analysis of sociology

Terrible Magnificent Sociology Notes ● Highlight Key

○ Key points ○ Highlighted in chapter introduction ○ Highlighted in InQuizitive ○ Vocab/Acronyms

● Introduction: The Science of Social Facts ○ Social Facts

■ Social facts - products of human interaction with persuasive or coercive power that exist externally to any individual

● Book uses expansive de�nition - encompassing anything produced collectively by people that exerts a force upon us

● Term coined by Durkheim ○ When our natural environment is a product of human interaction with persuasive or

coercive power, it can be fairly described as social fact ○ Social facts are as real as other facts ○ Studying Social Facts

■ In staking a claim on sociology as a science, Durkheim made society into an object of empirical inquiry - involves looking into the world for evidence with which scientists can test their hunches

■ Evidence = data - systemically collected sets of empirical observations ■ To collect data, scholars pose research questions - queries about the world that

can be answered empirically ■ Answer questions with sociological research methods - scienti�c strategies for

collecting empirical data about social facts ■ Durkheim published The Rules of Sociological Method - manual for how to

study society scienti�cally, second on topic along with How to Observe Morals and Manners by Harriet Martineau

■ Qualitative research methods - involve careful consideration and discussion of the meaning of nonnumerical data

● Comes from in-person interview, images, text, or observation ● Excellent for understanding how people think, feel, and behave

■ Quantitative research methods - involve examining numerical data with mathematics

● Introduced by W. E. B. Du Bois - studied with social scientists who were inventing statistics

● Recognized value of quantitative methods because he was trying to communicate facts about black people to a racist audience

● Du Bois knew that convincing a majority to understand black life in the US required extremely credible tools - statistics meant he would be taken seriously

■ Du Bois, Durkheim, and Martineau insisted that sociological research be systematic and impartial with the aim of producing accurate �ndings

■ Martineau added that studying people in their societies requires sociological sympathy - the skill of understanding others as they understand themselves

● Essential tool of data collection ○ Without it, person can describe the scene but not fully

comprehend its nature ○ May see people moving in rhythm but miss its role in sparking

joy or romance ● Only a sociologist with sociological sympathy could be impartial

○ Only by adopting the POV of person being studied can be avoid judging them by our own standards

○ True objectivity =/= value neutral; an earnest attempt to understand others' values

■ Research ethics - the set of moral principles that guide empirical inquiry ● Includes:

○ Respect - treating people as autonomous individuals with the right to make informed decisions

○ Justice - conducting research that is fair, nondiscriminatory, and nonexploitative

○ Bene�cence - doing more good than harm ● Practices designed to honor these principles include reporting con�icts

of interest, attaining informed consent from research subjects, ensuring con�dentiality, and minimizing deception

■ One aim of sociological research - build sociological theory - empirically based explanations and predictions about relationships between social facts

● Conclusions based on research �ndings ● Social patterns - explainable and foreseeable similarities and di�erences

among people in�uenced by the social conditions in which they live ● Theories start o� as sets of related hypotheses, tested through both

quantitative and qualitative research methods

○ Always tentative - ready to reject or change if data doesn't support them

○ Strongest when built by many di�erent kinds of scholars asking questions from various standpoints - points of view grounded in lived reality

■ Creates alternative ways of understanding the world and the experience of di�erent groups of people within it

■ Second goal of sociological research is to support public sociology - using sociological theory to make societies better

■ Sociologists are attentive to power relationships among us - questions of oppression and exploitation

■ Sociological imagination - capacity to consider how people's lives (including your own) are shaped by the social facts that surround us

● Chapter 1: The Self ○ In this Chapter:

■ The paradox at the center of sociology - we are individuals, but we have never been and were never meant to be alone

● Individuality emerges out of interactions with others rather than being inherent

■ Humans have the remarkable ability to think about ourselves ● We can do the thinking and be the thing thought about ● George Herbert Mead - We have an "I" that contemplates a "me" - "I"

does recognizing while "me" is recognized ■ We're concerned with how others see us, which in�uences how we see ourselves

● Charles Horton Cooley - in forming our self-concept, we imagine what other people think of us

● Self that emerges from this concept as the "looking-glass self" ■ We place ourselves on a life trajectory - sense of where we've been and where

we're going ● Self-narrative - story we tell about the origin and likely future of

ourselves, built partly on facts and written in collaboration ■ Two research methods

● In-depth interview - research method that involves an intimate conversation between the researcher and a research subject

● Laboratory experiment - a research method that involves a test of a hypothesis under carefully controlled conditions

○ The Self ■ To think "I am" = to make oneself simultaneously the subject and object of

thought ● Thing doing the thinking - the subject ● Thing we're thinking about - the object ● Can think about self the way we think about other things

