The Past, Present, and Future of Dual-Process Theory

Dual-process models (DPMs) became influential in cultural sociology because they helped solve the problem of motivation in action theory while acknowledging the existence of cultural incoherence (see e.g., Vaisey 2009). Now that beliefs and preferences are once again allowable categories of explanation in cultural sociology, what is the role of DPMs? Relying on David Marr's (1983) distinction between "computational" and "algorithmic" levels (see also Foster 2018 and Boutyline and Soter 2020), I consider when sociologists do—and do not—need to worry about dual-process cognition in their research.