Unit 3 Sociology Quiz Questions
Which of the following scenarios is an example of the free-rider problem?
A group of six teenagers is trying to get 100 signatures for a petition. They meet three days before their deadline to see how they are doing. Two of the teens have collected 25 signatures each, totaling 50. But the other four teenagers have only collected 25 signatures between the four of them, so the group is still 25 signatures short. The two teens who collected the most signatures are irritated about the poor results from the other four group members. FEEDBACK: The free-rider problem is the notion that when more than one person is responsible for getting something done, each individual has an incentive to shirk responsibility and hope others will pull the extra weight. Critics of the notion of equality of outcome often point to the free-rider problem in their critique, noting that without the selfish incentives of capitalism, progress would halt.
What does the example of the nadle in Navajo tribes teach us about gender?
Binary concepts of gender are not absolute and unchanging. FEEDBACK: Gender categories are social constructs that vary across different cultures. For example, the nadle are one of three genders in Navajo tribes. They perform both masculine and feminine tasks; Section- Gender: What Does It Take To Be a Woman (or a Man)?; Type- Conceptual.
In responding to surveys asking them to rank various occupations by status, people place more emphasis on the __________ of the position than the position's __________.
FEEDBACK: In Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan's study of occupational prestige, much of the explanation of peoples' status ranking of occupations was attributed to the education necessary for the position rather than the corresponding income.
Same-sex marriage is now legal in all U.S. states, and the number of people marrying those of the same sex has skyrocketed, with such couples becoming more visible in society. In Brazil, the travesti take on distinctly female characteristics, yet declare themselves as men and have penetrative sex with men who appear exclusively as male. How do these two different examples help describe the difference between homosexuality and homosexual behavior?
Homosexuality is a certain social identity, whereas homosexual behavior is an activity that is not necessarily tied to a social identity. FEEDBACK: Homosexuality is the social identity of someone who has sexual attraction to and/or relations with people of the same sex; homosexual behavior does not mean that someone identifies as homosexual, as the travesti demonstrate; Section- Sociology in the Bedroom; Type- Conceptual.
What has the pattern in income growth among low-, middle-, and high-income earners in the United States over the past 30 years looked like?
Income growth for high-income individuals has far outpaced that of middle- and low-income individuals. FEEDBACK: Over the past three decades, the income gap between a corporate chief executive officer (CEO) and a waitress who is a single mother has grown exponentially. A CEO who makes at least $200,000 is in the top 5 percent of households, with an average expected salary increase since 1979 (adjusted for inflation) of about 50 percent. In contrast, a waitress who makes only $22,000 is in the bottom 20 percent of households, and her income will have increased by 27 percent over the same period. Finally, a two-parent household with two kids and a middle-range income of $52,000 will probably have experienced an income increase of only 14 percent, a sign of what some analysts call the shrinking middle class (Gould, 2014).
Of the following social theorists, whose ideas about private property and social conflict could be said to align most closely with those of Karl Marx?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau FEEDBACK: Both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx believed that private property leads to social inequality.
Which of the following statements is most closely associated with a conflict theory approach to gender studies?
Men benefit economically from women's inferior position in the family and the workplace. FEEDBACK: Conflict theory is the idea that conflict between competing interests is the basic, animating force of social change and society in general. Conflict theories of gender mix Marxism with feminism and claimed that gender, not class, was the driving force of history and that men have profited from women's subordinate roles; Section- The Woman Question; Type- Conceptual.
What is feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz's model for the relationship between sex and gender?
Möbius strip FEEDBACK: Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1994) proposed that we view the relationship between the natural and the social (in this case, sex and gender) as existing on a Möbius strip. The Möbius strip is an old math puzzle that looks like a twisted ribbon loop, yet it has just one side and one edge. Biological sex, the plumbing, makes up the inside of the strip, whereas the social world (culture, experience, and gender) makes up the outside. However, as happens in the contours of gender, the inside and outside surfaces are inseparable; Section- Sex: A Process in the Making; Type- Factual.
In the United States, the one-drop rule broadly separated people into "black" and "white." Under apartheid in South Africa, on the other hand, there were four racial categories; and in Brazil there are up to a dozen racial categories, depending on whom you ask. What general insight can we draw from these differences in racial categories?
Racial categories are social constructs, not biological absolutes that transcend time and place. FEEDBACK: Though a race is a group of people who share a set of characteristics (often physical), there is no biological basis for race. Rather, race is a social construct, and the concept of race has changed over time.
