Everyday Sociology Blog

The Prevalence of Social Norms

By Bradley Wright

A social norm is one of the core concepts of sociology, and it refers to the behavioral expectations that a social group holds for its individuals. Basically, a social norm tells you what you’re supposed to do in any given situation. Social norms can operate in both small groups, such as a circle of friends, or a large group, such as a national society. They can be explicit, e.g., written down as laws, or implicit—something everyone just knows. Breaking norms can result in a formal punishment, such as being fined or imprisoned, or an informal punishment, such as being stared at or shunned by others.

There are a lot of things that can be said about social norms; in fact, sociology departments usually offer courses just about social norms and their violations, in a course called “deviance.” In this post, however, I have a fairly modest goal, and that is simply to illustrate just how many social norms guide every aspect of our life. As an example, I’ll consider classroom behavior in a college setting. Sometimes we don’t realize that norms exist until someone breaks them. Here, then, are just few of the many norms operating in this one situation.

Some classroom norms involve how students are to speak in class. If students want to say something, they should discretely raise their hands and wait to be called upon. (By the way, this norm is tough to break. In ten years, I’ve only been able to convince one of my classes to just speak without raising their hands). Once acknowledged, students can then offer their input with several limitations. They shouldn’t talk for too long, and they shouldn’t go too far off topic. What happens if they do? It’s not like the professor will call campus security, but instead the other students in the class will let the student know that they have strayed from appropriate behavior. They do this by rolling their eyes or snickering or some other means.

Other norms involve where and how students should sit during class. They should sit in the chairs provided, facing forward. Once I had a student realize that I never use the comfortable swivel chair provided for the professor (I walk around when I lecture), so he would routinely grab it at the start of class and sit through class leaning back with his feet up on a desk. I was fine with it, but his other students didn’t seem to think this was quite kosher.

When seated, students should give the appearance of paying attention by making a minimum of eye contact with the professor and by, hopefully, by staying awake. If a student dozes off, they should discretely close their eyes and definitely not just lay down or lean against the student next to them.

Students should also limit behaviors normally reserved for outside of class. For example, it’s usually a bad idea to order a pizza to be delivered to class and then share it with your friends. I know this because I encourage students to do this during evening classes, and it takes several weeks before they actually believe

that they can. Students should also have only specific interactions with their fellow students, such as talking or quietly joking around. Once I had two students in the back row start making out during lecture. Now, I tend to run a pretty loose class, but that surprised even me, and when I stopped lecture in befuddlement, the rest of the class turned around and started hooting and hollering.

Suppose that students need to leave class early. They can do so if they follow the right rules. If the class is small enough, they should let the professor know ahead of time. They should sit by the door, and when the time comes quietly pack up their belongings and they slip out unobtrusively. Often students will try to time it so as to leave when the professor has his/her back turned, which can be disconcerting—sometimes I turn around to a smaller class than I had just a moment ago.

This is not to say, however, that all rules are agreed upon. Sometimes people disagree about social norms. A classroom example of this is texting during class. I find it very distracting to have students texting on their cell phones during lecture, and so I think that it’s obvious that they shouldn’t. They, on the other hand, accept texting as appropriate in a wide range of settings, and so as long as they are trying to be discrete, they think what’s the problem?

In reading these examples of social norms, you might be thinking to yourself that they are obvious. Of course you’re not supposed to do some things and you’re supposed to do other things. This is the whole point—we’ve internalized social norms so well that we automatically know the hundreds, if not thousands, of rules that we need to follow as we go through our everyday life. Think about this as you go through today—you’re being guided by a comprehensive, albeit usually unwritten, rule book.

Age, Cohort, and Period Effects of Religion

By Bradley Wright

In sociological research, we often study the change of things over time. It’s reasonably easy to demonstrate how something changes over time, but it’s more difficult to explain why it changes because there are multiple causal processes that produce such change. In particular, three that are frequently described in demographic research are age, cohort, and period effects. I’ll illustrate each one using data about religious change over time.

An age effect is how people change as they get older. As people progress from childhood to adolescence to adulthood they go through various changes. Not only do their bodies change (as we start to lament once we hit middle age), but they change socially as well. For example, political beliefs can change with age; many people report being more liberal in their youth and more conservative in their older age. People tend to earn more money as they age too (at least until they hit retirement).