■ Sociologist George Herbert Mead di�erentiated between "I" and "me" ● "me" = object of thought

○ Self we see in the mirror, the one that is us ○ Self that we are proud of being or ashamed of

● "I" = subject of thought ○ Person feeling pride or embarrassment ○ Part of the self that judges, sets goals, evaluates progress,

monitors behavior to ensure we make the impressions we want to make

○ Mead described the I as a "running current of awareness" or an observer of the me that watches, plans, and considers

■ The I decides to present your me to the wider world ■ To think about other people in complex ways, we need to develop a theory of

the mind - the recognition that other minds exist, followed by the realization that we can try to imagine other's mental states

■ First few months of life - brains reach into others' brains using mirror neurons - cells in brains that �re in identical ways whether we're observing or performing an action

● These brain cells do not di�erentiate between self and others ● Mirror neurons respond to emotions - smiling and watching someone

else smile are the same ● Neurons may be too "hot" or "cold," but most people have systems that

are "just right" ○ Re�ecting on the Self

■ Before discovery of mirror neurons, sociologist Charles Horton Cooley used a mirror metaphor to explain how humans come to understand themselves, or develop a self-concept

● Self-concept - our understanding of who we are based on our personality traits, physical characteristics, ancestry, and biographies

■ Along with Mead, became one of the founders of social psychology - the study of the interface between the individual and society

● Social psychologists argue we can't understand either our psychologies or our societies independently of each other

■ Cooley - our self-concepts could only arise socially, in the presence of other people, through a process in which we choose, interpret, and imagine the views of others

■ The looking-glass self - the self that emerges as a consequence of seeing ourselves as we think other people see us

● Other people are mirrors re�ecting a vision from which we form our self image

■ Caregivers de�ne us before we are born and during early development, and we continue to look to people around us to inform out self-concept as we get older

■ Also learn to speculate what generalized others might think of us - imagined members of speci�c social groups

● When relevant, we tap into our ideas of how an average member of one of these groups might evaluate us

● Take the perspective of the generalized other ■ The Science of Sociology - In-Depth interviews

● In-depth interviews - a research method that involves an intimate conversation between the researcher and a research subject

○ Designed to capture the responses of a few people in great depth

○ Tend to be semi-structured - questions decided ahead of time, but researcher can ask di�erent questions depending on �ow

○ Questions are usually open-ended ● Resulting data is excellent for understanding how di�erent people

experience their lives and form their opinions ● Usually typed out word for word, resulting documents subjected to

coding - process in which segments of text are identi�ed as belonging to relevant categories

○ Categories or codes refer to concrete or abstract features of the conversation that are relevant to the research question

● Sociologists are ethically obligated to ensure con�dentiality - promise that researcher will not release personal information that can be connected to the research subject, including the fact of their participation

○ Refrain from releasing names of participants and keep data in secure locations

○ After research, may permanently separate real names from data and destroy any evidence of connections

○ Assign pseudonyms (false names) to interviewees ■ All re�ections are at least somewhat distorted ■ We can never truly see what others see, use theory of mind and mirroring

brains to make guesses ■ Cooley summarized his theory as "I am not what I think I am. I am not what

you think I am. I am what I think you think I am." ■ We are looking glasses for others too - the only way out of the in�nite re�ection

is to opt out of social interaction altogether ■ To see or not to see

● Most of us curate our collection of looking glasses - seek ones that re�ect the person we want to be and avoid the rest as much as possible

● May change who we are to give the right impression or manage our self-concept strategically

■ Often reject or accept someone's ideas about us, but we are not immune to caring what others think

■ Mirror neurons can't tell the di�erence between someone hating us and us hating ourselves

■ Whether we accept or reject someone's opinion is in�uenced by whether we like it, whether it's part of our self-concept already, and whether it's reinforced by other available looking glasses

● Also depends on whether we have an intimate relationship with the person, identify with them as a similar kind of person, or see them as someone who can fairly evaluate us

● Tend to take their re�ections more seriously if they fall into a group of generalized others we deem important - ex. Group of peers

■ Self is still dependent on looking glasses despite our ability to reject some perceptions we don't like

● Looking glass is a self-ful�lling prophecy - a phenomenon by which what people believe is true becomes true, even if it wasn't originally true

● If enough people consistently re�ect us in a certain way, their impressions will shape our impression of ourselves and we will act accordingly, bringing into existence the self they originally saw

■ The Science of Sociology - Experimental Research in the Laboratory ● Laboratory experiment - a research method that involves a test of a

hypothesis under carefully controlled conditions ○ Researchers bring research subjects into a lab - room

speci�cally designed for experiments ○ Attempt to keep experience of every subject exactly the same

except for the independent variable ● Variable - any measurable phenomenon that varies

