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.