culture

USA Today reports on a new study which suggests that race is a ‘changeable marker of social status.’

The data collected between 1979 and 2002 and analyzed by sociologists at universities in California and Oregon show change over time in both racial self-identification and the way people perceive the racial identity of others.

“There is much less ‘agreement’ about what race a person is than is commonly thought,” says co-author Aliya Saperstein, a sociologist at the University of Oregon-Eugene, “Fluctuations in both self-identification and how one is perceived by others happen more often than they would or should if race is something obvious or unambiguous.”

And that leads to an even more striking result: Those who are unemployed, incarcerated or in poverty are more likely to be classified and self-identify as black than white, regardless of past identifications. In about 20% of the 12,686 respondents, at least one change was noted in an interviewer’s perception.

The study found that setbacks in social status made it more likely that someone would be seen as black.

Read more.

This past weekend Christianity Today ran a story about ‘Megachurch Misinformation’ in which they cited not one, not two, but three sociologists. Check it out…

The evidence shows that more and more people are attending large churches. Duke sociologist Mark Chaves writes, “In every denomination on which we have data, people are increasingly concentrated in the very largest churches, and this is true for small and large denominations, for conservative and liberal denominations, for growing and declining denominations. This trend began rather abruptly in the 1970s, with no sign of tapering off.”

Furthermore, the 1,250 megachurches in the US in 2007 show remarkable strength across a range of indicators, according to Hartford Seminary sociologist Scott Thumma and Dave Travis’s Beyond Megachurch Myths. Thumma and Travis take seriously the stereotypes of megachurches as impersonal, selfish, shallow, homogenous, individualistic and dying but they do not find the accusations match the data.

Even Baylor sociologist Rodney Stark’s What Americans Really Believe lauds the strengths of megachurches as compared to small churches. “Those who belong to megachurches display as high a level of personal commitment as do those who attend small congregations” (p.48). This is significant because some of Stark’s earlier work claimed growth dilutes commitment. In 2000, he declared, “Congregational size is inversely related to the average level of member commitment . . . In all instances, rates of participation decline with congregational size, and the sharpest declines occur when congregations exceed 50 members.”

If you enjoyed the Crawler’s first look at the new study from Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and co-author James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, about the transmission of happiness, take a look at the latest installment courtesy of this weekend’s New York Times. 

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

Read on.

Yesterday the Telegraph (UK) ran a story about Malcolm Gladwell, famous author of ‘The Tipping Point’ and ‘Blink,’ and pop sociologist extraordinaire. The article was based upon an informal interview with Gladwell to discuss his latest book ‘Outliers: The Story of Success,’ which has received critical acclaim here and abroad. Telegraph (UK) reporter Bob Williams writes about meeting Gladwell in his Greenwich Village apartment, and the pleasure of being greeted with a properly-prepared cup of tea — which is later criticized for its weakness.

Williams writes:

As with his previous books, Gladwell glides effortlessly across every subject imaginable to back up his theories with statistics – from the tendencies of Korean airline pilots to crash and of sportsmen born in January to do well, to why so many top lawyers are Jewish. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a theory about why he likes watery tea, as he has seems to have one for everything else. It would, by definition, be elegantly framed, somewhat left-field, but guaranteed – when snappily packaged as, say, The Pouring Point – to capture the zeitgeist instantly.

About the book itself:

Exceptional people – or “outliers” as [Gladwell] calls them – excel for rather more prosaic reasons. Geniuses are made, not born, benefiting from very specific advantages in their environment and putting in at least 10,000 hours of practice first. The premise is not exactly counter-intuitive. Indeed, some have carped that it is obvious.

“Hopefully it will be an anti-anxiety book,” says the author. “The route to success is ordinary – it’s not based on extravagant, innate gifts. I want to demystify.” He wants to “humble the successful and strip them of their illusions of their own virtue”.

Read the full story, here.

Temple University sociologist Matt Wray has identified new patterns in suicides in the Las Vegas area, Medical News Today reports. The study, titled “Leaving Las Vegas: Exposure to Las Vegas and Risk of Suicide,” examined rates of suicide in the Entertainment Capital of the World over a 30-year period and compared that data to the rest of the nation. Wray and his colleagues found:

residents of Las Vegas face a suicide risk that is significantly higher than the risk faced by residents elsewhere

people who die while visiting Las Vegas are twice as likely to die by suicide than are people who die visiting someplace else

visitors to Las Vegas face an even higher suicide risk than residents of Las Vegas

Wray offers some plausible explanations for this pattern, but encourages further study…

According to Wray, there a couple of scenarios that may explain the reasons for this geographical suicide cluster, but these need further research. “One would be ‘gambler’s despair’ – someone visits Las Vegas, bets his house away and decides to end it all. Another would be that those predisposed to suicide disproportionately choose Las Vegas to reside in or visit. And, finally, there may be a ‘contagion’ effect where people are emulating the suicides of others, with Las Vegas acting as a suicide magnet, much like the Golden Gate bridge. Some people may be going there intent on self-destruction.”

On a positive note, Wray’s study found that the suicide risk has actually declined over the past 30 years in the Las Vegas area in contrast to national rates, which have risen slightly in recent decades.

The Chicago Tribune ran a story yesterday about the potential effects of Tuesday’s election results titled, “Transformed by Obama’s Win — Has the election of an African-American to the White House shattered stereotypes and changed the way Americans – black or white – view each other?” In addition to interviews with locals in Chicago, the Tribune calls in the sociologists to sort this out in greater detail…

One sociologist points out the remaining ‘structural issues’…

To be sure, few people said they believe Obama’s victory will be enough to transform race relations in the United States radically or instantly.

“There are structural issues that need to be addressed,” said Martin Sanchez-Jankowski, a professor of sociology at the University of California– Berkeley. He said it is much more difficult for people to transfer their attitude toward Obama to the people of color they encounter every day.

“That is not something that any single election will be able to make a major difference in,” Sanchez-Jankowski said.

But on a more optimistic note, sociologist Omar Roberts focuses on how Obama’s victory may be a starting point for future change…

Omar McRoberts, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, said he thinks the election has provided a forum for the kinds of discussion needed to effect change.

“This election doesn’t represent the erasure of race as an obstacle or as a point of tension,” McRoberts said. “What it marks is the opening of a new space for serious dialogue and hard work.”

Read the full story.

The Boston Globe ran a story this morning about whether or not American racism is dead after the nation chose an African-American as the next president of the United States on Tuesday. The Globe reports, “The answer, coming as people began to digest the fact that a majority of Americans had chosen a black man, Barack Obama, to be the 44th president, was not nearly as straightforward. No, but sort of. Maybe, but probably not. While Obama’s achievement was profound, its psychological lift enormous for many, the impact on the rhythms of people’s everyday lives was revealing itself in subtler ways.”

The article includes commentary from researchers, lawyers and Boston residents. Sociologist Dan Monti weighs in…

“Are there racist people out there? Absolutely. Is our society racist? No,” said Dan Monti, a professor of sociology at Boston University whose specialty is race and ethnic relations in the United States. “I know there are people who will think that’s just wrong. But I think Barack Obama winning the presidency of the United States is the single clearest example that we are not. Because if we were, it wouldn’t have happened – period” …

In his sociology classes yesterday at BU, Monti told his students that everything – and nothing – changed on Tuesday night and that a series of changes, small and large, over the last century had laid the platform for Obama’s victory stage.

“With that said, what this represents, both domestically and internationally, is a coming of age of the American people,” Monti said.

Full story.

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.