Everyday Sociology Blog

Feeling and Display Rules of Emotion

By Bradley Wright

When most of us think of work, we think of things like trading our time for money or maybe doing something physically difficult. It turns out, according to a large body of social psychological literature, that work can also involve emotions. That’s right, what you feel, and how you show it is “work” that is just as much of your life as your job at the local fast food restaurant.

Here’s how it works (pun intended). When we weren’t looking, society made up a bunch of rules about our emotions. Some of these rules, called feeling rules, govern what we’re supposed to feel in a given situation. For example, when you get married or graduate from college, you’re supposed to be happy, and people will be concerned if you’re otherwise. What if your wedding pictures all show you wide-eyed in terror? (Oh, wait, that was me). Other rules, called display rules, regard what emotions you present to others. With these rules, it doesn’t matter what you’re really feeling, you just have to show the right emotions. For example, when I teach, I don’t mind knowing that some of the students are bored out of their skulls, but I don’t want them showing it with loud yawns and constant eye-rolling.

Once you start thinking about it, it’s remarkable how many roles in society require serious emotion work. Most jobs, for example, pay you not just to do the official work, but they also pay you to do it with the right emotions. A classic example is being a physician. Part of being a doctor is poking, prodding, cutting, and doing all sorts of things to people that is very uncomfortable. In doing it, doctors have to maintain an emotionally-neutral, professional demeanor. What if the doctor is doing something that’s very uncomfortable for you, and they start laughing. Or, maybe they say “oh gross.” My guess is that doctor will start losing patients really quickly.

Likewise, in another example, a study of flight attendants found that they were explicitly trained in the emotions they are supposed to show to airline passengers. Despite being jammed in with hundreds of cranky people, packed together for hours with the same recycled air (you can tell I’m not a big fan of commercial airlines), flight attendants are supposed to be pleasant and cheerful. That’s their job, to smile with each passenger’s request, and if they can’t do the emotions well enough, they might be fired.

An event last summer illustrates the power of emotion work, as it defined an international news story. In Southern Italy, two cousins, aged 12 and 13, went for a swim. They got caught up in a dangerous riptide, and they drowned. This was a tragedy, as any death of a child is, but what made it newsworthy was the reaction of people on the beach. When the bodies were brought ashore, they covered them with a blanket, with the girls’ feet sticking out, waiting for the girls’ family and authorities. At first a crowd gathered around, but after not too long, the crowd dispersed and went back to their activities—sun bathing, talking on their cell-phones, having lunch and frolicking in the water—all this just a few meters away from the bodies. Eventually police officers carried away the girls’ bodies on stretchers, walking past sun bathers enjoying the nice day.

There are strong emotion rules in a situation like this. When young people are harmed, we are supposed to feel sadness, even grief. This is a feeling rule. At the very least, we’re to show proper respect and be solemn, a display rule. What we’re not supposed to do, however, is to just go about our business. The crowd violated these rules, and even though it caused no material or physical harm, their perceived indifference caused an international outcry. “The incident also attracted condemnation from the Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe. ‘Indifference is not an emotion for human beings,’ Seppe wrote in his parish blog. ‘To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.’”

To complicate matters, the girls were Roma (formerly termed “gypsies”) and the surrounding beach-goers were Italian. There is considerably tension between the Italian authorities and the Roma minority, with the authorities accusing the Roma of increasing levels of street crime, and the Roma charging discrimination. The situation of these two girls, and the crowd’s reaction, exacerbated these tensions. 

This event, and the furor it caused, illustrates the power of emotion rules. Society holds us accountable not just for what we say and do, but for how we feel as well.

Conspicuous consumption and your iPhone

By Bradley Wright

Conspicuous consumption is one of the classic concepts in sociology. It was developed by Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. I know, it’s hard to believe that people were actually alive back then, let alone creating ideas that we still find useful, but it’s true.

This concept describes how wealthy people spend large amounts of money on goods and services as a way of showing their status. It doesn’t refer to all large expenses—sometimes you get a lot more things when you spend more; instead, it refers to spending as a way of showing off who you are. In fact, sometimes what you end up with is no better, or sometimes worse, than what you can get for less money.

A classic example of conspicuous consumption is using silver utensils and fine china for meals, especially when guests are over. Bringing out the good stuff does show that you’ve attained a certain level of material comfort, but it’s also not very practical. Silver has to be polished, china breaks easily, and neither can go into the dishwasher. Their main purpose, then, is one of status display.

There’s no reason to limit the concept of conspicuous consumption to just the well-to-do. Even college students engage in it. I don’t know about where you go to school, but here at the University of Connecticut the fashion among students is to wear jackets and pullovers (preferably black) by Northface and, for women, boots made by Ugg. Now, Northface’s slogan is “never stop exploring”, and its website has pictures of people doing all sorts of brave, active things, like rock climbing and canoeing. My guess, however, is that most college students don’t need that high level of performance. Why spend the big money on name-brands when generic wear is also available? One could make the case that it’s an issue of style and cultural taste, and that makes sense. The main reason for their appeal could be that name brand clothes show statues. They show that you have the money and prestige to wear the coolest things.

I’m writing about this concept now, even though it has been around for literally a hundred years, because I read about the perfect illustration of conspicuous consumption. As everyone under 40 knows (and some of us over 40 have heard about), Apple makes a wicked-cool cell phone it calls the iPhone. You can load little software programs on it, called “apps”, that do various functions.

One of these apps is called the “I am rich” application. It costs $1,000 and serves absolutely no purpose other than to shine a red ruby on your iPhone that lets others know that you could afford to buy this app. That’s it. It shows that you’re rich and doesn’t do anything else. Apparently Apple no longer carries it at its stores because it was getting bad publicity (again, making decisions on how people perceive something).

In thinking about how this concept plays out today, I suppose there is something that we could call “inconspicuous” consumption. Here you consume goods and services, and present them to others, as a way of hiding status. Perhaps back in Veblen’s time, when I think dinosaurs still roamed the world, all status was seen as good, so if you got it, you flaunt it. Now, however, we’re sufficiently suspicious and cynical about wealth that some people may make choices to hide status. Here are some examples that might illustrate this idea.

My wife went to a fancy, well-known liberal arts college, and when people ask her where she went to school, she’ll usually answer “in the Boston area.” Now, this conflicts with other people I know who went to Ivy league schools. You can be pretty sure that within five minutes of meeting someone, these people will let drop that they went to an Ivy.

Last year a family member gave us a used car that he didn’t need anymore. It’s about seven years old, doesn’t have too much mileage, and runs reasonably well. The big downside: It’s a Mercedes. Besides paying extra for mechanic bills, I have to put up with my friends ribbing me about thinking I’m high status because I drive a Mercedes. I’ve even thought of yanking off the hood ornament to disguise the manufacturer of the car. From a straight conspicuous consumption approach, I should seek to display status with this car, but in reality, I want to avoid what I perceive as negative stereotypes associated with it. I suppose, then, that I really am looking for status with my car choices, it’s just that I see “wealthy-display” as undesirable and maybe I’m looking for a status I value more, maybe “broke intellectual”?

If nothing else, the discussion above points out that conspicuous (or inconspicuous) consumption involves more than simply what we buy and hire, for it also includes how we make it known to others. To make a status display, you need not only to have the goods, but you need for other people to know.

