Sociology Test 1

Confirmation Bias

Definition: The tendency to seek information that confirms our beliefs, rather than information that challenges them.

• It is the human tendency to seek information that confirms what you already believe.

• The tendency to accept uncritically anything that confirms their worldview and to be overly critical of anything that challenges or disproves their worldview.

• It affects everyone, to one degree or another.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Definition: 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.

• When we don't know another person's circumstances, our explanations tend to focus on who they are as a person or their actions.

• The Fundamental Attribution Error occurs when our explanations of human behavior and social phenomena solely focus on individual factors (e.g., personality, choices, motivation, character), and overlook important supra-individual factors (e.g., circumstances, social environment, structural conditions, historical moment).

• Sociologists argue that to fully understand human behavior or social phenomena, you must consider both individual and supra-individual factors.

Social Location

Definition: 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.

• No one is omniscient nor omnipresent, so as a result, everyone has a social location.

• Your social location is not just who you are, but who you are in relation to everyone else.

• Everyone's personal experience is limited. (i.e., individuals always possess limited perspectives)

• Who you are affects what you experience. People with different social locations often experience the same society differently. Individuals from different social locations encounter different opportunities, expectations, interactions, and experiences.

Social Phenomenon

Definition: Observable patterns of action, events, or outcomes that result from social interaction and cannot be created, caused, or controlled by any individual.

• A social phenomenon is an observable pattern of action, event, or outcome that occurs as the result of social interaction.

• A social phenomenon cannot be created, caused, or controlled by any single individual.

• Social phenomena emerge from the interactions among many people.

• Social phenomena can occur even when no one intends/wants them.

• Social phenomena have their own observable properties

• Social phenomena cannot be explained solely by individual characteristics

Supra-Individual

Definition: An adjective that literally translates to greater than the individual.

• Supra-individual means anything that is greater than the individual. The prefix supra- literally means "greater than."

• All explanations of human behavior and social phenomena are based on either individual or supra-individual factors.

• The ability to recognize supra-individual factors is a core skill of the sociological perspective and central to learning sociology.

The First Lesson of Sociology

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

• The First Half Refers to Social Location: "Who you are affects what you experience" is another way of describing the concept of social location. A person's social location influences the experiences they have throughout life.

• The Second Half Refers to Worldview: "What you experience affects how you perceive the world around you, think, and behave" is another way of describing the concept of worldview. People's experiences shape the worldview through which they interpret reality.

• Different Social Locations Produce Different Worldviews: Because people occupy different social locations, they have different experiences. Because people have different experiences, they often develop different worldviews. People, therefore, do not all perceive the same reality in the same way.

• People See Reality from Their Perspective: People do not see reality exactly as it is. People see reality from the perspective created by their worldview.

• The First Lesson Explains Why Seeing Society Is Difficult: Because people's worldviews are shaped primarily by their own experiences, it is difficult to recognize influences that extend beyond those experiences. This helps explain why people often fail to recognize society's influence on individuals without developing a sociological perspective.

Sociological Imagination

Definition: The ability to simultaneously analyze individual, societal, and historical factors surrounding any social phenomenon.

• Using the Sociological Imagination means looking beyond purely individual explanations of human behavior and social phenomena.

Sociological Perspective

Definition: The habit of deliberately looking for the influence of society when trying to understand human behavior and social phenomena.

• The sociological perspective is a form of disciplined attention; it teaches sociologists what kinds of things to notice. This shift in attention changes the kinds of questions sociologists ask.

• Someone without a well-trained sociological perspective may focus on individuals, intentions, personalities, or isolated events. The sociological perspective, however, deliberately redirects our attention toward patterns, relationships, contexts, institutions, culture, history, and social interaction.

• Developing a sociological perspective requires learning to ask different kinds of questions about social phenomena.

Worldview

Definition: 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.

• A worldview is the perspective through which an individual perceives and understands the world around them.

• An individual's worldview is shaped by their social, cultural, and personal experiences.

• A person's worldview influences how they perceive the world around them, think, and behave.

• Every person has a worldview. No one approaches the world from a completely neutral or unbiased perspective. A worldview reflects the assumptions and biases people have developed through their experiences.

• Because people's experiences differ, their worldviews differ. Social location profoundly influences worldview because it shapes the experiences people have.

• People see the world from their own perspective. People do not simply see the world "as it is." People perceive and understand the world through the perspective created by their worldview.

Common Sense

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

• Common sense is the collection of rules of behavior, practices, customs, and ways of thinking that we expect any reasonable person to understand.

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

• Common sense is not taught to us, but developed through social interaction and a lifetime of trial-and-error experiences.

• Common Sense Isn't Common: Common sense is only "common" among people who share sufficiently similar social and cultural experiences.

• Common Sense Doesn't Make Sense: Common sense is often internally inconsistent, logically flawed, and self-contradictory.

Representative Individuals

Definition: A representative individual is a fictional stand-in used to simplify a complex group of people into a single imagined stereotypical person, making it easier to explain social phenomena in terms of individual motivations rather than the social interactions and collective processes that actually produce those outcomes.

• Rather than recognizing the diversity within a social group, this imagined individual is treated as though they accurately represent everyone in it.

