Sociology Test 2

SOCIALIZATION

• Sociology - The process by which people learn, through interaction with others, that which they must know to become human, to survive and function in society.

• Rhesus Monkeys - Bodily contact and interaction with others seems to be a basic biological need and that when this need was not met early in the monkey’s life serious physical and emotional problems resulted.

  • Infant/mother bonding due not to feeding but to intimate physical contact.

• Foundling hospitals - House and care for orphaned and abandoned infants or infants taken from indigent families that could not take care of them. These public institutions were built and administered during the great waves of immigration to America - between the 1880s and 1930s.

  • Before the 1930s: the belief that the best way to raise kids was a combination of modern hygiene and strict detached care designed to transform a child quickly into an independent and autonomous being.

  • In some orphanages death rates ranged from 32% to 75% in the first two years of infancy.

• Psychoanalyst David Levy - interested in infants raised by overprotective mothers. He set up a control group made up of children who had never had maternal care as infants, and who subsequently were unable to establish attachment bonds with adoptive parents.

  • Children who lacked early bonding with a mother figure, although often affectionate on the surface, showed little or no real emotional warmth underneath.

  • Sexually aggressive, antisocial, lying, stealing, no meaningful friendships.

• Iowa Orphanage Experiment - one’s level of intelligence depends a great deal on early, stimulating interaction with other humans.

  • Your ability to love and care for other people depends on how you were loved and cared for as a child.

• Brain development - Stuff like proteins, vitamins, fats are vital nutrients for the developing brain but so are interactions with other people.

  • As we become a two-legged species, the human pelvis had to narrow to accommodate our upright stance.

  • In simple engineering: any further brain growth in the uterus and we couldn’t be born.

  • ¾ of our brain growth takes place outside the womb.

  • At the age of two, a child’s brain contains twice as many synapses and consumes twice as much energy as the brain of a normal adult.

  • “Neural Darwinism” involves the selection of those nerve cells, synapses, and circuits that help the brain adapt to its particular environment and the discarding of others.

  • Synaptic pruning - unused (connections and circuits) are pruned out.

  • Tiny bursts of electricity shoot through the brain knitting neurons into circuits as well defined as those etched into silicon chips.

• Infants pick up quickly on whether a parent is stressed, anxious, depressed.

• Attachment disorders are the result of negative experiences in this early relationship.

• Windows of Opportunity in Brain Development

  • Vision: birth to six months. Children who are deprived of visual stimulation during this time will not develop the necessary neural connections, and may end up visually impaired.

  • Speech & Vocabulary: open between birth and 3-6 years of age. The sounds a child hears in those years will largely determine the side of his/her adult vocabulary.

• About 23% of our children grow up in poverty. 40-50 million of Americans live in poverty.

  • The average child living in a family on welfare hears 6/6 words per hour.

  • The average child from a working class family hears 1,251 words per hour.

  • The average child from a professional family hears 2,153 words per hour.

GLOBAL WARMING

• In 1895, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius discovered that humans could enhance the greenhouse effect by making carbon dioxide - a greenhouse gas.

• The atmosphere is a mixture of gases just right for life. Lots of nitrogen and oxygen and traces of carbon dioxide, argon, & water.

• The Industrial Revolution cranks up in the mid-1700s. Burning of fossil fuels.

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - the panel was made up of 2500 of the world’s preeminent atmospheric scientists.

  • The earth was heating up and mankind was rapidly and drastically changing our climate because of the introduction of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

  • WE ARE DOING A HORRIBLE JOB !!!

  • To keep temps from rising 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, carbon dioxide emissions would have to drop by about 45% by 2030. To none by 2050.

ISOLATION (COLLAPSE OF COMMUNITY)

• Community is disappearing.

  • We are becoming more disconnected from our communities, neighbors, friends, and families.

  • We are becoming more and more socially isolated from each other.

• Startling evidence of change in the last 25 years, visiting is at a decline of 45% in barely two decades.