In terms of religion, it’s commonly observed the people become more religious as they age. To illustrate this, I examined data from the General Social Survey (GSS), a survey collected every two or three years from 1972 to the present. One of the questions asked if respondents identified with a formal religion, and, if so, which one. In the following figure, I chart how many of the respondents professed themselves to be Christians as a function of age. About 75% of the respondents in their twenties professed Christianity (the bar on the left), and this increased steadily until almost 90% of those in their seventies and eighties professed Christianity. This illustrates an age effect—adherence to Christianity increases with age.

Not only do people change with age, but they also change with when they were born. Different cohorts (or generations) act and believe differently than other generations.

Here’s an easy example: If you’re a college student, go find your parents’ high school yearbooks and get a laugh out of how they dressed. In the 1970s and 80s, boys wore their hair long, and girls had frizzy hair, and we all wore embarrassingly short shorts. If you want to see something really crazy, go back another generation and look at young people from the 1960s.

With religion, we might expect a similar effect. Maybe different generations experience religion differently, beyond how they age. To examine this, I used GSS data to look at the relationship between age and Christianity for three different birth cohorts—respondents born in the 1940s and the 1950s. The first graph replicates the graph above, levels of Christianity over age, for people born in the 1940s. The next for those in the 1950s. As you can see, the relationship between age and Christianity changes by cohort. The respondents who were born in the 1940s held steady in their profession of Christianity as they aged, but the later cohort actually declined somewhat.

In addition to age and cohort effects, there are also have history effects. Here society changes in some way that affects everyone. The classic example is the Great Depression of the 1930s. It affected people regardless of their age or their birth cohort. Various aspects of religion change with historical changes. Wars and other times of trouble might reinforce the strength of religious beliefs. The social turmoil of the 1960s led young people to question existing social institutions, including organized religion.

As a simple illustration of a historical effect, I took levels of professed Christianity by decade, for the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and the 2000s. As shown in the graph, a smaller percentage of the population is professing Christianity with each decade. (To be clear, since the population is growing, there are actually more

professed Christians in the country now than in the 1970s, they just constitute a smaller percentage.) This appears to be a historical effect—the times they are a changing.

If this weren’t confusing enough, age effects can change by both cohorts and periods. (In statistical terms, this is a called an interaction effect.) So, the relationship between age and Christianity now might be different than it was in the past. Who knows, maybe the relationship between age and cohort various by historical period.

The upshot of all of this is that it’s rather difficult to make sense of social changes over time, and this leads to a fair amount of confusion about what’s really going on in society. What seems to be an easy question, for example, changes in professed Christianity over time, is somewhat difficult to make sense of. In this post, I’ve only looked at one aspect of religion, but we could do similar analyses for other religions as well as other aspects of religion, such as belief in God, importance of religion, and attendance at religious services.

I suppose that this post serves as a warning about over-simplifying social trends. If nothing else, this difficulty will always give us sociologists something to do with our time.

Restorative Justice

By Bradley Wright

Have you ever embarrassed someone intentionally? If so, why did you do it? Maybe it was an accident or a joke taken too far. Maybe you wanted to get back at them for something wrong they had done to you. If you’ve ever done this, you’re not alone, for the criminal justice system also uses embarrassment and shame to accomplish its goals.

Perhaps the most common use of shame regarding crime involves the government or other officials shaming rule-breakers as a form of punishment. The logic of rational choice theory suggests that threatened shame should increase the costs of crime and thus deter future crime.

Thus shame gets added to a list of potential punishments, including prison and fines that keep people from committing crime. A wide variety of shame is used in criminal justice as a punishment. Arrestees have their mug-shots published (and they are never flattering). Some communities publish the names of men arrested as johns in prostitution stings. There have even been attempts to require sex offenders to use a special color license plate for their car.

Shaming wrong-doers isn’t limited to the criminal justice system. It is also used as a strategy for dealing with everyday rule-breakers. A business professor at Texas A&M International University caught six of his students plagiarizing on a research paper, and he wanted to teach them a lesson, so he published their names as plagiarizers on the class website for the whole class to see.