○ Independent variable - one that's hypothesized to in�uence the dependent variable, or cause an e�ect

○ Dependent variable - one that's hypothesized to be in�uenced by the independent variable, phenomenon expected to show an e�ect

○ Control variables - any other variables that might in�uence the dependent variable

■ Re�ect the phenomena that researchers attempt to keep exactly the same, or "hold constant" so changes in dependent variable can be attributed to independent variable speci�cally

● Two groups ○ Experimental group - members go through experience that

researchers believe might in�uence the dependent variable ○ Control group - members do not go through experience that

researchers believe might in�uence the dependent variable ○ After experiment ends, researchers check whether independent

variable in�uenced dependent variable by comparing data collected from each group

● Lab experiments are one of the few research methods that allow scientists to make causal claims - assertions that an independent

variable is directly and speci�cally responsible for producing a change in a dependent variable

● Almost all other research methods only facilitate correlational claims - assertions that changes in an independent variable correspond to changes in a dependent variable but not in a way that can be proven causal

■ Our self-concept emerges out of a lifetime of interactions, both real and imagined

● Based on these experiences, we come to understand ourselves as a certain kind of person

● We are active participants in this process - choose which mirrors to seek out and take most seriously

■ Cooley - our selves are stable when our circumstances are stable ● Our personalities feel �xed largely because our life circumstances are

relatively stable ● Also stabilize ourselves by seeking out others who re�ect the person we

think we are ● We like people who validate our self-concepts

■ Our selves tend to resist change because our self-understanding is usually more in�uential than either our own whims or the whims of others

○ The Story of the Self ■ Role of memory in holding together a sense of self ■ Remembering our selves

● Our self-concept is reliant on our ability to reassemble our reality ○ Our reality is our self-narrative - a story we tell about the origin

and likely future of ourselves ○ We note where we've been and where we're going, then step

back on the path ● We sometime nest our narratives in the narratives of others - placing

your life story into a larger narrative changes the meaning of your personal accomplishments - ex. Imagining yourself ful�lling your ancestor's dreams

● Our self-narrative is build out of a lifetime of experiences and drawn from prepackaged stories

○ Source of our self-concept and what makes it feel real

○ Being able to pull events and episodes out of our past to explain our present gives our self-concept a feeling of authenticity

■ Between fact and �ction ● Our self-narrative is not a true story

○ We forget almost everything that happens to us ● Of the events we do remember, we have room in deciding which are

plot points, which characters play a starring role, which story arcs to draw out

○ Version of ourselves we believe is probably far more coherent than our actual life history can support

○ Not a faithful account, but an imaginative one ● When we tell personal stories, we usually do so with a goal other than

accuracy ○ May be trying to bond with someone, be understood, get

sympathy, get a job, etc. ○ Each goal changes how we draw out the story, emphasize and

leave out details ● Strongest memories are most likely to be untrue - the more we recall a

memory, the less well we remember it ○ Recollections blend with original memory

● Memory distortion is predictable and swift - experts recommend trying to avoid recalling memories when accuracy is important

● Our most often recalled memories are most likely to be untrue ○ The Self as a Social Fact

■ Brain has a vivid imagination - forgets, alters memories, make things up, merges memories, borrows memories

● Mirror neurons make us especially vulnerable ■ Our sense of self is not "true" - mix of constantly evolving, mostly semi-true

memories passed back and forth between us and people who serve as looking glasses

■ Imagine possible future selves as we narrate our past ● Selves we fear or hope to be ● Looking glasses a�rm or refute possibilities for coming selves

■ Our past, present, and future selves are all social facts ■ The precise nature of our consciousness is a product of human interaction

■ Durkham - we are real because social facts are real ● Chapter 2: Culture and Construction

■ In this chapter ● Main argument - all human groups have unique cultures - shared ideas,

as well as objects, practices, and bodies that re�ect them ● Humans engage with their natural environment, but they also act in

relation to an intricate series of social constructs - in�uential and shared interpretations of reality that vary across cultures

● We learn social constructs through socialization - a lifelong learning process by which we become members of our cultures and subcultures

○ Sources = media and people around us ● Socialization is a force behind what we value

○ Culture is the source of our sense of right and wrong and our rationales for why we believe what we do

○ Sociologists warn against ethnocentrism - assuming one's own culture is superior to the cultures of others

● Research methods ○ Social network analysis - involves the mapping of social ties and

exchanges between them ○ Biosocial research methods - investigate relationships between

sociological variables and biological ones ■ Introduction

● What matters to us is not what something is, but what we make of it - reality is embellished with meaning, signi�cance, and value

