How to Teach Social Structure

One of the most difficult concepts to teach college freshpersons and sophomores is Social Structure. It's a major hurdle for those uninitiated to sociology. I've refined a metaphor over the years, though, that I think is helpful in getting the idea across successfully.

I begin by giving a textbook-type, formal definition. You can look that up for yourself or stick with your own interpretation. I find that students like to get those--especially since I don't assign a textbook--even if it doesn't really help them, but they'll furiously scribble it down anyway. I go on to juxtapose agency, which they all get because it's how they think about their lives, with social structure. "Think about the physical structure that we're in right now, this building," I tell them. "There are doors, locks, hallways, walls, windows--all things that constrain or limit your movement. When I showed up for class, you were all waiting patiently in the hall. Because of your identity--students--you could not enter the classroom because you were not given a key. I, on the other hand, because of my identity--faculty--have a key. You may have wanted to get into the room, but your will was constrained. Now, imagine if each of the classrooms in this building represented access to something that you might want, like a good education or a job or wealth. All of us might desire access to those rooms, but not all of us have the key. Because you all know me, you have access to a person who has the key and might be persuaded to grant you access [e.g. social capital, social networks]. Just like with a physical structure, social structure limits and constrains our behavior in ways that we often don't recognize. Because many of us are privileged enough to have the keys to things like a college education, we assume that it is just a matter of choosing to enter the room; we fail to appreciate that others might be disadvantaged, and we sometimes mistakenly decide that it's their own fault [e.g. attribution error]." I usually end by explaining that even though social structure is very resilient and enduring, with enough resources or consensus, society can "remodel." We can change social structure.

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Postscript: For the first time, I'm tagging something on Twitter with the #teachsoc and #learnsoc hashtags that Nathan Palmer (@sociologysource) has suggested. I'm not entirely confident that this fits there.

Slovenly or Sick? The Medicalization of the Messy

My wife introduced me to two television shows, both built on a similar premise but with radically different results.

First, check out this clip from Clean House, airing on the Style Network.

Now, compare that to this ad for Hoarders, airing on the A&E Network.

(Sorry I couldn't get the video to embed.) This is a wonderful example of medicalization. We have people engaging in almost the exact same behavior, but their actions are interpreted in two diametrically opposed ways. Clean House generally (though not exclusively) frames their subjects as having poor habits that, with a little tough love, can be corrected. Hoarders, on the other hand, frames their subjects as having serious mental illnesses. Indeed, they regularly bring in clinicians to treat their subjects. The former invokes judgment (note the eye-rolling and smirking in the first clip), while the latter invokes sympathy (hear the dire music).

Our behaviors do not come with meaning necessarily embedded in them. We have to make sense of them, and the way that we ultimately do so has consequences. We did this in the past with the behavior of children, particularly of little boys. Is Johnny being rambunctious? There once was a time when Johnny was sent to the principal's office for a spanking, but today, he is much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and given a pill. As we medicalize more and more in our society, our acceptance of and reaction to our behaviors change.

Structure vs. Agency and Free Will vs. Determinism

I've always found it interesting how different academic disciplines approach similar problems with varying language and frames. I was intrigued by this interesting piece in the Times about philosophies regarding free will. Here is a bit from the article:

...[R]egardless of whether free will exists, our society depends on everyone’s believing it does. The benefits of this belief have been demonstrated in other research showing that when people doubt free will, they do worse at their jobs and are less honest.

...

“Free will guides people’s choices toward being more moral and better performers,” Dr. Vohs said. “It’s adaptive for societies and individuals to hold a belief in free will, as it helps people adhere to cultural codes of conduct that portend healthy, wealthy and happy life outcomes.”

I wonder how this translates to people's acceptance of structural constraints. Take race as an example. The common conception of racism is bigotry. Why did the white guy get hired instead of the black guy? Well, the boss discriminated against the black candidate because he is prejudiced against blacks. This is what we would call sociologically an agential explanation: racism exists because individuals choose to hold deleterious views of others. Sociologically, though, we know that these kinds of explanations can only go so far. In the aggregate, we have a preponderance of evidence that whites have better chances of employment, controlling for virtually all other influences (e.g. level of education). The agential explanation would suggest that there are a lot of bigoted bosses out there, but that's not in fact what we find. To the contrary, most people who do hiring are quite aware of issues of race and do not hold overtly racist views; nonetheless, the hiring discrepancy remains. Even when individuals choose not to be racist, the problems of race persist.

I wonder, though, what would happen if all people bought the sociological argument. Among sociologists, there is a feeling that if we can get people to understand the complexity of issues such as structural racism, we can undo it, but the experiments highlighted in the article would suggest the opposite: making people aware of the deterministic nature of social problems should make them wring their hands of any moral responsibility toward social change.

Democractic Downer: "How Facts Backfire"

Joe Keohane writes at Boston.com:

...[W]hen misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation....[Voters] already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper....And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we're right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This does not bode well for democracy--or so we might think if our democratic ideals really served the purpose that they allege.

The point that Keohane and the authors of the study to which he refers above miss is that the real function of the democratic process is the illusion of agency, not actual agency. That our government does not serve the direct interest of the average voter is fairly well-established fact (see Clawson, Neustadtl and Weller's Dollars and Votes for one example). Despite that, we have done a wonderful job here in the United States of convincing ourselves that democracy works. In other places, folks are not so easily persuaded. Take Afghanistan for example. Would-be voters there assume--and probably rightly so--that the democratic veneer of their new government surrounds a corrupt system controlled by political elites and other interested powers. It should be no surprise that the fledgling Afghan government is far from stable. Democracy only works insomuch as the people are convinced that they have a voice. If the people feel muted, the illusion of democracy is a failure, and the masses rise up.

Granted, I have little in the way of a solution to offer. I am certainly no advocate for autocracy or oligarchy--especially since they lead even more quickly to the problems of constrained agency.

--Props to Stephanie McClure for passing on the article.