Sociology is, at least in part, the science of social behavior. Or (just) behavior? From one angle, sociologists look at the mechanisms or forces or dynamics, depending on your persuasion, shaping, constraining, and enabling behavior. We might call this the sociology of social control, or so it was before critical and “post-” social theorists of a wide variety call it other things. From another angle, sociologists are interested in why or, oftentimes, how people do the things they do. This diverse array of social scientists call themselves action theorists. Of course, sociologists are also interested in the question of how the former determines the latter – how does society get inside of us? At one point, sociology broadly accepted the idea of socialization, but for various reasons, it was rejected and the question was left unanswered. Luckily, this question has returned with some urgency, as has the gradual re-incorporation of the term socialization.

In any case, how the two pieces fit together is not always clear, because what people say they do, why they think they do it (at least, when asked after the fact), and what they do is often misaligned. Moreover, the reliance on self-reports – which sociology has spent an inordinate amount of time litigating – muddles what we are actually studying: are we asking people about the motivations that propelled their behavior or the ex post facto justifications or “motive talk” for doing what they did (Abrutyn and Lizardo 2023)? As is too often the case, sociologists seem resigned to accept that the former is an impossibility; a question best left in the hands of the psychological sciences. Instead, we are better at (a) asking about the latter and then, (b) rejecting our interlocutor’s claims and imposing some sort of explanation we prefer best (Martin 2011), whether it be some grand, unfalsifiable systemic cause (Neoliberalism!) or some sort of pseudo-psychological cause (e.g., because we care deeply about others expectations and fear reprisal!) (Wrong 1961).

Case in point: Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of ethnographic texts. I am really interested in the question sociologists appear to have largely ceded to psychology. While it appears, to some extent, that they have largely ignored the question of why people do things, in all reality they haven’t ceded the question at all; rather, they’ve internalized the discipline’s ready-made answers to the question. If anything, it would seem sociology’s reliance on these common stocks of knowledge underscores how society or, the mental life of a community, gets inside our heads with real consequential outcomes (Zerubavel 1999) as well as its own strange blind spots. But, this essay isn’t exactly a critique of the discipline, so let’s set this all aside for the time being.

The Fallacy of Reason Triumphing over Passion

In any case, I’ve come to realize just how allergic sociologists – today in two thousand and twenty-four – are to emotions. Despite having a flourishing and rich subfield, and three decades of research in neuro- and cognitive science telling us this position is untenable, sociology is largely defined by cognitivism. What is cognitivism? There is an overwhelming emphasis on our big brains and cognitive processes vis-a-vis other processes. But, it is something darker and more problematic than this. It is the vestiges of the roots of the discipline and our unfortunate reverence of the masters to the extent of being backward instead of forward-facing field. What do I mean?

Generally speaking, humans imagine themselves to be significantly more evolved, advanced, and distinct from non-humans. We build houses and tame every ecological space; we go to comedy clubs, churches, hospitals, and museums; we write poetry, debate abstract ideas, and think a lot about thinking. While these beliefs about our special status and superiority are not unique to sociologists (van den Berghe 1990), it is easy to understand why the classical theorists we revere the most carried these biases into their own theorizing. Chimpanzees and orangutans were unknown to most people until the late 19th century, and when faced with creatures that shared some real morphological features as us, the reception was to double-down on these differences rather than face the fact that we are animals, primates, apes (de Waal 2019). This idea that we are different from animals was most obvious in our presumed superiority in intelligence, reason, and ability to use logic to tame the animalistic passions that we were all aware of. This was obvious! The role of a parent is to teach a child to control themselves, to self-regulate. What are they regulating? The infantile outburst, uncontrolled desires, and lack of social norms. This position was also adopted by those who set out for adventure, plunder, and, unfortunately, worse motives. The peoples they encountered were human, to be sure, but they were either “barbarians” or, worse, “savages.” Like children, they were to be tamed, but with one major exception: they could not be socialized into being full humans, as they were unredeemable less evolved. Finally, where did this leave animals? Animals cannot even communicate with language! So not only is this (not totally correct) fact an indictment of their intelligence, but it also meant/means they could not defend themselves in the court of scientific or public opinion.