● Culture - word used to describe di�erences in groups' shared ideas, as well as the objects, practices, and bodies that re�ect those ideas

● Socialization - lifelong learning process by which we become members of cultures

● Through socialization, we become culturally competent - able to understand and navigate our cultures with ease

■ Social Construction ● Social construct - an in�uential and shared interpretation of reality that

will vary across time and space ● Social constructs emerge from social construction - the process by

which we layer objects with ideas, fold concepts into one another, and build connections between them

● Members of the same culture generally share similar social constructs - staying power because no one person can change them at will

● All human communication depends on social structure ● Social constructs are often powerful social facts - ex. Money ● Types of Social Constructs

Social construct De�nition Examples

Signi�ers Things that stand for other things

Emojis, thumbs up, diamond rings, Christian cross

Categories Subsets of things that we believe are su�ciently similar to one another to be considered the same (yet di�erent enough from other things to be considered distinct)

"pets" (subset of animals), "blue" (subset of the spectrum), "blouses" (a subset of shirts)

Binaries Categories we see as opposites or otherwise in opposition

Good and evil, friends and enemies, legal and illegal, business and pleasure

Associations Ideas that have nothing special in common except for the fact that they're connected by a third idea

Rainbows and �ags (LGBTQIA+ pride), roses and diamonds (love), red and green (Christmas)

Sequences Ideas arranged into a speci�c chronological order

Outline, draft, edit; hug, kiss, fondle; marry, buy a house, have kids

Hierarchies Ideas placed into ranked relationships

Nordstrom is higher end than Kohl's, mammals are more important than insects, it's better to be young than old

○

■ Together, the universe of ideas and their relationships to one another form a symbolic structure - a constellation of social constructs connected and opposed to one another in overlapping networks of meaning

● Meanings allow communication, but symbolic structure is unyielding - di�cult to communicate in ways it doesn't support

● No universal symbolic structure, varies by culture ■ Culture

● Cultural objects - natural items given symbolic meaning or natural resources extracted and molded to serve cultural purposes

○ Ex. Stop signs ● Cultural cognitions - shared ideas and values

○ Ex. Red means stop ● Cultural practices - habits, routines, and rituals people frequently

perform ○ Ex. Stopping at stop signs

● Cultural practices produce cultural bodies - culturally in�uenced shapes, sizes, capacities, and physiological processes

○ Ex. Re�exively moving foot to brake when we see a stop sign coming - body has been culturally conditioned to react this way

● Social learning - the transmission of knowledge and practices from one individual to another via observation, instruction, or reward and punishment

○ Not exclusively human - documented in animals as well ● Speaking of culture is speaking of cumulative culture - we are the

forefront of generations of knowledge built upon previous knowledge ● Dual inheritance theory - the notion that humans are products of the

interaction of generic and cultural evolution ○ Our genetic evolution in�uences our cultural evolution and

vice versa ● Culture shock - when our cultural competency is compromised,

leaving us unsure of what's going on or how to communicate e�ectively

■ Socialization ● Life is a series of encounters with new and di�erent social

environments which require us to adapt to di�erent cultural expectations - socialization is the process by which we become culturally competent in these environments

○ Through socialization - we learn the beliefs, values, and norms typical of culture's members

● Cultural beliefs - ideas about what is true and false ○ We learn a lot from direct experience, but much of what we

think has been communicated by other people or mass media ● Cultural values - notions as to what's right and wrong

○ Re�ect moral commitments about the way things should be ● Cultural norms - shared expectations for behavior

○ Some apply to all or most of us, others depend on mix of identities

● We learn beliefs, values, and norms from agents of socialization - channels of in�uence through which we become socialized

● Resocialization - the unlearning of old beliefs, values, and norms in favor of new ones

● Agents of Socialization

Type

Families ○ First group we belong to ○ First source of socialization ○ Often have a strong in�uence on what we grow up to do,

believe, and value

Schools ○ Teach reading, writing, math ○ Socialize us to listen to authority, follow rules, take turns, and

show up on time

Peers ○ Shape what we think is cool, who we think is cute, how we spend our time

Religion ○ Source of values, beliefs, and practices for many ○ Socializes us into speci�c ways of thinking about and being in

the world

Mass Media ○ Often reinforces what we learn elsewhere ○ Teaches us about things few people experience �rsthand, ex.