He explained his public humiliation of these students as follows: "Plagiarism is manifestly unfair and disrespectful to your classmates," Young wrote on his blog. "There are students taking the course who are working very, very hard to learn a subject that in many cases is foreign to them. A plagiarizer is implicitly treating the honest, hard-working student as a dupe. Of course, the plagiarizer is the dupe or else would not need to plagiarize." So, not only did  these students flunk the class, they were also called “dupes”. Bummer. (By the way, the professor was immediately fired for revealing the course grades of those six students—that’s a big no-no at most universities and colleges).

Shaming is taking on a new and very different role in criminal justice with the increased popularity of restorative justice. In traditional, adversarial justice systems, crimes are viewed as occurring against the states. So, if person A assaults person B, it’s the state, rather than person B, who prosecutes them. Restorative justice, however, focuses on the offender, victim, and community collectively. The goal is not to punish offenders, per se, but rather to make amends to the victim and to restore the offender.

There are various forms of restorative justice, but they tend to have several things in common. The victim of the crime actively participates in the proceedings and they have the opportunity to express how the crime has affected their lives and to have a say in what happens to the offender. The offender, in turn, gets to tell their side of the story and are given a chance to make things right with the victim. So, the offender might pay for damages the victim occurred or offer free labor to assist the victim.

Sometimes just the offender and victim meet to work things out, but other times families and friends of both offender and victim participate as a way to help keep the offender accountable and to support the victim.

Various studies have looked at the effectiveness of restorative justice, and the overall picture is positive. A summary by Sherman and Strang found that victims who went through the restorative justice process were better able to deal with the negative consequences of the crime. Relative to victims going through a traditional justice, those participating in restorative justice were able to function better at work and in other daily activities and they slept better at night. Furthermore, it seems likely that offenders who go through restorative justice are less likely to commit future crimes. It’s also important to note that there is little evidence that bringing the offender and victim together again results in any more violent or abusive behavior against the victim.

Even if proven effective, I doubt that restorative justice would ever become the dominant approach in our criminal justice system because, if nothing else, the current system makes too much money for too many lawyers. Still, the idea of holding a guided conversation, rather than a juried trial, for some crimes is appealing. Who knows, maybe someday that will be the fate of students who plagiarize.

Sport and Gender

By Bradley Wright

This week’s issue of ESPN magazine featured the star basketball player Candace Parker, and when I saw the cover photograph, I chuckled, but when I read the article, I rolled my eyes and sighed in exasperation.

You see, I had recently been writing a lecture on content analysis for my social research methods class, and I was looking for a video example to illustrate the power of this technique. With content analysis, we identify existing documents, photographs, or other forms of data, and we analyze them much the same way we would other forms of data, e.g., survey data or participant observation. In cruising around the internet, I found a presentation by Mediaed.org entitled Playing Unfair: The Media Image of the Female Athlete. It’s a clip from a longer film in which various experts subject talk about how female athletes are presented in the media.

The experts on this topic (and I am not one of them) identified several themes in the media presentation of female athletes. These representations tend to deemphasize the women’s athleticism by portraying them in street clothes or in everyday activities; in contrast, male athletes are more often portrayed in their uniform, performing their sport.

The representations also emphasize the women’s sexuality more so than men’s, so pictures and text about the women are more likely to highlight their sexual features. They emphasize the women’s heterosexuality to counteract stereotypes of female athletes as lesbians. Pictures of them often include a boyfriend, husband, or children. Finally, female athletes receive far less media coverage than do their male counterparts.

Okay, back to Candace Parker. I work at the University of Connecticut, which is a perennial powerhouse in women’s basketball. (At this point, you should be cheering U-C-O-N-N). Candace Parker, unfortunately, attended our archrival, Tennessee, where she led them to two national championships. She’s now gone pro in the WNBA, and in her first year she was both rookie-of-the-year and player-of-the-year. She even dunks the basketball! In short, Candace is perhaps the best women to ever play the game.

ESPN magazine wants to feature her on its cover, and which picture do they choose? As you can see, it’s a picture that epitomizes the sociological analysis of women in sports. Candace is shown in a white dress, not a basketball uniform or playing basketball. The lighting and make-up are glamorous, and she’s pregnant—holding her hands on her womb to emphasize it. This is when I laughed—a perfect illustration of what the sociologists in the video spoke of.