Why do the three partners who own a small graphic design business fit into what Erik Olin Wright calls contradictory class locations?
The fact that they own their own business puts them in the capitalist class, but they do not control the labor of others. FEEDBACK: Contradictory class locations is the idea that people can occupy locations in the class structure that fall between the two "pure" classes. Erik Olin Wright created this term because Marx's two-class model of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat did not seem to fit modern society.
How was racism expressed in Ancient Greece?
There is no evidence that racism, as we know it today, was a part of Ancient Greek culture. FEEDBACK: Ideas of race and racism did not exist in Ancient Greece. Instead, the Greeks judged men by their civic actions. Modern racial thinking did not develop until the mid-seventeenth century.
While racial justice advocates might seem to be cheered by the use of DNA databases in identifying perpetrators of crimes, what potential grounds for injustice do these databases create?
They are more likely to include black individuals, making their relatives easier to identify in run-ins with police than uncatalogued whites. FEEDBACK: If your relatives are more likely to have been registered in the database, you are more likely to be located, even if you yourself have no priors. The unfairness lies in the fact that the person who committed a crime who comes from a more advantaged background might get away with their crimes. In the United Kingdom, one in four black children over the age of ten have their DNA in a database, while only one in ten of whites do (Doward, 2009).
What is the current gender wage gap, which is defined by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). as the "difference between male and female earnings expressed as a percentage of male earnings"?
Women earn approximately 81 cents to every $1 men earn. FEEDBACK: In addition to working in hostile environments, women have consistently been paid less than their male peers, earning about 81 cents to every $1 of a man's wage (BLS, 2013a; Figure 8.4). In some large, economically successful cities, however, the gender gap may be shrinking or even reversing among young adults as early-career women enjoy success at work; Section- Inequality at Work; Type- Applied.
In India, a system of stratification persists, partially because it was exploited by British colonialism to persistently divide the people. This division of society into four main groups (Brahaman, Kshathriya, Vaishyas, and Shudra) is an example of
a caste system. FEEDBACK: The caste system is a predominantly religion-based system of stratification. Despite the extent of change in places like India, the caste system still is strongly characterized by little or no social mobility, and people are expected to marry within their caste.
Since 1970, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that there has been about an 8 percent jump in the number of male nurses. A pay disparity also exists, with male nurses being paid about 20 percent more than their female counterparts. This change in gender balance in this profession seems counter to the idea that
a female-dominated profession is the result of fewer men entering the field, with the corresponding increase in women in that field. FEEDBACK: Sociologists Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos argued that women end up in some occupations, like book editing, that were once male-dominated but now are losing or have lost their attractiveness to men. When men flee professions for better-paying ones, women enter those professions and they become resegregated as women's work; Section- Growing Up, Getting Ahead, and Falling Behind; Type- Applied.
When you board an airplane, the boarding order generally starts with first class passengers, and then makes its way down to the coach class. Imagine you are boarding an aircraft, and you are in coach class. As you search for a place to store your luggage, you notice that the people in first class are already being served free wine and snacks. This an example of
a status hierarchy. FEEDBACK: A status hierarchy is the result of social prestige and is not tied exclusively to economic prowess. Anyone can get first-class seats if he or she pays the cost, and when he or she does, it automatically confers a specific type of status.
Some Enlightenment thinkers felt that individuals preserving current resources and transforming them into assets was a good thing for society. Part of the thinking was that this opportunity would encourage individuals to work to build up society. In the eyes of the Enlightenment thinkers, this system
acceptably fosters inequality through the emergence of private property. FEEDBACK: Adam Ferguson, John Millar and Thomas Malthus all felt that inequality could help society by motivating those who held resources, whether in the form of property, money or other tangible goods, to create surpluses. These could be converted into assets, a form of wealth that can be stored for the future, and then into private property, something seen as a huge improvement in society.
The brief review of Peggy McIntosh's essay on white privilege lists just a few of the 50 privileges that McIntosh identified in her original work, which included not being asked to represent your entire race and being able to match bandage colors to your skin tone. Which of the following could also be considered white privilege?
being able to choose any seat you wish on public transportation FEEDBACK: McIntosh's work found a long list of things that we often take for granted, as noted. The problem of white privilege has not gone away, however, and today the list is even longer and more multifaceted.
