Prof Gordon Brett
Assistant Professor
9.13, 9/F., The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus
+852 3917 1092
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.
Gordon holds a Ph.D in Sociology from the University of Toronto.
Culture
Cognition
Creativity
Theory
His current working projects focus on the routinization of creativity, how and why post-secondary education promotes reflective thinking, and developing the cultural and cognitive dimensions of affordance theory.
2021 ASA Sociological Theory Section’s Best Graduate Student Paper Award
Brett, Gordon, and Soli Dubash. 2023. “The Sociocognitive Origins of Personal Mastery.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
Dubash, Soli, and Gordon Brett. 2023 “The Diffusion of Culture and Cognition Within and Beyond Sociology, 1997–2021” Sociological Forum.
Miles, Andrew, Gordon Brett, Salwa Khan, and Yagana Samim. 2023. “Testing Models of Cognition and Action Using Response Conflict and Multinomial Processing Tree Models.” Sociological Science 10: 118-149.
Brett, Gordon. 2022. “Dueling with Dual-Process Models: Cognition, Creativity, and Context.” Sociological Theory 40(2): 179-201.
Leschziner, Vanina, and Gordon Brett. 2021. “Have Schemas Been Good To Think With?.” Sociological Forum 36: 1207-1228.
Brett, Gordon, and Andrew Miles. 2021. “Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition.” Sociological Science 8: 96-118.
Brett, Gordon, Daniel Silver, and Kaspar Beelen. 2020. “The Right Tool for the Job: Problems and Solutions in Visualizing Sociological Theory.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 50(2): 223-248.
Leschziner, Vanina, and Gordon Brett. 2019. “Beyond Two Minds: Cognitive, Embodied, and Evaluative Processes in Creativity.” Social Psychology Quarterly 82(4): 340-366.
Brett, Gordon. 2017. “Reframing the ‘Violence’ of Mixed Martial Arts: The ‘Art’ of the Fight.” Poetics 62: 15-28.