Learned

Subculture

A group within a larger society with its own shared beliefs, values, or practices.

Counterculture

A group whose beliefs or practices reject important parts of the dominant culture.

Norms

Shared rules and expectations for behavior.

Folkway

An informal everyday norm; breaking it is usually not considered very serious.

More

A strongly held norm connected to a society's ideas about right and wrong.

Taboo

A behavior considered extremely forbidden or unacceptable.

Ethnocentrism

Judging another culture by the standards of your own culture.

Cultural relativism

Understanding a culture using its own values and standards.

Socialization

The lifelong process of learning society's norms, values, and behaviors.

Agents of socialization

People and institutions that teach us how to behave, such as family, school, peers, and media.

Life course theory

The perspective that people's lives are shaped by social experiences and events over time.

Sex

Biological characteristics, such as reproductive anatomy, hormones, and chromosomes.

Gender (and doing gender)

Gender involves social identities and expectations; doing gender means performing behaviors society associates with gender.

Theory of self-development

The idea that a person's sense of self develops through social interaction.

Preparatory phase

Mead's stage when children imitate others without understanding the roles fully.

Play phase

Mead's stage when children pretend to take the role of one specific person at a time.

Game phase

Mead's stage when children understand several roles and the rules that connect them.

Generalized other

A person's understanding of the wider society's expectations and rules.

The 'I' and the 'Me'

The 'I' is the spontaneous part of the self; the 'Me' is the part shaped by social expectations.

Looking-glass self (three phases)

Cooley's idea that self-image develops through imagining how others see us, imagining their judgment, and developing feelings about ourselves based on that imagined judgment.

Sociology The study of society, people, and how they interact.

Sociological imagination

Understanding how personal experiences connect to larger social issues.

Positivism

The belief that society can be studied using scientific methods and evidence.

Social facts

Social rules, values, and patterns that influence how people behave.

Sociological perspectives

Different ways sociologists explain and understand society.

Functionalist perspective

The view that society is made of parts that work together to create stability.

Conflict perspective

The view that society is shaped by competition over power, wealth, and resources.

Symbolic Interactionist perspective

The view that people create meaning through everyday interactions and symbols.

Manifest function

An intended and recognized result of something in society.

Latent function

An unintended or less obvious result of something in society.

Feminist theory

A perspective that examines gender inequality and how gender shapes social life.

Social exchange theory

The idea that people make choices by weighing rewards against costs.

Research methods

Ways sociologists collect and study information.

Survey

A set of questions used to collect information from people.

Experiment

A study that tests how one factor affects another under controlled conditions.

Field research

Research conducted in people's natural surroundings.

Participant observation

A method in which a researcher joins a group while observing it.

Ethnography

A detailed description and study of a group's culture and everyday life.

Secondary analysis

Using data that someone else has already collected.

Content analysis

Systematically studying written, spoken, or visual material for patterns and meaning.

Auguste Comte

Founder of sociology; positivism; scientific method - Functionalist Perspective(foundational)

Émile Durkheim

Social facts outside individuals, influence behavior, and should be studied scientifically; study of suicide; mechanical solidarity - Functionalist Perspective

Harriet Martineau

Translation of Comte; study of domestic life and inequality - Conflict Perspective (early feminist theory)

Karl Marx

Social conflict; class struggle; inequality - Conflict Perspective

Herbert Spencer

Social evolution; Social Darwinism - Functionalist Perspective

Jane Addams

Social action; applied sociology; reform movements - Symbolic Interactionist Perspective/ Applied Sociology

Max Weber

Rationalization; bureaucracy; Protestant ethic - Symbolic Interactionist Perspective (also conflict elements)

W.E.B. Du Bois

Double consciousness; race and inequality; NAACP - Conflict Perspective

Irving Janis

Studied groups and decision-making. He coined the term groupthink.

George Mead

Developed the foundation of symbolic interactionism as well as the stages of development of the self, which focuses on how the self emerges through social experience, communication, and taking the role of the "other."

Charles Horton Cooley

Introduced the looking-glass self, explaining that people develop their self-identity by interpreting how others see and respond to them.

Thorstein Veblen

Known for his critique of capitalism and highlighted wasteful displays of wealth for status, called conspicuous consumption, and his theory of the leisure class (1899).