Sociology on Vacation

 

By Bradley Wright

Last week I took my two sons up to a big amusement park (this is New England, so unfortunately we don’t have Disneyland). Each summer we try to buy season passes to a different fun place, and this year it was an amusement park. The boys really enjoy the rides and the water park. Me? I kind of have fun being a sociologist and watching what goes on at the park because a lot of what goes on fits with sociological principles. These include:

Social Stratification is a social system that ranks people in terms of a hierarchy. Sociologists usually talk about it in terms of class, caste, and intergenerational mobility. Well, this amusement park had its own class levels. At the bottom were the regular people like my family who just buy a ticket and go on rides. Next up is what they call a “super flash pass.” This pass works like magic. When you go to one of the popular rides, and there is a long line, you show this pass and you get put into a much shorter line for the ride.

Cool, but the “super flash pass” starts at $50. At the highest level is the “very important you” experience. With this you go straight to the start of the line, you get to park your car close to the entrance, you get a private tour of the park (though, I don’t know how private it is with thousands of people around you), and you get a private autograph session with one of the park characters. Okay, as far as I can tell, the characters can’t talk, and they are really alienated teenagers dressing up like cartoon animals for minimum wage, so I’m not sure why someone would pay extra for the autograph of an irritated, silent young person. The price for this highest level of “service”? $250 per person with a minimum of four people. That’s $1,000 to be top dog of the amusement park.

The conflict theory of crime holds that laws are passed to favor the wealthy (I know, you probably find this idea shocking), and it too was in evidence at the park. Being rather cheap, I don’t like paying $15 for the regular parking at the amusement park, so I pay $10 to park at a nearby restaurant that is actually a little closer to the main gate of the park. In speaking with the owner, I found out that the city is working hard to make it illegal to park there for the amusement park. So, if you want a bite to eat at the restaurant, go ahead and park your car. But, if you want to walk 100 yards to the amusement park, forget it.

Why would the city outlaw parking outside the park? Well, it’s a small town, and the amusement park is far-and-away their biggest tax payer. The amusement park makes approximately 1-trillion-dollars-a-day (their concession stands are really expensive), but they also want the less than one-thousand-dollars-a-day that this off-site parking place pulls in. The park, having lots of money, has lots of influence with the city government. The city government, eager to please the park, tries to pass an ordinance that doesn’t make much sense and only harms the average Joe looking to save a few dollars.

Another sociological observation involves the young people we saw at the park. Studies of youth culture note how young people find their own, distinctive ways of doing things, and this culture works best when it is different than what boring-old-people are doing.

Well, walking around the park, I noticed a unique style of dress. Scattered about were clusters of high-school-aged kids who were dressed virtually identically. They all wore oversized athletic shoes and relatively new blue jeans. Around their necks, they wore white t-shirts twisted with a bandana. This bandana was folded so that, if they wanted to, they could pull it up over their mouth to hide their features. (“Hey, you guys want to go rob a train?”). The kids had similar haircuts, and they wore brand-new ball caps, turned about 90 degrees to the side.

Now, these kids carried a bit of an “I’m tough” scowl on their faces and had a tough guy swagger to their walk, but to me they looked downright silly. I honestly thought that they were park characters when I first saw them (“Hi, can I get your autograph for $1,000?”) More than anything they reminded me of little kids dressing up like cowboys, which didn’t fit with the tough persona they were trying to project. Okay, if I were younger, a lot younger, maybe I would think they are cool, so I’m not trying to impose some middle-aged standard of appropriate dress. Instead, these “outfits” they wore illustrate the powerful influence of youth culture.

So there you have it; in addition to offering roller coasters, water rides, and overpriced hot dogs, amusement parks serve up sociology as well.

Types of Causality, III

By Bradley Wright

It’s the end of summer, the beaches are hot, friends are home, and you’re using up what little vacation time you have left. What better thing to do than think about causality? I know that I am!

Today I’m writing about two more concepts associated with causality. The overriding point of this series is to help you think through the multi-faceted nature of causality. Everyday we use causal language—this happened because of that—but we’re not always clear in our thinking about what is, and is not, a cause. So, on to more types of causation:

Interaction effects. An interaction effect occurs when the effect of one variable on another varies by levels of a third variable. Let’s say that we’re looking at how levels of variable “A” affects variable “B”, but we find out the effect of “A” varies by how much of “C” we have. If so, that’s an interaction effect.

Interaction effects are perhaps best described by example.

Would drinking a beer or two or three make you feel light-headed? Well, it depends on various factors, including what you’ve eaten. If you have just had a full meal, the food in your stomach slows down the absorption of alcohol which in turn means it has less effect on you. However, if you’re drinking on an empty stomach, then the alcohol will have a much greater effect. This is an interaction effect. The effect of alcohol (A) on how you feel (B) depends on what you’ve eaten (C). We could think of other “C” variables as well, variables that alter the effect of alcohol on you. It also varies by your body weight, how much you’re used to drinking, your gender, and your metabolism.

Here’s another example of an interaction effect. I like watching late-night talk shows, and I find the monologues to be really funny. Recently, however, I’ve tried watching them during the day on the shows’ websites, and I didn’t enjoy them at all. The same joke, told late at night, will have me in stitches but in the middle of the day bores me. To really enjoy them I think that I have to be tired and not planning to do anything else. So, the effect of late-night jokes (A) on my laughing (B) varies by the time of day (C).

Causation & correlation. A statistical truism is that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. This reflects the fact that two variables can be spuriously correlated.

Just for laughs and giggles, though, let me point out that the opposite is true as well. Causation does not necessarily imply correlation. That is, some variable “A” can be a cause of “B” without actually being correlated with it. I know what you’re thinking—this must be some kind of sociological magic, but, really, it’s true. Here’s how it works.

The cause, “A”, might increase “B” through some mechanisms, say “C.” It might also decrease these “B” through other mechanisms, say “D”. As such, “A” has a causal impact on “B” even though there is no association between levels of “A” and “B” in a population of people.

Suppose that you ate a dark-chocolate candy bar. One of those 65% cocoa ones—you know what I’m talking about. Now, the other 35% is probably sugar and butter, which have a lot of calories which should increase you’re weight. But, the caffeine in the bar might give you enough energy so that you bounce around the house for awhile, thus burning off the calories. As such, eating dark chocolate has a causal linkage to weight gain but is not correlated with gaining weight. 

I actually used this principle in some research I conducted. For some time, criminologists have had theories about why poor people commit more crime. They have more strain put on them, fewer opportunities for conventional work, etc…. However, self-reported studies found little correlation between social class and crime. Why? Turns out that there are mechanisms though which being poor lowers crime rates, or, put more intuitively, being wealthy promotes crime. The wealthy are more likely to think that they can get away with crime, so they are less deterred by possible punishments. They also foster an ethos of risk-taking, which associates with more crime.

So, social class both increases and decreases criminal behavior, and we have causation without correlation. Cool, huh? 

Okay, back to your regular summertime activities.

Types of Causality II

By Bradley Wright

This post continues a several-part series on causality. Now, why would I spend so much time writing about causality? Maybe I have too much time on my hands, or maybe I think that the readers of this blog have too much time? Actually, the issue of causality comes up in a lot of social research. When a study presents some findings about the social world, these findings usually make a whole string of assumptions about causality. As such, to understand fully sociological research, we need to have a working knowledge of the basics of causality—hence my addressing the topic in this series.

In this post I continue a discussion of different types or dimensions of causality.

Let’s consider linear vs. non-linear causality. Sociologists like to be boring when we talk about methods, so we usually end up using letters in our examples rather than real things. For example, we talk about “x” being a cause of “y.” Far be it from me to violate this norm, so I will use letters, but I’ll also try to give examples to make the ideas more clear.