A Muslim classmate from your introductory sociology course helps organize a march protesting discrimination against Muslim Americans on campus. Hundreds of students from area colleges participate. What type of action is this?
collective resistance FEEDBACK: Collective resistance is an organized effort to change a power hierarchy on the part of a less-powerful group in society.
Robert Park's model of how immigrants adapted to a new setting was called straight-line assimilation. Milton Gordon refined this theory and suggested that an immigrant population can pass through seven stages of assimilation. Harold Isaacs then observed that, despite what seemed to be full assimilation, ethnic identity persisted. His findings led Clifford Geertz to conclude that because it was not biological, ethnicity must be the result of
culture FEEDBACK: Assimilation is a complex process, with no single model able to fully capture every group's experience. This successive refinements led to the realization that much of what we think of as ethnicity is the result of cultural inheritance. Geertz termed these deeply felt ties to one's culture "primordialism."
In the book, we are presented with a mobility table (Table 7.2). As you look at this table, you can begin to see what happens to the sons: The rate of occupational change is surprisingly low. The sons largely wind up in the same occupational category as the fathers. One of the conclusions from the mobility table analysis suggests that
despite the American belief that we live in the land of opportunity, mobility rates have declined significantly in the past decades. FEEDBACK: Mobility tables are used to analyze individual mobility. They traditionally included occupational categories of parents and children to facilitate comparison in occupational statuses between generations. They can help us counter some common beliefs about opportunity.
Consider outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address, in which he forewarned of the rise of the "military-industrial complex" which had the potential for a "disastrous rise of misplaced power." Eisenhower's position critiques the __________ system
elite-mass dichotomy FEEDBACK: C. Wright Mills also opposed the elite-mass dichotomy system, which has a governing elite and a few leaders who hold broad powers in society. Mills presciently argued that a few economic institutions, political order, and the military order were the three major components of American life where the power of decision making was centralized.
In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state of Michigan's ban on affirmative action. In a passionate dissent, Justice Sonya Sotamayor argued that the law placed an undue burden on racial and ethnic minority students not faced by other applicants. What type of equality was Justice Sotamayor arguing in favor o
equality of condition FEEDBACK: Equality of condition is the idea that everyone should have an equal starting point. This is a key idea behind affirmative action, an attempt to partially correct for unequal starting points.
Which of the following standards of equality was key to the arguments of civil rights leaders in the 1960s?
equality of opportunity FEEDBACK: Civil rights activists argued in favor of equality of opportunity, the idea that everyone should have an equal chance to achieve wealth, social prestige, and power because the rules of the game are the same for everyone. They believed that not all Americans had access to the same opportunities.
At the outset of U.S. history, eligible voters were white property owners or very wealthy. The gradual inclusion of African Americans, women, and other groups took a long time. More recently, voter ID laws have become popular. Many would argue that such laws restricting who can vote are an extension of this long history, which is largely what kind of stratification system?
estate FEEDBACK: The estate system is a politically based system of stratification characterized by limited social mobility. It was primarily found in Europe from the medieval era through the eighteenth century and in the American South before the Civil War
You're traveling with a group in a foreign country. After a homestay with a local family, a member of your group remarks that the meal he had last night was horrifying: roasted dog! "No one eats dog!" he exclaims. "It's barbaric!" This person is speaking from a perspective of
ethnocentrism. FEEDBACK: Ethnocentrism is the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of one's own. This also involves the belief that one's own culture or group is superior to others.
Between 1924 and 1979, the state of Virginia performed sterilizations on individuals deemed "unfit." This included people with epilepsy, which today is recognized and treated as a medical condition. These cases represent a manifestation of
eugenics. FEEDBACK: Eugenics arose out the mid-nineteenth-century proliferation of scientific exploration, including Charles Darwin's work in evolutionary biology. When scientific thought at that time realized that existing attempts to "explain" differences in human beings such as skin color did not fully fit current scientific knowledge, new answers were sought.
Native Americans have been the target of racial and ethnic abuses since Europeans arrived. In Indian Bureau boarding schools and schools provided on reservations, English was mandatory and children were severely punished if they spoke or wrote their native language, resulting in the gradual erosion of culture. This policy was an attempt at
forced assimilation. FEEDBACK: The Indian Bureau (later called the Bureau of Indian Affairs) was established in 1824. This bureau oversaw the forced assimilation of Native Americans, attempted through placing Native American children in government-run boarding schools.
