Culture, Cognition and Inequality

Over the last decades, sociologists have increasingly examined the relationship between cultural, cognition, and social inequality. While social inequalities shape individuals’ life chances and opportunities, cultural frameworks provide the cognitive tools through which people perceive, interpret, justify, contest, and navigate these inequalities. Recent theoretical and methodological developments in cultural sociology have highlighted the importance of cultural schemas, beliefs, values, narratives, identities, and repertoires in shaping social perceptions and actions.

This session aims to bring together scholars interested in the social psychological processes linking culture and inequality. We seek contributions that examine how cultural knowledge, broadly understood as beliefs, values, attitudes, identities, schemas, and repertoires, influences the ways individuals understand and respond to social hierarchies and social change. We invite works covering but not restricted to the following topics:

• Cultural schemas and perceptions of social inequality.
• Navigation of social inequalities through cultural knowledge.
• Cognition and the reproduction of social inequalities.
• Social class, status beliefs, and symbolic boundaries.
• The influence of family, education, religion, and social networks on cultural knowledge acquisition.
• Effects of cultural knowledge on status attainment processes.
• Cross-national studies on the perception and attitudes towards social inequalities.
• Culture, cognition, and subjective well-being.
• New methodological approaches to studying culture and cognition, including computational and AI-assisted research.