Sociology

Actually, after class, you email, so if you've got an idea, you're like, I don't know if this is really what he's looking for, feel free to send me an email office. The third section that I want you to focus on here is identify the causes. Now, you don't have to bring your own research or research articles into this. This is not research paper. I just wanted it to be... I just wanted to make sense. Make some connections to me and explain them. in a way that's reasonable, that's plausible. You don't have to bring in general articles or newspaper models, or anything like that, to say that this is an established relationship. That's why I should take it serious. I'm familiar with all that. I'm so soundous. I want to know how you make this. why it is that you think it makes sense, when you identify the causes, like, in terms of the social forces that affect your choices. And this strip on your dress, and this life sentence here, makes you sure you address why it's better than or not better. But why we can understand the outcome more fully, what we consider, these bar scale forces, and not merely as an influence on individual attributes or experiences. And then finally, make sure that you clearly explain the causal link between the social factors who identify it. And the phenomenon jersey. Everyone when we talk about causality last time, we talked about that third quality, or that third condition for meaning, the threshold comes out. John's burgessness. Why is your explanation make more sense than an alternative explanation? So demonstrate why people in similar social positions will be likely to experience similar outcomes, or like individual explanations alone might be insufficient. for understanding the thing they go right. All right, I want to look at two more things here, on a canvas. Are there any questions at this point? Yes?. Yeah, so the length, the question was about length. So the expectation that this is that this paper will be about, uh, two to three pages of, like, about 700 words. You need to write at least about that much to fully satisfy all the points in the group. One of the things that I said last time, but I'll reiterate it now for our purposes, is that I'm not a huge stickler when it comes to that word. If you send, if you submit a paper at 688 words, I'm not gonna... I have your 12 words short, and that's minus five or whatever. Don't worry about that. I'm not going to be that rigual. But be aware, if you're getting closer to 600, if you're sort of dwindling down towards 600, lower than 600, you probably have not bitten enough to fully satisfy all of the rubber points, and won't be able to change sort of the highest rate possible on the assignment. So bear that in mind. Students also ask me about formatting, like APA, MLA, et cetera. I don't require any particular formatting, just choose a format, and stick to it, as long as it's something I can read, because it's easy for me to figure out how you're organizing your ideas. That's all that's necessary for this ride. Any other questions before I move on? Yes. for the back of our... Sorry, let me come a little closer. Okay, so the question is, are you allowed to use outside sources to support your argument? The answer is, yes, you are allowed to. If you want to use outside resources to support your argument, your points, absolutely, please feel free to do so. Just remember that you are not required to do so, you can still achieve perfect score, theoretically, on the paper, without bringing in any outside sources whatsoever. So, you're more than welcome to do so, it certainly won't perfect whatsoever. But you're not required to do something. Good question, though. Anything else before I move the world? Okay, well, as usual, if anything comes to mind, please let me know. Two documents here that I have added for you to take a look at. If you need them. Is this one on third time of suicide in a sociological imagination? I won't go through this in detail, but basically this year, too, create an outline for what we talked about on Friday, so that way, if you're trying to think about this paper and going back to this content, and going, what did we talk about? Why does this matter? I'm not sure, I got everything the first time around. Take a look at this document, and it'll get into some detail here of white. We were talking about dirt time and suicide. It continues on the full PDF. The canvas interface is always weird about getting the PDFs, but once you download it and get it, you'll see. But this document is there, is one that I created. just to fully lay out the argument that I was presenting to you on Friday. So if you're trying to be like, I'm still figuring this out, I'm still wrapping my head around it, and what I can write about from my paper, take a look at this PDF here that should be in the first model. The next one. To take a look at. Is the writing guy? Again, the writing guy is not there to stress you out, or make you worry that if I don't, that if you don't hit all the points that I talk about in the sky, on your first paper, or in doing class writing assignments, then I'm gonna be like, Oh, they didn't read the writing guy, you know, take away points, left right, and said, It's more so just to orient you towards the planet writing that I want you to do. Any students come into my classes, and