Thinking through death and employment

What is it about?

Much social scientific work focuses on how individuals think largely through habit. To test the extent to which people actually think using habituated stocks of knowledge, I compare interview results from two topics which are relatively complex and difficult to think through: death and employment. By comparing findings from these sets of data, I demonstrate how interviewees' responses to questions about these topics showcase the complexity of individuals' thought processes in ways which are irreducible to the logic of habit. Rather than think about these topics in patterned ways, interviewees think through these topics using similar stocks of knowledge but in highly personal, idiosyncratic ways.

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Why is it important?

My findings show that individuals may indeed deliberate more about many topics than is made to seem the case in much contemporary social science research.