SOCIAL STRUCTURES(Ch. 5-6)

Dr. Bradford

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

STATUSES ROLES

Social Structure

AscribedAchieved

• Social structure refers to the way society is organized. • Status = is a position in a social structure.• Role = how we (generally) expect members of a status to behave.

– Statuses and Roles exist independently of their ‘incumbents’ or ‘occupants’

Expectation Performance

Statuses

• You can think of (sets of) statuses as different ways of categorizing people in different situations. – Examples: Family statuses, occupational statuses ,

social class statuses, demographic statuses, etc.

1. Achieved statuses – positions that are achieved by the individuals for themselves (but not always on purpose); these statuses can change.

2. Ascribed statuses – statuses given to individuals generally at birth, and from which they cannot escape; these statuses are fixed.

Statuses

• Master Status- the most important status someone occupies (as perceived by others)

• Status Symbol- material sign that indicates someone’s status.

Roles

• Roles- how we expect occupants of a social status to behave and their attempt to meet those expectations in role performances. – Role = the common denominator among all

occupants of a status; (i.e. what they all have in common)

• Role Conflict- a situation in which incompatible role demands are placed on a person by two or more statuses at the same time.

Primary and Secondary Groups

• Primary group: the people we spend the most time with; a common whole, a “WE.” (George Horton Cooley)• Secondary group: a larger, more specialized group in which members engage in impersonal, goal-oriented relationships.

PRIMARY GROUP SECONDARY GROUP

Relationships are ends in themselves Relationships are viewed as means to an end (e.g. money)

Tend to be small in size; intimate association

Tend to be larger in size

Personal or individual qualities are most important

Your status, rather than personal attributes are most important

The family is typically the first and the most enduring source of influence on the individual

The most important secondary group is the formal organization (e.g. bureaucracy)

Durkheim and Division of LaborTraditional Society Modern SocietyMechanical solidarity = a form of social interdependence based on commonly shared beliefs and strong group identity. Based on very simple division of labor.

Organic solidarity = form of social interdependence based on differentiated/specialized division of labor.

Similar to simple organism or machine: individuals are mostly functionally equivalent and substitutable.

Similar to a complex organisms; its organs are not interchangeable.

‘Society is in the individual’ ‘The Individual is in Society’

Ferdinand Tönnies

Two types of social relationships:1. Relationships that people enter as ends

in themselves, or Gemeinschaft = intimate or communal association.

2. Relationships that people enter into as means to an end, or Gesellschaft = goal-driven, impersonal relationships

• Relationships in modern society are more frequently gesellshaft relationships. Why?

Ferdinand Tönnies(1855 – 1936)

Facial Expressions

• Facial Expressions are the most important means of nonverbal communication.

• Emotions are communicated via facial expressions.

The Primary Emotions

Can you name these emotions?

The Primary Emotions

Can you name these emotions?

ANGER FEAR DISGUST

SURPRISE HAPINESS(JOY)

SADNESS

Cultural Differences in Nonverbal Communication

1. Eye Contact and Gaze:– In Nigeria, Puerto Rico,

and Thailand, children are taught to avoid eye contact with superiors

– In the Middle East, Arabs often use a lot of eye contact

Cultural Differences in Nonverbal Communication

2. Personal Space and touching:• High-contact cultures: stand

close to one another and touch frequently; Middle East, South America, Southern Europe

• Low-contact cultures include: North America, Asian, Pakistani and some Native American peoples

Cultural Differences in Nonverbal Communication

3. Hand Gestures:– “OK” Sign: In Japan = ‘money’; in Mexico

=‘sex’; in Brazil = the middle finger– Thumbs-up: Japan = ‘boyfriend’; Iran =

obscene– Hand-purse gesture: no meaning in the US; but

in Italy means ‘What are you trying to say?’; in Tunisia it means ‘slow down’; in Malta means ‘you may seem good, but you are really bad.’

– Nodding head: in some parts of Africa and India, up and down mean ‘NO’ and side to side means ‘YES’; in Korea, side to side means ‘I don’t know’

Stanley Milgram and Obedience

• One of the most famous experiments of the 20th century.

• What explains the Holocaust? Are Germans just inherently more obedient than other people?

• The Milgram experiment measured the willingness to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.

Stanley Milgram and ObedienceExperiment: • Three roles:

– an experimenter (man in white lab coat); – a volunteer (the ‘teacher’); – and the shockee (the ‘learner’). All are

actors except the volunteer. • Responding to a newspaper ad, a volunteer

was told he would be participating in an experiment testing the effects of negative reinforcement (punishment) on learning. The volunteer was told that a ‘teacher’ (giving electric shocks) and ‘learner’ (receiving electric shocks) were to be picked at random.

