The Occupy Wall Street protests are in full swing across the nation, and reporters are doing their best to navigate and explain the growing, and sometimes ambiguous, movement. Not surprisingly, sociologists are helping journalists make sense of the phenomenon for viewers and readers. To help shed light on the Occupy Boston protests, FOX 25 Boston turned to Tufts University sociology professor Sarah Sobieraj. In a relatively short TV interview, Sobieraj was asked to cover a lot of territory, including explaining reasons for the movement’s popularity, addressing the breadth of its message, and identifying connections to other famous American protests.

These are all topics Sobieraj should feel pretty comfortable speaking on—after all, she wrote the book on media and protest (Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism). However, she isn’t the only academic with something to say about the Occupy protests. For instance, CUNY professor Héctor Cordero-Guzmán was asked by OWS itself to analyze the characteristics of occupywallst.org visitors and saw his results picked up by The New Yorker’s Rational Irrationality blog, while Columbia’s Todd Gitlin wrote about the difference between Tea Party and OWS protests in the New York Times and discussed the movement with National Public Radio’s Marketplace. These scholars are working as ambassadors for the discipline and proving to the broader public that sociological research can be timely and relevant for parsing current events. Let us know if you spot any particularly edifying articles in your daily news review.

A common evolutionary theory of religion views the brain as composed of modules and explains religion by a module for supernatural beings.  But, as The Guardian reports, Robert Bellah’s new book takes evolution seriously while challenging this common view as showing a lack of insight into religion as it’s actually lived.

Go back deep into evolutionary time, long before hominids, Bellah invites his readers, because here can be found the basic capacity required for religion to emerge. It is mimesis or imitative action, when animals communicate their intentions, often sexual or aggressive, by standard behaviours. Often such signals seem to be genetically determined, though some animals, like mammals, are freer and more creative. It can then be called play, meant in a straightforward sense of “not work,” work being activity that is necessary for survival.

Such liberated play was found among creatures that didn’t need to work all of the time to survive, and the evolutionary changes that occurred during it weren’t driven by survival pressures.

Mimesis and play are integral pieces of this story of religion because they are precursors to ritual.

…that embodied way of being in the world that enacts, not thinks, understanding. If you have ever played peekaboo with a child, you were together learning about presence and absence. At a more sophisticated level, religions nurture the complex gestures of ritual and practice. Christians perform liturgies, Muslims prostrate themselves in prayer, Buddhists focus attention on breathing. This is the bread and butter of religion. Man can embody truth, reflected WB Yeats, when he cannot rationally know it.

Theoretical exploration and theological propositions accompany the ritual, but they are less fundamental modes of religious understanding.  Indeed, when Plato used the word “theoria,” he was referring to a ritual practice to make a journey to witness a life-changing event rather than theory.

The National Basketball Association and universities can sometimes have a strained relationship, especially in the case of “one-and-done” players—those athletes who make only a one-year pit stop at college before taking their talents to the big leagues. But now, an NBA lockout due to a collective labor dispute has led to the cancellation of at least the first two weeks of the upcoming NBA season, and players are making plans for their time off. Some are looking to play ball overseas, but the star point guard of the Golden State Warriors, Stephen Curry, is planning to head back to school. It seems the NBA’s sticky situation may be a boon to sociology.

That’s right: Curry has dusted off his backpack to return to Davidson College and finish his sociology degree. An article in the Charlotte Daily Observer detailed what it was like for the young star to be back in the classroom, pointing out that, if the lockout drags on until December, Curry will be able to finish the full semester. At that point, he’d be just one class and senior thesis away from earning his degree.

No player (or fan) wants to see the NBA cancel a season, but Curry can at least see the silver lining.

“I’d love to be playing basketball right now,” Curry said, “but if I don’t, it makes this degree pursuit a whole lot easier.”

While it remains to be seen whether Curry’s senior thesis will make an impact on the sociological community, Curry’s actions help legitimize time spent earning a college diploma to other young athletes considering whether to stick it out in college ball or head straight for the NBA. Of course, his move might also make one department’s intramural basketball team an early frontrunner this semester.

A study commissioned by Anderson Cooper 360 found that the stereotype of schoolyard bullies preying on the weak doesn’t reflect reality.  Instead, the Long Island-based study showed students are involved in a constant verbal, physical, and cyber fight to reach the top of the school hierarchy.

“Kids are caught up in patterns of cruelty and aggression that have to do with jockeying for status,” explains Robert Faris, a sociologist whom “Anderson Cooper 360°” partnered with for the pilot study. “It’s really not the kids that are psychologically troubled, who are on the margins or the fringes of the school’s social life. It’s the kids right in the middle, at the heart of things … often, typically highly, well-liked popular kids who are engaging in these behaviors.”

Faris and his co-author, Diane Felmlee, also found that “bullies” and “victims” aren’t defined roles and can in fact be the same person.

