Mechanics and dynamics of social construction: Modeling the emergence of culture from individual mental representation

•Translates meaning-centric action into an agent based model (ABM).•Reviews contemporary cognition research on mental representation processes.•Demonstrates emergence of macro-level cultural dynamics from individual cognition.•Discusses implications for new approaches to cultural theory and empirical research.

This paper presents a parsimonious model of social construction that can be extended and applied by researchers interested in unpacking how culture emerges from individual meaning-making. Using a review of contemporary cognition research, it first hones in on the mental representation processes which drive individual sense-making in social situations. It then uses agent-based modeling (ABM), a modern simulation tool used to theorize how emergent phenomena arise from individual behaviors, to systematically demonstrate how this cognitive mechanism generates macro-level dynamics. Specifically, it shows how mental representation processes can account for cultural emergence and subgrouping, cultural path dependency and lock-in, endogenous cultural change, and the manifestation of these collective dynamics as variations in individuals’ experiences of culture. The final part of the paper discusses a few initial implications of this work including the expanded use of ABM in cultural theory, testing and verification of this theoretical work using Implicit Association Testing (IAT) and large-scale quantitative analyses, and this model's significance for existing qualitative approaches to the study of culture.