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.

Although there has long been debate over the connection between crime and the economy, most of the criminologists, sociologists and police chiefs interviewed by Reuters forecast a rise in crimes in certain categories in the coming months as the United States heads deeper into recession territory.

Crime has increased during every recession since the late 1950s, said Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St Louis.

Those interviewed stressed they were not talking about an increase in overall levels of crime, which have been falling in the United States since the 1990s, but an uptick in opportunistic crimes like theft and burglary. They say most crimes will still be committed by career criminals but that others in the ranks of the newly unemployed could become drawn in for a variety of reasons.

Reuters also draws upon the work of another sociologist to help explain the potential impact of budget cuts on urban crime…

Lesley Williams Reid, a sociologist at Georgia State University who has studied urban crime, said any cuts to police budgets would be bad news, particularly if the economic downturn is prolonged and more people become unemployed.

“I don’t want to add to a culture of fear, but there is a clear reason to be worried about how this is going to affect crime rates,” she said.

Read more from Reuters.

Science News reports this morning on an alarming new trend which suggests that middle-aged whites are a high-risk group for committing suicide.

A dark underside of middle-age has surfaced in the past decade. Although this phase of life is one psychologists have long considered a time of general stability and emotional well-being, white men and women ages 40 to 64 accounted for the bulk of a recent increase in the U.S. suicide rate, a new study finds.

Data gleaned from U.S. death certificates show that the overall suicide rate rose 0.7 percent annually between 1999 and 2005, reversing a downward trend in the rate that had begun in 1986. This increase primarily reflected a 2.7 percent annual rise in the suicide rate among middle-aged white men and a corresponding 3.9 percent annual rise among middle-aged white women, say epidemiologist Susan Baker of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and her colleagues.

A sociologist weighs in…

In 2005, evidence of a disproportionate number of annual deaths among middle-aged people in the United States raised suspicion that an escalating percentage of the deaths were suicides, remarks sociologist Robert Bossarte of the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y. “The big unanswered question is why middle-aged adults killed themselves at an increased rate in the years covered by this new study,” Bossarte says.

Possible contributors to this trend include mounting numbers of military veterans reaching middle age and rising difficulties for middle-aged individuals in trying to secure medical insurance, he suggests.

Read more.

USA Today reports on new research which suggests a link between children with ADHD and the likelihood of their parents’ divorce. Researchers William Pelham Jr. and Brian Wymbs of the State University of New York-Buffalo find that a child’s disruptive behavior ‘probably pours fuel on other stresses that spark marital conflict.’

Marilyn Elias reports:

Because ADHD can be inherited, parents often have it too, and that may hinder marriage, says Andrea Chronis-Tuscano, a psychologist at the University of Maryland. If children have ADHD, their mothers are 24 times more likely than other mothers to have it, and fathers are five times more likely, her studies find. Adults with ADHD may be impulsive and find it hard to concentrate or solve problems.

“That can lead to conflict in marriage,” she says, “and a child with ADHD only adds to the stress.”

But the sociologist disagrees…

In other studies, parents of children with ADHD have said they’re less satisfied with marriage. But not all researchers agree that they divorce more. A large Canadian report last year found no higher divorce rate for parents of children with ADHD. Pelham’s group may have particularly bad symptoms because their parents sought treatment, says Lisa Strohschein, a sociologist at University of Alberta who did the Canadian study.

Read more.

The folks over at the Freakonomics blog (housed by the New York Times) recently posed the question: ‘Who are the modern-day outlaws? Do we still have outlaws or did they die off with the last of the frontier towns — or maybe later, with the Hell’s Angels?’

Stephen Dubner, the post’s author, approached a number of experts on the issue, including well-known sociologist Chris Uggen. Dubner presented each expert with the following set of questions:  Does America still have an outlaw group? If so, why do you consider them outlaws?Does society need outlaws?

Check out this sociologist’s response…

Chris Uggen, Distinguished McKnight Professor and chair of sociology at the University of Minnesota, executive secretary of the American Society of Criminology, co-author of Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, and co-editor of Contexts Magazine.