As I thought about this image of Parker, I realized perhaps ESPN magazine routinely portrayed athletes in everyday life, and I had just happen to notice this week’s issue with a woman on the cover. So, I looked up the covers of the last five issues of the magazine, and four of the five had men in uniforms doing something related to their sports. The fifth had a male basketball player in street clothes, but he was dunking a basketball.

Hm-m-m-m, maybe this is an ESPN magazine thing, so I looked up recent covers of Sports Illustrated--again all men, in uniforms, performing their sports except for one cover featuring a woman. The swimsuit issue.

Then I read the article about Candace Parker, and this is when I started rolling my eyes. Here are its opening lines:

THE SELLING OF CANDACE PARKER

She's the total package: your sister's pal, your brother's prom date, supermom-to-be. She's also an MVP—of a league few watch. So can Candace Parker be the female Jordan? Lots of folks are banking on it.
Candace Parker is beautiful. Breathtaking, really, with flawless skin, endless legs and a C cup she is proud of but never flaunts. She is also the best at what she does, a record-setter, a rule-breaker, a redefiner.

Can you imagine any mainstream magazine taking a similar approach to a male athlete? “Baseball player Sidd Finch is a hunk. A complete hunk, really, with chiseled features, rippling biceps, and a larger-than-average penis that he is proud of but never flaunts.” Ah, I don’t think so. (By the way, you get extra credit if you recognize the name of the player.)

Content analysis has various advantages. It’s a way to study existing documents and portrayals in society. It’s usually less work than collecting survey, interview or observation data. It can be analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

It has its disadvantages too, but more than anything, after looking at these articles, I’m just depressed about the media’s portrayal of women athletes.

Field Experiments and Racism

By Bradley Wright

When sociologists study something, we usually start by making observations. Maybe we take a survey, in which case we covert our observations to answers on a questionnaire, or maybe we’ll do fieldwork and go out into a social situation and watch what goes on. In either case, we’re not changing what we’re studying, or at least we’re not trying to, but rather we’re just watching it and recording what we learn.

In contrast to these observational studies, we could intentionally change something and then see what happens as a result. This is an experimental approach. With an experiment, you have two or more groups, and the researcher (or somebody) does something to one of the groups but not the other. What the researcher does is the independent variable (or cause). The researcher then measures the outcome of what happens—the dependent variable (or effect).

The idea of an experiment conjures up images of a mad scientist in a castle or at least well-funded psychologists in laboratories messing with introductory psychology students. Another approach, however, is called a field experiment, where the researcher conducts an experiment in a natural setting instead of laboratory.

Here’s a video that illustrates this approach. In it, the reporting team from ABC News sets up an experiment. They park an old car in a parking lot in a predominately white neighborhood. They then have several white teenagers vandalize the car for about an hour. These kids jump on the car, spray paint it, and try to break into it. During this time, several people walking by stop and talk to the kids, sometimes even telling them not to do it. However, during that period of time, only one person called the police.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Next, the reporters repeated the situation but they used African-American teens instead. The kids did the same things to the car for about the same period of time, but this time ten people called the police. The conclusion? The race of the possible offender influences whether their actions are defined as criminal, so it’s not just what people do that matters but also who they are. (Unfortunately, the news crew did not repeat the experiment in a predominately black neighborhood.)

Field experiments have a lot going for them. Like all experiments, the causality is clear. The independent variable precedes the dependent variable, and, if the study is done correctly, the change in the dependent variable is the only difference (on average) between the two groups. Sociologists call this internal validity— which means we can trust the causal story of a study.

Also, field experiments measure things that people might not report on surveys, either because they don’t want to look bad or they don’t realize that aspect of themselves. For example, imagine we gave a survey to the people in the community described above, and we asked them if they would be more likely to call police if they saw African-American kids committing vandalism. I imagine that they would all so “no”—who wants to be viewed as potentially racist? Yet, in the field experiment, that’s exactly what they did.

Finally, field experiments take place in naturalistic settings in contrast to laboratory settings which happen in small, windowless rooms in academic buildings. Now, maybe what happens in lab experiments generalizes to the real world just fine, but we’re more confident in the generalizability of field experiments because they actually happen in everyday life. Sociologists call this external validity.

So, field experiments have both high internal and external validity. Sweet deal!