Dealing drugs, working in an ER, surviving in the wilderness

Work ○ To succeed, need to adjust to norms, values, and beliefs of people in the profession

○ Learn most of this on the job

Military ○ Members are subject to assertive, all-encompassing socialization aimed at transitioning them into military life

○

■ Interpersonal and self-socialization ● Interpersonal socialization - involves active e�orts by others to help us

become culturally competent members of our cultures ● Subcultures - subgroups within societies that have distinct cultural

ideas, objects, practices, and bodies ● Self-socialization - active e�orts we make to ensure we're culturally

competent members of our cultures ○ Mimicking adults, older siblings, other kids ○ Learning from �ctional characters and taking morals of stories ○ Imagining generalized others and how they may evaluate us ○ Attempt to learn skills and info that will help us bond with

others ● Social ties - the connections between us and other people

○ Can be formal/informal, strong/weak ○ Formal - mother listed as parent on government-issued birth

certi�cate ○ Informal - friends, voluntary and undocumented relationship

● Social networks - webs of ties that link us to each other and, through other people's ties, to people whom we're not directly linked

● Social media - social networks mediated by the internet ● Homophily - our tendency to connect with others who are similar to

us ○ People tied together in social networks homogenous than

expected by chance alone ○ We socialize people like us - lead people who are networked to

become even more alike ○ Ties represent social connection and enable cultural contagion

● In�uence �ows through multiple degrees of separation - ex. Friend, friend of a friend

● Our ties' attitudes and behaviors socialize us by setting expectations ■ The Science of Sociology - Social Network Analysis

● Social network analysis - research method that involves mapping social ties and exchanges between them

○ Can be between people or groups/organizations ○ Social network analysts show who/what is connected to

who/what ■ Characterize nature of the social network, ex. Network

size (how many individuals involved), network density (number of ties)

■ Determine overall shape and character of collected ties - ex. Central �gures who tie most people or cliques with stronger ties

○ Researchers can determine what �ows between social ties, including resources like money, information, ideas, or contacts

■ Media socialization ● Mass media - mediated communication intended to reach many

people, not just one or a handful ● Media socialization - includes all the cultural competence we gain

through our exposure to media, including print, internet, and other widely shared sources

● Social media vs. nonsocial - nonsocial features people with di�erent lives than our own, but use social media to connect with similar people

● We actively participate in our self-socialization, are socialized by others, and learn from mass media - say no to certain values, ideas

■ Socialization and the body ● Culture is embodied - physically present and detectable in the body

○ Measurable in shape, size, and form of our bodies, how our bodies have learned to react to their environments

● Cultured physiques - bodies formed by what we do to and with them ○ Ex. Bone density dependent on participation in high-impact,

weight-bearing activities ● Cultured capacities - culturally speci�c skills

○ Ex. Hunting, �shing, typing ● Culturally conditioned - taught to respond physiologically to a socially

constructed reality

○ Bodies learn to respond to social cues and stimulate socially appropriate responses, do so outside the realm of consciousness or intention

● Cultural ideas layer environment with signi�cance ■ The Science of Sociology - Biosocial Research Methods

● Biosocial research methods - investigate relationships between sociological variables and biological ones

○ Inc. hormone levels, brain functioning, gene expression ○ Data can be correlated with sociological variables - experiences

● Reveals social constructs aren't just in our heads ● Some physical changes caused by experiences can be expressed in genes

and passed down ■ Culture Wars

● Culture-as-value thesis - we're socialized into culturally speci�c moralities that guide our feelings about right and wrong

○ Values that are common and widely accepted in our cultural environment tend to become our own POV

○ Our bodies are culturally conditioned to produce a physiological state of disgust when our moral beliefs our violated

● Culture-as-rationale thesis - the idea that we are socialized to know a set of culturally speci�c arguments with which we can justify why we feel something is right or wrong

○ Emotional responses require logical arguments ○ We search for culturally familiar rationales to explain our gut

feelings ● Ethnocentrism - assuming that one's own culture is superior to the

cultures of others ● Cultural relativism - the practice of noting the di�erences between

cultures without passing judgment ○ Type of sociological sympathy ○ We need a reason for criticizing cultural ideas, values, or

practices beyond only di�erence ● Developing sociological imagination requires putting aside both

positive and negative reactions to understand unfamiliar cultures

○ Requires subjecting our own cultures to equally critical examination

■ Culture During COVID-19 ● Normally when entering a new social environment, we are newcomers

to a preexisting culture - can learn how to �t in ● Rifts in reality that undo or disrupt a preexisting culture - leaves

everyone confused, no established members to look to for guidance ● Established norms like physical contact abandoned, "odd" behaviors

like wearing a mask became ● Ann Swidler - asked whether people have a di�erent relationship to

culture in "settled" and "unsettled" times ○ Settled times - familiar and stable - beliefs, values, and norms in

place are well established ■ No reason to expect tomorrow will be di�erent ■ We take for granted what we know to think, right and

wrong, how to act ■ We put relatively little thought into thinking or acting

di�erently ○ Unsettled times - unfamiliar and unpredictable - requires us to

reevaluate beliefs, reconsider values, adopt new norms ■ No settings for new reality ■ Many old habits may be ine�ective or harmful ■ Require more thought about what we believe, value,

and do ■ May deeply re�ect on nature of reality, right and

wrong, best way to interact with others - can be mentally and emotionally demanding

