Sociology Exam 1

The Paradox of Common Sense

"is that even as it helps us make sense of the world, it can actively undermine our ability to understand it." (Watts 2011:xiv)

The Two Problems with Common Sense

1. It isn't common; common sense is only common between two people if they "share sufficiently similar social and cultural experiences" (Watts 20011:14). Put another way, common sense is in many ways a shared worldview that stems from a shared social location. 2. It doesn't make sense; common sense it inconsistent, logically flawed, and even self- contradictory.

Social structure, broadly speaking, has three primary component parts:

1. Social Hierarchies 2. Social Institutions 3. Social Networks

Your Position Within a Social Hierarchy Determines:

1. Your social statuses and their corresponding rolls, 2. How much power you have over others, 3. What privileges you can expect, 4. Your life chances

Social Network

A collection of people that are connected to other members within the network. How people in a society connect to one another affects how information, resources, and opportunities are spread amongst the people of that society.

Common Sense

A collection of rules of behavior, practices, customs, and ways of thinking that we expect any reasonable person to understand.

Language

A comprehensive system of symbols (i.e. letters, words, images) that are used to communicate.

In-Depth Interviews

A method of collecting data based on asking a person a set of questions and having a conversation with him or her focused on gathering information related to the research.

Systematic Observations

A method of data collection where observations are collected based on pre-defined rules and procedures.

Surveys

A method of data collection where respondents are given a questionnaire with a set of standardized questions.

Anecdotal Observations

A method of data collection where we rely on what we have personally observed in our day-to-day lives.

Inter-subjectivity

A perception of a situation, event, or thing that is shared between multiple people.

Correlation

A shared relationship between two variables. For example, we can say that A and B are correlated if an increase in A leads to an increase (or decrease) in B.

Social Constructions

A social construct is an idea, concept, or meaning we attach to a symbol that is jointly created through social interaction.

Cross-tabulation

A table that displays two or more variables in a way that makes it easy for you to compare the relationship between two variables.

Hypotheses

A tentative prediction researchers have about what they are going to discover before research begins.

Structural Functionalist Theory

A theory of society in which individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions are guided by an overarching social system that is designed to maintain equilibrium and ensure stability/security for the whole of society.

Conflict Theory

A theory of society in which individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions are guided by the competition over scarce resources (e.g. money, social honor, access to good schools, etc.).

Symbolic Interaction Theory

A theory of society which focuses on how people interact with one another and the role that symbols play in those interactions.

Statuses

A title or position within a social hierarchy (e.g. mother, doctor, college student).

Public Policy

All of the laws, policies, and regulations that are created and enforced by social institutions and every other type of social organization.

Individual Agency

An individual's ability to think and act independent of society. This is very similar to the concept of free will.

What makes Non-Scientific data LESS reliable?

Anecdotal Observations, Confirmation Bias

Phenomenon

Any observed action, event, or situation. A phenomenon is not a thing, but rather, something that happens within things. For example, a wave in the ocean is a phenomenon, but the wave is separate from the water itself. The wave goes through the water, but the wave is not the water itself.

Social Theories

Are logically formed arguments that explain social phenomena in general terms.

Social hierarchies

Are rank ordered networks of relationships where individuals or groups at the top of the hierarchy command the most status, power, and resources while those at the bottom command the least.

Norms

Are rules that tell us how to behave in a particular situation.

Criteria for Causality

Before a causal relationship between two variables (A & B) can be established, three criteria must be met: 1. There must be a correlation between A & B. 2. A must occur before B. 3. Alternative explanations have to be ruled out.

Sociological Theories

Broadly speaking there are two types of sociological theories: 1. A logically formed argument that explains why groups of people behave how they do. 2. A logically formed argument that explains what the relationships are between individuals and society.

Correlation ≠

Causation

Common sense explanations use inaccurate mental models of how individual people behave.

Common sense explanations focus on factors like incentives, motivations, and beliefs that the individual in question was consciously aware of at the time.

Common sense explanations use inaccurate mental models of how groups of people behave.

Common sense explanations talk about groups of people as if they are a single person.

When Common sense IS a Reliable Way to Understand The World Around You

Common sense is a reliable strategy for hypothesizing what is happening and what is just about to happen in the immediate here and now.

Generalizations

Conclusions about a population in general that are drawn from specific observations of people from that population (i.e. the sample).

Cross-Sectional Data

Data collected at a single point in time. For example, a study that surveys students right after they graduate from college

Longitudinal Data

Data collected at multiple points over a long period of time. For example, a study where students are surveyed after their first, second, third, and fourth year of college.

Cultural Capital

Displayed cultural competencies that can be used achieve one's goals (i.e. knowing what to say or how to behave in a particular situation or in front of a particular audience).

