5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Understanding human behavior and decision-making is a key task across fields of sociological research. Sociological accounts often highlight the impact of cultural orientations, such as educational aspirations, legal cynicism, the code of the streets, or other frames and scripts (Small/Harding/Lamont, 2010). In North America, work on “culture and cognition” has made important theoretical advances in this regard (DiMaggio 1997; Vaisey 2009; Miles 2015; Cerulo et al. 2021), often adopting a dual-process perspective that distinguishes between intuitive and reflective processes (Evans 2010; Kahneman 2011). In Europe, a largely separate sociological tradition of dual-process reasoning has developed, starting from classical sociological and modern multi-disciplinary roots (Esser 2009; Lindenberg 2013; Kroneberg 2014; Esser/Kroneberg 2015; Tutić 2022). This line of work has yield new hypotheses about the determinants of social behavior, leading to new insights on altruism, bullying, cultural consumption, crime, discrimination, education, environmental behavior, fertility, political participation, or the stability of partnerships. Our session seeks to bring together these and other traditions of “cognitive sociology” and thereby to contribute to the integration of theoretical and methodological developments in this field. We invite conceptual and theoretical work on dual-process and framing, empirical applications, and methodological contributions.