AgSIT and Lifecourse

Here are some somewhat disjointed thoughts on Banding Together by Jen Lena and Is Rock Becoming The New Jazz? from Rick Beato.

For the tl;dr, skip to 10:32.

I think Rick makes an interesting point. Is what Lena's claim about dominant trajectories really just a life-course effect? Is it that the audience (i.e. the genre community) ages and takes their music with them? How much is the genre trajectory really just the lifecourse trajectory?

Rick calls it "demographic level."

• Avant-garde is the young, whippersnappers breaking rules that they haven't fully learned yet.
• Scene-based is youth settling into geographic stability and creating their own communities.
• Industry-based is the capitalistic exploitation of adults as they start careers and become economically stable.
• Traditionalist is the nostalgic institutionalization of the music of those who are older.

Lifecourse Stages*

• Stage I: Achieving Independence (16-23)
• Transition from lives centered psychologically and emotionally on parents to lives in which we stand on our own.
• Stage II: Balancing Family and Work Commitments (18-40)
• Stable worker, partner/spouse, and parent roles with the challenge of establishing oneself firmly in these roles and forgoing other options.
• emerging adulthood
• Stage III: Performing Adult Roles (35-70)
• An occupational plateau for many employed adults, who seek other challenges such as trying to be good workers, parents, and spouses.
• Stage IV: Coping with Loss (60-90)
• The central challenge during this period is to cope with a series of losses, including the loss of one’s occupational role through retirement, loss of significant relationships through death, and the eventual loss of health, energy, and independence.

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* - DeLamater, John and Daniel Myers. 2007. Social Psychology, 6th ed. Thomson Wadsworth: Belmont, CA. P. 440

WOOP for Health and Wealth

A recent episode of Hidden Brain, You 2.0: WOOP, WOOP!, focuses on the research* of Gabriele Oettingen, Professor of Psychology at NYU. She says, "Those who have stronger, more positive fantasies about reaching their goals are actually less likely to achieve them. They lose fewer pounds, earn worse grades, receive fewer job offers, stay lonely longer, recover from injury more slowly."

I have researched on the Prosperity Gospel (dissertation, paper [PDF], blog). I see a connection here.

Hypothesis: Prosperity Gospel (PG) adherents will be less likely to achieve health and wealth.

Theoretical Explanation: Postive fantasies seduce people into feeling accomplished. Essentially, positive ideation creates its own rewards. PG is a theology that encourages positive ideation. Once feeling fulfilled, PG adherents do not take active steps to become healthier or wealthier. Moreover, PG adherents do not plan behaviors to overcome potential obstacles to their wishes.

This could be a cool link in the literature between a social-psychological finding and religion.

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* - See:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10463283.2011.643698

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-18731-013?doi=1

Trouble Teaching the Self

Quick teaching note. I encounter a recurring problem teaching the self. Students imagine core sociological theory as a failing, as deviance, as running against human nature. I don't mean that students reject or disagree with the theories. I mean that they accept the theories but compartmentalize them instead of seeing them as universal. For example, when I teach the Looking-glass Self, students often make comments along the lines of, "Why can't people just be themselves?" and "Some people are such followers!" Part of this, of course, is that it's difficult to imagine oneself being affected by social forces. We like to imagine ourselves as being completely agential and above the fray. More than this, though, I think that students have been primed by platitudes, memes, and inspirational posters to think deeply individualistically. Social theories, like the Looking-glass Self, however, are quite radical! What most claim is that you are not you apart from how you interact with others. (More broadly, I think that we can say that the social precedes the individual.) To say that this is anathema in a culture that valorizes the heroic individual is an understatement. I shouldn't be surprised when students interpret such theory as aberrant. It takes just a little preemptive persuasion to avoid this.

The "Other-race Effect" Is Racism by Another Name

I caught this article in the NYTimes a couple days ago. Here is an excerpt (emphasis added):

The outcry was immediate and ferocious when a white New York City police officer tackled James Blake, the retired biracial tennis star, while arresting him this month in a case of mistaken identity.... 

Racism, pure and simple, some said.

But was it?

Scientists...call it the “other-race effect,” a cognitive phenomenon that makes it harder for people of one race to readily recognize or identify individuals of another.

...

Psychologists say that starting when they are infants and young children, people become attuned to the key facial features and characteristics of the those around them. Whites often become accustomed to focusing on differences in hair color and eye color. African-Americans grow more familiar with subtle shadings of skin color.

The gist of the article is that this isn't racism; it's some kind of innate psychological effect and, thus, should be excused or at least forgiven, but what belies this is the psychological research itself, and I think this points to an important sociological fact.