“When kids increase in their status, on average, they tend to have a higher risk of victimization as well as a higher risk of becoming aggressive,” Faris says.

Many of these results mirror results from an earlier study that Faris and Felmlee conducted in North Carolina. Based on such similar findings in such different locations, Faris noted,

“Family background of kids does not really seem to matter in their aggressive behavior. Instead, what really matters is where they are located in the school hierarchy”….The patterns, “arise in a wide range of schools across the country regardless of what community they may be in.”

Yet, the authors remained hopeful for two reasons.  First, their study found that aggressive behavior does not actually elevate a child’s social status. Second, Faris thinks behavior is contagious.

When students are aggressive, there’s a higher likelihood that their friends will become aggressive. But Faris said, “there’s also the possibility that positive behaviors can also spread through social networks and that kids may be more likely to intervene in bullying situations if they see their friends stepping in to stop things, or if they see their friends discouraging that kind of behavior.”

[T]he harm to public health may have already been done. When politicians or celebrities raise alarms about vaccines, even false alarms, vaccination rates drop.

Recent research published by Siegwart Lindenberg, Janeke F. Joly, and Diederik A. Stapel, social scientists in the Netherlands, has confirmed that “star status” can really boost a cause (Social Psychology Quarterly, March 2011). Unfortunately, in this case, Bachmann’s public status lends credibility to her scientific missteps and will likely, the New York Times says, set back HPV vaccination efforts by years.

If you’d spent some time in the New York fashion scene and looked closely among the high heels, you might have spotted one model taking scrupulous field notes as seriously as she took the runway. Ashley Mears, assistant professor of sociology at Boston University and author of the book Pricing Beauty, immersed herself into the world of modeling by actually becoming a model. A recent New York Times’ T Magazine Blog interview with Mears got into what the world of fashion looks like through the eyes of and insider and the eyes of a sociologist.

Mears didn’t specifically set out to study fashion models, she claims: “Rather, I study questions of how cultural value gets translated into economic values.” In fact, she had only some limited teenaged experience in the field, and so it was a surprise when a “career” in modeling more or less fell into her lap—she was approached as she puzzled over her dissertation topic at a Starbucks.

From her life backstage, Mears was able to draw several conclusions on a lingering disconnect between traditional beauty and the type of look often revered on the catwalk. First and foremost, she says, fashion makes a distinction between mass appeal and cultural prestige:

The commercial end… [does the] kinds of jobs that are intended to sell things, to move merchandise. They have to resonate with a mass audience. The editorial end is the elite end, it’s by far the more prestigious end … And they look really strange. They don’t resonate with a mass audience, and that’s the point. They’re not intended to. That’s kind of a general principle that we take from the art world. The more people a specific piece of art is intended to make sense to, the less valuable on the whole it is.

And why do the elite modeling specifications require an extraordinarily tall, extraordinarily thin, white woman? For Mears, it all stems from class:

If you look at a historical trajectory of what, in Western society, elite culture values, it’s this prized aesthetic for women with extremely thin, taut, controlled bodies. A corpulent body, a body with rolls and with flesh, is a body that signals looseness, sexual availability, and is antithetical to a kind of “elite” body. You can see this in strip clubs as well. There’s some ethnographic work that shows that strip clubs that cater to higher-class audiences have thinner women, and whiter women. You see it reproduce in all kinds of different settings.

Whether in boxing clubs or factories or catwalks, sociologists have a rich history of this kind of embedded ethnography. To read more about Mears’s research, visit her Boston University website here or pick up a copy of her book.

We’ve all heard that there is no peace without justice and vice versa.  But, when policy makers and leaders discuss how to handle national and international conflicts, peace and justice are often pitted against each other.  Recently, the trial of Hosni Mubarak and the Internal Criminal Court’s opening hearings on Kenya have elicited many criticisms that prosecuting leaders who have grossly violated human rights will in fact undermine democracy and exacerbate conflict.  Political Scientist Kathryn Sikkink considers these claims in a New York Times Op-Ed.

Critics argue that the threat of prosecution leads dictators like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan to entrench themselves in power rather than negotiate a transition to democracy. In El Salvador, where domestic courts have refused to extradite officers accused of murdering Jesuit priests 22 years ago, critics claim that such a prosecution would undermine stability and sovereignty.

But, Kathryn’s research provides evidence to question some of these concerns.

My research shows that transitional countries — those moving from authoritarian governments to democracy or from civil war to peace — where human rights prosecutions have taken place subsequently become less repressive than transitional countries without prosecutions, holding other factors constant.

Of 100 countries that underwent a transition from 1980 to 2004 (the period for which extensive data is available), 48 pursued at least one human rights prosecution, and 33 of those pursued two or more. Countries that have prosecuted former officials exhibit lower levels of torture, summary execution, forced disappearances and political imprisonment. Although civil war heightens repression, prosecutions in the context of civil war do not make the situation worse, as critics claim.