Linear causality happens when every increase in “x” prompts a similar change in “y”, regardless of the value of “x.” Every time you change “x”, you get the same change in “y.” For example, my sons like to take allowance money to the store and buy a bag of candy. The candy is about a dollar, so every dollar they spend (and, thankfully, it’s usually only one or two), they get a bag of candy. If they spend one dollar, they get one bag. If they spend $50, they get fifty bags. This is a linear relationship—no matter what the value of “x”, whether $1 or $50, a one-unit change in “x” produces the same change in “y”—one more dollar equals one more bag.

In contrast, non-linear causality happens when the effect of “x” on “y” varies by levels of “x”. There are countless forms of non-linearity, but commonly maybe “x” brings about some change in “y” at low levels of “x”, but it causes much less change in “y” at high levels of “y”. 

Here’s a simple example. I like bicycle riding—and even have one of those fancy recumbent bicycles—but I don’t do much riding during winter because, well, it’s cold and snowy out. So, when I first go out in spring, I average about 12 miles an hour. (The area around here is all hills, so average speeds are lower than if it were a flat part of the country). After a month of riding, however, this increases to 14 miles an hour. So, one month riding = two miles an hour extra. If training and speed were linearly related, every additional month would always produce an extra two-miles-an-hour. Let’s see, after six months of the riding season, I’d be at 26 miles an hour—Tour-De-France speed. If I could ride steadily for another year or two, I could be passing cars on the interstate. Alas, that’s not the way it works, for training is a cause, but a non-linear cause, of riding speed.

Now let’s think about unidirectional vs. reciprocal causation. So far, I’ve discussed one variable as a cause and another as the effect. This is unidirectional causation, that “x” causes “y”, but “y” doesn’t cause “x”. Unidirectional causation is usually what people talk about when they talk about causation. However, there is also reciprocal causation. Here, “x” causes “y”, as in unidirectional causation, but also “y” causes “x” at the same time. They are both causes and both effects—how cool is that!

As I mentioned , New England is all hills. We also have rocks, not just a few—a lot. If you dig a hole to plant some flowers, you probably end up tossing out several rocks. (As an aside, the rocky terrain has shaped New England’s social and economic development in numerous ways, but that’s for another time). What do we do with all these rocks? Well, sometimes we build walls out of them. Pretty much wherever you go around here, you see rock walls. The farmers of previous centuries would drag the rocks out of their fields and put them on the borders of their properties, thus both clearing their fields and marking their territory. Homeowners have kept with that style, and they often put up rock walls as part of the landscaping. For me, building rock walls is a summertime hobby, and I’m on my third one. When I put a rock down as part of a wall, it pretty much stays there and doesn’t do anything back to me. This would be an example unidirectional causation—my efforts change the location of the rock.

But let’s say that I went bad, and instead of building walls, I picked up the rocks and started throwing them at my neighbors. Some of my neighbors are elderly widows, and they don’t put up with any crap (plus I think they have pretty good throwing arms), so they would probably start throwing the rocks back at me. As a result, my throwing would give them bumps on the head, but, in response to me, they would throw the rocks back and give me bumps on the head. This is an example of reciprocal causation—the bumps on their heads are both effects of my throwing and causes of their throwing.

Who would have thought that causation could be so dangerous?

Facebook and Social Comparison Theory

By Bradley Wright

My high-school aged son and his friends use a Facebook application that is both interesting and horrifying. With this application, the user compares him- or herself to all of their Facebook friends. Once you start this application, it shows random pairs of individuals from your Facebook friend list (which, by the way, includes me), and it asks you to judge them on a remarkably wide range of criteria.

For example, it might show pictures of two friends, and then ask who has the best profile picture or smells the nicest or is the coolest or is the best potential parent or is the most fun to go shopping with. Just think-- if you use this program, you might be able to go to school or work the next day uplifted by the knowledge that you smell nicer than any of your Facebook friends.

This program horrifies me because I’m aware of how incredibly powerful peer-influence is during adolescence and even young adulthood (read: college students). If all your friends are doing something, then you’ll probably do it too--no matter how silly or thoughtless it is. This is why young people will dress funny, have bizarre hairstyles, and listen to terrible music—but that may have just been me growing up in the 1970s disco-era. Thankfully, the program doesn’t have negative categories, in which you vote for who smells the worst. Still, I shutter to think how much power these explicit peer-comparisons have over young peoples’ understandings and feelings about themselves.

This program is interesting because it is a great example of social comparison theory. This theory, developed by well-known social psychologist Leon Festinger (back in 1954, even before Facebook!), assumes that people understand themselves, in part, by comparing themselves to others. In fact, we make these comparisons constantly and in just about every area of our lives—our abilities, opinions, possessions, relationships. If we walk into a room with other people in it, even if we don’t know them well, we have probably already figured out whether we are taller or shorter, richer or poorer, and younger or older than them.

We’re especially prone to compare ourselves to people we view as similar to us. So I usually compare myself to men about my age, especially those in academia. I’m much less inclined to compare myself to someone considerably different, e.g., one of my first-grade son’s friends. The fact that I can run faster than a seven-year old really doesn’t matter much, but I’m aware of how much I publish or earn compared to my colleagues in sociology.

The fact that we compare ourselves to others is pretty straightforward. Social comparison theory gets really interesting when we consider why we do it. Sometimes we just want to know how we’re doing—to assess ourselves—and in that case we compare ourselves to people who are most similar to us. Say you were a golfer, you might want to get a sense for how well you were doing, so you would compare your golf scores with those of people like you—maybe the friends that you go golfing with. (I actually gave up golfing after a particularly difficult experience getting the ball under the windmill).

Other times, however, we want to improve how we’re doing in a given area. In this situation, we consciously choose someone much better than us to compare ourselves with. The idea is that if they are better, any differences between us and them might signal areas that we could improve on. So, a golfer might compare himself with Tiger Woods, correctly assuming that Tiger has a much better swing and approach to the game than he does.

Sometimes, however, we want to feel better about ourselves, and so we might compare ourselves to people who are doing less well than us in a particular area. So, if a golfer is down in the dumps, maybe watching a beginner play might make her feel better about her own golf skills.

The larger point here is that how we define and understand ourselves is an inherently social process, for it stems in part from who we compare ourselves to. Not only that, but we strategically use these comparisons to alter who we are and how we see ourselves. So, the Facebook social comparison application, like so much else in life, becomes a tool for making sense of who we are in the world.

Still, this is little comfort for me not having been voted the nicest smelling person.

An Effect of Measurement

By Bradley Wright

A friend of mine bought a hybrid car—one of those cars that runs on both gas and a battery engine—and when he gave me a ride, I was struck by two things. First, the car is amazingly quiet when it is running on battery power; in fact, I wouldn’t have even known that the engine was running except we were driving down the street. This, I thought, would be perfect for sneaking up on pedestrians (but that’s a topic for another blog post). Second, my friend, who is otherwise quite sensible, spoke at great length about the gas mileage that he gets with the car, and how it varies by driving patterns and terrain. Apparently braking slowly is good (or bad) because it does (or doesn’t) charge the battery. (You can tell I wasn’t paying too much attention).

Now, I thought my friend was unusual in his fascination with miles-per-gallon until I read this Washington Post article about hybrid owners. It tells of various owners who seem willing to do anything for that extra mile-per-gallon. One driver changed his route to work, just to avoid a big hill that drops his mileage to below 20 mpg. Another is so keen on keeping his mpg high that he won’t let his wife—who apparently just drives normally—drive his hybrid.

The key feature of hybrids that makes this mpg obsession possible is a dashboard mileage monitor that indicates how many miles-per-gallon the car is getting at that exact moment. This feedback appears to change drivers’ behavior.