This raises the question of why sociologists don’t do more field experiments. Perhaps one reason is that it’s not traditional in sociology. When I went through graduate school, I received a lot of training in survey research, some in qualitative methods, and none in experiments.

Unfortunately, it’s not always clear how to translate a sociological topic into a field experiment. Let me give you an example. I study the sociology of religion, and I am also very interested in field experiments. This makes me wonder about how to study religion using field experiments. To do this, I need to randomly assign religion, or at least the perception of religion, or randomly assign something that will change religion. Obviously I can’t just assign religious beliefs—“you’re Christian, you’re Muslim, you’re Hindu.” Also, it’s tough to assign levels of religiosity. “Could you stop going to church so much?”

So, can religion be studied using a field experiment, and, if so, how? I have some thoughts, but I would like to hear what you think. If you have some ideas, send them to me at Bradley.wright@uconn.edu. Who knows? Maybe your idea will someday be featured on a television show!

Differential Opportunity for Criminal Behavior

By Bradley Wright

Jocelyn Addison, Nia McBrayer, and Jenniffer Watson are three college-aged women who needed some money. They could get a job, but that would probably cramp their style—with work hours and all. They could have asked their parents or family, but maybe they felt shy or had done that a lot before. So, instead, they decided to rob a Dollar Store in Bedford, Ohio. (Now that raises red flags right there. Is a Dollar Store the best place to find a lot of money? Why not go rob the Two-Dollar Store and double your take?).

They walked in with masks and a BB gun (in case the store was defended by a small bird?) and demanded money. The manager claimed that she couldn’t open the safe, (got to watch those crafty Dollar Store employees), and so the three young ladies left empty-handed. The manager called the police, who apprehended them about a mile away from the store, and each woman was charged with robbery.

Now, it might sound like these three novice criminals didn’t know what they were doing, but, to the contrary, when the police searched their car, they found a printed document, downloaded from the web, entitled: “How to Commit Armed Robbery in Six Easy Steps.” This document, downloaded 12 hours before the crime (so that they had enough time to learn the subtleties of robbery), spelled out exactly what a prospective robber should do, and they had followed some of its advice.

The funny thing is that this guide was written as a joke. For example, the first step advises the reader to get appropriate gear, such as a mask or sunglasses. A ski mask “gives you a badass look as well as conceal your appearance.” The website promises good things with the mask, for wearing one will reduce “your chances of being caught… by .001%.” Next you need a big bag for carrying all the loot that you’ll get. The website recommends one with a dollar sign printed on its side, like in cartoons. After that, the website offers valuable guidance on picking partners, planning the robbery, executing it, and getting away.

What’s the point of this true-but-funny story? It illustrates that not everyone has the same access to crime—a line of thinking developed by sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin. As the story about the Dollar Store robbers suggests, some people, don’t have the knowledge needed to pull of crimes successfully. They don’t have family members or friends to teach them how to do it, and some crimes require special knowledge. Okay, robbing a Dollar Store might be pretty straightforward, but what about opening a safe or embezzling someone or creating counterfeit money? Some crimes take a certain amount of expertise, and many people do not have that expertise.

Other people do not have the opportunities to commit certain crimes. Some crimes need a person to have access to specific people and situations. Do you want to defraud stockholders? Well, you should probably have a job in a stock-trading company. Want to commit white-collar crime? It helps to have a white-collar job.

This differential access to crime compliments an idea that most of us are familiar with, and has been studied a lot in sociology--differential access to conventional gain, such as schooling and employment. Not everyone can pay for college or knows how to get into good colleges. Not everyone has the connections or experience needed to land a good job. In a way this makes the world unfair, for those who have can get more.

This discussion makes one wonder about the role of the internet. I don’t know if you’ve tried lately, but you can find information about just about anything online. I once challenged a colleague to come up with some human activity that wasn’t represented on-line, and he guessed “elbow fetish.” Well, it turns out that there are plenty of people who live in appreciation of the well-turned elbow. Go figure.

There is plenty of information on-line on the techniques of criminal behavior. For proprietary sake, I won’t list the sites here, but they are out there. So it’s possible that the advent of the web might give more people more ability to commit crimes more effectively. I just suppose that you have to be careful about which advice you follow.

