasts that success with the relative stagnation of sociological theory over the same period. My argument is twofold. First, features of the Big Science research landscape explain both the decline of traditional subfields such as sociological theory and the emergence of hybrid subfields including neurosociology. Second, sociological theorists since the 1990s have performed theoretical arbitrage, importing concepts from cognitive neuroscience into sociology. Analysis of Web of Science citation data supports these arguments. Identifying which areas of sociology were most influenced by cognitive neuroscience, which areas were influenced first, and who were the arbitrageurs who brought cognitive neuroscience into sociology, I show that theorists operating within social psychology, cultural sociology, and sociological theory subfields imported cognitive neuroscience into mainstream sociology. In doing so they accentuated preexisting philosophical divisions within sociology between constructionist and naturalist/realist camps and redefined the role of sociological theorist from abstract theoretician to theoretical arbitrageur.