Sociology’s Unanswered Question

In this essay, Nathan Palmer asks how does a person’s social context affect their behavior and finds that sociologists really don’t have a clear answer.

Who you are and where you are affects your experiences, your behavior, and your understanding of the world around you. This is sociology in a nutshell^[1].

Sociology is built on the idea that your social context affects your individual choices and perceptions of the world. Social context is the term we use to describe both who you are as an individual and how you relate to everyone else around you. For example, being a wealthy business executive in New York City is a social context that is very different compared to that of an undocumented immigrant working in a sweat shop making dresses outside of Los Angeles. The way people interact with you, the opportunities available to you, and the lessons you take away from those experiences all vary based on your social context.

Now I’m going to let you in on one of sociology’s dirty little secrets; we don’t precisely know how or why social context influences individual behavior. We know that social context affects individuals (mountains of scientific research confirms this), but sociologists do not exactly agree on why (Rubinstein 2001).

Sociology’s Two Teams

To understand why sociologists do not agree on why social context affects individuals, we have to discuss sociology’s two teams. Sociology, especially American sociology, can be split up into two teams on this issue; structural and cultural^[2]. Team Structure argues that the way society is organized influences the opportunities an individual has and ultimately what choices appear rational to that individual. Team Culture, on the other hand, argues that our individual behavior is a product of what we think others around us expect of us and more generally how we understand the world around us. This disagreement is nicely summarized by a theorist named Jon Elster (1990 as cited in Rubinstein 2001:7) who suggests that in social science, ”there are really just two basic motivations of human behavior" rationality and social norms.

Walking Calculators of Rationality

The individual according to Team Structure is a rational/instrumental actor. Which is another way of saying, individuals make choices to achieve goals. For instance, it is rational to go to college if you would like to have a high paying career. Similarly, if during a job interview you didn’t mention you had a bachelor’s degree, that would be irrational as it would reduce the likelihood of you achieving your goal of employment. Taking this idea to its logical extreme, the individual becomes a walking calculator constantly looking to make the decisions that maximizes their chances of achieving their goals.

Team Structure’s main point is that what appears rational to an individual is largely based on the social context they live in. For instance, research shows that wealthier parents are more likely to not vaccinate their children (Smith, Chu, and Barker 2004). The fact that these parents have more money and thus could afford medical treatment if their child did contract one of these preventable diseases, could make the decision not to vaccinate more rational than if they were poor. The structure of society (i.e. the unequal distribution of money) creates multiple social contexts (i.e. affluence/poverty) which ultimately affect what decisions appear rational (i.e. to vaccinate or not) in the pursuit of an individual’s goals (i.e. to raise a happy healthy child).

Sociologists, by in large, would hate the accusation that they believe individuals are rational. Most sociologists would argue that individuals make choices for a wide variety of reasons and rationality is but just one. But despite our distaste for rationality, multiple scholars have argued that classical sociological theory (e.g. Marx and Weber) and contemporary theory (e.g. Giddens, Bourdieu, and Collins) is rooted in rationality (Alexander 1984; Knottnerus and Prendergast 1994; Rubinstein 2001).

Norm Driven Role-Players

Individual behavior, according to Team Culture, is primarily driven by the individual’s perception of the world around them. An individual receives messages about what is possible for someone like them (i.e. their opportunities) and also messages about how they are expected to behave (i.e. social norms). From this point of view, the individual is playing a role in society.

For example, let us consider the role of being a college student. Individual college students may choose to abuse alcohol because they perceive that they have ample opportunity to do so and that binge drinking and alcohol abuse is what college students are supposed to do as a sort of rite of passage (Crawford and Novak 2006).

Conclusion

Sociology is great at showing us how our individual experiences and choices are affected by our social context. However, as a discipline we are still debating why social context affects individuals and precisely how it does. Modern sociologists, especially in America, have moved away from answering generic questions of how society influences the individual. Instead the bulk of sociological research today focuses on a how a specific social context affects specific individual behaviors (e.g. what affect does growing up poor have on college graduation). Each of these single context studies could be bringing us closer to finding the general relationship between all social contexts and individual behavior or it could be bringing us closer to discovering that there are no generalizable rules for how social context affects individuals. Only time will tell.

Dig Deeper:

1. What is your social context? First describe at least 5 aspects of who you are (e.g. your race, class, gender, etc.) and then how that relates to the people in your community.
2. How would your life be different if you lived in a different social context? Look at the attributes you listed in question 1 and swap them out for a different status (e.g. swap rich for poor or Christian for Muslim). How do you think you would experience the world differently if this was your social context?
3. Which team’s explanation of how social context affects individual behavior do you find most persuasive? Compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of each explanation.
4. If thousands of sociological studies show that social context does affect individual behavior, does it really matter if sociologists aren’t exactly sure how it does or why it dose have an impact? Write out at least one reason why it does matter and one reason why it doesn’t.

References:

• Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1984. “Social-Structural Analysis: Some Notes on Its History and Prospects.” The Sociological Quarterly 25(1):5–26.
• Crawford, Lizabeth A. and Katherine B. Novak. 2006. “Alcohol Abuse as a Rite of Passage: The Effect of Beliefs about Alcohol and the College Experience on Undergraduates’ Drinking Behaviors.” Journal of Drug Education 36(3):193–212.
• Knottnerus, J. David and Christopher Prendergast. 1994. Recent Developments in the Theory of Social Structure: Introduction and Overview. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press.
• Rubinstein, David. 2001. Culture, Structure and Agency: Toward a Truly Multidimensional Sociology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
• Smith, Philip J., Susan Y. Chu, and Lawrence E. Barker. 2004. “Children Who Have Received No Vaccines: Who Are They and Where Do They Live?” Pediatrics 114(1):187–95.