Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sociologists increasingly use insights from dual-process models to explain how people think and act. These discussions generally emphasize the influence of cultural knowledge mobilized through automatic cognition, or else show how the use of automatic and deliberate processes vary according to the task at hand or the context. Drawing on insights from sociological theory and suggestive research from social and cognitive psychology, we argue that socially structured experiences also shape general, individual-level preferences (or propensities) for automatic and deliberate thinking. Using a meta-analysis of 63 psychological studies (N = 25,074) and a new multivariate analysis of nationally representative data, we test the hypothesis that the use of automatic and deliberate cognitive processes is socially patterned. We find that education consistently predicts preferences for deliberate processing and that gender predicts preferences for both automatic and deliberate processing. We find that age is a significant but likely nonlinear predictor of preferences for automatic and deliberate cognition, and we find weaker evidence for differences by income, marital status, and religion. These results underscore the need to consider group differences in cognitive processing in sociological explanations of culture, action, and inequality.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it