Kathryn believes that the possibility of punishment and disgrace deters future leaders from violating human rights.

From the final Nuremberg trials in 1949 until the 1970s, there was virtually no chance that heads of state and government officials would be held accountable for human rights violations. But in the last two decades, the likelihood of punishment has increased, and newly installed officials may be more cautious before deciding to murder or torture their political opponents.

So, while confronting the past may be painful and difficult, it could result in a better future.

For several months my husband has been trying to get me to read ESPN The Magazine.  So when he said, “Hey, a sociologist is cited in here,” I thought his ploy continued.  But, as he pushed the magazine across the table, I had to admit I was intrigued.

In the article, Shaun Assael asks, “Why do fans riot?”

You’ve probably heard or read about the uprisings in Buenos Aires over soccer and in Vancouver over hockey. What amazed me weren’t the images of violence that went viral, causing the word “hooligan” to pop as a trending topic. And it wasn’t even the fact that the riots followed historic losses — a playoff defeat for River Plate that demoted Argentina’s version of the Yankees to a lower division for the first time in 110 years, and a bitter Game 7 Stanley Cup loss that left the long-suffering Canucks still searching for a title.

No, what stunned me was the realization that this kind of violence rarely happens in American pro sports. We riot after wins.

To help understand why Americans can be better losers than winners, he turned to sociologist Jerry M. Lewis, who studies outbreaks of sports violence.

…Here are the three warning signs he’s learned to spot: a) a hotly contested championship final; b) watched by lots of young men; c) in a common urban gathering spot with a history of violence.

Lewis mainly focuses on celebratory violence and believes the prevalence of many professional sports and teams in America means that Americans don’t get upset about any particular one.  This contrasts to countries where a single sport, like hockey or soccer, dwarfs all others.

Read the rest here.

New research by psychologists Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt shows that people enjoy stories more when they already know the ending.

This research actually made headlines a month ago, but it was highlighted in Steven Colbert’s “The Word” on September 6^th.   While Colbert then proceeded to share the endings of movies like The Sixth Sense or the Star Wars trilogy so that those who hadn’t seen them would enjoy them more, his coverage brought even more attention to research that ABC News covered after speaking with the authors of the study.

“I was surprised by the finding,” Christenfeld said. “I’ve spent my life not looking at the end of a book.” He and Leavitt had 300 volunteers read 12 short stories, including mysteries or tales with surprise endings by the likes of Agatha Christie, John Updike and Anton Chekov, and rated them on a scale of 1 to 10. Almost without fail, and by sizeable margins, the readers rated them more highly if the researchers inserted copy near the beginning, giving away how the tales would come out.

Though their study didn’t point to explanations for the finding, Christenfeld thinks that people enjoy a good story just as much as a surprise ending.

“Writers use their artistry to make stories interesting, to engage readers, and to surprise them,” Leavitt and Christenfeld said in their paper, to be published in the journal Psychological Science. “But giving away these surprises makes readers like stories better. This was true whether the spoiler revealed a twist at the end — that the condemned man’s daring escape was just a fantasy before the rope snapped taut around his neck — or solved the crime — that Poirot will discover that the apparent target of attempted murder is in fact the perpetrator.

A recent report released by Senator Tom Coburn accuses the National Science Foundation of wasting taxpayer money on questionable science projects.  Minnesota Public Radio (MRP) News offers some comfort to scientists, though.

Lawmakers and political groups like to point to government spending that seems wasteful — especially in tough economic times. And one popular target has been scientific studies that either sound silly or involve foreign countries or have to do with sex.

MRP News reviews several examples of research that, taken out of context, were deemed as inappropriate uses of government funds.

“They tried to say that about $9.4 million tax dollars was spent to study men’s penis size,” says Jeffrey Parsons of Hunter College in New York, referring to a study that was recently criticized by a group called the Traditional Values Coalition.

Parsons and his colleagues did publish a study on men’s penis size and its link to the risk of sexually transmitted disease — but Parsons says no tax dollars were used to collect the data.

While little if anything actually comes of claims like this, they do make some scientists nervous and influence their decisions.

People started to be very careful when they wrote grant proposals, Parsons recalls. “A lot of code words started to get used. We would talk about ‘highly vulnerable youth’ as a euphemism for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered youth.”

Yet, scientists can take comfort in remembering past studies that were ridiculed.  Robert Kraut’s research on why bowlers smile was once given a Golden Fleece Award for wasting tax dollars from then-Senator William Proxmire, but it’s now considered ground-breaking research on how people communicate.

Kraut thinks scientists will always have to deal with this kind of thing. “Much of the policy debate in Washington, it’s all about appearances,” he says. “And it’s easy in sound bites to ridicule without presenting a full story.”