they're used to not riding from a first person perspective, not using pie, talking about what I did, my experiences. And this document will tell you things like, That is what I want you to do. I want you right now. I want you to tell me, I don't want you to be indirect. I want you to be very direct and crystal clear. You don't have to sort of, uh, infer or imply ideas. I want you to state that very directly. Um, so other things that this will talk about. Also, I have to do with... the difference between description and analysis. That's often one of the places where students get tripped up when they're writing sociologically, is students, I've noticed, are sort of, they don't want to make strong claims, and I understand. You don't want to make strong claims without strong evidence. But many times in this course, I'm going to ask you to sort of try anything. to make an argument. To connect some doubts for them. Just to see how you're thinking sociological. To go beyond description, in terms of what people experience, and try to talk about analysis. Why is it happening? What are these structural or sociological factors that are produced in the outcome that we're writing about, talking about? Let me see if the interface here will scroll down. Okay, so... let me see. So it gets to my first point that I just mentioned about using first person and personal examples. If I ask you to do it, please do it, please write that way. But take a look at the entire media, again. It's not meant to, sort of, scary or freak you out that I'm going to be incredibly harsh, if you don't follow this exactly. It's meant to guide you into writing more along the lines of what I'm looking for, of what, how I want you. Okay. So that's pretty much what I want to cover here at the beginning. Take a look at the assignment, looking at the supplemental documents that are, you know, on canvas, in the module. Any questions there before we get started on chapter one, it's here. Is it woman out here today? Yeah. I'm glad you both agree. I'm standing here going, It is a lot cooler outside, and I am dying. So, if you don't learn uncomfortable, then I guess we're just all in this together. All right, well, let us go ahead, then, and jump into chapter one, two. So what we're talking about, our lengthy introduction last week, our introduction of sociology, starting to get our bearings and get our feet underneath us about what it is that sociology is all about. How it works, how it thinks, I would understand is the wrong. The first chapter, hopefully, you all have got a chance to at least look at it, if you haven't, please do so as soon as possible. But the first chapter starts with the self. This is a really useful segue from the introduction. because the introduction, and a lot of the things that I talked about beyond it last week, were meant to emphasize the way in which the individual is fairly radically reimagined associated. As removed from the center of the way that we think, the way that we study the world, the way that we analyze. The social world around us. And so we begin the book, we begin the material today, talking about the self, when we take it as sort of the smallest possible humans. We're going to, again, hopefully talking about some things that are intriguing, non intuitive, and a different way of thinking about ourselves as individuals that we might have people. So remember that last time, some of the key things that we visited in the instruction. had to do with social facts. Remember, we talked about the language spare time identified social facts as the objects of sociological stuff. That it's one thing just to say that sociology is the science of sociology, the science of society. But the things that we study, that we're collecting data on and analyzing, theoretically about, are these things called social facts, which have three key features. Do you remember their external to the individual? They exist above and beyond the individual? They exert a persuasive or coercive force of this. There are things that we can just idly escape by and ignore. By the very definition, they impact and shape our lives, not just the environment in which we find ourselves. But they afford us different opportunities, or constrain our choices. insofar as how we live our lives. And that third feature is their interactive. They are in the products of social interaction. This is one of the features that highlights are underscores that are, nature is being different from sort of natural or what I call natural facts or scientific patterns. Things that you're going to be studying when you're over at physics and chemistry, et cetera, things that are simply immutable laws of the universe that work to say whether or not humans are here or here. And that we study social facts, collect data on them, so that we can identify patterns. and build sociological theory, when you touch very, very briefly on sort of those classical schools of sociological theory. And we also... took a look at a brief overview of sociological methods. Talk about the dinners we want to take, qualitative methods, quantitative methods being the methods that we use in sociology, capture data, relevant to questions that could be answered with numerical, mathematical information, that could be analyzed statistically. Whereas qualitative research has to do with data