Population

Every possible person in the group you want to research. For instance, in a study of U.S. college students' social media habits the population would be all college students in the country.

The Universe of Possible Thought, Discourse, and Action

Everything that can be thought, said, or done. When people encourage us to "think outside the box" they are inviting us to think outside the universe of possible thought, discourse, and action.

Structural Explanations of Human Behavior/Social Phenomena

Focus on an individual's or group's behavior is influenced by social hierarchies, social institutions, public policy, and similar supra-individual factors.

Individual Explanations of Human Behavior/Social Phenomena

Focus on how an individual's or group's behavior is influenced by their biology, personality, choices, talents, and similar individual factors.

Cultural Explanations of Human Behavior/Social Phenomena

Focus on how an individual's or group's behavior is influenced by their society's ideologies, beliefs, values, and similar supra-individual factors.

Often the material aspects of culture reinforce the non-material aspects of culture.

For example, clothing is designed to highlight particular aspects of our bodies based on what society believes is beautiful and society's notions of how gender should stereotypically be performed.

Structural Functionalist's Question

How does this affect stability and security?

Your life chances

How much access you have to the opportunities and resources needed to achieve your goals.

Path Dependency

How the actions and outcomes of the past influence people and organizations today by making it harder/illogical to do some things and easier/logical to do others.

Hegemony

How those in power use their power to convince those without power that it is in their best interest to do what is in fact in the interest of the most powerful.

"All you see is all there is."

If you didn't see, hear, or learn about something, then it doesn't exist in your version of reality. By implication, this means that there is not a single reality, but rather there are as many realities as there are people in the world. Each of us only has a piece of the picture.

Disproportionality ctn.

In sociology, we often compare the size of a particular social group (e.g. a racial-ethnic group, an age group, a social class, etc.) experiencing some social phenomena and compare it to the size of that particular group in society. If the proportion of the particular group in question experiencing the social phenomena is larger or smaller than the proportion that group holds within the population at large, then we say that the particular group in question disproportionately experiences the social phenomena we are looking at.

The tools of Qualitative research

In-Depth Interviews, Ethnographers, Thick descriptions

We Can Dived The Factors Used to Explain Human Behavior & Social Phenomena Into Just two Categories:

Individual-Factors and Supra-Individual Factors

Empirical Data/Evidence

Information acquired from using the scientific method that can be verified (or falsified) by other researchers.

Non-Material Culture Includes:

Language, ideas, knowledge, beliefs, values, ideologies, behavioral norms, customs, traditions, rituals (See Appendix A for definitions of these key concepts).

The Social Construction of Reality

Our perceptions of what is going on around us (i.e. our perceptions of reality) are drawn from our interpretation of the behaviors and symbols those around us use when we interact with them. Reality is therefore socially constructed because our interpretations of other behavior and the meanings we attach to the symbols they use are socially constructed.

Mental Horizons

People from similar social locations have similar "mental horizons" or put another way, people from similar social locations have similar limits on what they believe to be within the universe of possible thought, discourse, and action. This explains why people from similar social locations think and act in similar ways.

The dominant culture's values, norms, ideologies, and language become the standard in society by which all others are judged.

People from the dominant culture leverage their social privileges to ascend to positions of leadership in social institutions (e.g. the government, the economy, the media, the education system, etc.). Once in these positions of leadership, these people from the dominant culture create laws and policies that reflect their cultural values, norms, and ideologies (i.e. they engage in cultural hegemony)

Individual-Factors

Personal factors that influence an individual's behavior (e.g. biological/ physiological or psychological factors).

Comparing Quantitative & Qualitative Approaches

Qual is good for hidden populations, breaking new ground, or for answering research questions with dependent variables that are hard to operationalize numerically (i.e. hard to turn into numbers).

Spurious Relationships

Relationships between two variables that seem to be correlated, but really the correlation is caused by a third variable.

The Qualitative Approach

Research that uses detailed interviews, direct observations, and/or historical records to examine how a particular group interprets and gives meaning to the world around them.

The Quantitative Approach

Research that uses statistics to analyze numerical data (i.e. numbers). Examples include studies that use surveys like the U.S. Census or analyses of public records like a study of home property values or applications for marriage.

Ethnographers

Researchers who enter the everyday lives of those they study in hopes of understanding how they navigate and give meaning to their worlds.

Thick Descriptions

Rich and detailed descriptions of the ways people in a specific social context make sense of their lives, written from the perspective of those people themselves.

Overrepresentation Example

Roughly 49% of the U.S. is male, but in 2017 93.6% of Fortune 500 companies had a male CEO. Therefore, we can say that males are overrepresented as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.

Underrepresentation Example

Roughly 51% of the U.S. is female, but in 2017 only 6.4% of Fortune 500 companies had a female CEO. Therefore, we can say that females are underrepresented as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.