Sociologists have long understood what is called an observer effect (also called the Hawthorn Effect). The idea here is that people change their behavior when they know they are being observed. This is why sociologists will sometimes use covert observation to study a situation, so as not to change it unnecessarily. It’s also why experimenters will often deceive their subjects about the true purpose of the study.

Well, related to the observer effect might be something that we can a measurement effect. Just the act of measuring a behavior changes it to be (usually) more in-line with our preferences and goals.

This principle applies to much more than driving hybrid cars. In fact, when people want to change their own behavior or that of others, one of the first things they’ll do is start measuring that behavior. It’s remarkable in how many areas of life we use this measure-to-change-it approach to behavior.

Weight Watchers is one of the best known weight loss programs. What’s one of the first things that a person does at the Weight Watcher’s meeting? Step on a scale, and have someone write down how much you weigh. This measurement brings your attention to what you’re trying to do, and it indicates how well you’ve done it in the previous week.

Most money management programs operate on the same principle. They have you keep track of all your expenses (i.e., measure them), and then see how they change over time. (I tried a program, called Money Counts, and I realized that I’m better at sociology than managing money.)

Want to live a more holy life? Start confessing. The Catholic Church encourages its members to periodically tally up their sins for a priest who then (hopefully) absolves them of these sins. The awareness of sin that the periodic confessions encourage should help move the individual away from behaviors they don’t desire.

Fundraising programs not only ask for money, but they also let their target audience know how much they’ve already raised. This is why every summer we see signs with thermometers painted on them. The more money given, the higher the red-mark on the thermometer.

I suppose that even classroom grading works this way. Students who know their grades throughout their semester probably study harder and are more engaged in the tests than those who are not told their grades. (This is why professors always tell students their grades.)

This principle has implications for social research. Just the act of measuring someone’s behavior, e.g., as is done in a survey, can change that person’s behavior by making them more aware of what they are doing. This may not matter in a cross-sectional survey, done only once, but with longitudinal research, it may alter the data. That is, if we measure a person’s behavior a second time, we may observe something different than if we hadn’t measured it a first time.

What’s the bottom line here? Well, when we measure anything, whether in professional research or everyday-life, realize that we’re probably changing some aspect of it. If we want to change something, probably the first thing to do is to start measuring it.

Types of Causality

By Bradley Wright

(Part II of a series)

In my last post, I wrote of basic ideas about causality. Sociologists most readily assume that one thing in the social world causes another when the cause correlates with the effect, occurs before it, and there’s a plausible, non-spurious causal mechanism. 

In this post, I develop the idea of causality more by talking about its different types. Yes, just as there are different types of cars, ice cream, and television reality shows, there are different types of causality. Knowing these distinctions in causality allow us to recognize causality more readily and to think about it more deeply… and you thought you’d have nothing to do during your summer vacation!

1) Nomothetic vs. Idiographic . The first distinction involves two words no one has ever heard of: nomothetic and idiographic (they come from the Latin phrase “really confusing”). They regard how many cases are being explained—many or just one. 

Nomothetic means a causal relationship is assumed to happen among many cases. (Sociologists usually study people as cases, but these principles apply to non-people cases like bears or stars or battles). With nomothetic causation, some cause has some effect on lots of people. This is what sociologists do almost all the time, and it’s so routine, we can forget that there is anything else.

Idiographic causation, however, involves just one person (or case). Basically, you’re saying that a cause has an effect for one person or thing, and you don’t know, or don’t care, whether it affects others. 

Now, why would anyone want to go idiographic? Well… historians might want to explain why a specific event happened. For example, why did the American Civil War occur? Different historians might have different explanations, but they are not trying to explain all wars (this would be nomothetic) or even all civil wars (again, nomothetic), but rather why this particular war happened.

2) Deterministic vs. Probabilistic . The next distinction of causality is fortunately easier to pronounce, but it still identifies a type of causality that people sometimes miss. This distinction regards whether a cause happens every single time or just some of the time.

Deterministic causation occurs when every time you have a cause, you have an effect. For example, every time you cool pure water to 32 degrees, it freezes into ice. (Okay, I suppose any science types reading this would find an exception, e.g., maybe water under high levels of pressure doesn’t freeze or maybe it acts differently in outer space, but work with me here).

Sociologists rarely, if ever deal with deterministic causation. Instead, we’re all about probabilistic causation. This happens when a cause sometimes brings about an effect, but not always. A classic example is smoking and lung cancer. Not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer, but it definitely increases the likelihood of it, so we call smoking a cause of lung cancer.

Sometimes people confuse this distinction, and they proclaim that if a cause is not deterministic, it is not really a cause. For example, someone might argue that since their grandfather smoked a pack a day and died at natural causes at 100 years old smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer.

In this sense, probabilistic causation is more difficult to deal with (and I think more interesting) because it does have lots of exceptions, but, it’s still causation. 

3) Necessary vs. sufficient. This next distinction is rather tricky. It’s the one that that most sociology students have to stop and really think about when they’re answering a midterm question. It regards whether a particular cause is needed to bring about an effect and if that cause is enough by itself.

Necessary causation occurs when you absolutely, positively must have a certain cause to observe a corresponding outcome. Simply having that cause may not be enough to have the effect, but you definitely need that specific cause to have any hope 

of observing the effect. A simple example: You need air to be alive, so air is a necessary cause for life. Air, by itself, might not be enough, for other things can come into play. Maybe you were just bitten by some crazed monkey that has Ebola, and you’re going to be dead by sundown no matter how much air you breathe.

Sufficient causation means that a particular cause is enough to have an effect, though other causes could bring that effect about as well. Eating a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream every day is enough to make you fat just by itself (assuming that the rest of your diet stays the same). It is a sufficient cause of weight gain. (By the way, I just tried their flavor “Visual Whirled Peace” today—outstanding). But, there are also other possible causes of weight gain, such as Haagen Dazs and Bryers ice creams.

Just to keep you on the edge of your computer chair, let me tell you that I plan to write about several other distinctions in causality in my next post. How sweet it is…

Causation

By Bradley Wright

Sociologists spend a lot of time talking and thinking about causality. (We probably spend even more time with office politics, but that’s not very interesting, so I won’t write about that).

Now, I have a sneaking suspicion that philosophers spend a lot of time defining exactly what is the essence of causality, and they probably trace it back to Romans and Greeks and people like that. Rather than go into this type of philosophical analysis, I will simply focus on how we might test for its existence.

If “A” is a cause of “B”, what does that mean? In this case, “A” and “B” could be just about anything—characteristics of people, interactions, groups, societies.

First off, we would expect some level of association between “A” and “B”. By this we mean that as levels in “A” change, we would expect usually to see some change in “B”. Some associations are positive, meaning that “A” and “B” move in the same direction. So, as “A” increases, “B” does also. (Or, conversely, if “A” decreases, so does “B”). Other associations are negative, meaning that as “A” increases, “B” decreases or the reverse.

Second, we should see changes in “A” occur before changes in “B”. Since very few sociologists can afford time-travel machines (though I think that I saw a colleague with a flux capacitor in their office), we are stuck with the linear progression of time. That means that changes in a cause have to happen before the resulting consequences in the effect. Sometimes this time difference is miniscule, so that changes in “A” and “B” seem to happen almost simultaneously, but there is still some ordering. At the very least, if “A” causes “B”, then changes in “B” can not happen before corresponding changes in “A”.