The classification of homosexuality as a deviant personality type by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, which was only changed in 1973, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2003 decriminalizing homosexual sex, both reflect Michel Foucault's assertion that
homosexuality appears as the result of the state and the medical profession's interests in asserting their power. FEEDBACK: Michel Foucault argued that the way we know our bodies is linked to power. Both the state and the increasingly powerful medical profession had a strong interest in categorizing and monitoring deviance. The increase in surveillance and monitoring of sexuality included what Foucault called normalization; Section- Sociology in the Bedroom; Type- Applied.
Suppose you have a good friend who has done well as after college. His work in telecommunications helped him land him a job with a six-figure salary last year. He lives in a tiny apartment in the suburbs and keeps his money in a checking account. In addition, he lives off a credit card, and he still has $50,000 in college loans. Your friend is in the category of people considered to have high
income FEEDBACK: Many people assume that acquiring a lot of money means they are wealthy: winning the lottery means you're a wealthy person. But that's not what wealth really measures. Rather, wealth is a matter of net worth: the total amount of assets (real estate, income, material goods) minus total debt (credit card, loans). Your friend is doing well but has a large debt load and no tangible assets, both of which are considered part of the wealth equation.
Feminists argue that gender matters because
it structures social relations between people. FEEDBACK: Gender is the set of arrangements that are built around normative sex categories. Feminists argue that gender is an organizing principle of social life; it structures social relations between people; Section- Mars and Venus; Type- Factual.
We often think that the role of women in Western societies prior to the 1960s was largely unchanging: a matter of doing what women were expected to do. During World War II, however, the roles of women silently upended conventional ideas about gender roles. Women worked as bomb makers and in factories and were later revealed as having been a key part of the code-breaking effort that won the war. These examples lend insight into how we create our identities through interactions and not through fixed definitions. As such, they reflect ideas posited by
microinteractionist theory. FEEDBACK: Microinteractionist theorists argue that gender is not a fixed identity that we take with us into social interactions, but rather a product of those interactions. This "doing gender" perspective is rooted in Erving Goffman's theories, which argue that gender roles have open-ended scripts; Section- The Woman Question; Type- Conceptual.
In her interview with Dalton Conley, Paula England highlights the changing gender dynamics of relationships for college students. England's research found that students hook up rather than date, and that when they do, "something sexual happens" (which may or may not be intercourse). In contrast, dating has a very different meaning than hooking up, with the expectation that it might mean a relationship, and that it is
monogamous. FEEDBACK: According to England, a hook-up culture has supplanted dating, and dating is seen as the route to romance on college campus. The norm of monogamy in both dating and marriage is in opposition to hook-ups, which are done with many partners; Section- Sociology in the Bedroom; Type- Applied.
We often see sex and gender as immutable: sex is a biological fact, which in turn determines the gender of an individual. As the examples of Deirdre McCloskey and David Reimer demonstrate, however, neither sex nor gender are as straightforward as many people would like to believe. A lot of how we understand sex and gender is found in how we understand the differences and interplay between
nature and nurture. FEEDBACK: Nature, or biology, and nurture, a term that is shorthand for culture and the social aspects of our lives, are central concepts that must be clearly understood and defined when we study sex, sexuality, and gender; Section- Sex: A Process in the Making; Type- Applied.
Tyrone is frustrated by having submitted dozens of resumes to tech companies around the Pacific Northwest, resulting in zero job interviews. He decides to try submitting three resumes as "Tyler," and receives two calls from prospective employers. What is this an example of?
passing FEEDBACK: Passing is a response to racial oppression that involves blending in with the dominant group. It can involve physical changes but may also involve things like changing a first name or surname to one that better blends with dominant group norms, such as choosing a "white" name in the United States.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government decreed that all people of Japanese descent living in the United States, whether or not they were citizens, were subject to internment in concentration camps. At the time, enclaves of Japanese Americans thrived in several American cities. The fear and rejection of anyone with Japanese ancestry following the attacks reflected a decline in
pluralism. FEEDBACK: A society with several distinct ethnic or racial groups is a pluralistic society. Within the large sociocultural framework of 1940s America, a diversity of cultures coexisted.
