Culture and Society: the Role of Distributed
Cognition
David B. Kronenfeld
kfeld@citrus.ucr.edu
"Society", here, refers to patterns of grouping and interaction
via which a collection of individuals forms some extra-individual entity.
"Culture" refers to the shared (learned, but not explicitly taught) system
of knowledge, feelings, and behavior (and, sometimes, their products) that
characterize one human community vs. another. Culture and society,
as seen here, are mutually constitutive. Culture provides the shared
knowledge system which enables members of a society to recognize fellow members
and to coordinate their actions with one another, while society provides
the communities, and thus the patterned interactions and experiences, out
of which individuals construct their representations of culture.
I have used a computer simulation of a collection of simple
critters (having only individual goals and actions) to explore the minimal
properties necessary for a social group as opposed to a simple collection
of individuals--i.e., Durkheim's emergent properties. More recently
I have increasingly become involved in experiments with and analyses of "cultural
models"--posited shared conceptual structures (deriving from schema theory
in psychology) that pull together culturally standardized knowledge, motivation,
affect, values, goals, and so forth and that relate these to action or behavior.
In this latter research I have been particularly concerned with problems
of definition (what is a cultural model), of boundaries (what is in one vs.
out, and how can you tell), of structure (how do they differ from individual
schemas, how are they organized, and so forth), and of how individual people
evoke them and use them in deciding how to behave and how to interpret the
behavior of others. I have also been concerned with how different cultural
models and variant forms of any given cultural model are related to different
social groups.
The computer simulation dealt with social rather than cognitive
or cultural issues. But my long term goal is to show that similar feedback
processes involving an individual homing in on the behavior of others, but
now joined to an assumed internal model of what drives the behavior of others,
can explain the emergence and functioning of cultural models.