Social Psychology and Culture

Summary

Since the 19th century, there has been a shared research program in sociology concerned with understanding how culture shapes individual behavior. This program has particularly been a focus of the subfields of the sociology of culture and sociological social psychology. Although these subfields often developed apart from one another, traditions within both have pursued the core question of the processes by which culture patterns individual action. That is, both have asked: What are the processes by which the patterns of values, beliefs, and practices that vary between groups are internalized by individual members and translated into actions?

The classical foundations of this program are found in the scholarship of Max Weber and Georg Simmel in the 19th century. Weber’s “switchman” metaphor captured how cultural beliefs channel individual action, while Simmel illuminated how meaning is embedded in social interaction. Later theories from Talcott Parsons and Pierre Bourdieu advanced this by modeling how cultural content becomes internalized and dispositional. Parsons theorized the role of role expectations and normative socialization and Bourdieu the role of habitus as embodied class disposition.

Later developments were pushed forward by the exchange between Ann Swidler and Stephen Vaisey over whether culture motivates or merely justifies action, and by the rise of dual-process models that import insights from the cognitive sciences. Within sociological social psychology, several theoretical programs have been especially productive: symbolic interactionism, with a focus on shared meanings and identity; affect control theory, which formally models how culturally affective meanings guide behavior; and expectation states theory, which shows how culturally shared beliefs shape judgment and interaction.

Across these bodies of scholarship, a latent research agenda emerged, focused on explaining the processes by which culture influences perceptions, judgments, and, therefore, behaviors. Growing integration between these subfields, utilizing innovative research methods, promises to yield increasingly sophisticated accounts of the role of culture in action.