Survivor!

As those of you who have had me in class before might know, I have kind of a thing for the TV show Survivor. I don't think I have what it takes to be a sneaky person to go the distance on the show, but it's a perfect labratory of human behavior. We identified all the different types of groups that existed in the episode of Survivor we watched in class today, and although I didn't ask you to identify these in class, I know there are examples of the different types of group social interaction within the video as well (remember these? Cooperation, Conflict, Social Exchange, Coercion, and Conformity). The way all the different members of the tribe work together to build a shelter or approach a challenge? Cooperation. The way they all gang up on Billy to have him voted out of the tribe? Conflict. HOW they got the people to gang up on Billy even though they all didn't agree with Ozzy's strategy? Coercion. The way they all went along with Ozzy's dumb idea anyway? Conformity. My challenge for you today is go out and try to identify each of the different types of social interactions within not only the real life encounters that you have, but in different television shows or movies that you might watch. They're out there......

People Who Need People.....

according to Barbara Streisand, are the LUCKIEST people in the world! Or at least, that is how the song goes :) As we move onto our next unit in Sociology, groups, we'll be examining WHY people need to be around others in order to be functioning members of society. Remember when we talked about the concept of solitary confinement in prisons, learned about it when we went to jail and the sheriff talked about it, as well as saw what it did to Andy in the movie Shawshank Redemption? Solitary confinement really messes with a person's brain as we are inherently social creature who need some sort of human contact to be a "normal" functioning members of society. It's like the monkeys in Harlowe's experiment who preferred the fuzzy metal monkey rather than the food metal monkey...we just want to be around somebody/thing who interacts with us. We're going to be identifying many different kinds of groups in class today: primary, secondary, kinship, interest, just to name a few. I challenge you for your blog post that is due on FRIDAY to list all the different groups of people you belong to and explain the roles that they have played in socializing you to American society.

And the Results are.....

Well, we did our data collection, and the results came in to answer our question of whether the kindness of strangers would stop a theft. As expected, there was a lot of variations to our answers. For the most part, we found that humanity was good and would step in, but we still had our lingering doubts, especially those who set up sting operations and had their wallets/phones/calculators nabbed. I'm glad to see that there were so many different methods of research done in the class as we could see the up and downsides of all of them.

I had mentioned to you the story of an Indian grad student at the University of Chicago, Sudhir Venkatesh, who wanted to study the workings of a typical African American Chicago street gang in the early 90s. He entered the housing projects and began surveying gang members by asking them how it felt to be black and poor, with a spectrum of potential answers from very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, to very good. As you can imagine, he didn't get too many answers, and he was actually held hostage by the gang overnight because they didn't know what he was up to. The result of this hostage experience was that he was befriended by the leader of the street gang and given an up close and personal look at the gang, getting much more rich detail. If you'd like to read an excerpt from the resulting book, Gang Leader For a Day, click HERE. If you'd like to see the movie, wait until next year when it comes to a theater near you :) If you want hear from Venkatesh, see below. Compare his research methods to your own. Do you think you got the best results that you could have, or were there barriers in the way from getting the true answers? Humans aren't too easy to study, are they? :)

Putting It Into Perspective...

We took some time out today to look at the three perspectives of Sociology, functionalism, conflict theory and symbolic interactionism. Of the 3 perspectives, symbolic interactionism is always the trickiest of the bunch because the meanings we assign to symbols may not necessairly match those of others. We took a look at some Snowmageddon 2011 pictures and did some analysis of poor dudes snowblowing their roof, and so on. Pretty straight forward, right? But if you saw the picture above, could you be so sure of what was going on? Is it Mardi Gras in Japan? Are those go-go dancers on the top of the float? Is it legal to dance on a float? Is it a float? Are those guys going to do some kung-fu? What's going on? In order to fully understand symbolic interactionism, one needs to realize that there are 3 assumptions that go along with the theory: (1) you learn meaning through observing others, (2) you then base your behavior on those reactions, and (3) you use the meaning you have internalized to predict how others will respond to stimuli out there in society. So for the picture above, if you were Japanese, you would (1) know that this was taken at a matsuri (a local Japanese festival) which celebrates either a deity or a historical event for a village or town, and the float (dashi) is a part of a parade that goes through town, and you would (2) be following along with the parade, being loud and joyful and you would (3) know others would be loud and joyful because that's what you do at a matsuri. How can you interpret that which you see around YOU on a daily basis?

Freaks and Geeks

I loved this show when it was on TV. I didn't go to high school in the 1980s, but even today, there is a lot that is timeless when it comes to describing the high school experience. Today you watched the pilot episode for the series and did some application of our sociologists and perspectives to what you saw. Did Sam and and his guy posse have anything to do with Herbert Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism? How did Lindsay trying to fit in with the "burnouts" an example of conflict theory? How is the school dance connected to symbolic interactionism? Looking forward to the connections that you've made to prepare for next week's test!

I'm So Puzzled....

So while we're waiting to gather results on our theft study, we're taking a 2 day break to talk about sociological perspectives. We're going to introduce them formally tomorrow (get ready to meet the functionalist, the symbolic interactionist and the conflict theorist), we got a sneak peek at them through our puzzle activity today. Think to when you were a little kid putting a puzzle together. What was the first thing you would reach for? The edge pieces. Why? They put your picture in perspective. You know how big it is, you have an idea of what part of the picture goes where, etc. But then you didn't have any edge pieces today to start when you assembled your puzzle. A bit frustrating? I'd think so. You also didn't have the picture to start either. A bit more frustrating? You bet! How were you supposed to figure out what the picture was going to be? Well, you all came up with strategies to work through the problem. You knew to put the like-colored pieces together because those colors mean that they went together. So you figured out the FUNCTION of the different pieces, as well as the puzzle itself, you assigned SYMBOLIC meaning to the different pieces you used, and you might have felt a bit of CONFLICT between you and the puzzle. Looks like some sociology in a 100 piece puzzle box if you ask me :)

Would YOU Stop a Theft?

So we watched this video in class today, and other than getting a nice Jersey Shore vibe at 8AM (have their 15 minutes run out yet?), it poses a valuable sociological question: what factors come into play when you decide whether or not to stop a theft in progress? We took today to analyze the problem and discuss all the variables that might cause people to step in or not: whether the victim was a hottie or nottie, whether the victim was normal or a wackadoo, whether the victim was social or stayed to herself. Other variables come into play as well, such as value of the stolen item, the age of the victim, and where the theft takes place. We're going to take some time in class tomorrow to discuss how we can test the hypotheses that you all wrote in class today and partake in some research design (which would probably please Emile Durkheim if he were still around today). One of the ways you can collect data is through a survey you create on a website called http://www.polleverywhere.com/. By using everyone's favorite piece of technology (the cellphone) you can place your poll directly on your Facebook page or blog and have your friends respond. I've attached my survey here for you guys to check out, and reply to if you want. There are many other ways to gather data, and we'll come up with them in class tomorrow, then the world is yours to sociologically mess with :)

Make a live audience poll at Poll Everywhere