Third, there should be no spurious correlation. A spurious correlation means that some other variable causes both “A” and “B” such that they correlate with each other, and maybe “A” comes before “B”, but in fact there is not causal connection between them. (For a fuller explanation, read this previous post). This is where things get a little tricky. Researchers can measure if two variables are associated, and he or she can measure which came first, but how can you know that there is no secret variable out there that makes the correlation spurious? Who knows, given what “A” and “B” are, there could be dozens if not hundreds possible spurious correlates. How can a researcher rule out all of them? They can’t. The researcher can measure and rule out any obvious spurious correlates, but ultimately it’s an act of faith (or, as it’s called in sociology, “theory”) that a correlation between “A” and “B” is not spurious.

Finally, we like to know how “A” causes “B”. There can be a causal relationship between the two even if we don’t know how they affect each other, but knowing “how” makes us more confident the causal connection. Basically, sociologists sleep better at night if they know the causal mechanism.

So far I’ve discussed this in rather abstract terms, and you’re probably wondering if I had intended to put you to sleep at your computer. (Sociologists sometimes forget that regular human beings don’t get excited talking about vague “A”s and “B”s).

Here’s an example.

Suppose that a friend told you that they had a bag of magic M&Ms. Now, I realize that for some people, any bag of candy is magic, but these are special M&Ms, according to your friend. If you eat a green one, you will instantly become amazingly physically attractive (if you’re not already). You’ll be so handsome or beautiful, that you’ll end up on lists like this, this, and this. (Okay, the last one was just to see if you were paying attention.)

You are intrigued, but you want to find out if it’s true. Does eating green M&Ms make you attractive? Or, to put into boring sociological notation, does “A” cause “B”? To test this, you give a bag of the magic M&Ms to your friends, and then you take notes.

First you notice whether the friends who ate green M&Ms are more attractive than those who didn’t. If so, this would be a positive association—more green M&Ms = more good looks.

Then you would look to see which came first. Perhaps beautiful people just happen to eat more green M&Ms; if so, they “B” comes before “A”, and we don’t think “A” is a cause of “B”.

Can you think of any spurious correlation between green M&Ms and attractiveness? At this particular moment, I can’t (but then again, I may just be thinking about how thin this example is getting).

Finally, you wonder how green M&Ms would change a person so dramatically. You might send them off to the lab and have them analyzed.

Once you’ve answered all these questions, you can decide for yourself if there is hope that green M&Ms will make you so good looking. Then again, maybe you should have some anyway… just in case.

The Economics of Selling Drugs

By Bradley Wright

One of the joys of doing social research is the constant exposure to empirical data. I can’t count the number of times that I was sure that the world worked in one way only to be corrected by data (and sometimes my research corrects others’ misperceptions).

Here’s a great example of how actual data about a topic can correct prevailing misconceptions. I think that most people in society would view drug dealing as a fairly lucrative business. Illegal drugs, such as cocaine, heroin, marijuana, are bought from growers and resold at a substantial mark-up. Somebody has to be making lots of money, no? Stories of drug busts often emphasize the enormous amounts of money involved. In movies and television, drug dealers usually seem to live on yachts and have private airplanes and waiting, chauffeured cars. 

Well, it turns out that once social scientists actually measured how much money that drug dealers were making, the results suggested that most dealers work for close to minimum wage. That’s right—that make about as much money selling drugs as if they were working at McDonalds or at the mall.

The best known study of the drug dealers’ finances was conducted by Levitt and Venkatesh. While they published it as an academic article, it is best known from a chapter in their best-selling book Freakonomics. What’s unique about this research is its data. Venkatesh, a sociologist, spent years living with a crack-dealing gang in Chicago.

(Check out the video clip of Venkatesh describing some of his work on the right.)

In the process of getting to know the gang members, Venkatesh was given financial records covering four years of the gang’s activities. These were the accounting books of the gang—the amount of drugs sold, expenses, and the pay given to each member of the gang. This remarkable data gave insight to the inside workings of a drug-dealing street gang.

The data indicated that the gang received its money from selling drugs, collecting dues from its members, and extorting individuals and companies doing business in the gang’s turf. The majority of money came from selling drugs. The gang’s expenses went to buying the drugs, hiring mercenary fighters, giving money to the gang hierarchy, paying for funerals for its members, buying weapons, and paying its members.

The picture that emerged from the wage data was one very similar to a conventional corporation. A few members made lots of money, but the majority made barely enough to live on; in fact, some of the dealers had to live with their mothers because they couldn’t afford to move out. The actual hourly wage earned by a gang’s foot soldier—the person on the street making the sales—ranged from $2.50 to $7.10 an hour (in 1995 dollars). That’s not much money at all. The gang leaders or “officers” did much better. They earned from $32 to $97 dollars an hour. These are data for one local gang. The central gang, which oversaw the local gangs much like a company would oversee its franchises, made substantially more money. As with a regular, legal corporation, the low-level workers of the gang did most of the work but the high-level members received most the pay. 

An interesting question arises from these data: Why do foot soldiers sell drugs for so little money? Any job has its potential costs—a worker at McDonalds might get sore feet, occasional grease burns, and probably some weight gain—but selling drugs is extraordinarily dangerous. The death rates in Venkatesh and Levitt’s sample was 7% annually. That means that, on average, about 1 in 14 gang members was killed. Why would anyone risk so much for so little?

A standard sociological answer would hold that the gang members had few opportunities for legitimate wages. In addition, the sample members spoke of being foot soldiers as a way of stepping up to becoming an officer of the gang and make much better money. Just as a college student might work in the mail room of a large corporation, in order to start climbing the ladder, these gang members started with selling drugs on the street for near minimum wage pay.

Despite the considerably different cultural context between gangs and corporate America, it seems that they share a lot of similarities. Both have hierarchical pay scales that represent inequality, and both have individuals willing to suffer through the lower ranks in hopes of getting to the higher ranks.

Who would have thought? 

Want to learn more? Here’s a presentation by Steven Levitt about this research.

Get Religion, Live Longer

By Bradley Wright 

Do you want to live a longer life? Well, science says there are a few things you can do to add years to your life: eat well, exercise, watch your weight, get regular medical check-ups, to name a few. In addition, there are various social factors that are linked to longevity, and one of them is religious involvement. That’s right, people who attend religious services and are involved in religious communities live longer. 

Dozens of studies have found a link between religion and longevity. As an example of this line of work, sociologists analyzed data from a study of about 21,000 people who were first interviewed in 1987. Researchers then followed up eight years later, in 1995, and found that about 2,000 of them had died. The study was designed to study risk factors for cancer, and it contained measures of attendance at religious services. This allowed researchers to test if the people who went to religious services were less likely to die during the study than those who did not. 

Here’s what they found. Using various fancy statistical methods, they calculated that a twenty-year-old person who did not attend religious services at all would on average live to be 75 years old. If they attended religious services less than once a week, they would live to 80 years old; and if they went once a week, they’d live to be 82. Finally, if they attended more than once a week, they would live 83 years. Wow! Going from not attending religious services to attending multiple times a week was associated with living eight full years longer. Eight years, that’s a long time. That’s how long George W. Bush will have been president. That’s two four-year college experiences. That’s about how much extra longevity you get for not smoking.

Since women live longer than men and also tend to be more religious, we might expect a different effect by gender, but the effect of religion on longevity still holds. Men who attend services more than once a week live, on average, seven years longer than men who don’t attend services (81 versus 74 years). There’s a similar finding for women.

These findings lead to the question of why. What is it about religion that has people living longer?

One answer has to do with what sociologists call selectivity. Maybe the people who become religious are the type of people who would live longer anyway, and religion really has nothing to do with it. This seems plausible. Perhaps most people who frequently attend religious services aren’t the type to live life reckless, dangerous lives and would be this way even if they didn’t go to religious services. (This is called selectivity because people “select” themselves into religion.)

