Chapter 4: Sociology

Norms

Ordinary Behavior: is what makes society possible

Extraordinary Behavior: what we usually notice

“Even when we have nothing to do, we have something”

Being normal is hard

Social Interaction

Moments we share with other people:

• Imaginative

• Back and Forth

• Spontaneous Performance with ongoing rapid calculations and balance between inventiveness and predictability

Norm of Reciprocity

People should act toward one another in parallel ways

Ex: if someone gives you a birthday gift, you should give one as well

Ex: if you put a girl in a post, they will do it back

Social Rules

Culturally specific norms, policies, and laws

Prescriptive

Telling what TO do

Proscriptive

Telling what NOT to do

Norms

Folkways

-Loosely enforced norms

-Facilitate everyday social interaction

-Separate right from rude

Ex: posting too much (violates informal social etiquette, rather than formal laws or deep moral codes)

Mores

-Tightly enforced norms that carry moral significance.

-Separate right from wrong

Ex: online bullying

Taboos

-Prohibitions so strong that the thought of violating them can be sickening.

-Inspires extremely negative emotion

Ex: talking about your period on social media

Policies

Rules that are made and enforced by organizations

Ex: snapchat is against uploading people without consent

Laws

Rules enforced or made by cities, states, or federal governments

Ex: illegal to threaten to harm someone

Why we follow rules

We follow rules because:

• Because being good feels good (or people treat us well)

• Because being bad feels bad (or people treat us badly)

Social Sanctions

Reactions by others aimed at promoting conformity

• Enforce social norms and control behavior

Accounts

-How we fend off negative sanctions

-An excuse that explains our rule breaking but also affirms that the rule is good and right:

• An acknowledgment that the rule is valid

• An explanation for the exception in the case

Ex: “I wouldn’t have studied so little for the exam, but I have work to pay the rent”

Symbolic Interactionism

-Created by Herbert Blumer (a former football player)

-The theory that social interaction depends on the social construction of reality.

• Reality is produced through ongoing social interaction

  • Hugging repeatedly turned into a social norm

• We don’t respond to reality itself, but to the meaning we give it

  • A hug is never just a hug - it is a hello or goodbye and an I love you

• Meaning is negotiated in interactions.

  • Eye contact, generous compliments, or lingering hand/elbow

Interaction dynamics

Symbolic interaction depends on the setting.

• We know how to act when we read the signs and determined the situation

Successful social interactions are delicate and depend on cooperation

• People react with confusion or betrayal when people don’t play along

Without collaboration, interaction breaks down

• We play along to make things run smoothly, and to seem culturally competent

Dramaturgy

-Erving Goffman

-The practice of looking at social life as a series of performances in which we’re actors on metaphorical stages.

-We behave according to the constraints of the situation and role we are expected to play, others in the scene help us and we help them in return

3 Components:

• Set = social situation

• Roles = relative positions in the interaction

• Props = social symbols

Impression Management

Efforts to control how we’re perceived by others

We are all actors trying to control our public image

Face

-A version of ourselves that we want to project in a specific setting.

• Our face is not automatic; it’s up to us

• High stress situations require effort

• Habitual situations come to feel natural

Face work

Effort to establish and maintain our face

Front Stage

A public space in which we are aware of having an audience.

Most performative at this stage

Backstage

Private or semiprivate spaces in which we can relax or rehearse

Out of face

Acting in contradiction to one’s desired face

• Must do extra work to save face

Marked Identity

-A social identity that stands out as different, unique, or divergent from what a culture treats as the default or the "norm"

-EX: WNBA —> Women’s national basketball Association

Unmarked Identity

social categories treated as the invisible, neutral, or default standard in a given culture, requiring no special label, explanation, or acknowledgment

Ex: men have unmarked identities

• guys means people but girls never does

Role Identity Match

A correspondence between the type of person in the role and the role itself

Ex: when men are scientists

Role Identity Mismatch

When a person’s social or professional role does not align with how they perceive themselves

Ex: When women are scientists (especially for black and latina)

Interpersonal Discrimination

Prejudicial behavior displayed by individuals

Ranges from the overt and unambiguous to the subtle and ambiguous.

•It’s also cumulative: Even occasional discrimination can produce observable and measurable negative consequences for our lives.

Hard to see without clear comparison behavior

Microaggression

a brief, everyday verbal, behavioral, or environmental slight, snub, or insult

Field Experiment

A type of experiment that involves a test of a hypothesis outside the laboratory.

• Occur in natural real world setting

• The kinds of things we document in a lab (can happen outside)

Field experiments can provide compelling evidence of real-life

discrimination, for example, against:

• People with disabilities as well as women, mothers, Muslims, women wearing headscarves, people from poor and working-class backgrounds, sexual minorities, and African, Asian, Hispanic, and Arab Americans

Combating Discrimination

People who are frequently the target of discriminatory behavior or

expectations must do extra work to ensure that they are acknowledged and rewarded.

• Can range from irritating to life threatening

Ex: Black men’s lives are often at risk because of the discriminatory stereotypes that portray them as a threat.

Ethnomethodology

Research aimed at revealing the UNDERLYING SHARED LOGIC that is the FOUNDATION of social interactions.

How people use everyday common sense reasoning, routines, and practical methods to make sense of the world and build a shared sense of social order.

Harold Garfinkel

In order to make these ethnomethods visible, Garfinkel exploited breaching

Breaching

purposefully BREAKING A SOCIAL RULE in order to test how others respond

Foundational Rules

set of culturally specific BACKGROUND ASSUMPTIONS that we use to make sense of everyday life

Indigenous Methods

Approaches to research partnerships with Indigenous communities that respect their ways of being knowing and learning:

• Relevant, Respectful, Reciprocity

Lynching

Murder of black men by white mobs

• Done to traumatize black ppl into submission to uphold white supremacy

Monroe Norman

Found that black people were getting arrested solely on submission

Iceberg Metaphor

When Americans want to suggest that there is more to something than meets the eye

• social rules are bigger than looks too

Brent Staples

Wrote an essay to describe how the author acts in public in ways that counter racial stereotypes as a matter of survival