○ In confusing times, we turn to our social ties - remake culture together

● Chapter 3: Our Identities ○ In this Chapter

■ Social identities are culturally in�uenced social constructs ■ We collectively make certain features of humans socially important and carve

out subcategories to place ourselves in - imbued with meaning (or stereotypes) and arrayed in a hierarchy

■ Part of having a social identity is acting in ways that re�ect it

● May be for enjoyment or for other's expectations ■ We call carry many social identities and our lives are shaped by all of these at

once - intersectionality ■ Sociological observations about identity re�ect social identity theory - people

are inclined to form social groups, incorporate group membership into their identity, take steps to enforce group boundaries, and maximize personal esteem and in-group success

■ Research methods ● Content analysis - involves counting and describing patterns or themes

in media ○ Analysis can be quantitative, qualitative, or both

● Computational sociology - uses computers to collect, extract, and analyze data

○ Especially useful in era of big data - extremely large and growing repositories of information

○ Introduction ■ Social identities - the socially constructed categories and subcategories of

people in which we place ourselves or are placed by others ● Social constructs - cultures invent them, provide subcategories, and

give them meaning and value ■ Identities are linked to unfair advantage and disadvantage

○ The Lure of Identity ■ Distinction - active e�orts to a�rm identity categories and place ourselves and

others into their subcategories ■ Positive distinction - the claim that members of our own group are superior to

members of other groups ■ In-group bias - preferential treatment of members of our own group and

mistreatment of others ■ Minimal group paradigm - the tendency of people to form groups and actively

distinguish themselves from others for the most trivial of reasons ■ How to socially construct an identity

● Invent - establishing a human feature as a basis of identity ● Divide - deciding what will di�erentiate people within identity

subcategories ● Stereotype - giving identity subcategories di�erent symbolic meanings ● Perform - doing social identities in accordance with stereotypes

● Rank - elevating some identity subcategories over others ■ Social identity theory - people are inclined to form social groups, incorporate

group memberships into their identity, take steps to enforce group boundaries, and maximize positive distinction and in-group success

○ Step 1: Invent - The Origin of Sexual Identity ■ Major changes in the organization of everyday life laid the groundwork for

building an identity ● Urbanization provided freedom from small town eyes, especially for

men ○ Gay subcultures formed in hidden corners of cities

● Industrialization - shift to an economy based primarily on large-scale mechanized industry

○ Heterosexual sex as a matter of survival - needed children for farms

○ People no longer needed families to work, worked for money and

○ Legal pay gap = women still dependent on family unit ● WWII - 1/8 males served in the war

○ Unmarried people on both front lines and home front were largely left with the same sex during the war - organized their lives around sexual desires when they came home

■ Sexual minorities - people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or otherwise non-heterosexual

■ Journey from homosexual behavior to sexual identity - the �rst step in the process of distinction - seeing something as an identity at all

○ Step 2: Divide - Race, Ethnicity, and the Emergence of Subcategories ■ Racial groups we are familiar with are not biological facts - approx. 85% of

human genetic variation is found within any group of people identi�ed as racially alike, almost all

■ Race - social fact; a socially meaningful set of arti�cial distinctions falsely based on super�cial and imagined biological di�erences

● Social constructs rather than biological ■ In the US, the most culturally stark distinction is between "black" and "white"

● Subcategories did not exist when English colonizers arrived - both poor Europeans and Africans shared position at bottom of economic ladder and were subject to indentured servitude

● Shared class interest - indentured servants of all colors sometimes rebelled against masters

● Colonists used color as a means to end rebellion by passing laws tying rights to skin color

● Protected and enforced European indentured servants' rights and eliminated potential for Africans to earn freedom

■ W. E. B. Du Bois - psychological wage - a noneconomic good given to one group as a measure of superiority over other groups

● Race used as a means to divide and conquer ■ US federal government included subcategories of mulatto, quadroon, and

octoroon - distinguishing and quantifying multiracial people further de�nes line between white and nonwhite

■ One-drop rule - the idea that anyone with any trace of black ancestry should be considered back

■ Race is a social construction - its logic can be distorted to include and exclude arbitrarily

● White was whatever white people wanted it to be ● Generally exclude, but inclusion is used when advantageous

■ Blood quantum rule - a law limiting legal recognition of American Indians to those who have at least a certain level of indigenous ancestry