It could also be that involvement in religion changes people such that—whatever their life expectancy before they become involved in religion—they live longer. This could happen in several ways. (In case you’re wondering, this is called mediation. Mediating factors are mechanisms through which X causes Y. In this case, things that religion does to make someone live longer).

Many religions have explicit norms about health related behaviors-about drinking or smoking, for example. Even when they don’t have specific rules, they encourage moderation. To illustrate, in the church that I attend, it’s fine if I regularly have a drink or two, but I think my friends there would be concerned if I were routinely getting drunk (especially if I showed up drunk on Sunday mornings). Eating well, drinking in moderation, and not smoking are things that will usually increase longevity regardless of one’s supernatural beliefs.

Another factor is more social in nature. Many religious groups provide strong social ties—friendships, social activities, personal support, and, in general, lots of social interaction. Social ties, regardless of the source, lead to longer lives. My church has numerous meetings a week in which people interact with each other, often seeking to help each other.

A final factor is the effects of stress on religious versus non-religious people. Many religious groups provide various forms of formal and informal support. The theologies espoused by religions frequently include instructions on how to cope with stress. Religious organizations often provide counseling, confession, and just plain old friendship. They also can provide material goods, such as food and money, to members who experience difficulties in these areas. 

What does all this mean? That even with something as seemingly-biological as how long we live, social conditions matter greatly. Based on this, if you’re going to smoke, do try to get to services! ;-)

Strict vs. Lax Churches

By Bradley Wright

Here’s a puzzle for you: Why are strict churches growing much faster than lax churches?

When a church is strict, they demand more of their members. They might ask members to give more money, attend more meetings, and perhaps to cede to the church more give authority over their daily lives. Basically, the strict church “costs” more than other churches. Yet this type of church typically grows more than other churches do.

In contrast, other churches are more lax. They require less time, money, and overall commitment. These types of churches tend to be decreasing in membership.

Within Christianity, worldwide, various denominations have different growth rates. In recent data, Pentecostals grew at the rapid rate of 8.1% a year. Evangelicals grew at the rate of 5.4% a year. By contrast, all Protestant denominations grew by 3.3%, and Catholics by just 1.3%. Pentecostal and evangelical churches typically are stricter than other churches.

In the United States, data from the National Council of Churches show mainline Protestant denominations, typically less demanding churches, in steady decline in membership. In 2007, membership in the United Methodist Church dropped 1%, the Evangelical Lutheran Church dropped 1.5%, and the Episcopal Church dropped 4%. Wow.

Here’s why this finding is a puzzle. We usually associate increased costs with decreased demand. If a restaurant were to double its prices, it would probably get fewer customers. If a real estate agent increased the selling price of a home, she could probably expect it to take longer to sell. This is why stores have sales when they want to attract customers, not “price-raising” events.

With churches, however, it seems to work the other way around. The more you ask of members, the more members you get. How can we explain this?

A popular explanation comes from the work of Laurence Iannoccone, an economist who applies basic economic theories to religion. Economists talk of supply and demand, costs and benefits, and rational choice, and though one wouldn’t initially think this would apply to religion—God being somewhat different than what economists usually study—it has some interesting insights.

When churches are strict, Iannaccone writes, this "increases commitment, raises levels of participation, and enables a group to offer more benefits to current and potential members." It does this because it gets rid of the people who would want to enjoy the benefits of the church without doing their fair share of the work involved in keeping a church going. Economists call these people free-riders, and they tend to drag groups down. Because they require so much from their members, strict churches have fewer free-riders and thus can give more and do more for those people who are members. This makes them more appealing to prospective new members, which increases their size.

As Iannaccone writes, strict churches “mitigate free-rider problems. Potential members are forced to choose: participate fully or not at all. The seductive middle-ground is eliminated; average levels of commitment and participation increase; and, strange as it may seem, many members come out ahead.”

In addition, a strict church makes it difficult for members to leave. They have invested a lot in that church, and they will lose this investment if they leave. Furthermore, by virtue of being so committed to that church, they have probably not developed other social resources outside of the church, so they have less-developed options for social groups outside the church.

This type of analysis applies social science theory to a religious phenomenon, and this mixture of the secular and the sacred isn’t to everyone’s preference. Albert Mohler, a Christian writer and commentator, reviews this literature, and he concludes that “Laurence Iannaccone's rational choice theory can actually explain very little about conservative Christianity” because the growth of strict churches is the result of theological, rather than social-economic principles. “Evangelicals are willing to pay a high social cost for the Christian faith, precisely because we believe the Gospel to be true. Furthermore, Christians know better than to expect fulfillment in this world. True satisfaction will be realized only in the age to come, and a perspective focused on eternity transforms the questions of everyday life.”

The tension between the observed social and the believed theological won’t be resolved in this blog post, but as someone who is both an adherent to Christianity and a practicing sociologist, it fascinates me. I often wonder if the two perspectives complement each other rather than being mutually exclusive.

If nothing else, these two perspectives offer competing metaphors for church growth. Theology would speak of making people “fishers of men” while sociology would emphasize growing churches saying “fish or cut bait.”

What's a Spurious Correlation?

By Bradley Wright

Every sociology major learns about the concept of spurious correlation, but they don’t always fully understand it. This concept matters because when it occurs, two things look like they cause each other, but in reality they don’t.

Here’s how spurious correlation works. Suppose we have two things that are correlated. This means that when we see levels of one of them change, we usually also see levels of the other change. Because we’re academics, and not always very creative, we’ll call these things “A” and “B” (sounds like a Dr. Seuss book).

If we see “A” correlate with “B”

AB

We might be tempted to assume that “A” causes “B” or that “B” causes “A.”

AB

AB

There may be causation, but there may not be. Before we go much further, we have to look for a third variable, boldly named “C”, that creates a spurious correlation between “A” and “B”. This happens when “C” causes both “A” and “B” and thus produces the observed correlation between them.

We might draw it as follows:

AB

                                       C 

Okay, this is where presentations of spurious correlation usually stop. Some students get it, some don’t. I’m teaching research methods this semester, and I wanted to make this concept more understandable, so I asked the students to come up with examples of spurious correlation based on things that they observed in their everyday life. After reading these examples, you should have a better understanding of how spurious correlation works.

• One student had gone out partying the weekend before, and while sitting in the bar watching his friends during the evening, he noticed that people who had the most fun dancing were also those who were most likely to throw up by the end off the evening. It’s not that dancing made them sick (“A” causes “B”), or that being sick make them have fun dancing (yuck—“B” causes “A”), rather there is a third variable, alcohol consumption (“C”) that leads to both fun dancing and sickness.
• A student works as a nurse at a local hospital. He noticed that the patients who received radiation therapy were also those most likely to die (A and B). Why? Cancer (C) leads to both radiation and death.
• A student has noticed that the mornings when she has the toughest time getting out of bed are also the mornings with the most car accidents on the roads around campus. It’s not that her staying in bed causes car accidents (A-> B), or that she stays in bed out of fear of car accidents (B->A); rather bad weather causes both car accidents and her wanting to stay in bed.
• A student lives in the dorms next to some guys who are varsity athletes. The guys were explaining to her that women are attracted to them (A) because they are athletes (B). She, however, pointed out that it could be because of their muscular bodies (C). Maybe being strong increases their athleticism and it also attracts women.
• A student is from the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. He has noticed that the more people there are on the island, the more crime there is. It’s not that simply having a greater population leads to crime, or that crime attracts more people. Instead, the population swells when lots of tourists arrive, and the tourists commit crimes.
• A student explained that when she burps (A), she also gets the chills (B). She doesn’t think that she burps in response to the chills, or that she gets chilled because she burps. Rather, she just thinks that something weird is happening in her body (C) that causes both.
• Finally, a student and his friends formed a rock band some years ago, and they are trying to make it big. It doesn’t look promising though. As he explains it, the more they practice, the better they sound. Unfortunately, he thinks the relationship between practice time (A) and quality of sound (B) is spurious. The band practices in a friend’s unheated garage and during winter its pretty cold, so they don’t like to practice much. When they do practice, their fingers are so cold, that they have trouble playing their instruments. As such, the cold temperature (C) both decreases practice time (A) and performance quality (B), leading to correlation between them. The student doubts that they are actually getting better, and he may need to plan a career as something other than a rock star.

