We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.– Rev. Martin Luther King in Letter from Birmingham Jail.
It is fascinating to watch groups of people going about their business in malls, airports, at home and other places. One time at the mall, I watched people engaging in the simple activity of entering and exiting an escalator. After some time, my daughter in throes of all the outlet stores, I noticed there were generally three types of people who got on the escalator: those who immediately got on, those who slowed down took a sense of the situation, and those people who were like the bather tentatively testing the water for warmth, got on the escalator is phases. One of our reasons for being as social scientists is to search for patterns and explanations of those patterns in social life.
In my years as a professor, I sought to have students understand that for the sociologists, we live in a world of averages. Although, we may study individuals as case studies to see the intersection between biography and history, sociologists study group behavior. Moreover, just because you may have a brother, sister, or friend who doesn’t follow a trend or “fit” with an average, does not mean that both the trend and average are wrong. Anecdotes do not disprove the “rule.”
The proper place to start with any discussion is laying out the parameters of what it is we want to discuss and defining what we mean when we talk about various things. This chapter sets out what sociological social psychology is and how it may compare to psychological social psychology.
Social Psychology [is] the systematic study of people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior in social contexts.– (Rohall et al., 2007:4)
Furthermore, according to the text (Rohal et al., 2007:4),
When sociologists study social psychology, they emphasize the ways in which society shapes the meaning of social interactions, while also assessing the effects of the broad social conditions on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Social science is not based on speculation, leaps of faith, or anything that can not be tested in some fashion. What is sociology? Remember your earlier classes about the origins of sociology—August Comte, positivism, etc. Positivism is the idea that we can use science to explore social behavior.
Social Psychology is a science. We use a set of organized procedures to understand and predict why people have certain beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. Our approach differs from knowledge gained from authority (sergeants and priests) or tradition. Unlike psychology, we are interested in both our internalized and externalized social worlds. We use macro (large-scale) and smaller, micro-level theories to help us make sense of group behavior. The paradigm followed throughout your text is symbolic interactionism.
William James, George Herbert Mead, and W.E.B. Du Bois are some key figures in the emergence of symbolic interactionism. This “American”[i] approach is pragmatic, which means basically that the paradigm must be centered on answering social questions with practical solutions. Symbolic interactionism tends to focus on micro-level social life.
Please make sure that you carefully review the section about the three perspectives of social psychology: 1) symbolic interactionism, 2) social structure and personality, and 3) group processes. In Symbolic Interactionism (SI from now on), shared meaning is everything. A reflection of that is language. You may remember the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from another class—the idea that language shapes our reality. Various social structures influence our individual behavior (e.g. education, religion, etc.). What is the role of agency in this process? Finally group processes are such things as socialization, stratification, and social control.
One of my main duties as your sociology professor is to cultivate within each of you a sociological imagination. We need to continually reflect the how larger society impacts our lives in a daily way.
Another point to consider as you begin this course is how sociology if done well, like Toto pulling back the curtain on the Wizard, focuses on hidden assumptions, agendas, and meanings.
The final point I want to make is how pervasive culture is for us. This may be material culture (books, desks, and even our Wiis) and nonmaterial culture (beliefs, ideas, etc.). The nonmaterial culture drives the material culture. What are the meanings you find in an object? What is the point of a hammer? Can you use it for more than nails? To begin to make sense of culture, we as scientists need to not only provide our interpretations of what the “natives” are doing (etic) but also ask them what they think they are doing (emic).
RESOURCES
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Berger, Peter L. 1963. Invitation to Sociology; a Humanistic Perspective. 1st ed. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday.
Buford May, Reuben A. 2001. “”The Sid Cartwright Incident and More”: An African American Male’s Interpretive Narrative of Interracial Encounters at The University Of Chicago.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 24:75-100.
Collins, Randall. 1985. Three Sociological Traditions: Selected Readings. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fine, Gary Alan. 1979. “Small Groups And Culture Creation: The Idioculture Of Little League Baseball Teams.” American Sociological Review 44:733-745.
Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall.
Heise, David R. 1999. “Controlling Affective Experience Interpersonally.” Social Psychology Quarterly 62:4-16.
House, James S. 1977. “The Three Faces of Social Psychology.” Sociometry 40:161-177.
Leary, Mark R, and June Price Tangney, eds. 2003. “Seeking Self-Esteem: Construction, Maintenance, and Protection of Self-Worth.” P. 703 in Handbook of Self and Identity. New York: Guilford Press.
Liebow, Elliot. 2003. Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. New ed. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield.
Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nash, Jeffrey E. 2000. “Racism In The Ivory City The Natural History Of A Research Project.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 23:147-168.
Rohall, David E. , Melissa A. Milkie, and Jefferey W. Lucas. 2007. Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives. Boston, MA: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.
Ritzer, George. 1996. Classical Sociological Theory. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Rosenberg, Morris. 1986. Conceiving the Self. Reprint ed. Malabar, Fla: R.E. Krieger.
Rosenberg, Morris. 1990. “Reflexivity and Emotions.” Social Psychology Quarterly 53:3-12.
Rosenberg, Morris, and Ralph H Turner, eds. 1990. “Social Structure and Personality.” P. 776 in Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives. New Brunswick, U.S.A: Transaction Publishers.
Schieman, Scott, Tetyana Pudrovska, Leonard I. Pearlin, and Christopher G. Ellison. 2006. “The Sense of Divine Control and Psychological Distress: Variations across Race and Socioeconomic Status.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45:529-549.
[i] Georg Simmel, a German sociologist, provided a number of key insights in what would later be called symbolic interactionism such as dyads and triads.