that isn't best captured numerically or mathematically. Here, we talk about things like in depth interviews, where we have to capture linguistic information. and analyze contents and meaning. One of the other things that we talked about lifestyle? In the case of WEB DuBois, if you remember him, is that we don't just choose quantitative and qualitative methods based on the questions that we're asking. We also have to consider the audience. for the research that we do. Who are we trying to persuade, four out of four, and for what reason? And finally, from last time, the overarching goal... At least in my mind for this course, but also it's the tool of thinking to develop over the course of the semester. Is this thing that we call the sociological imagination, coined by the sociologist, C. Wright Mills? It's a way to see the intersection of personal biography, your own story, about life. as an individual, a social agent in the world, and the intersection of your life with the forces of history. Those things that are broader, more persistent in society than ourselves. That sociology is finding that intersection and studying it, analyzing it, and theorizing about it. And that's what we're going to try to develop over the course of the semester. And the thing, I really hope that you all hang on to, once you're gone, more than any other individual piece of information that we talk about. But moving on. What we're talking about in chapter one. Is that, as you might guess, from what we talked about with the dirt line, and sort of the groundwork that we're laying so far in sociology? is that we can also talk about the way in which this self. The individual is a social fact. And that might seem a little bit strange, counterintuitive, or even paradoxic. Because what I talk about those three features of social science. We don't think of the self as external to us. That's probably the condition of a social factor that's hardest to understand. It's certainly persuasive or coercive. I think all of us are struggling persuaded by the idea that we are, or have, the self. And probably the one that's maybe a little bit easier to understand is that it's a product of human interaction. That we don't have a self spontaneously. That is, if we put out of the ground, that it's something that is cultivated, brought into being, through social interaction. Because we know that the self does not develop in isolation. Humans, too, grow up and live in the absence of other humans. A, not only do they physically and psychologically not thrive, they fail to develop what we would consider to be any kind of stuff. Any concept of who they are. They do not acquire language, they do not acquire culture. In many ways, an individual, who comes into being, or exists without others, in any ways, fails to have a self at all. It is this paradoxical nature of itself. That it feels deeply individual, it's how we reflect on our lives. We understand our experiences. Well, we think of them as something that is organized. around this thing called ourselves. that is consistent across time and space that is known and knowable to other people. And that is individual thinking pages. We possess self awareness. We know that we are here in the world. But we also are capable of cognitively going a step deeper. Human beings have this thing called meta consciousness or meta awareness. Is that not only do we have an awareness of the world in ourselves, we are aware of that awareness. Think about when we talk to ourselves, and we have our internal model. We are talking to ourselves about ourselves. And an argument that sociology and others are making is that this is a capacity that is cultivated through socialization, through experiences, and tools that come from outside of us as individuals. But we can contemplate or exist our own existence through our social lens, as if we are another person that we carry along with ourselves. Because even though we often contrast, the individual versus the social, that even our most private thoughts, and our internal feelings, are shaped and structured, by things beyond us. where the society that we find ourselves in, the culture that we've been socialized into, the language that we've been taught, that we think of reflexively. We can automatically turn to, to understand everything that we think of, that represents itself and the individual. One particular thinker that's useful to us here, just start talking about how it is that we analyze and understand. The self is a social kind. Comes to us from, uh, an individual who's usually claimed, actually, by social psychology. George Herbert, who was working around the same time that Dirkham was around the turn of the 20th century. And in line with this discussion, of myself as a social fact, not only has awareness, but the capacity to reflect on that awareness, to know themselves as a thinking agent, but also the thing being thought about. This is where Mead comes in. It offers that observation. But we are simultaneously... the thing doing, the thinking about the world, but also the think... The object and the thing being thought about. to that point about better consciousness. We are actively doing the thinking, but we are also reflecting on those thoughts themselves. Another way to put what meat argued is that we are staying simultaneously, both subject