Informal Social Sanctions, Prostitution, and Johntv.com

By Bradley Wright

When we think of preventing crime, we usually think of the government punishing people with fines, arrest, jail time, and so forth. It turns out, however, that informal punishments by friends, family, and neighbors also deters crime as much, if not more, than formal punishments. These informal punishments can take many forms. A family member might express disapproval; a friend might cut off the friendship, and even passing strangers looking askance can prevent crime.

These informal social sanctions are part of daily life, and they aren’t necessarily planned ahead of time as a way of preventing crime. It’s in this context that we can think about a class of informal sanctions developed explicitly to prevent crime. These sanctions threaten public embarrassment as a way of deterring criminal behavior (as former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer might for other politicians). The logic here is that people sometimes care deeply about their good reputation, and will avoid activities that would threaten it. As such, threatening reputations might be a way to influence peoples’ behavior more effectively than threatened jail time.

Recently an individual in Oklahoma City has been getting a lot of attention for his efforts to use shame to prevent crime. His name is Brian Bates, and he styles himself as a video vigilante in his efforts to prevent prostitution. Brian started some years ago when he got frustrated with the high levels of prostitution in his neighborhood. At one point, he came out of his house to find a prostitute and her client conducting business while parked in his driveway. He eventually testified in court for several cases, but no convictions resulted. Off-handedly, a prosecutor joked that maybe next time he could bring in a video clip, and he thought that was a good idea.

Armed with only a video camera, Bates drives around areas of Oklahoma City to video tape men who frequent prostitutes. He starts video taping when he sees a car slow down to pick up the prostitute, and then he follows them until they stop. After they engage their transaction, Bates will typically approach the car to film the customer. He confronts the man, asking him to explain his behavior, which the man usually denies, and Bates films the conversation.

Bates then posts his videos on-line for the whole world to see. Here is one of them, in which an Army recruiter, dressed in his uniform and driving a military car, gets caught “recruiting” paid sex. This video, and many more like it, are available on youtube.com. (In fact, Brian Bates gets a cut of the advertising dollars associated with each online view of these videotapes).

On Bates’ website, he says that deterring crime is his motivation. One of the goals of his work, he writes, is to “use those caught and published here as an example to hopefully dissuade others.” Elsewhere, Bates has been quoted as saying "If you get caught by the cops, you pay a fine. If you get caught by me, you get a life sentence… there's no reprieve, no probation. People will be hitting that video on Google searches as long as you live."

(Somewhat surprisingly, Bates supports the legalization of prostitution, in private settings. His focus is on “street” prostitution.)

Bates’ actions have raised various ethical concerns—does he have the right to follow people around and videotape them? Apparently, he does, as long as it’s all done in public. Bates also turns over his videos to the police in an effort to assist them in getting convictions for prostitution. The police, however, have reported that they tend not to be of much use.

A remaining question is whether his work is effective in deterring street prostitution in Oklahoma City. It’s difficult to know, but my guess would be that it does deter individuals who are caught once from doing it again. It seems like the shame of having friends, family, and coworkers watch such activities on-line would lead a person to find some other outlet for their desires. It’s less clear, however, that his work discourages customers who have not previously been caught. Probably many of them have never heard of Bates and his video camera, and others are from out of town.

Ironically, there could well be some reverse shaming going on here. While Bates emphasizes that he’s the good-guy here, and he’s bringing justice to the community, perhaps people have begun to wonder about somebody spending his days trying to film other people having sex.

Who knows, maybe someday we’ll all have video cameras, and we’ll be so busy videotaping each other that we won’t have time to break the law.

Attribution Theory and American Idol

By Bradley Wright

In this post, I’d like to bring together two of my favorite things: Attribution theory and American Idol.

Attribution theory is a collection of theories and models developed by social psychologists to explain how we explain things. Human beings are obsessive explainers—we always want to know why things happen. How we make these explanations (also called attributions) can be very interesting.

American Idol, of course, is the television show that dominates the ratings for the first several months of each year. In it, singers perform for a panel of judges, after which the judges give their opinions of the singer, and the viewers phone in to vote for their favorite singer.

In applying attribution theory to American Idol, we ask why things happen on that show. Why do viewers vote for a particular singer? Why does a singer choose a particular song and style to perform? Why do Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell bicker with each other? And… the question that I’ll discuss here: Why do the judges say what they say?

A powerful version of attribution theory is Kelley's Covariation model of Attribution. This model says that the way we explain why something happens depends on how we answer three different questions.

1. If person “A” does something to person “B”, the first thing we ask is whether “A” is the only person doing it or if lots of other people are doing it as well. Kelley terms this consensus.
2. Then we ask if person “A” always does this or if this particular time is a unique occurrence. This is consistency.
3. Finally, we ask if person “A” does this to everyone or to just person “B”. This is distinctiveness.

According to Kelley’s theory, how people answer these three questions tells us how they’ll explain why person “A” did what they did.

To apply this theory to American Idol judging, let’s start with Simon Cowell—the acerbic-tongued British music producer. His comments tend to be low on consensus—he’s not afraid to offer an opinion different than the other judges and the live audience. (In fact, the audience routinely boos him for expressing negative opinions.) He’s also low on consistency. One week he’ll rip a contestant while the next week he’ll praise the same contestant. Finally, he’s also high on distinctiveness. On the same show, Simon will pointedly criticize one contestant and praise another. 

How do we explain Simon’s comments? Perhaps he bases his opinion on the particular performance. As the performances differ in quality across singers on a given evening, Simon will express different opinions. If a particular singer’s performances vary across weeks, he will also give different opinions.

As an aside, some of Simon’s criticisms are hysterically funny. Here are some of his greatest hits:

· “If you sang like this two thousand years ago, people would have stoned you.”

· “You don’t need a judge—you need an exorcist.”

And my personal favorite:

· “You sang like someone who sings on a cruise ship… and halfway through [the song] I imagined the ship sinking.”

Now, let’s turn to Paula Abdul, the former Laker girl and pop singer. Paula takes a very different approach to judging than does Simon. Her comments are high in consensus because she almost always agrees with fellow judge Randy Jackson. If Randy says a contestant has pitch problems, Paula will chime in too—often repeating Randy’s exact phrasing. The more the audience cheers for a singer, the more Paula will as well. Her comments are also high in consistency—she takes the same positive, supportive approach to a singer each week. If she praises a singer one week, she’s almost certain to do it again the next week. Her comments are also low in distinctiveness. She praises all the singers. In fact, that sets up one of the creative tensions of the show—Paula will gush over a singer and then Simon will lambaste them.

How do we explain Paula’s comments? Perhaps she bases her comments on a general desire to affirm and support each singer, regardless of their performance. Her comments tell us more about Paula than they do about the singer—for each singer gets rather positive comments on each show.

