Culture, Cognition, and Social Exchange: A Classic Case Study of Social Negotiation Network Dynamics

How do automatic vs. controlled, hot vs. cold, and agentic vs. communal facets of cultural cognition operate together in a perspective informed by social neuroscience? This question is explored by re-imagining Malinowski’s classic ethnographic case study of the Kula in light of a contemporary social exchange theory of negotiation networks. We propose: (1) sub-institutional patterns of power-dependence form a structural foundation for the rise of tacit meanings, which evolve through social negotiation into explicit, cultural meaning agreements; (2) crucial sub-cultural categories form around the pursuit of both agentic benefits and communal benefits; (3) an individual is culturally shaped through externalization, socialization, and internalization to value and be motivated to seek both kinds of benefits; (4) an individual faces the existential task of navigating both agentic and communal situations across the negotiation network; (5) the basic individual mechanism underlying such navigation entails motivated behavioral choice and motivated cultural cognition; (6) a behavioral choice rests on automatic, largely implicit and hot cognitive processing; (7) motivated cultural cognition rests mostly on the deliberate, mostly explicit, and cool selection of materials from the prevailing cultural toolkit for assembling a justification, but whose underlying trajectory is biased by an automatic, hot value-position, whether agentic or communal. Based on the analysis, some directions for future empirical research are suggested.