  • Given the choice between going out with friends or having them over, or just staying home alone, we prefer staying home 2 to 1.

• Between 1976 and 1997 family bonds were loosening rapidly.

  • Between 1981 and 1999 the average frequency of card playing among American adults plunged. Card playing could disappear entirely in 20 years.

  • Neighborhood ties in 1990s are less than half as strong as they were in the 1950s.

• Philanthropy is way down. The desire to promote the welfare of others, expressed especially by the generous donation of money to good causes.

• Altruism is way down. The principle or practice of unselfish concern for the welfare of others.

• Thick trust - trusting your good friends, trust in those you know personally. (strong)

• Thin trust - trusting your fellow citizens, trust people in general even thought you don’t really know them. (disappearing)

• Suburban Sprawl - Irresponsible, often poorly-planned development that destroys green space, increases traffic and air pollution, crowds schools and drives up taxes.

  • America: 2,300sq ft. France: 946 sq ft. Germany: 932 sq ft. Spain: 917 sq ft. Britain: 817 sq ft.

• Suburbia - a collective effort to live a private life.

• When exposed to the cold virus, isolated people were three times more likely to catch the cold than people who had lots of close connections to other people.

• The isolated rats develop eighty-four times the number of breast cancer tumors as the rats who had a community.

• People who are socially disconnected are between two and five times more likely to die from all causes.

• In any given year 10% of Americans now suffer from major depression.

• RAT DRUG EXPERIMENT!!!!

• In Vietnam, using heroin was as common as chewing gum among U.S. soldiers. Some 20% of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there.

• According to the pharmaceutical theory to addiction, their brains and bodies were being hijacked by the drug.

ENVIRONMENT

• Roundup is our public enemy number one probably, but that’s one of 260 chemicals that are now prevalent in our food system.

  • We’ve lost about 40% of biology on the planet in the last 40 or 50 years, and so we’re almost halfway done with this great extinction.

  • In the U.S. industry admits to releasing over 4 billion pounds of toxic chemicals a year.

  • The average U.S. person now consumes twice as much as they did 50 years ago.

  • We each see more advertisements in one year than people 50 years ago saw in a lifetime.

  • In the U.S. our national happiness peaked sometime in the 1950s.

  • In the U.S., we spend 3-4 times as many hours shopping as our counterparts in Europe do.

  • Average U.S. house size has doubled since the 1970s.

  • Each person in the U.S. makes 4 ½ pounds of garbage a day. That is twice what we each made thirty years ago.

• We are now aware that one by one the natural resources we have come to depend on are dwindling away.

• Consumerism - an unexamined faith in personal and spiritual fulfillment achieved via an endless stream of cheap and disposable consumer products.

• Materialism - getting a lot of stuff because having a lot of stuff, especially a lot more stuff than the other fellow, that would make you happy.

• 2,300 coal burning plants in the world. 620 in China. 600+ in the US. 18 in Texas.

• What we need is a sustainable economy – one that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

• Planned Obsolescence - they actually make stuff that is designed to be useless as quickly as possible so we will chuck it and go by a new one.

• Perceived Obsolescence: convinces us to throw away stuff that is still perfectly useful.

EMPATHY

• John Locke (1632-1704): The one predisposition of humans - to acquire property.

• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): Human nature is aggressive and self-interested.

• Adam Smith (1723-1790): “Each individual is born to pursue his or her own naked economic self-interest.”

• Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The fundamental drive is to reproduce ourselves.

• Sigmund Freud: NASTY. SEX. BABIES. 

• “We evolved as intensely interdependent social animals and our sense of empathy toward others, our sensitivity to reciprocity, our desire for inclusion and loyalty to the groups we bond with, the intrinsic satisfaction we derive from cooperative activities , our concern for having the respect and approval of others, all evolved in humankind to temper and constrain our individualistic, selfish impulses.”

• So what are humans (and human nature) really: An affectionate, highly social animal, who craves companionship, abhors isolation and is biologically predisposed to express empathy to other beings.

COOPERATIVE AND HELPFUL.