Departmental Seminar - Erving Goffman as “folk” Dual-Process Theorist: The Meaning of Automatic and Deliberate Cognition in Improv
24 October 2024 at 3:00:00 am

Sociologists employ dual-process models to explain how culture shapes action, but they have yet to acknowledge that these processes are themselves value-laden, inferred by others, and used as a basis for social judgements. I argue that such an account is implicit in Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory and reframe his work as identifying a “folk” dual process model of social evaluation. I then use improvisational theatre as a case to examine the meanings that actors attribute to automatic and deliberate cognition, drawing data from both interviews and improv “how-to” books. I find that improvisers possess and prescribe beliefs about automatic cognition as the “right way” of thinking, infer whether people are consciously "thinking up" ideas through external cues, and use these inferences to make social and moral judgements that broadly align with Goffman’s folk model. This perspective opens new directions for both cultural sociology and social psychology.
About the speaker:
Gordon Brett is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. Broadly, his research examines how cognitive processes and social and cultural life interrelate. This includes examining how cognition shapes creativity and human behavior in social contexts, how people develop patterns of thought, perception, and action, and how the cognitive sciences can improve sociological theory and research. His dissertation, “Creativity on Demand: Cognition, Materiality, and Sociality in Improvisation” examines how improvisational theatre troupes create new jokes, characters, stories and scenes in real-time, drawing on interview and observational data with experienced improvisers from the Toronto improv scene. His research has been published in Sociological Science, Sociological Theory, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Psychology Quarterly, Poetics, and Sociological Forum, among others.
Departmental Seminar - Erving Goffman as “folk” Dual-Process Theorist: The Meaning of Automatic and Deliberate Cognition in Improv
Date: 24 October, 2024
Time: 11:00AM – 12:00PM
Venue: CJT-9.29
Speaker: Prof Gordon Brett
Registration: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?ueid=96918