Now, Paula herself is very quotable, though for a different reason than Simon. Rather than being hilariously critical, she’s often unintelligible—from the tone of her voice, you know she’s praising a contestant, but from her words, it’s unclear what she actually means. Some classic Paula-isms:

· “Your voice is truly your instrument” (as opposed to what?)

· “What you brought to the song was familiarity.” (Which sounds good except I think it means that we’ve heard this rendition before.)

What about Randy Jackson? He’s somewhere in the middle between Paula and Simon—he aims to be kind in his comments (unlike Simon) but he will sometimes critique the performance (unlike Paula). I suppose that makes him somewhat less quotable…but consistent.

Where to Sit: Doing Qualitative Research

By Bradley Wright

One of the fun things to do in sociology is to make empirical generalizations. Sometimes in research we start with an idea or a theory, make a hypothesis, and then collect data to test if our idea is correct. This is deductive research, going from large (abstract idea) to small (collecting data about specific people or situations). Deductive research can be very interesting, because we learn if our ideas hold up in the real world, but I don’t think that it’s as fun as inductive research (and as I am aging—about a year annually—I am placing more weight on research being fun).

Sometimes when we enter a situation, even if we don’t know anything about it, we start noticing things. We notice if there are patterns to peoples’ behavior. From these patterns, we create larger explanations about how the social world works. This is inductive because we start with the smaller observation, and from it we build explanations about the larger social world. 

Here’s a simple example of how to create empirical generalizations. In my social research methods class, I asked my students why they sat where they did. It was a reasonable question because the class itself has about 100 chairs, but there are only 50 students, so they had some choice in where they sat.

After talking for about it for about 10 minutes, we came up with the following ways that students decided where to sit.

1) Look for a friend. When you walk into the classroom, first look for someone that you know reasonably well and feel positively toward and sit next to them if there’s an available seat nearby. Or, if you’re really close, see if they’ll move so that you can sit next to them. Don’t sit next to them if you know them well but feel negatively toward them (e.g., an enemy). Also, don’t sit next to them, at least too conspicuously, if you feel positively but don’t know them (e.g., you’re attracted to a stranger).

2) Figure out how close to the front of the room you like to be. If you’re right up front, you catch everything that is going on, but it does make it difficult to sleep, text message, or talk with your friends. If you want to goof around a bit, maybe sit in the back.

3) Find a comfortable seat. Classroom seating is usually pretty tight, with the seats being crammed together—just like economy seating on an airplane. The best seats are those on the aisle. Once class starts, students in the aisle seats can stretch out their legs more than those in the interior seats. The first students to arrive in the class tend to take the aisle seats, and as a result the students arriving later have to step past them to get to the middle seats.

4) Keep an empty seat between you and others (unless you know them). When at all possible, pick a seat that has empty seats on both sides. Seating directly next to someone invades their personal space, and it gives you less room as well.

5) Sit in same area each time. Once you find a suitable seat, try to sit in it, or near it, every class period. This way you get the best seat for you each time, and you don’t really have to think about it. Of course, you may have to change if someone is sitting too close to that seat.

We came up with some other factors that might be incorporated, such as left-handed desks for left-handed students and not sitting directly behind people, especially if they are tall, but the five criteria listed above represented the main decisions made by the students. 

Because students follow these criteria, when I as a professor look out on a classroom, I see alternate seating with only friends sitting next to each other. The aisle seats are always taken. Also, since students tend to sit in the same area each time, I learn to recognize them in 

part by where they sit. In fact, on test days, when I assign random seating, I have trouble recognizing all of my students.

These seating rules are strong enough that they represent social norms, and it can be considered deviant to violate them. For example, if you have friends in a class, but you go sit by yourself, they would probably be upset. Likewise, if there are plenty of empty seats, but you pick one right next to someone, they may take offense.

 

Obviously where to sit in classrooms is a relatively minor issue in the grand scheme of things. Still, it represents a highly structured social interaction, demonstrating the reach of social norms into every aspect of our lives.

Social Movements and Your Attention Span

By Bradley Wright

There are countless social movements in society, and they want you to pay attention.

In a social movement, a group of ordinary people come together to advance a social cause, and there are countless movements in society. In the early twentieth century, women activists banded together to promote women's suffrage —the right to vote. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement promoted justice for African-Americans. The anti-nuclear movement protests the development of nuclear energy. Mothers against Drunk Drivers advocate tougher laws against drunk driving.

A common goal of most social movements, whatever their focus, is to get the public’s attention. Sociologists understand this via resource mobilization theory-- how being in the public’s eye helps movements accomplish their goals. It brings in workers for the cause, it helps collect money, and it might result in changed laws. In fact, more than a few social movements have as their explicit goal raising public awareness about their cause. For example, the National Children's Cancer Society (NCCS—a worthy cause if ever there was one) explicitly states the importance of raising public awareness. They write:

“Take action against a disease that has been ignored for too long. Raising awareness in your community about childhood cancer and the survivorship issues surrounding it is critical to our mutual mission. Awareness can inform and change minds. It can change public policy and raise more funds for crucial patient services. Awareness of the programs of the N.C.C.S. can give hope to families facing the chaos of a diagnosis of childhood cancer.”

As a result, social movements work hard at having distinctive approaches. The movement for breast cancer awareness has the ubiquitous pink ribbons. Not to be outdone, other movements have adopted their own ribbon colors. For example, white ribbons are for lung cancer and violence against women. Yellow ribbons are for deployed soldiers and suicide awareness. Blue ribbons are for child abuse and Hurricane Katrina. Purple is for lupus and showing religious tolerance. Green is for environmental awareness and Lyme disease. Puzzle-piece ribbons are for autism. Ribbons with the words “publish me” are for untenured faculty--okay, I made up that last one.

(As an aside, some have criticized ribbons and wristbands as “slacktivism”—doing things that make us feel good about helping others without actually spending any of our time or money in doing so).

In addition to distributing ribbons, social movements do lots of other things. They can hold demonstrations. The million-man march in 1995 brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to Washington D.C. to promote unity and political participation among black men. They also get celebrity endorsements. For example, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) regularly features actors and actresses in their commercials, sometimes taking off their clothes (a time-honored method of getting attention). Sometimes they just advertise on television and in print, similar to a business seeking customers.

There’s a problem, however—there is only so much public attention to go around, and there are a lot more movements wanting attention than there is attention to give. As such, movements compete with each other for the public’s attention. In this sense, groups like the National Children’s Cancer Society are fighting against not only the disease but also against other disease-related groups. If, for example, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation does a particularly good job of raising awareness, then there may be less to give the NCCS.

This puts social movements in a bind. On one hand, they are probably sympathetic to the causes behind their competing social movements. I suspect that members of the NCCS are also against juvenile diabetes. On the other hand, these other groups are their competitors, taking resources from them.

It’s in this context that we can understand the following commercial. Pandarescue.org is group dedicated to saving 

wild pandas and their habitat. It’s a small group—I’ve never heard of them before this commercial, and so I imagine that they struggled with how to get their message out. They came up with this commercial that explicitly recognizes the resource mobilization model described above. As implied in this commercial, the problem for panda bears is not just deforestation and poaching, but also the public support for whales. Yes, Greenpeace and others portray whales as beautiful, noble creatures, but this video shows the shocking truth! (My guess is that baby harp seals and cute little kittens are also harmful for pandas. Hopefully future commercials will get at that as well).

 

Well, what did you think? In a way, I appreciate its honesty because I imagine that a lot of social movements think that they are more important than other movements. Still, it is so, so tacky. It certainly does exemplify the social mobilization theory of social movements.