The text discusses the plight of the Irish immigrants in the United States in the late 1800s, when vicious, racially motivated attacks were directed toward them. In 2014, there was a series of angry demonstrations in Waterford, a town in Ireland, directed against the Roma (formerly referred to as gypsies). The irony of the attacks on the Roma in Waterford is that, like the anti-Irish attacks in the United States, they are an example of
racism FEEDBACK: Racism is the belief that members of separate races possess different and unequal traits. According to the text, racist thinking is characterized by three key beliefs: (1) humans are divided into physical types, (2) these physical traits are linked to distinct cultures, personalities, and so forth, and (3) certain groups are superior to others. Both the Roma and the Irish have been targeted on the basis of perceived physical differences and a belief in their inferiority.
In some urban neighborhoods, buying food staples requires a lengthy journey to another (more white) part of the city. "Food deserts" are a significant problem for people whose resources are limited. Based on the text, a food desert is a possible marker of
segregation FEEDBACK: Segregation is the legal or social practice of separating people based on race or ethnicity. This is a paradigm for minority-majority relations. Poverty, unequal (or absent) education, and unemployment are all symptomatic of segregation.
The model family in the 1950s in America was a happy, simple one. Mom stayed home and raised the kids, and Dad went to work and made a good living. Even the dog was happy. In this nuclear family model, we can clearly see the structure of
sex role theory. FEEDBACK: Talcott Parsons's sex role theory posits that a healthy, harmonious society exists when women and men play specific roles that fulfill societal needs. This theory is a functionalist account of gender relations; Section- The Woman Question; Type- Applied.
In his interview with Dalton Conley, Jeffrey Sachs notes that providing women in Africa with free birth control has been suggested as a way to speed up a demographic transition by reducing
stratification FEEDBACK: Stratification is structured social inequality between groups of people. These inequalities arise as intended or unintended consequences of social processes and relationships. High birth rates can be linked to persistent poverty as parents try to support their large families. This in turn induces stratification in societies, especially since bigger families are more common among rural woman.
Your introductory sociology professor believes that gender roles serve a purpose in society by fulfilling certain functions. What type of theoretical background is your professor espousing?
structural functionalism FEEDBACK: Structural functionalism is a theoretical tradition that claims that every society has certain structures, like gender roles, that exist in order to fulfill some set of functions (reproduction of the species, production of goods, and so on); Section- The Woman Question; Type- Applied.
A surgeon recommends surgery to make the genitals of an intersex infant conform to an ideal of normal genitalia. A sociologist might view the doctor's recommendation as a result of
the belief in a binary sex system. FEEDBACK: Doctors must often make decisions based on what is immediately in front of them and on all that they themselves have been taught about sex, sexuality, and gender. The social norm about sex and gender is built around a binary sex system, and so it is not surprising that a doctor might recommend choices based on that perspective; Section- Sex: A Process in the Making; Type- Applied.
According to sociologist Jennifer Pierce's research on gender disparities in the legal field, trial lawyers perform masculine emotional labor, using aggression, intimidation, and manipulation, behavior which is often deemed inappropriate ("bitchy") when enacted by female litigators. What social fact does this help us understand?
the discrepancy between women's representation among law school and their representation among partners at law firms FEEDBACK: Pierce's research helps us understand the discrepancy between women's representation among law school graduates (39 to 49 percent) and minimal representation among partners at law firms (16 percent). On the other hand, the paralegal jobs are overwhelming filled by women (86 percent). These jobs have different behavioral expectations, which are stereotypically associated with women, such as being deferential, caring, and motherly; Section- Growing Up, Getting Ahead, and Falling Behind; Type- Applied.
The Nazi regime's belief that it had to protect a superior race from contamination by inferior races stemmed in part from
the notion of social Darwinism. FEEDBACK: Recall that social Darwinism is the application of Darwinian ideas (mainly the evolutionary "survival of the fittest") to society. In Nazi Germany, Jews were believed to have innate biological differences, and the government sought to purify society so those with supposedly more desirably characteristics survived. The notion of social Darwinism is also behind the general idea of eugenics.
Numerous methods have been devised to ensure that people's racial categorization was clear. The "one-drop" rule was a particular U.S. method, which arose from miscegenation laws forbidding interracial marriage. The fundamental flaw with the "one-drop" rule is that
the one-drop rule depended on a nonexistent ability or test to detect, biologically, the presence of African heritage. FEEDBACK: The one-drop rule is the belief that one drop of "black" blood makes a person black. It is not possible to determine this through any test, since perfect ancestral records on all individuals would be required to make such a determination.
