ON THE APPLICATION OF SOCIAL COGNITION AND SOCIAL LOCATION TO CREATING CAUSAL EXPLANATORY STRUCTURES

Portions of this paper were presented at the 2000 Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, Washington, D.C. I appreciate comments by Erich Goode, Howard Schuman, Alice Robbin and Robert Branson's "Change Management" students on earlier versions of this manuscript. Research in the social cognition field of heuristics (perceptual shortcuts) holds considerable untapped potential to study culture wars. In this paper, I draw upon research about heuristics, paranormal beliefs, cognitive development, religion, and public attitudes toward science to discuss diverse approaches to creating and maintaining systems of causal explanations. Explanatory systems are critical in constructing philosophies of human nature, epistomologies, priorities for organizations that originate and promulgate culture, and establishing societal priorities in general. Research on attribution theory and heuristics may be especially useful to examine the types of evidence and styles of proof embedded in causal systems. Group differences in causal explanatory structures, in conjunction with group status locations, contribute to culture wars. I conclude with suggestions for possible truces while admitting that group differences can make cultural armistices difficult to attain. Early in my graduate school career when I was a student in the Detroit Area Study, Howard Schuman recalled for his methods students his attempts to survey ideal family size in Bangladesh. His initial question: "Suppose you had no children. How many would you like to have? " drew a nearly universal response of "as many as God wills. " Finally, he rewrote the survey item as: "Suppose you had no children, if God wished to give you as many children as you wished, how many would you wish for? " and the survey moved forward (Schuman, 1967). More recently, establishing why an Egypt Air jet crashed in October 1999 became entangled with interpreting the co-pilot's comments on the plane's "black box. " To the consternation of Egyptian officials, American investigators decided that when the co-pilot said that he put his life in God's hands, he meant that he would suicidally crash the plane. Egyptian officials insisted instead that upon realizing the plane was about to crash, the co-pilot called out a final religious invocation (Lewis & Johnston, 2001). Assessments of causal systems resurfaced as Americans watched Osama Bin Laden discuss the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in an apparently home-made videotape (Poniewozik, 2001). The Time journalist was mystified as the al Qaeda described using dreams and portents as one basis to plan the attacks on the United States. In the English translation, visions and magical thinking interwove throughout the conversation to bolster convictions of divine sanction and invincibility. When Schuman constructed the fertility survey questions, his initial, implicit assumption was that we can control conception. By failing to acknowledge causal attributions that ideal family size depends on divine intervention, the original item inadvertently obviated such a causal perspective as a legitimate answer. Differences in causal language meant that researchers were denied the data they wanted until they translated that question into the causal language respondents spoke. The Egypt Air crash probe slowed as Americans and Egyptians disputed the meaning of the copilot's final remarks. Time journalist Poniewozik argued that Americans will misunderstand the current Middle Eastern situation unless they comprehend the basics of Al Qaeda causal beliefs. This paper examines the social and educational importance of systems of causal explanations. It describes how processes associated with social cognition and social location can contribute to creating and maintaining these systems. Causal explanations are central in many social institutions, particularly those, such as education or the humanities, which reproduce culture. …