The Thomas Theorem

Situations defined as real are real in their consequences.

How Does Structure Influence Human Behavior?

Social structure influences human behavior by constraining/enabling individual agency by making it harder/illogical to do some things and easier/logical to do others. We treat people differently based on their statuses within social hierarchies.

Social Structure

Social structures are durable forms of organization and networks of social relations that create patterns of human behavior by constraining some actions and enabling others.

Supra-Individual Factors

Social, situational, contextual, or environmental factors that influence our individual behavior. These are factors that are neither created or controlled by any single individual.

Dysfunctions

Something that decreases the stability and security of society.

Functions

Something that increases the stability and security of society.

Symbols

Stand-ins for other things. Symbols are inherently empty until we fill them with meaning.

Ascribed Statuses

Statuses that are often set at birth, but if set later in life, the statuses become something the individual is unable to escape.

Achieved Statuses

Statuses where the individual had to do something to earn them or must claim them publicly for them to be recognized.

What Makes Scientific Data More Reliable?

Systematic Observations

Social Privilege

The ability or right to have special access to opportunities or claims on rewards. These benefits and advantages are often automatically and unconsciously extended to people based on their social location. Privilege can be either the presence of some advantage or the absence of some disadvantage.

Example of a Cultural Explanations of Human Behavior:

The author of the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad argues that poor people are poor because they never had rich parents to teach them the values, beliefs, and ways of thinking (a.k.a. ideologies) that make wealthy people wealthy.

Mean

The average of a data set.

Roles

The behavioral expectations that society associates with a status.

Constructionism

The belief that objects have no inherent qualities or meaning, until they are given meaning through a process of social interaction.

Essentialism

The belief that qualities of an object are inseparable from that object (i.e. Objects have a true essence).

Confirmation Bias

The bias to accept uncritically anything that confirms our worldview and to be overly critical of anything that challenges or disproves our worldview. Simply put, we are all biased to favor information that confirms what we already believed.

Probability/Odds

The chances that some event or outcome will under certain circumstances.

Cultural Tool-Kits

The collection of symbols, rituals, skills, and ways of thinking (i.e. ideologies), which we use in varying configurations to construct strategies of action that we use everyday to solve problems and get through our day. People from similar social locations tend to develop similar cultural tool-kits.

Representativeness

The degree to which a sample is similar to the population it is supposed to represent. For instance, 51% of the U.S. population is female, therefore a sample would be representative, in regards to gender, if 51% of those who participated where female.

Independent Variable (IV)

The factors which we think influence or cause a particular outcome or event. For example, if we think A causes B, then A is the independent variable.

Data

The facts and information used in research.

Sample

The group of people from the population who are asked to participate in a research study.

Latent Functions

The hidden or unintended function of something in society.

Representative Individuals

The inaccurate belief that a complex network of people can be understood as if it were a single person.

Central Tendencies

The mean, median, and mode of a social group or category. These represent the typical or common characteristics of a social group or category.

The Dominant Culture

The most powerful and influential culture within a society.

Dependent Variable (DV)

The outcome or event that is influenced or caused by the independent variable. For example, if we think A causes B, then B is the dependent variable.

Manifest Functions

The overt or intended function of something in society.

Worldview

The perspective you have on the world around you. Our individual worldview is shaped by our social, cultural, and personal experiences all of which are profoundly influenced by our social location. Each of us has a worldview and it reflects the biases and assumptions we hold about the world around us.

Coercion

The power of an individual or group to get another individual or group to do something it wants, which sometimes may involve force

Agenda Setting

The power to control the agenda of issues that are to be decided.

Hegemony

The power to persuade others that their interests are the same as those of a power-holder.

Cultural Hegemony

The process by which powerful groups gain legitimacy and hold power based on establishing or reinforcing widely shared beliefs about what is right or wrong, proper or improper, valuable or not.

Operationalization

The process of taking abstract ideas and turning them into things that can be measured.

Research Questions

The question(s) a research seeks to answer with their study. Comprised of a independent variable that influences or causes the dependent variable to change.

Sociology

The scientific exploration of how society influences individuals and how individuals create society through interaction.

Statistics

The use of mathematics to estimate facts about a population from data collected from a sample.

Median

The value in the middle of a data set.

Mental Models

The way we conceptualize something in our mind's eye.

Micro Theories

Theories that focus their attention on the relationships and interactions between individuals.

Macro Theories

Theories that focus their attention on the relationships between large organizations, social institutions, nations, etc. Macro theories look at the "big picture."

It's called cultural capital because like financial capital (i.e. money), you are using cultural knowledge to purchase access to opportunities and resources.

This is how cultural tastes are used to maintain social boundaries between different groups in society.

Culture Influences Human Behavior by Limiting the Universe of Possible

Thought, Discourse, and Action.