Oh, hell yes, there are outlaws in America — and everywhere else, for that matter. Anyone who breaks rules is in some sense an outlaw, subject to social or legal sanctions if their outlawry is detected. These penalties operate on a sliding scale, depending on whether the outlaw smokes cigarettes or meth, pirates DVD’s or ships, or violates college hate-speech codes or state hate-crime laws.

But our standards for outlaws are relative, not absolute; they change over time and social space.

Societies are constantly raising or lowering the bar, outlawing formerly accepted behaviors — like smoking — and legalizing former crimes, like lotteries.

In any group, those with greater power tend to control the rule-making process. And they sometimes go to great lengths to make outlaws out of those who might threaten their power, by restricting their ability to vote or work or have children. Regardless of who holds power, societies operate with a basic set of rules that necessarily beget a basic set of rule violators.

Just imagine, as sociologist Emile Durkheim did, a society of saints made up of exemplary citizens. Would there be no outlaws in such a group? No! They’d pick at each other for minor peccadilloes and trivial misdeeds. In that crowd, even a burp or blemish could mark one as a real bada–.

Nobody is arguing that contemporary America is a society of saints. To the contrary, it often seems as though we’re “defining deviancy down,” as senator and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it.

Cultural critics of the hell-in-a-handbasket school worry that our blasé attitudes toward once-shocking behavior –- network telecasts of ultimate fighters beating the bloody snot out of one another, for example — diminish us all. But don’t forget that we’re simultaneously outlawing other nasty conduct that shocks our collective conscience, such as date rape or sexual harassment.

Whether you view our culture’s current constellation of outlaws as ennobling or diminishing is largely a matter of value preferences.

And remember that outlaws put in some important work for a society. When they expose their bodies at the Super Bowl, our reactions — the extent to which we freak out — tell us something about the current boundaries between proper and improper public conduct. When outlaws are arrested at a political convention, we get a heads-up that change is in the wind. When outlaws sell sex or drugs, we get a safety valve to release pent-up frustrations.

Even when outlaws commit consensus crimes like murder, we get a needed opportunity to publicly condemn them and reaffirm our shared values with our fellow citizens.

While society needs outlaws, it doesn’t need a permanent outlaw class. We’d do well to remember that today’s outlaws are tomorrow’s good citizens; and there’s no citizen more zealous than an outlaw redeemed.

Read the full story, here.

I recently discovered a series on Chicago Public Radio which features reports from Greg Scott, a sociology professor and documentary filmmaker. 

The most recent installment explores the daily lives of women working as prostitutes on Cicero Avenue in Chicago’s West Side. Scott’s story paints a vivid picture of the complex relationship between sex and pride for these women…

Listen to ‘Women of the Brickyard’ here.

For more of Scott’s stories, look here.

In ‘A Walk on the Seamy Side,’ the Boston Globe reports on a remnant of the American Sociological Association annual meetings which occurred in Boston in early August. The article highlights a different kind of Boston history tour – visiting sites of homicides, arsons, and other illegal activities – creatively developed by sociologists. 

Two local criminal experts created this “Immoral Boston” tour for a recent sociology conference – and it may be no less insightful than walking along the red bricks of the Freedom Trail. James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice, law, policy, and society at Northeastern University, sees the tour as a way to understand the influence major crimes have had on the city. Tour cocreator Jack Levin, a Northeastern sociology and criminology professor, has a slightly different perspective: “Crimes can be very abstract,” he said. Real crime “isn’t something you see on prime-time TV, like in ‘Law & Order,’ ‘CSI.’ I think what a tour does, by focusing on the particular spots where crimes have occurred, is lend some reality.”

The Globe concludes:

The men acknowledge their tour caters to the public’s lurid interest in terrible crimes. “For most people, Hannibal Lecter is as real as Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s a fascination, an escape,” Levin said. But “if what you know about crime is based on books, on television, movies, sometimes, it’s difficult to distinguish . . . an actual trial from ‘Boston Legal,’ ” Fox said. “Therefore [we have] a very glamorized perception of what’s happened.

“By going to the sites, it reminds us that people actually died,” he said. “It is difficult to glamorize something when you remember how many people were killed.”

Read the full story.