Classical instances of racism are increasingly rare. The Civil Rights Movement has been quite successful in convincing the overwhelming majority that overt bigotry is morally wrong (or at least that it comes with social sanctions that are best avoided). What sociology has shown over and over again is that racist outcomes persist even without obvious examples of racist intent. Instead, subtle social psychological and social structural phenomena perpetuate unequal treatment and outcomes. The "other-race effect" is exactly the form that racism increasingly takes today, a racism that persist as an unconscious--and hence unchallenged--matter.

Moreover, the "other-race effect" is itself the product of those very subtle social forces that make it so that infants and young children are surrounded by a "those around them" who are disproportionately of their own racial/ethnic group. There is nothing natural or inevitable about being surrounded by a non-diverse set of people.

Student Success Story

I would hope that my colleagues in psychology would agree with me that their discipline (while certainly distorted by uninformed "pop psychology" theories) has had far more success in gaining respect and understanding among the public than sociology has. Psychology is much more palatable to a social orientation that frames the world in individualistic terms. In line with the liberal arts mission, I firmly believe that students should be exposed to psychological as well sociological perspectives as undergraduates; the problem is that they generally already have at least a rudimentary understanding of the former but a complete ignorance to the latter. It is in that collegial spirit that I share this story.
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Yesterday, I had a student stick around after the final class meeting of our Critical Thinking course. (The course is a general requirement of all frosh and transfers and is taught through several departments and programs, spanning a variety of disciplines.) This student, a psychology major, told me that our class, which uses a Social Problems model to do critical thinking, was eye-opening and had forced her to place individuals and their decisions into the larger social context for the first time. That is a great victory, I think!

If You Believed They Put a Man on the Moon

The New York Times has this otherwise good article that looks largely to psychology for sociological answers about conspiracy theories. It's still worth a read. Here is my quick sociologizing of the topic. It doesn't necessarily contradict the author's reporting, just reframes and clarifies it.

We need to remember that conspiracy theories are a relatively new phenomenon, really only showing up in the 20th century. The increasing complexity of our social world--and the fragmenting of our social world into multiple, often incongruous worlds--has made us anxious. We are not naturally predisposed to dealing with the overwhelming and crushing ubiquity of late-/post-modern society. When events transpire that are beyond our control or understanding, we look for understandable explanations--even if irrational. Ironically, belief in a relatively small cadre of puppet masters pulling the strings behind closed doors is much more comforting than reality; one can imagine a way to stop the masters of the universe, but it is much more difficult to recognize--let alone counter--the social structure that dictate and constrain our lives.

Mentally Ill More Likely to be Victims than Perps

I posted the following on Facebook last week after watching a decontextualized report on the evening new:

I was mildly shocked when an acquaintance from high school questioned this in the comments. I wanted to re-present the research here as I'm sure that many of us find this claim counterintuitive.

First, here are three peer-reviewed journal articles that make this point:

• Lancet: Prevalence and risk of violence against adults with disabilities: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies
  - (coverage from the BBC)
• Lancet: Prevalence and risk of violence against children with disabilities: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies
• Psychiatric Services: Perpetration of violence, violent victimization, and severe mental illness: balancing public health concerns

My friend seemed perplexed by the research since the alleged Aurora gunman was clearly disturbed. I shared that it has been reported that Jared Holmes was receiving psychiatric treatment through the University of Colorado campus where he had been a student, but we do not yet know what his exact diagnosis was. Clearly, he was afflicted with a mental illness. In no way, however, does that refute the claim that the mentally ill are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violence.

Here is an example that I shared to help clarify things. (It's a variation of a heuristic I got from Sociology Focus.) Imagine I am the coach of a football team, and I tell the team that the average maximum bench press for our squad this season is 200 lb. “But, coach,” Billy interjects, “that can’t be correct because I maxed out on the bench at 280 lb.!” Billy’s mistake, while I hope obvious to us, is quite common. We can think about the findings about mental illness in the same way. Yes, some people who are mentally ill do violence to others. On average, though, the overwhelming majority do not. About 1 out of 4 who are mentally ill, however, will be victimized in a given year. We can even quantify that and say that people living with mental illness are 10 times(!) more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. We risk a serious logical error if we claim that one individual invalidates what we know literally from thousands of others.

It is easy for us to assume that those who are mentally ill are dangerous when, in reality, they are the ones who are actually endangered in our society. The overriding concern I have based on this science is that mental illness is still highly stigmatized in our society, and that stigma further entrenches that vulnerability of those with mental illness because many of us mistakenly believe that we should fear them instead of being afraid for them.