• Common-sense explanations often use this representative individual as a stand-in for the entire group, assuming that what this imagined person thinks, values, or does explains the behavior of the group as a whole.

The Paradox of Common Sense

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

• The Paradox of Common Sense is that even as common sense helps us make sense of the world, it can actively undermine our ability to understand it.

• The paradox of common sense illustrates the difference between "making sense of" a phenomenon and understanding it. Making sense of a phenomenon means constructing a story that explains why we think something happened. Understanding a phenomenon requires constructing a scientific explanation based on evidence.

• Because common-sense explanations often feel intuitive and satisfying, people are easily led to believe they genuinely understand a phenomenon when they have only constructed a plausible story about it.

The Special Person Hypothesis

Definition: The mistaken belief that major social outcomes of a complex network can be explained by the actions of a single important/extraordinary individual.

• Rather than recognizing how the outcomes of complex groups emerge from the combined actions and interactions of many people, the Special-Person Hypothesis uses one extraordinary or especially important individual as a stand-in for the group.

• Common-sense explanations often use the Special-Person Hypothesis because common sense is more applicable to individuals than social groups. By collapsing the complexity of a social group into a single individual, the Special-Person Hypothesis makes one's common sense applicable to explaining that social group.

Agency

Definition: An individual's ability to think and act independently of society. Very similar to the concept of free will.

• Agency is the ability to think and act independently of society.

• Individual agency is constrained and enabled by society. That is, society influences which courses of action are easier or more difficult, more logical or less logical to pursue.

• While society influences individuals, they are not "robots" controlled by society. Individuals have agency and retain the ability to make choices even though those choices are shaped by structural and cultural influences.

• Individuals influence society by how they use their agency. Individuals can conform to societal expectations & in doing so recreate their society’s social structures, reinforce their culture’s way of living, & ultimately pass on to the next generation a society that looks very similar to the one they were born into. Alternatively, individuals can use their agency to resist their society & reshape its culture & structure.

Cultural Explanations of Social Phenomena

Definition: Explanations that argue that social phenomena are caused by the values they have been taught to believe in and/or by limiting the universe of possible thought, discourse, and action.

• Cultural explanations explain social phenomena by focusing on culture rather than how society is organized (structural explanations), or people's personal choices and characteristics (individual explanations).

• Cultural explanations argue that culture influences behavior by teaching people values they come to believe and shaping what people perceive to be possible, normal, desirable, acceptable, or even imaginable.

• The universe of possible thought, discourse, and action refers to everything that can be thought, said, or done. Culture influences behavior by shaping people's perception of the boundaries of this universe rather than by literally determining what is possible.

Cultural Tool-Kit

Definition: 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 every day to solve problems and get through our day. People from similar social locations tend to develop similar cultural tool-kits.

• A cultural tool-kit is the collection of symbols, rituals, skills, and ways of thinking that people use in different combinations to construct strategies of action for solving problems and navigating everyday life.

• The cultural tool-kit perspective argues that culture primarily influences the means people use to achieve their goals rather than prescribing the goals themselves.

• Individuals from similar social locations tend to develop similar cultural tool-kits because they are exposed to similar cultural experiences, skills, symbols, and ways of thinking.

Individual Explanations of Social Phenomena

Definition: Explanations that argue that social phenomena are caused by the personal choices and/or characteristics of the individuals involved with the social phenomena.

• Individual explanations of social phenomena argue that social phenomena are caused by the personal choices and/or characteristics of the individuals within a society or social group.

• Individual explanations seek the causes of social phenomena within individuals rather than within society.

Path Dependency

Definition: 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.

• Path dependency describes how the actions and outcomes of the past influence people and organizations today by making some courses of action easier or more logical while making others harder or less logical.

• The central idea of path dependency is that the past structures (i.e., it organizes and shapes) the present.

• Like other structural factors, path dependency influences behavior by influencing which actions are easier, harder, more logical, or illogical today.

Structural Explanations of Social Phenomena

Definition: Explanations that argue that social phenomena are caused by how society is organized.

• Structural Explanations argue that social phenomena are caused by how society is organized, how resources and opportunities are distributed among the population, and by the laws, policies, and regulations that govern how individuals and groups operate and interact.

• Structural explanations argue that society influences behavior by making some courses of action easier or more logical while making others harder or less logical.

• Structural explanations argue that how society is organized influences how opportunities and resources are distributed across the population.

• Structural factors shape the choices people are likely to make by influencing the opportunities available to them rather than eliminating individual agency.

The SCI Model

Definition: A framework for explaining social phenomena that emphasizes the interaction of Structure, Culture, and Individual Agency. The SCI Model argues that human behavior and social phenomena cannot be fully understood by focusing on only one factor; instead, sociologists examine how social structures, cultural beliefs and values, and the choices individuals make work together to shape society and people's experiences within it.

• The SCI Model is a framework for explaining social phenomena by simultaneously considering Structural, Cultural, and Individual factors. "SCI" stands for Structural, Cultural, and Individual.

• The SCI Model is built on the idea that society influences individuals while individuals simultaneously influence society.

• The SCI Model reflects the idea that social phenomena are typically explained by some combination of structural, cultural, and individual factors rather than by a single cause. Well-developed sociological explanations therefore consider all three types of factors instead of relying exclusively on one.