USA Today reports this morning about fears surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, a $6 billion experiment in particle physics, which was launched in early October with phenomenal proton-smashing results. The collider made it through nine days of operations before shutting down due to technical difficulties. USA Today writes, “The collider — a 16.6-mile underground race track that will smash protons together in an attempt to re-create conditions from the beginnings of the universe — is the most recent example of a scientific experiment that taps into the public’s deep reserve of doomsday fears.”

Only a sociologist can sort this out…

There is something in the human psyche that makes us view some innovations or research with great suspicion, fearing that careless scientists will blow us all to kingdom come, says sociologist Robert Bartholomew, author of the 2001 book Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion. “People see what they expect to see in a search for certainty, especially during times of crisis, as they attempt to confirm their worst fears and greatest hopes.”

Lack of understanding, “combined with anxiety, has been responsible for scares of all sorts over the centuries,” he notes, ranging from witchcraft trials to UFO sightings. Scares often arise from such anxieties as war jitters, including the phantom zeppelin sightings that convulsed Great Britain before World War I.

After describing a number of different ‘scientific nightmares’ from the last century, sociologist Robert Bartholomew claims that the Large Hadron Collider has joined the ranks…

“I believe this is a social delusion with legs,” Bartholomew says. After all, the actual collisions of protons at the lab won’t start again until spring, when he believes fears will resurface that the colliding protons will create black holes in the same way that imploding stars do in space.

“In the case of the ‘Collider Calamity,’ believers are likely to redouble their efforts to stop the experiments, and their numbers are likely to grow in the short term,” Bartholomew says. “Most ‘believers’ seem to think Armageddon will happen when the experiments become more sophisticated.”

Read the full story.

Yesterday LiveScience.com highlighted the work of sociologist Andrew Perrin on “the irrational side of voting”, which also can be found in the latest issue of Contexts Magazine.

Live Science senior writer Jeanna Bryner reports:

…When it comes to the underlying reason why citizens vote in general, little has changed philosophically. Our propensity to vote has always been a complex mix of feelings and strategy, writes sociologist Andrew Perrin of the University of North Carolina in the fall issue of Contexts magazine, published by the American Sociological Association.

Voting is both rational and emotional, Perrin says. “It is a ritual in which lone citizens express personal beliefs that reflect the core of who they are and what they want for their countrymen, balancing strategic behavior with the opportunity to express their inner selves to the world.”

That’s why reason alone can’t explain say why a significant group of citizens voted for Ralph Nader, who ran as an independent candidate for U.S. president in 2004. “A significant, obviously small, group of people thought they were best able to express themselves by voting for Nader even though there was never any possibility h
e was actually going to win the presidency.”

Read the full story.

Don’t forget to exercise your right to vote today! Find your polling location and cast your ballot.

This weekend the New York Times ran a very flattering review of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book ‘Outliers: The Story of Success.’ Times contributor Stephen Kotkin writes, “Malcolm Gladwell has a rare ability: he can transform academic research into engaging fables spotlighting real people.”

In the book Gladwell disputes the idea of the self-made man and focuses on the fact that success is fundamentally ‘social.’

…Mr. Gladwell promotes a cultural explanation for success no matter how indirect the causal mechanisms. Although the individuals that Mr. Gladwell cites are exceptional, their success, he argues, does not flow from their natural gifts but from their unusual cultural legacies, the uncanny opportunities that come their way, and their really, really hard work.

But Kotkin offers some critique…

…Often the examples are unsatisfying, as in his discussion of the KIPP academy in the Bronx, where 90 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches but do as well in math as privileged suburban children. Why? Supposedly because the academy abolished long summer vacations. Mr. Gladwell, following the research of the sociologist Karl Alexander, contends that virtually the entire educational performance difference between better-off and poorer children derives from what some students do not learn when school’s out.

Read the full review, here.

The New Pittsburgh Courier ran a story about sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s recent lecture in which he discussed how presidential candidate Barack Obama is “not the symbol many perceive him to be.” The story ran under the headline “Sociologist Says Obama is Raceless.”

The Courier reports:

“Symbols work in many directions,” said Bonilla-Silva, a sociology professor at Duke University. “(Obama’s) going to be a truncated symbol; both segments happy, but for totally different reasons—we have to understand what does it mean for Black communities and White communities.”
…
He discussed “new-racism,” meaning “the post-civil rights racial system of subtle, institutionalized, and apparently non-racial practices that maintains White supremacy and its accompanying racial ideology of color-blind racism.” Instead of seeing Obama as the end of this racism, Bonilla-Silva said his campaign success has been based largely on his ability to appear raceless. Although he admitted Obama could be a good role model, Bonilla-Silva said it is more important for him to create “real change.” — Read more. 

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva was also a contributing writer to Contexts Magazine‘s feature on the “Social Significance of Barack Obama.” Take a look at Bonilla-Silva’s commentary, here.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece this week in their ‘Community College’ section from sociologist Chad M. Hanson, who “Fled a Humorless University for a Sanctuary of the Liberal Arts.”

Hanson writes about finding a fulfilling career beyond the University of Texas system, where he worked as a research associate:

A successful career at a community college depends on shifting one’s perception. Students — even the snarling ones with baseball caps pulled down over their eyes and baggy pants hanging off their posteriors — must become the focus of one’s work life and the source of one’s job satisfaction. Regardless of whether they want or feel as if they need to take your courses, ill-prepared and unmotivated students show up in your classroom, and that fact often presents a challenge to new teachers. Even so, the good ones eventually realize that making ill-prepared and unmotivated students a priority is a luxury of sorts. At universities, educators take pride and pleasure in the challenge of securing grants to pay for new lines of research, but I have the freedom to make the surly, often-ill-prepared kid in the back row the challenge of my professional life, and that suits me.