Material Culture Includes:

Tools, food, fashion, forms of media (e.g. music, movies, books, social media), or physical symbols (e.g. cash money, flags, maps, religious symbols, or a stop sign).

The Social Construction of Reality

We collaborate with those around us to develop our inter-subjective sense of the world and to socially construct what we interpret to be reality (Berger and Luckman 1967).

Overrepresentation

When a group experiencing something is disproportionately larger than we would expect based on their size in the population.

Underrepresentation

When a group experiencing something is disproportionately smaller than we would expect based on their size in the population.

The Ecological Fallacy

When group level data is used to draw conclusions about individual members of that group.

Special-Person Hypothesis

When people explain the behavior of groups by focusing on one hypothetical "average person" inside the group.

Human Behavior

When sociologists talk about human behavior, we are typically talking about one of two things: 1. Why groups of people behave the way they do or 2. Why individuals from particular social groups behave the way the do

Causality

When the change in one variable causes a change in another variable.

Disproportionality

When the size of one proportion is larger or smaller than we would expect based on other known proportions.

Sampling Bias

When the way participants are recruited leads researchers to draw a sample that is unrepresentative of the population and thus the conclusions researchers draw from their unrepresentative data may be inaccurate.

Fundamental Attribution Error

When we mistakenly attribute the cause of an individual's behavior/experience to individual factors when, in fact, that individual's behavior/experience was (at least partially) the result of supra-individual factors.

The Atomistic Fallacy

When we use individual level data to draw conclusions about groups of people.

Conflict Theory's Question

Who benefits from this?

The First Lesson of Sociology:

Who you are affects what you experience and what you experience affects how you perceive the world around you, think, and behave.

Social Location

Your social location is the collection of social demographics (i.e. your race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, etc.) that you hold and how they relate to everyone else in your community and around the world. Your social location affects: 1. How you see yourself. 2. How you expect others to treat you. 3. How others treat you. 4. What others expect from you. 5. How others interpret your actions.

Rituals

a formalized sequence of behaviors or activities. Some rituals are sacred (e.g. taking communion in the Catholic church), but many others are not (e.g. when I wave my hand at you to say hi, you wave your hand back at me)

Culture

a system of meanings and symbols that is expressed in both material and non- material ways.

Social Phenomenon

an observable action, event, or outcome that is caused by social (and therefore supra-individual) factors. Social phenomena cannot be created, caused, or controlled by any single individual.

Social Structure

are durable forms of organization and networks of social relations that create patterns of human behavior by constraining some actions and enabling others.

Social institutions

are organizations that perform crucial social functions and are passed down from generation to generation.

Social Institutions

are organizations that perform crucial social functions and are passed down from generation to generation. In our class, we identify 8 distinct social institutions: the government, economy, media, education system, religion, the family, health and medicine, and the environment.

Symbols

communicate an idea while being distinct from the idea itself.

Human behavior is also influenced by culture when socially powerful groups create norms, policies, and laws that reward their cultural preferences and/or punish people from other

cultural backgrounds.

Structural Analysis:

examines all of the relationships between individuals, groups, organizations, and social institutions and investigates how these relationships influence the behaviors of every member of society.

Cognitive Sociology

examines the influence culture has on how humans think, specifically how culture influences perception, classification, meaning-making, and collective memory.

Structural Explanations of Human Behavior

focus on an individual's or group's behavior is influenced by social hierarchies, social institutions, public policy, and similar supra- individual factors.

Power

in the sociological sense, is the ability to get other people to do what you want them to do, even if they do not want to do it.

Seeing Society is Hard because our worldview is almost exclusively shaped by our ______________________________.

individual experiences.

Common sense is not taught, but can only be learned through

interactions with others

Culture

is a system of meanings and symbols that is expressed in both material and non- material ways.

Common sense explanations are based on a flawed understanding of why things happened in the past and what things are

likely to occur in the future.

Families, schools, corporations and all other social organizations have a

social hierarchy.

Social institutions provide the hard landscape for

social interaction.

While social hierarchies exist within a particular social organization they also exist across all _______________. For instance, there is a racial hierarchy (i.e. white supremacy) and gendered/sex hierarchy (i.e. patriarchy) that exists across all social organizations within our society.

social organization

The Tools of Quantitative Research

statistics, surveys, operationalism

Cultural explanations of human behavior focus on how an individual's or group's behavior is influenced by their society's ideologies, beliefs, values, and similar

supra-individual factors.

Values

tell us how things "ought to be."

Common sense explanations pick one person out of a group and attribute all of the groups accomplishments to

that individual.

8 distinct social institutions:

the government, economy, media, education system, religion, the family, health and medicine, and the environment.

ascribed statuses and achieved statuses

two types of statuses