Stanley Milgram and ObedienceExperiment: • In reality, the experiment was to see how much

electroshock the teacher would give as punishment, when told it was part of an experiment. Everyone but the ‘teacher’ was acting and knew the true purpose of the experiment. No electric shocks were actually administered, but the volunteer believed he was administering them.

• The ‘learner’ would go into another room and a tape recording was played of scripted answers. For each wrong answer, the teacher was supposed to give a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer.

Stanley Milgram and ObedienceFindings:• BASELINE STUDY (most famous):

65% of volunteers ‘go all the way’ and are willing to shock the subject to death!

• Milgram also studied 20-40 variants of this experiment with different results:

Stanley Milgram and ObedienceFindings:• Experiment #3: The Shockee is placed in the

same room so that the volunteer can see him; obedience drops to 40%.

• Experiment #4: The volunteer must physically restrain the shockee; obedience drops to 30%.

• Experiment #14 : If experimenter is not a scientist in a white lab coat, then obedience drops to 20%.

• Experiment #17: Volunteer and two other participants (both actors); if other actors refuse to continue the experiment, obedience drops to 10%

Stanley Milgram and ObedienceFindings:• Experiment #15: *If there are two

other experimenters in white lab coats (both actors) who disagree about what to do, then obedience drops to ZERO!

• As soon as participants are told that they “have no choice”, obedience drops to ZERO!

• These results were confirmed in 2006.

Stanley Milgram and Obedience

QUESTION: What does all this mean? Why did so many people go along with the experiment, if they only did so long as they were NOT ordered to do so?

Stanley Milgram and Obedience• This study does NOT show that

people ‘obey orders’! • They are participating because they

believe they are promoting the ‘greater good’, a noble cause: science.

• They are shocking innocent strangers not because they believe they have to, but because they believe they ought to.

Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiments

Experiment: • 70 volunteers selected; • by flip of coin, half are chosen as

guards, other half as prisoners• Participants make up their own

rules; not pre-determined• Each participant was paid $15 a

day

Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiments

• Findings: • Experiment ended after 6 days!• Could no longer distinguish reality (the

experiment) from the roles they adopted as prisoners and guards

• “There were dramatic changes in virtually every aspect of their behavior, thinking and feeling…. We were horrified because we saw some boys (guards) treat others as if they were despicable animals, taking pleasure in cruelty, while other boys (prisoners) became servile, dehumanized robots….” (141)

Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiments

• Findings: • About 1/3 of guards became

‘corrupted by the power of their roles’ (142)

• “[T]he mere act of assigning labels to people and putting them into a situation where those labels acquire validity and meaning is sufficient to elicit pathological behavior” (Zimbardo, pg. 143)

Asch’s Conformity Experiments• Question: Which of the lines on

the second card (A, B, or C) is the same length as the line on the first card?

• “That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call White Black is a matter of concern. It raises questions about out ways of education and about the values that guide out conduct” (95)

Solomon Asch(1907 – 1996)

The power of the situation

• A definition of the situation consists of our expectations of the relevant roles that ‘make sense’ in a given context , and the corresponding behaviors associated with these roles

• Role = “social scripts that are attached to the statuses people occupy” (140).

• Different situations can elicit different behaviors!

Situation

Behavior

The power of the situation

• We normally think an individual’s behavior is a consequence or effect of his/her personality, the type of person s/he is, or some other internal characteristic.

CAUSE = Inside Personality

EFFECT = Outside Behavior

Common-sense view of human behavior

The power of the situation

• This view is incomplete! Behaviors are often influenced more by social context, i.e. the expectations we have of relevant or appropriate behaviors defining a perceived situation.

Relevant Behavior

Labeling of Personality

CAUSE = Perceived situation

Sociological view of human behavior

The power of the situation

• Quote: “Individual behavior is largely under the control of social forces … rather than personality traits, character, will power or other empirically unvalidated constructs. Thus we create the illusion of freedom, by attributing more internal control to ourselves, to the individual, than actually exists. We thus underestimate the power and pervasiveness of situational controls over behavior….” (Zimbardo, pg. 142)

Relevant Behavior

Labeling of Personality

CAUSE = Perceived situation

Sociological view of human behavior

The power of the situation

• These are not only individual expectations that matter! Sometimes, the expectations of others impose themselves on us! Remember, the Thomas theorem.

• In the Prison experiments, the prisoners and guards were both trapped in an imagined situation, but once established, the guards ran the show…