Hanson provides a thoughtful reflection about what pushed him to pursue this type of career in sociology…

Community-college teaching can be lucrative. I received a pay increase when I left the university and took up teaching at a two-year college. But that’s not why I left my job conducting research. I left because, though the work was meaningful, it was humorless. Near the end, as I sat in front of the computer in my office, I could feel the hours and days slipping by without the kind of uninhibited laughter that makes your eyes water and your cheeks ache. I longed for that. I was surrounded by brilliant people who took themselves far more seriously than anybody should, no matter how many ways you prove yourself or your intelligence. Once on a coffee break, I caught a look at myself in a mirror — short-sleeve shirt, bold-striped necktie, and a pocket protector lined with upscale pens and mechanical pencils. I looked like a ball of rubber bands wound too tight to be useful to anyone. I knew I needed a change.

Read more.

The latest installment from the video podcast ‘Meet the Bloggers‘ (from Friday, October 24th), examines the role of race in the presidential election and features commentary from sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield. Watch the podcast below.

Also take a look at Wingfield’s recent post on the Racism Review blog, ‘How White Privilege Works.’

The November issue of The Atlantic has an article by psychologist Paul Bloom called, ‘First Person Plural.’ In the piece Bloom explores a number of new ideas about ‘the self.’ He writes, “An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy makers, get into the fray?”

In the piece Bloom draws upon work by sociologist Sherry Turkle about online avatars:

Sometimes we get pleasure from sampling alternative selves. Again, you can see the phenomenon in young children, who get a kick out of temporarily adopting the identity of a soldier or a lion. Adults get the same sort of kick; exploring alternative identities seems to be what the Internet was invented for. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has found that people commonly create avatars so as to explore their options in a relatively safe environment. She describes how one 16-year-old girl with an abusive father tried out multiple characters online—a 16-year-old boy, a stronger, more assertive girl—to try to work out what to do in the real world. But often the shift in identity is purely for pleasure. A man can have an alternate identity as a woman; a heterosexual can explore homosexuality; a shy person can try being the life of the party.

Read the full story.

Salon Magazine interviewed Georgetown University sociologist Michael Eric Dyson about Barack Obama and race in America. Salon writes, “According to sociologist and Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, Barack Obama has already won the election. But if he were white, ‘he’d be up by 15 to 20 points in the polls.'”

An excerpt from the interview: 

Does it not surprise you that two-thirds of black Americans say race relations are poor?

Not at all. Regardless of whether or not they make $100,000, they still see barriers imposed that white brothers and sisters don’t see. If you were stopped by a policeman, as a black person you think: Will they make up some story that I tried to run and shoot me in the back? I use that example because I have been pulled over by the police several times despite the fact that I have a Ph.D. from Princeton and some notoriety. It makes no difference. You are still afraid. That is the great equalizer among black people, regardless of how rich or well-known they are.

It would obviously be an enormous achievement if Barack Obama were to be elected president. What would he be able to change for black Americans?

Well, let’s start with what he can’t change. Given the investment of black people in Mr. Obama’s success, you would think that he was a kind of political Santa Claus, that the day after he was elected, black people wouldn’t have to pay taxes or would get a get-out-of-jail-free card. But social inequalities will still be real. Ironically enough, he has imposed upon himself certain restrictions when it comes to showing a willingness to be susceptible to the demands of black people.

Read Cordula Meyer’s interview with Dyson here.

The Washington Post is running a story on common misperceptions about how American voters base their decisions on moral values. 

The myths: (1)”Moral values” determine who wins elections. (2) Americans have broadly rejected “traditional values.” (3) Americans are polarized and fighting a culture war over values. (4) Traditional values are “family values” or “moral values.” (5) Basic values, properly understood, are compatible and harmonious.

In support of myth #2, the Post draws upon the work of sociologist Wayne Baker. MYTH #2: “Americans have broadly rejected ‘traditional values.’ — Actually, Americans retain our traditional values more than just about any other developed country in the world.”

That’s what University of Michigan sociologist Wayne Baker found in his 2005 book, “America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception.” Baker uses the World Values Surveys to look at American values from a broad, global perspective. He describes human values on two planes. The first is a scale of values from traditional to secular-rationalist. Societies with more traditional values emphasize the importance of God and religion, family and parenting, national identity and pride and absolute standards of morality, not relative ones. Secular-rationalist values are pretty much the opposite: nonreligious, open to abortion and euthanasia, skeptical of national pride or patriotism and evolving away from family, duty and authority.

The second range of values runs from survival values to self-expression ones. In less developed and safe societies, survival values reign. Procuring physical security and meeting basic material needs dominate; foreigners and ethnic diversity are seen as threatening; intolerance is exaggerated. Self-expression values concern creativity, self-fulfillment and lifestyle.

Fascinating. Read more about the other myths here.

Mother Jones ran a story yesterday that was meant to serve as a ‘field guide’ to vote-blocking tactics titled, “Beyond Diebold: Ten Ways to Steal This Election.” The piece outlined a number of different state and federal measures taken to exclude certain voting populations… and sociologist Chandler Davidson helped Mother Jones sort this out.

Tactics to deny Americans the right to vote are as old as, well, the right to vote. Democrats have been at fault in the past—take the literacy tests Southern states used to deprive blacks of their suffrage from the Civil War up through 1965. Today’s shenanigans—which still target minorities and vulnerable first-time voters—are more often designed to stifle Democratic turnout, perhaps never more than in 2008. “This is obviously an important election, and the turnout may break records,” says Rice University sociologist Chandler Davidson, who has studied vote suppression, “so there is every reason to expect these tactics will be employed.”

Read more.