and object of our own worlds. Another way that he presented this is explained between the eye and the knee. It needs formulation, the eyes, the subject, or the subjective element. Of this thing that we call the stuff. That the subjective refers to the spontaneous, creative, active, and unpredictable, unpredictable element itself. It represents our immediate response to social situations. In many ways, it's what we bring to a given context that is unique, that, again, is unpredictable. They represent what we want to attach to our sense of self, our sense of individuality. that we think of as we're the author of that experience, using my example of language. We offer the sentences or the paragraphs or the thoughts that previously were unspoken, even though we're using a language. spoken over centuries, by hundreds of millions of people, it has a structure and a vocabulary that came long before us, it was not settled by. But on the other hand, not in opposition, but complimentary to the high, or the subjective aspect of the self, is the me, or the objective aspect of the self. The media refers to the set of internalized social expectations, norms, and roles, learn through interaction, and role taking with others. So while the eye represents what we bring to the table, what we bring to a social context that no one else does? The meat represents the structure that was already there. That we aren't bringing... along with their eye, with their subjective element. complete chaos and unpredictability. Well, we bring that eye into a social context that is already built, that already has roles. And then we learn that through interacting with others, as we grow up, as we're socialized into social worlds that we belong. Let me make this a little bit more concrete and a little bit less abstract. I want to go through a handful of examples. A little bit more than the book does, because I think the book sort of introduces this and just moves past it a little bit too quick. So, some examples that I thought about. Highlight what we invented when we talked about the eye of the name. If you consider the example of something like team sports, I don't know how they would be playing team sports, or maybe you played them in high school or earlier. I was always. He's a basketball fan, but, unfortunately, did not have the skills of continuing. But I knew the game, how the game worked. I mean was the position. What plays? I knew about the aspect of this, the meat, or the injective aspect. That part of participating in team sports is nowhere the structure of the court or the field. Anticipating plays in team strategy, by internalizing your position, and the expectations attached to them position. And more broadly, your role on the field. Were you in a leadership role or not? What are the expectations attached to your actions? Your moves in a game. They came not from who you are as a unique individual. We're from, again, your role on the team, or your role on the field. But again, we don't just have the me or the objective part of the sub. We also bring the eye. onto the field or into the game. As individual players can execute spontaneous creative moves. Even within the bounds of the rules or the structure of the game. We might make choices. or decisions, that other people may not have made. adhering to their same rules, and in that same position. During my game. Another example... has to do with something here like the classic. Where we know what roles there are here. This one's pretty simple. There's a distinction between students and a truck and instructor, for teachers. We know what the expectations are. They'll expect me to come in the front room, talk for 50 minutes, about something hopefully relevant to sociology, especially at an introductory level. And you students are meant to be in the audience, be in the lecture hall to participate, to take notes, to listen. And asking questions, there's an order. There's a process that happens. There's the expectation of silence. I didn't have to remind anyone to be quiet on the first days on the first day of class. Everyone knows the way the plastic functions. But at the same time, there's a subject I desire. So he might prepare it, but it's hard in a class this way. But if there are opportunities for giving input, you have your own unique thoughts and feelings about the material. If we're able to have a classroom discussion, you would make unique contributions. That sit within your role as a student, but nonetheless may differ meaning from the contributions made by others. Just to get into a couple more examples to make sure that this feels really concrete. You can even think of something... a little bit smaller scale, maybe a little bit more open in, but something like a classroom, or a game. Which is a job. It still has a structure to it. There still is a formal aspect to it. We know that there are interviewers and an interviewee. You know that there are expectations. in terms of how we present ourselves. that we're there to answer the questions, and maybe ask if you thoughtful ones. They were there to make a case this is why we should be hired for this particular position. But at the same time, there's an expectation that we will give, like, oil... What do I say? Make a case for ourselves. The distinguishes us from other people. that when we bring in the