All three of these “categories” of objects lacked adequate control. Children because they had not yet been socialized into the ways of the community; savages because they were closer to animals and their community had not yet developed “appropriate” norms and beliefs that could provide the “necessary” mechanisms of social control; and animals because, well, they lacked reason, logic, language, and the like. What’s more, all of these objects were imagined as lacking key cognitive processes and skills, with only some capable of gaining them. The father of American social psychology, George Herbert Mead, for instance, humans were different from their pets because children could learn to speak, which meant they could self-reflect and understand other’s behavior. The discovery of mirror neurons (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia 2008) along with decades of naturalistic (de Waal 2019) and experimental research on other primates and human children (Tomasello and Vaish 2013) challenges many of these self-evident assumptions, but nonetheless. Mead (1934:173, 193, etc) felt the self and everything social was a cognitive achievement, which was undoubtedly shared by the pragmatist circle he traveled in (folks like Charles Peirce or John Dewey) and his colleagues at Chicago (e.g., Park). Likewise, German sociologist, Max Weber, had many categories of social action, but all of them were compared to formal or instrumental rationality, which admittedly was impossible in its pure form, but which served as a measuring stick of sorts for determining why people did what they did (Kalberg 1990).

When we sift through the common explanations today, we see the specters of these giants. Rational-choice and cognition-in-culture perspectives both rely heavily on cognitive processes, while symbolic interactionism inherited its progenitors’ overemphasis on language and cognition. There is nothing inherently wrong with caring about cognition. Without a doubt, there are traits that humans have that are unique to them; at least unique in so far as evolution appears to have built off of capacities and traits other mammals possess. We are significantly better at taking the role of other people over long periods of time (Tomasello 2019), and are able to keep track of people’s reputations as well as ours for an entire lifetime. Of course, the counter to this is that role-taking and reputation tracking are as much a product of our brain’s memory systems that rely heavily on affective tagging (Asma and Gabriel 2019), as they are our inherited ape traits, like paying close attention to face, to emotions, and to how fair our exchanges are (Turner 2007). Moreover, many mammals express behaviors resembling grief and mourning when they see a “friend” die, as well as concern when a friend is hurt (Lents 2016).

I think the point, in the end, is that sociology has largely ignored emotions. And when we deal with them, we are mostly interested in their construction – that is, either how some emotions are structured by systems and organizations (Kemper 2006) or culturally determined through ideological rules (Hochschild 1979). None of this is wrong. BUT, it does miss the several facts. First, before language or the gray matter we cherish so much evolved, mammals evolved complex affective systems that compel us to seek out resources, find friends to play with, mates to lust over, and children to nurture (Panksepp 1998). In addition, the neural pathways going “up” from the subcortical, emotion centers of our brains are more numerous and denser than those going “down” (Franks 2006). This is not too mention that key affectual centers in our brains are significantly bigger than our closest relatives, chimps, suggesting evolution worked heavily on these places for survival (Turner 2007). On the one hand, having better control over emotional noisiness common among apes would have helped us better hunt big game in coordinated hunting groups. On the other hand, for a species lacking most of the natural defenses other mammals and, especially apes, have, group life would have been most fit. Affect is the bonding force. Durkheim knew this, but it has been confirmed in neuroscience, psychological sciences, the ethnological record, and in sociology.

Second, nearly every process cognitivists emphasize have their basis in affect! Perception, attention, memory, and even our most prized possession, our sense of self are affective (Izard 2009; Frijda 2007). Indeed, when sociologists talk about cognition, they sometimes mean consciousness, which can be reflective, but it can also be pre-reflective emotional consciousness (LeDoux and Brown 2017). That is, we are often coding, indexing, storing, and retrieving memories without being cognitively aware of these processes (Holland and Kensinger 2010). This is not to say that cognition doesn’t matter, because it certainly does. But, there is a ton of affective processes coordinating cognition, and at times controlling it or, worse, commanding it. That is to say, “affective mechanisms are the core of value generation, of the valence that directs, slows down, speeds up, and gives meaning within decision-making and action release” (Asma & Gabriel, 2019, p. 32). So, while we think we are taming our passions, there is very little we do that is not affectually based; and our emotions are just as essential to us making decisions or setting goals (Lerner et al. 2015), as they are taming our reason, logic, and rationality.

Thus, while we do indeed have comedy clubs, churches, and art museums, these are affective achievements first and foremost. They are amplified by our big brains, but they are affective in their nature. Yes, we write poetry and think about thinking. Both are cognitive achievements in so far as we piece coherent sounds together into words, sentences, paragraphs, and so forth. But, the artist feels motivated to express or debate or argue; they feel motivated to continue on, even when they struggle with their words; and, the reader feels the words, keeping attention and the desire to finish the piece or simply daydream and move on.