Aside from the substantive issue at hand, I found the exchanging illuminating. I'll admit, my knee-jerk reaction was to be annoyed with my Facebook friend, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was in fact what I do as an scientist-educator and this was an incredible moment for teaching. In the end, he was convinced by my exposition of the research. I hope that others learned something, too.

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UPDATE (12/17/2012):

Two more articles worth reading:

• New York Times: In Gun Debate, a Misguided Focus on Mental Illness
• The American Journal of Psychiatry: The Population Impact of Severe Mental Illness on Violent Crime

UPDATE (2/15/2018):

• American Journal of Public Health: Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms

UPDATE (7/30/2018):

• The Incidental Economist: Becoming mentally ill increases your risk of becoming a crime victim

UPDATE (8/23/2022):

• What Are the Real Warning Signs of a Mass Shooting?

'Mr. Sociology' Throws Hat in Ring for 'Mr. Psychology'

David Brooks is at it again, this time weighing in on the tragedy in Aurora. Here is the kicker:

The crucial point is that the dynamics are internal, not external. These killers are primarily the product of psychological derangements, not sociological ones. 

A few paragraphs later, there's this:

The best way to prevent killing sprees is with relationships — when one person notices that a relative or neighbor is going off the rails and gets that person treatment before the barbarism takes control. But there also has to be a more aggressive system of treatment options, especially for men in their 20s. The truly disturbed have always been with us, but their outbursts are now taking more malevolent forms.

So, let's get this straight. It's not sociological; it's psychological--expect that it's about "relationships," that is, interpersonal accountability, neighborly intervention, and reform of the mental healthcare system, a big social institution. Seems that even if the cause is psychological, the preconditions (or, conversely, the mitigation) is indeed sociological. If you had submitted this column as an essay in my introductory sociology course, I'd give it a D, David. I'll give you one week to revise it for the chance at a better grade.

Explain to me again how this guy won the American Sociological Association's Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues last year?

Use the Force, Lucas

I've been given another free month of Netflix, and I'm watching Joseph Campbell: Mythos, a collection of lectures Campbell gave shortly before he died as a way to summarize the main points of his lifelong scholarship. I first learned about Campbell long ago (in this galaxy) from watching a documentary on the Star Wars phenomenon in which George Lucas relates how his writing of Star Wars was essentially a telling of what Campbell called the "hero's journey."* Campbell's theory attempts to bridge psychology, culture, and social structure. It's a grand undertaking--and one at which I think he ultimately, but nobly, fails--but it got me thinking about the heuristic nature of psychoanalytics. Freud and his disciples got the psyche wrong because they mistook their own models for the way that the brain actually functions. Neuroscience has thoroughly debunked the ego-id-superego theory. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't practical utility in that theory as a heuristic device for making sense of the mind so long as we don't confuse the mind with the brain. After all, "The map is not the territory" (Alfred Korzybski).

As I started to make sense of it, an analogy came to mind that I think helps to understand disciplinary pursuit on a continuum. Take a shopping mall. One can learn about what goes on there by wandering around and observing the shops, the cafeteria, and the walkways with almost no understanding of the architectural knowledge that was necessary to build the structure itself, and conversely, understanding the architecture tells one almost nothing about what goes on in the place. In the same way, an architect need only the most rudimentary understandings of mechanical physics to build a safe structure. She doesn't need a full understanding of quantum mechanics to make sure that the walls will stand and the roof won't collapse. We can stretch the metaphor even further. Understanding what goes on in one shop tells us nothing about what goes on in the others. Knowing that Rite Aid is a pharmacy doesn't tell me what goes on at Claire's. Additionally, understanding one mall doesn't tell me much about what goes on at all the other malls. While there is a continuity through different levels of analysis, each level (i.e. discipline) can generally behave independent of the others. Contrary to what many theoretical physicists might believe, understanding the quark does not explain society.

* - Despite my interest, I was discouraged from reading Campbell in graduate school and was told to remove him from my qualifying (a.k.a. comps) exam reading list. Though unfortunate, I now understand that Campbell is widely unknown and unread in sociology, likely because of his indirect ties to Freud through Jung. I believe that he should be reintroduced to the Sociology of Religion canon.

The Divided Brain

I think this clip from RSAnimate is interesting. I'm trying to think if this helps me in my ongoing argument about the increase in individualism at the expense of communalism.

Mental Illness and Violence

As the rhetoric is ramping up and it is becoming clear that Jared Loughner was dealing with some emerging, untreated mental illness, it is worth stating yet again: people with mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than to do violent crime themselves. A quick Google search will bring up several psychological and psychiatric studies that bear this reality out. Mental illness is still highly stigmatized in our society. I hope that the ensuing debate does not exacerbate the problem.