eye of the subjective eye, we're supposed to adapt fluidly on unexpected questions. Do you need processing? Or to give answers to different meaningfully for other people? So the interviewers can make a decision as to whether or not they would prefer you as a candidate versus others. And then, finally, when I think about something like social media that we might think of as much more casual, open ended, maybe less structured and less formal. Then maybe a job energy site. Did we know that there's an objective element to social media? Again, in means terms. That we exist as an object in other people's social universe, 'cause even we're thinking about all our social universe, where we're, I guess I would say, connected to people that we might not know directly or personally at all. And that there are expectations around presentation, and that people will react. to the personality and the content that we create, or maybe we don't create. Well, we want to present ourselves in a particular weapon. Knowing the audience that's out there, viewing interface circus. But again, coming from each perspective, when we think about the eye or the subjective element, we're also considering the fact that we're interested in differentiation, creativity, spontaneity. Something that is unique. That operates within the boundaries of the role of the rules that exist in this context, but nevertheless allows for some sort of differentiation. or creative freedom. In this idea, the distinction between the eye and the meat is the two parts of the suburb. When we think about the cell as a social instinct. Emerge from natural human biology. That one thing you learned about, maybe in a psychology class, or you haven't? We'll talk about it briefing out. Is that one thing that humans are capable of? And if you've ever been around small kids, you'll see them develop it randomly. One thing is the theory of mind. For this notion? That is, we grow up as we're socialized into our world, that we develop the capacity for knowing that other minds exist beyond our right. That they have their own distinct thoughts and feelings? They may sometimes overlap, coincide with ours, or sometimes may not. But that those other mines are knowable? through communication, whether we're talking about herbal, pomaljation. So there's things that we've talked about, that capacity, for the self, to engage in a reciprocity or a reciprocal relationship between the eye and the mean. to recognize that we are both subject and object. And to be aware of that interplay also means that we can use that skill, to interpret other ones. And this is something that we develop that has been growth, from small kids. And that another feature, a function, of our brain, is the feature that we have, simply by virtue of being human, is we also have these things called mirror arms. I don't know if this is something that, again, people are familiar with. But again, it's a biological reality of how human brains work, where we have these things on mirror. which represent neural mechanisms? that allows to basically take in information about other people, to recognize, again, both nonverbal and verbal cues, to empathize with other people's reactions, their emotional states. The information they're trying to communicate to us. And then simulate, in our own words. What those thoughts or feelings might be. And basically create a small, sort of experimental version. of that other person's interior state for us to react to. The reason I think that it's useful that your author talks about these things, brings in a little bit of neurosispense. is to show the way in which we are even biologically prime, to connect with other people, through the theory of mind and through miracles. It reminds of ornament to exist in isolation. They are fundamentally structurally set up to constantly read their human social environment, to interpret it and to simulate it. in order to facilitate interaction and communication. Another way of thinking about itself, which is similar to, but fairly distinct, from... means way of thinking about itself, and, again, as a social factor. There's something that could be... the focus of sociological experience. Well, it's another social psychologist working about roughly the same time as me. And he developed what's known as the looking glass. So, or looking glass theory or something. There's a picture of a mirror here, an old sort of antique or name era, because if you're not familiar with the certain looking glasses, simply are an old fashioned term for mirror. Now, like I said, Cooley advanced an idea of the stuff that was similar. to me. He also argued that the self was a social fellow, that humans did not exist in isolation, but the way that we became who we are was through human interaction. But he took a different approach than me. In his idea of Lehi versus me, the subjective object, or the subjective and objective nature of the South. Cooley argued that humans have organized a sense of a self concept. To understand ourselves. Subconcept being, our sense of who we are. as bounded from other people. Where do we start? an end? What are the things that make us who we know? What are the characteristics, traits, personality attributes? Well, cool to even notice that this thing that we call the self concept. is something that's deeply influenced by other