How American Congregations are Changing (and Staying the Same)

By Bradley Wright

Have you ever picked up a sociology journal and tried to read one of its articles? Well, good luck if the article uses numbers because most quantitative sociological research uses multivariate analysis such as regression that can be difficult for those without a background in statistics to understand. Now, once you get used to this type of research, these articles can make sense, but the methods do pose a barrier for most non-academics . (Qualitative studies have their own problems that typically involve using way too many big, funny sounding words that probably don’t mean anything). That’s probably why the journal American Sociological Review is not sold in supermarket checkout lines.

Every once in awhile, however, studies come along that demonstrate that some of the most important things we learn are simple percentages. Sociologist Mark Chaves provides an example with his National Congregations Study. For this study, conducted in 2006-7, Chaves interviewed pastors or other church leaders from about 1,500 churches drawn from a nationwide, random sample, and he asked them a bunch of questions about their churches. He had done a similar study in 1998, and this allowed him to measure how American congregations have changed over the last decade.

Any guesses as to how?
As reported in the Winter 2008 issue of Sociology of Religion, he and a coauthor found four main changes in congregations in the last ten years:

1) Churches use a lot more technology than they used to. They are much more likely to use e-mail to communicate with their members and web pages to advertise themselves in the community. I suppose that this change didn’t surprise me much. The church I attend now has blogs, web pages, Facebook groups, and uses something called Twitter, which may or may not involve birds. This technological change has implications for congregations. By better advertising their beliefs and values, churches might attract like-minded people from further away. This might increase the theological homogeneity of congregations—having people who have similar beliefs with one another than might have previously been the case. Technology also costs money and time, which raises the question of what are churches cutting back on to support their use of technology.

2) Worship services have become more informal. Services are now less likely to have choirs and to use written programs. Instead, they are more likely to have services featuring drums, jumping, shouting, dancing, raised hands in praise, applause, and calling out “amen.” There are some variation in which churches do which—with Catholic churches less increased informality and black churches showing more—but this increased informality appears to be a general trend in religion as it is in society as a whole. In line with this trend, probably the best known Evangelical pastor, Rick Warren, who said the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration, is known for wearing Hawaiian shirts when he preaches.

3) Clergy age. From 1998 to 2006, the average age of the American adults has increased by 1 year, but the average age of pastors has increased by 5 years! The median age of the head clergy in the study went from 48 years to 53 years old. That’s a big change, and it’s happening the most in Catholic and mainline Protestant churches (and least in Evangelical and black churches.) What is causing this big change? One explanation is that fewer future-pastors are going into seminary right after college, and more are taking on the ministry as a second career, after retiring from a secular career.

4) The demographic make-up of congregations is changing. Overall, the average age of congregation members is increasing faster than the general population. For example, in 2006, 30 percent of the congregants were over age 60, but in 1998, only 25% were. Also, the racial and ethnic make-up of congregations is becoming more diverse. For example, from 1998 to 2006 the number of completely white congregations dropped from 20% to 14%.

Now, so far I have focused on the changes in American churches because, for some reason, discussing changes is more interesting than thinking about what stays the same; nonetheless, the study found a number of things that have stayed about the same over the past decade. They include the median size of congregations (about 75 people), the high number of women in the pews, the low number of women in the pulpit, and involvement in social services.

There, wasn’t that interesting, and you didn’t have to read a single regression coefficient. Maybe sociology journals just need to make themselves more accessible to the general public. I’m thinking more pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie on the cover?

(By the way, you get extra credit if you recognized the drummer pictured above).

Being Off-Time in the Life-Course

By Bradley Wright

When we think of going through life, we often think in terms of how old we are. Children celebrate birthdays, middle-aged people wear t-shirts proclaiming that they are over the hill, and drug stores have rows and rows of birthday cards.

Another way to keep track of life is in terms of age-graded life stages. A life stage is a set of roles and activities that we participate in. They can be based on any number of things such education, marital status, employment, hobbies, even the condition of our bodies. Some stages are age-graded, meaning that society norms exist regarding when we should experience these stages. For example, with education, we’re supposed to attend elementary school as children, then middle school, then high school, and then, maybe, college in our late teens and early twenties. With work, we can work part time while in school, maybe bounce between jobs after we graduate, but by our late twenties or so we should probably have settled down in our careers.