● Rather than excluding, included people into the subcategory ● Arti�cially shrank number of American citizens to reduce obligations

to provide services ■ Ethnicity - identity based on the collective memories of a shared history and

distinctive culture ● In response to in�ux of immigrants from Mexico after revolution, US

added "Mexican to racial subcategories on census" ● Instead became listed as an ethnicity

■ The subcategories within an identity are socially constructed - product of changing political priorities in a society based on racial and ethnic divides

○ Step 3: Stereotype - Filling Gender Subcategories with Contents ■ Gender - the signi�ers of masculinity and femininity - the ideas, traits, interests,

and skills that we associate with being biologically male or female ■ Sex - reference to physical traits related to sexual reproduction

● Male and female used to refer to two body types ● Subcategories of men and women are socially constructed identities

■ Gender binary - the idea that people come in two and only two types, males who are masculine and females who are feminine

■ Intersex - those with physical characteristics typical of both people assigned male and people assigned female at birth

■ Cisgender - people assigned male at birth who identify as men and people assigned female at birth who identify as women; their assigned sex and gender identity align according to cultural norms

■ Transgender or trans - people assigned male at birth who don't identify as men and people assigned female at birth who don't identify as women

■ Nonbinary - people who identify as both man and woman or neither man nor woman; includes trans people

■ Stereotype - clusters of ideas attached by social convention to people with speci�c social identities

● Work and home became gender stereotypes - work cutthroat and competitive so men were too, home sentimental and sweet, so women were too

■ Meta-analyses - method of statistically joining a pool of studies with the aim of aggregating their results to produce a more conclusive �nding than any individual study can o�er alone

■ Meta-synthesis - a meta-analysis of meta-analyses ■ Meta-synthesis evidence showed men and women are more alike than di�erent ■ The Science of Sociology - Content Analyses

● Content analysis - a research method that involves counting and describing patterns of themes in media

○ Can include print, audio, video, any medium that sends messages

● Researchers decide what content to examine, then whether to analyze all of the content or a subset of it

● To do analysis, researchers decide on codes to apply or features of the content that are relevant to their research question

○ Ex. For toys, code whether colors are bold (masculine) or pastel (feminine) and whether it is a stereotypically masculine or feminine toy

○ Applying codes to content transforms it into data ○ Researcher looks for patterns in completed code

● Can be quantitative, qualitative, or both

○ Quantitative content analysis involves counting and correlating codes

○ Qualitative content analysis involves rich descriptions of speci�c instances of codes

○ Using both together o�ers a useful characterization of content - researchers can explain both how often themes occur and what they are like when they do

● Examining media for persistent themes and messages shows that social constructs are not just in our heads

● When concerned with social identities, can be used to measure ○ Representation - whether members of social groups are

portrayed ○ Misrepresentation - inaccurate and sometimes harmful

representations of social groups ● Can show what stereotypes are present, how frequently they're

communicated, by whom, and in what media ○ Step 4: Perform - Act Your Age

■ We bring stereotypes to life by acting in ways consistent with them, but none of us perfectly conforms to stereotypes that apply to us

■ Doing identity - the active performance of social identities ● Behaving in ways that are consistent with the expectations other people

have for members of our social groups ■ Cheryl Laz - absurd to think about age as anything but a chronological fact and

as something everyone is ● "Act your age" presses for behavior that conforms to norms

■ "Doing age" extends to appearance, behavior, how we spend our time, and with whom

■ Behavior is expected to change with age ■ "Settling down" - as we get older, we are expected to ful�ll speci�c roles in a

predictable sequence, like spouse, homeowner, parent, and grandparent ■ Aging is natural, but age is socially constructed ■ Age is stigmatized - Americans generally consider young better than old

○ Step 5: Rank - The Building of Body Hierarchies ■ Plumpness was desirable until around 1900 ■ The identities that matter to us and our evaluation of them is a matter of

cultural and historical change

■ The change in fat's value occurred in response to a new abundance ● Agricultural production increased - food was plentiful and cheap, so

fat bodies became accessible to all, not just the rich ■ Rising rates of other types of consumption - the use of wages to purchase

goods and services - left cultural critics worried Americans were becoming greedy, materialistic, and immodest

■ Thorstein Veblen - conspicuous consumption - the phenomenon of spending elaborately on items and services with the sole purpose of displaying one's wealth

■ Ideals of self-restraint characterized a lot of American history - undisciplined self-indulgence challenged this

■ Thin bodies were a 2-part solution for the rich ● Now that anyone could get fat, the rich needed a new way to create

positive distinction between them and middle/working class ○ More accessible to them due to leisure time and �nancial

resources ● Turned into a symbol of supposedly superior willpower

■ Being fat carries stigma - a personal attribute that is widely devalued by members of one's society

■ Controlling images - pervasive negative stereotypes that serve to justify or uphold inequality

■ Prejudice - attitudinal bias against individuals based on their membership in a social group

■ Ridgeway's research produced evidence that highly regarded traits are more often and easily attributed to people with some identities than others

■ Identities di�er in the extent to which they're attributed status - high or low esteem

● People with high-status identities are seen as generally more valuable than people without them

● Unless there is a reason to think otherwise, people with high-status identities will be assumed to be better than others in a variety of ways - smarter, more talented, etc.