people in their perceptions of it. They can be shaped by people who may not even directly know us, and it can even be shaped through expectations of who we are, who we're going to be before we're born. By the family that we're born into? What the expectations of our parents are... What kind of family do we have? The work that they do, the education that they have, the place in the community. This will start to create expectations and structure the experiences. Or the time before they're even more. It could happen in a big laser, even small place. The one that I always dream about is I think about my order on it. When my wife was pregnant. And I remember we used to joke about their stuff about the way that when she started moving, it started kicking, and we started joking about her being stubborn. And that was more than 13 years ago now. And we still talk about how stubborn she is. And we're sort of teasing and hearing our hearts on it. But that idea of her having that personality straight, whether it's true or false, is something that's starting to be shaped before she was even out the world while speaking. One element that Cooley adds to his formulation of the cell. The definitively sort of extends it in a different direction for me, is by the introduction of the idea of the generalizing company. Now, what we think about, ourselves in society, our world, that in Cooley's formulation, we are just thinking about, are we playing the role that we've been talking about? Even if we're bringing our unique spin to it, why don't we just simply, are we fulfilling that role or doing what's expected? The fully suggested is that we have this sense that there's other people, for the day, or society. We have this sense of what it's like to be watched to be observed. To be described, to be judged. And then this generalized other is something that we construct, and create a mental representation of group expectations outside of ourselves, maybe outside of our immediate circle. You argued that the sense of the generalized other was how we came to conclusions about, sort of, what will people think, if I don't do this? How do people realact by doing this? We might not have these conversations with ourselves explicitly. They become intuitive reactions. And Cooley also highlights that this is something that is a reciprocal phenomenon. That while others act as a looking glass for us, through the generalized other, that as we become members of our society, we form part of the generalized other for other people. We become a looking glass, reflected other people's choices, and actions back to them. You put this in a little bit more detailed terms. The way that this works, assembly through the fact that we have that capacity to imagine other people. We have the theory of mind. We can imagine with some... fidelity, simulate the interior states of other people. We know this is something that we are biologically capable of here. Can you imagine how our appearance, our behavior, our ideas, the things that we say, the things that we do are perceived by the people around us? It doesn't mean that we might like one anything. or what their feelings are, but we are able to tell you what those opinions, what those reactions might. Oh, I got ahead of myself there. Is the second piece of this is interpretation. Not only do we imagine the impact that I'm having on other people, you can also imagine their interpretation. whether or not our choices, our behaviors, our appearance, et cetera, overvote criticism, or gain approval, will be met with injuries, and might not even be noticed. And then, third, we use this information to guide our choices. We developed this sense of feeling about it. Or a set of emotional responses. Including, but not limited to, things like pride and shame for self confidence, anxiety or self doubt. But it used to form a continuous sense of self continuous sense of self consciousness. time already? Let me just get started on this one last bit, and then we'll wrap up. So, did you do the same thing that I did with me? Did you give you some concrete examples to react to another stage? About why Cooley's idea is different from me. To take those exact same examples, like I did with sports. Whereas, me, you made a distinction between the eye and the beam. If we apply that to sport or gain, we recognize that, we're being gained, we have certain positions, certain both stars. representing the meat of the object development. Any either bring the eye or the subjective element that brings unique creative contributions. We're coolly asked to this. is that we don't just act indefinitely and creatively, within prescribed roles that we will socialize into, that are hard for other people. We also bring into it a sense of what other people are thinking about. And their feelings, right? That when you're on XP, rules, athletes or players might imagine how they're viewed by their players on their own team, by the other team, or by any spectators, are they seen as a strong player or a weak player? A leader? Someone who does not demonstrate... Isn't that by internalizing these perceptions, this structure of how we feel about ourselves as individuals and as players of the game. probably that's, so I will go ahead and let y'all go for today. Have a good rest of the week. Okay, let me know if you have any questions.