Given that there are social norms regarding when we go through these life stages, it’s interesting to examine what happens when people violate these norms and either don’t go through a life stage or do so at the wrong time. This is called being “off-time,” and it can have a wide range of consequences.

Let me tell you about a friend from college. Back in school, he was completely on-time, and he was enacting age-appropriate roles. He was single, a college student, and he really enjoyed partying—all things that are fitting for someone in their late teens or early twenties. Then, after he graduated, he got a good job, started making some good money, and he bought a fancy sports car. So far so good. After that, however, the trouble started, at least from a life-course perspective. You see, he sort of never left that fun-single-guy stage, but now he’s in his late-forties.

What was appropriate then seems awkward now. He still wants to date attractive young women, but they don’t really want to date him. His desire to “party” used to be fun but now it’s a cause for concern. He would like to start a family, but the women his age are now more likely to pull out pictures of their grandchildren. To make matters worse, he got tired of his old job, and he is trying to get into a new career, which means he has to start at an entry-level job.

My friend’s situation illustrates some of the problems with being off-time. It can lead to a loss of social opportunity. For example, he is less likely to find an eligible marriage partner now that he’s older. He’ll also probably have a harder time on the job market as he competes with younger people. His life situation also puts him out of synch with his friends. When he wants to go out and have fun, they’re going home to their families. It’s also a source of embarrassment, for he feels awkward in social situations where he’s the only older single person.

Another example of the detrimental effects of being off-time comes from criminology research. Studies have found that girls who hit menarche (i.e., go through puberty) early are more likely to be involved in criminal activity than girls who are more on-time. Why? When a young girl starts to develop into a woman, she starts to attract older boys, and teenage boys are more involved in criminal activity than just about any other segment of society.

This is not to say that being off-time is always bad. Having enough money to retire in your forties would make you off-time, but many people would still want that option. Also, we can be off-time in one area but on-time in others. An example would be someone in their thirties who is married with kids (on-time) and goes back to school for their college degree (off-time).

Still, being off-time can cause a variety of problems and raise some eyebrows, and not because we’re doing something wrong, per se, but rather we’re doing it at the wrong time of life.

Is "God is Dead" Dead?

By Bradley Wright

In 1882, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche declared that “God is Dead.” With this statement, he didn’t mean that God has suffered a physical death of some sort, like slipping on an icy planet or something, but rather that humans had lost their ability to believe in God, and as such religions, like Christianity, had lost their moral basis and would not last long. Nietzsche wasn’t the first or last person to predict the decline of organized religion. Among the other predictions:

• In 1710, English thinker Thomas Woolston said Christianity would be gone by 1900
• Voltaire said in religion would crumble in 50 years
• Thomas Jefferson said in 1822 that “there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian”
• Famous dead-white-guys Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Sigmund Freud each predicted that religion soon crumble
• Renowned sociologist Peter Berger wrote in 1968 that in “the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.”

Secularization is the idea that societies are transforming from the sacred to the secular, from religious beliefs to rational, scientific principles. As the quotations above suggest, secularization has been expected for hundreds of years by some very smart people, but contemporary evidence suggests that they were wrong.

Religion is perhaps as strong as ever. A simple ride down the road will usually turn up local church buildings, often full on Sundays. Worldwide, Christianity has about 2 billion adherents, Islam 1.2 billion, Hinduism 800,000 million, and Buddhism 350,000. Over two-thirds of all humans adhere to one of these four religions alone.

Here in the United States studies find strong evidence of continued religiosity. Around 85% -90% of Americans believe in a God, and over three-fourths affiliate with a religion. An interesting chart presented by Iannaccone graphs out the number of paid clergy in the United States since 1850. As you can see, it’s remained level and has slightly increased in recent decades.

Certainly some societies have transitioned from religious to secular-based forms of government. In the early 1990s, Turkey, for example, adopted an explicitly secular form of government. In contrast, other countries have made the reverse transition. Iran in 1979 went from the more secular Shah-led government to a government based on religious fundamentalism. A number of the Iron Curtain countries have seen a resurgence of faith with the fall of Communism and its insistence of secularism.

