What is the role of trust in ordinary social workings? I would say that a fairly high level of trust is simply mandatory in any social group, from a family to a workplace to a full society. Lacking trust, each agent is forced into a kind of Hobbesian calculation about the behavior of those around …
Components of one’s "social identity"
A social identity is a complex thing. It involves the ways in which one characterizes oneself, the affinities one has with other people, the ways one has learned to behave in stereotyped social settings, the things one values in oneself and in the world, and the norms that one recognizes or accepts governing everyday behavior. …
Bad behavior
How do we explain the occurrence of anti-social behavior that we witness in everyday life? For that matter, how do we explain the more common occurrence of good behavior? There are numerous extreme examples of anti-social behavior. But more prosaic examples are more interesting. A passenger on a jet airliner becomes enraged at being denied …
Cognizing society
"Society" is a large abstract whole -- more abstract, really, than "nature". We as social beings perceive very little of this whole directly, though we do perceive fairly directly many local social facts, social interactions, and social relations. We are often astute readers of the social situations around us -- what our students may be …
Mentalité?
Is there such a thing as a "mentalité" of a people, group, or nation? Take these young people at an Iowa potluck supper, or the traders pictured below at the Chicago Board of Trade -- is there a midwestern mentalité that they can be said to share? What factors might be comprised by such a …
More on knowing poverty
Mike Poole has picked up on the question of "knowing poverty", an earlier topic in UnderstandingSociety, in a very interesting post on his blog, greetingsearthlings. He adds a really valuable international perspective on the topic of how we understand poverty if we don't experience it directly -- he's Australian, trained in Southeast Asian Studies at …
Knowing poverty
Poverty is an important social fact in virtually every society. What is involved in knowing about poverty -- for the citizen, for the poor person, for the social scientist, the historian, and the novelist? To start, there is a set of descriptive and analytical features of poverty. How do we define the concept of being …
What people know
It is interesting to consider what kinds of social knowledge people need in their everyday lives. This is clearly a question of scale. At the proximate and local level, people need to know how to interact with local social practices and institutions. We need to know how to behave in the doctor's office, police station, …
Prejudice and social framing
People bring highly contingent assumptions, beliefs, and frames to their reading of their social worlds. These framing assumptions are presumably the effect of prior life experiences and learning -- this is what we can refer to as the social psychology of social perception. (It is possible there is some degree of biology here as well; …
"Folk" sociology
All of us are sociologists, at some level. We have social concepts in terms of which we analyze the social world around us -- "boss," "working class guy," "politician," "evangelical", "millennial generation". (Stereotypes of groups defined in terms of race and class probably fall in that category.) We operate on the basis of stylized schemata …
Understanding Society 