▲ Here children experience ordered interaction in the competitive environment of a soccer game. What values, skills, attitudes, and assumptions about life and social interaction do you think these kids are learning?
© Moodboard/Cultura/Getty Images
Two-person interactions—dyads—are the smallest units studied by sociologists. Examples of dyads include roommates discussing their classes, a professor and student going over an assignment, a husband and wife negotiating their budget, and two children playing. Next in size are small groups consisting of three or more interacting people who know each other—a family, a neighborhood or peer group, a classroom, a work group, or a street gang. Then come increasingly larger groups—organizations such as sports or scouting clubs, neighborhood associations, and local religious congregations. Among the largest groups contained within nations are ethnic groups and national organizations or institutions, such as Google or Facebook, the Republican and Democratic national political parties, and national religious organizations like the Southern Baptists. Nations themselves are still larger and can sometimes involve hundreds of millions of people. In the past several decades, social scientists have increasingly focused on globalization, the process by which the entire world is becoming a single interdependent entity. Of particular interest to sociologists is how these various groups are organized, how they function, how they influence one another, and why they can come into conflict.
Thinking Sociologically
Identify several dyads, small groups, and large organizations to which you belong. Did you choose to belong, or were you born into membership in these groups? How does each group influence who you are and the decisions you make? How do you influence each of the groups?
Ideas Underlying Sociology
The idea that one action can cause or result in something else is a core idea in all science. Sociologists also share several ideas that they take for granted about the social world. These ideas about humans and social life are supported by considerable evidence, and they are no longer matters of debate or controversy. They are considered to be true. Understanding these core assumptions helps us see how sociologists approach the study of people in groups.
People are social by nature.
This means that humans seek contact with other humans, interact with one another, and influence and are influenced by the behaviors of others. Furthermore, humans need groups to survive. Although a few individuals may become socially isolated as adults, they could not have reached adulthood without sustained interactions with others. The central point here is that we become who we are because other people and groups constantly influence us.
People live much of their lives belonging to social groups.
It is in social groups that we interact with family, friends, and fellow workers; learn to share goals and to cooperate with others in our groups; develop identities that are influenced by our group affiliations; obtain power over others—or are relatively powerless; and have conflicts with others over resources we all want. Our individual beliefs and behaviors, our experiences, our observations, and the problems we face are derived from connections to our social groups.
Interaction between the individual and the group is a two-way process in which each influences the other.
In our family or on a sports team, we can influence the shape and direction of our group, just as the group provides the rules and decides the expected behaviors for individuals.
Recurrent social patterns, ordered behavior, shared expectations, and common understandings among people characterize groups.
Consider the earlier examples of the chaos created by 9/11 and other bombings and mass shootings. These events were so troubling because they were unexpected, even though such events are becoming more common. Normally, a degree of continuity and recurrent behavior is present in human interactions, whether in small groups, large organizations, or society.
The processes of conflict and change are natural and inevitable features of groups and societies.
No group can remain unchanged and hope to perpetuate itself. To survive, groups must adapt to changes in the social and physical environment, yet rapid change often comes at a price. It can lead to conflict within a society—between traditional and new ideas and between groups that have vested interests in particular ways of doing things. Rapid change can give rise to protest activities; changing in a controversial direction or failing to change fast enough can spark conflict, including revolution. Governments in several Latin American countries have been challenged or overthrown, springing from citizens’ discontent with corrupt or authoritarian rule. The problem is finding acceptable replacement governments to take over what has been overthrown.
The previous ideas underlying sociology will be relevant in each of the topics we discuss. As you read this book, keep in mind these basic ideas that form the foundation of sociological analysis: People are social; they live and carry out activities largely in groups; interaction influences both individual and group behavior; people share common behavior patterns and expectations; and processes such as change and conflict are always present. Thus, in several important ways, sociological understandings provide new lenses for looking at our social world.
Thinking Sociologically
Try this throughout the book: Apply the core ideas underlying sociology, just discussed, to understand the groups to which you belong—a class, team, religious organization, work group, or other. You can better understand these groups by applying these ideas to examples you can relate to rather than memorizing abstract ideas.
Sociological Findings and Commonsense Beliefs
Through research, sociologists have shown that many commonly held beliefs are not actually true, and some “commonsense” ideas have been discredited by sociological research. Here are three examples.
Belief: Most of the differences in the behaviors of women and men are based on “human nature”; men and women are just different from each other.
Research shows that biological factors certainly play a part in the behaviors of men and women, but the culture (beliefs, values, rules, and way of life) that people learn as they grow up determines who does what and how biological tendencies are played out. A unique example illustrates this: In the nomadic Wodaabe tribe in Africa, women do most of the heavy work, whereas men adorn themselves with makeup, sip tea, and gossip (Cultural Survival 2010; Drury 2015; Zaidi 2017). Each year, the group holds a festival where men adorn makeup and fancy hairstyles, and show their white teeth and the whites of their eyes to attract a marriage partner. Such dramatic variations in the behavior of men and women around the world are so great that it is impossible to attribute behavior to biology or human nature alone; learned behavior patterns enter in.
Belief: Racial groupings are based on biological differences among people.
Actually, racial categorizations are socially constructed (created by members of society), and beliefs vary among societies and over time within societies. A person can be seen as one race in Brazil and another in the United States. Even within the United States, racial categories have changed many times. All one has to do is look at old U.S. Census records to see how racial categories change over time—even within the same nation (Chappell 2017)! We discuss construction of the concept of race in Chapter 8.