This isn’t to say, however, that secularization has not occurred in any way. It’s reasonable to believe that the church has less formal authority in many countries than it did in past centuries. Also, the way in which religion is practiced is changing around the world. For example, here in the United States religion is often experienced as a private, spiritual endeavor rather than a participation in an authoritative social institution. In an effort to be more effective, many churches are adopting business models of organization and presentation to society, moving them toward a more secular appearance. Some religious groups, such as the Salvation Army and the YMCA have transitioned almost completely into secular groups.

However, religion hasn’t gone anywhere, and it probably won’t be gone anytime soon. In fact, the failure of past predictions of complete secularization highlight the continued significance of religion in modern day society.

General Deterrence and an Eye for an Eye

By Bradley Wright

Ameneh Bahrami was a young woman in her twenties who worked as an electronics technician. She lived in Tehran, Iran, and in her free time she enjoyed photography and sight seeing. Several years earlier, when she was in university, she and some friends gave some clothes to a bedraggled, younger student named Majid Movahedi. Movahedi fell madly and obsessively in love with her and pursued her for several years. Finally, Bahrami made it clear that she would not marry Movahedi. “Continue with your life,” she told him. “There is absolutely no hope for us.” What Movahedi did next forever altered Bahrami’s life and stirred a national controversy in Iran. Movahedi staked out her office, and then as she was leaving one day, he poured sulfuric acid over her, permanently blinding and disfiguring her.

Iran, of course, is a fundamentalist Islamic country, and Bahrami petitioned the courts to punish her attacker according to Islamic jurisprudence. Recently, an Iranian court accepted her request and ordered that five drops of sulfuric acid be placed in each of Bahrami’s eyes so that he will be blinded in a similar manner--literally an eye for an eye.

As sociologists, we could examine this heartbreaking story in terms of gender and domestic violence or we might use it to explore the role of religion and the law. Instead, I want to address a different aspect of it, and that involves Bahrami’s and the court’s reasoning for this punishment.

In explaining her reasoning for requesting this punishment, Bahrami said that she wanted to prevent this type of crime from happening to any one else. “I am doing that because I don’t want this to happen to any other women.” The courts agreed with her. “If propaganda is carried out on how acid attackers are punished, it will prevent such crimes in the future," said Mahmoud Salarkia.

This motivation for punishment—to prevent future crimes by others—illustrates the criminological concept of general deterrence. Deterrence refers to preventing crime, and general deterrence is punishing one person as a way to prevent the crimes of others. Here in the United States, punishing criminals is also viewed as a general deterrent; in fact, that’s one of the arguments for the death penalty. By killing criminals who have killed, the criminal justice system might prevent future killings.

General deterrence works best when potential criminals find out about punishments given to previous law-breakers. So, punishing someone quietly with no one else knowing would have little general deterrence effect. It is not unreasonable, then, to expect that the sulfur-in-eyes punishment of Majid Movahedi might have some deterrent effect, for the case has become widely known, and the brutality of the punishment might make other men in Iran think twice before similarly attacking a woman.

Related to general deterrence is the concept of specific deterrence, when a person is punished not to prevent other people from committing crimes but rather to prevent that person from committing future crimes. For example, locking someone up in jail creates specific deterrence because it makes it difficult for that person to commit additional crimes (at least against the general population). The proposed punishment of Movahedi would also serve as a specific deterrent, for it will be more difficult for him to attack people if he’s blind.

The idea of deterrence assumes rationality among criminals. The reasoning goes like this: If society makes known the costs of crime, people should be less likely to participate in it. What if, however, criminals are not responsive to the costs of crime? Given Movahedi’s very strong emotions at the moment he injured Bahrami, would knowledge of future punishments kept him from attacking her? It’s unclear, but we might expect strong punishments to deter rationally-based crimes, such as theft, more strongly than emotionally-based crimes.

The application of general deterrence has its own issues, for not only does the victim have rights, but so does the attacker—though they forsake many of them when they commit crime. Is it reasonable to punish one person harshly in order to benefit other people? Is it appropriate for society to “make an example” of someone? In the story above, Bahrami is such a sympathetic figure that it’s easy to overlook these issues, but they still stand.

Questions remain about the effectiveness and appropriateness of general deterrence, and yet it stands as one of society’s main defenses against law-breaking. Do you think general or specific deterrence work? If so, in what situations might they be most effective?