● There is status we can earn, like those that come with learned skills or good deeds, but some are granted based on who we are

■ Status beliefs - collectively shared ideas about which social groups are more or less deserving of esteem

● Explicit attitudes - beliefs we choose to have or at least know we have ● Implicit attitudes - beliefs we've absorbed involuntarily and of which

we're mostly unaware ● We learn implicit attitudes through socialization and our brains retrieve

these beliefs automatically, often without conscious knowledge ■ Scholars developed way to detect implicit attitudes through computer-assisted

research - a set of methods that uses computers to collect data ● Subjects play a computer game where they sort low- and high-status

ideas and identities ● Generally able to match positive ideas with group members we see as

highly valued a bit quicker than negative ideas and vice versa ● Longer times = weaker associations, shorter times = stronger

associations ■ We are both victims and carriers of prejudice ■ Status elite - people who carry many positively regarded social identities ■ The Science of Sociology - Computational Sociology

● Computational sociology - a computer-assisted research method that uses computers to extract and analyze data

● Sociologists program computers to scour the internet for certain kinds of information, then program them to read that information for speci�c kinds of data and organize it in interpretable ways

● Data can include ○ Digital life - social media accounts, search records, streaming

sites ○ Digital traces - incomplete records of online activity, including

tax data, voter records, death certi�cates, and data on political contributions

○ Material that has been digitized - originally nonelectronic information that's been uploaded, like book, newspaper, and photo archives

○ Intersectionality and Disability ■ Social theorist Anna Julia Cooper - the experience of enslavement was di�erent

for women and men ● Men were not spared sexual assault, but women bore its brunt ● Women uniquely carried and birthed the children conceived against

their will

● Understanding black women required thinking simultaneously about race and gender

● Black women have unique insights not available to white women or black men

● Mother of black feminism ■ Kimberle Crenshaw coined phrase intersectionality - our lives are shaped by

multiple interacting identities ● Lawsuit against General Motors not hiring black women - they

countered that they hired white women and black men, women lost the case

● Lives of black women are shaped not by race OR gender but by race AND gender

● Their experiences and the nature of their disadvantages were distinct from those of men of the same race and women of other races

● GM did not discriminate against black people or women, but they discriminated against black women

■ No single identity truly captures anyone's life experiences ■ The experience of disability is in�ected by all of a person's identities, including

gender, sexual orientation, body size, and race ■ Impairment in�uences our self-concept - often related to gender

● Men are expected more than women to be strong and independent - a disability can threaten the gendered expectation that they be able to take care of themselves without help

○ Declined sexual prowess ● For women, disability can a�ect their ability to perform physical

attractiveness ○ Women who are visibly impaired may �nd that their femininity

and sexuality become invisible ■ Other identities add further complications to the experience of being a

wheelchair user ● Sexual orientation, gender, and ability intersection - queer spaces are

already limited, so accessibility issues limit options even further - not just for sex, often gay bars are the �rst place a gay person feels truly safe

● Not a struggle because gay or male or disabled, intersection of the three - change even one and the struggles would change

■ Intersection of disability and fat - when thin people use wheelchairs, people assume need, but when a fat person uses wheelchairs, people assume laziness

● Fat women are penalized and stigmatized more than fat men ● Fat white women are penalized more than fat women of color ● Women perceived to be heterosexual are judged more harshly for being

fat than women believed to be non-heterosexual, who are judged less harshly than men perceived to be gay or bisexual, who are held to higher standards than men perceived to be heterosexual

● Stereotype of black men as criminal makes people assume black male wheelchair users' disabilities came resulted from violence

■ Each of the many identities we live with interacts with the others, creating constellations that intermix in complicated ways

■ Understanding any one person's experience means seeing the whole person and attending to all their identities as well as intersections

● Chapter 4: People in Interaction ● Chapter 5: Deviance and De�ance ● Chapter 6: Organizations, Institutions, and Structures ● Chapter 7: Economic Inequality ● Chapter 8: Institutional Racism ● Chapter 9: Gendered Oppression ● Chapter 10: Elite Power ● Chapter 11: The Power of the People ● Chapter 12: Our Future on Earth ● Conclusion: The Sociological Imagination ● f