Looking for an Emotional Escape Hatch

To return, then, to some comments I made earlier, I have found it exceedingly interesting that sociologists of various ilk have been looking for a way to escape cognitivism. For instance, the dual process model has become a common explanation for how society gets inside of us and which control mechanisms shape action (Vaisey 2009; Lizardo et al. 2016). The model simply pulls from cognitive science to reify an older model of social action: One type, Type 1, is habitual, rooted in automatic processes often inaccessible to reflective thought, while a second type, Type 2, is deliberate and often triggered only in the face of dissonance, incongruence, problems, or unsettled cultural solutions. While these have become the common currency in cultural sociology, where the problem of action is currently receiving its most concerted attention, a growing number of sociologists have sought to show there is plenty of action that simply does not fit either type. Using pragmatism, phenomenology, and other fonts of inspiration, these folks point to aesthetics (Pagis & Summers-Effler 2021; Silver 2022), creativity (Leschziner & Brett 2019), and embodiment (Winchester 2016; Winchester and Pagis 2022) as ways around conventional cognitivist explanations. Instead, terms like somatics, sense and sensation, feeling, and so forth are evoked. Attention and perception are key.

However, my take, and I may be wrong, is that they aren’t framing it as escaping cognitivism because we (I, too, belong to the tribe of sociologists) have taken for granted the idea that cognition and consciousness are synonymous and that affective processes like perception, attention, and memory are largely cognitive. They are not throwing the shackles off, not because they don’t want to, but because the Cartesian dualism remains firmly entrenched in sociology; their works are, unironically, challenges to this dualism and to cognitivism’s primacy. Yet, the evocation of words like senses or sensation are not enough to overcome the barriers the Weber’s, Mead’s, and others have erected. For these folks, emotions were understandable, so long as they were sublimated to cognitive things like ultimate valued or in so far as they became objects that could be labeled, classified, quantified, and interpreted. Otherwise, emotional action was not meaningful and, therefore, not sociologically interesting. This position, however, is untenable.

As such, while I see the incredible flourish of work pushing against cognitivism as entry points to an affective revolution; one in which sociology shifts to an embrace of affectivism, The problem is, the vocabulary for making this case is delimited. So, when Winchester & Pagis (2022) talk about the ways religious practices are learned, unreflectively, they are talking about the pre-reflective affective processes that call us to attention (Frijda 2007; Izard 2009; Asma and Gabriel 2019). Locating value in our environments or determining object salience – including our own self – is an affective act, driving by the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward systems that intensify when we find activities or objects rewarding, when curiosity is met with a sense of control and competency (Panksepp 1998; Berridge 2023), and when we find unexpected rewards are affective systems (Di Domenico & Ryan 2017). They are the neural circuits and chemicals Panksepp (1998) undergirding the affective system of SEEKING or wanting — which is dissociable from liking (Berridge 2023). Wanting is the folk psychological name for a set of affectively motivated actions: anticipation, preparation, curiosity, learning, mastery, and the like (Abrutyn & Lizardo forthcoming). All of these activities and desires are all closely tied together in their relationship to the mesolimbic reward system. Dopamine is tonic, continuously firing, meaning we are always affectively moving. When we get an unexpected reward from something, instead of continuous firing, it fires rapidly in pulses calling our attention to the thing and motivating us to approach it.

In short, we feel driven to do things. Eastern Orthodox, Buddhist meditators, and women who join convents (Lester 2005) all experience these SEEKING feelings, compelling them to want to do things and learn things. Just as my writing this post is a mixture of cognition (I have to think about the words, sentences, and overarching argument) and affect. The desire to finish it, to keep writing, to come back to it to edit. These are affective. Learning to become a better writer involves learning to love learning, just as becoming an Olympan swimmer (Chambliss 1989), an opera fanatic (Benzecry 2011), or big wave surfer (Corte 2022) is as much about the affective motivation to want to do it as it is about the pleasure of winning or aesthetic experience or the camaraderie of preparing for a surfing outing or the recounting of the day’s events. The motivation to prepare and the subtle joy in the mundanity of preparation, of waiting, of imagining the act, and, of course, the pleasure of doing it. Affectivism is the embrace of the emotional nature of how we think and act. It isn’t the pendulum swinging so far that cognition is tossed out. But, rather it puts affect in its rightful place. Once we begin to embrace that piece, the vocabulary for thinking about it, the leveraging of methods designed to observe and understand emotions as independent variables, and the rolling back of outdated understandings of animals, preliterate peoples, and even infants can be undertaken.

In the end, we cannot abandon cognitivism entirely, nor should that be the goal. I think bringing affect into the discourse more seriously along with developing or borrowing methods designed to examine the sorts of components sociologists tend to take for granted – like the expressive or physiological aspects of affect – is the correct course of action. There is nothing to lose from seeing ourselves as animals. Indeed, we can learn a lot from the observations primatologists have made, including the fact that primates feel the same things we do with or without the capacity to express it in self-reports. They grieve; they remember old friends; they lust and care for, and play with each other. They also show remarkable amounts of what many have considered to be the hallmarks of humanity: self-control. While they may not search for tickets for their favorite comedians, the desire to search for amusement is recognizable. In short, affect evolved to help mammals survive and, regardless of the environmental changes cultural adaptation affords human societies, it remains a force in how we think and act.