trends

The North County Times reports that there is a “convergence in values” between Mexican and American people:

In fundamental attitudes about work, religion, sex, politics, the free market and the like, we are becoming more like each other, according to polls during the last 30 years, and the melding is only likely to continue. The growing economic integration under the North American Free Trade Agreement, an explosion in travel and communication, and the fact that 10 percent of Mexicans now live here and that many Americans are retiring there help push the trend.

Recent survey and poll data provides insight:

Half of all Mexicans in 2005 supported actually abolishing the border, a doubling since 1980, according to the latest World Values Surveys, done by a global association of sociologists.

This is consistent with a September Pew study showing that a third of Mexicans would “say yes” to moving to the U.S., and 18 percent would do so “without authorization.” They are pulled by jobs and relatives here, helping reverse what historically had been a deep suspicion of the U.S.

Indeed, the World Values survey finds that the number of Mexicans who distrust Americans as a people plummeted from 52 percent in 1990 to 31 percent, while those who trust us grew. Mexicans overwhelmingly look favorably on President Barack Obama, Gallup and other polls show, but that is a more fickle political measure.

Far fewer Americans —- 18 percent in the World Values survey —- favor union with Mexico. But until the recent drug violence along the border, nearly two-thirds of Americans have supported closer ties and had favorable views of Mexico, according to various polls from the last 20 years.

Americans remain righteous about maintaining national identity, but so do Mexicans. In fact, the World Values survey shows that Mexicans have more national pride than Americans, by a margin of 83 percent to 66 percent.

Even the gap between individualist versus collective orientations seems to be narrowing:

In the 1950s, the celebrated sociologists David Riesman and William Whyte lamented the decline of individualism in America, and they were partially right, as Americans have steadily placed higher emphasis on what polls coincidentally show are Mexican values oriented toward community, family and group.

At the same time, Mexicans in 1980 placed little emphasis on encouraging children to be independent, imaginative or determined, but now do so almost as much as Americans, according to World Values.

So…

The list goes on, and what such convergence on broad values means, at the very least, is that mutual understanding becomes easier.

A recent article in the Fresno Bee examined the current wave of apocalyptic themes in pop culture:

Prophecies about the end of the world have been debated by scholars, theologians and religious leaders for a long time. But it’s not just them. Pop culture also has a fascination with end times.

The fascination is clear in society today with the release of recent movies. The film “2012,” which opened Friday, depicts the end of the world and is stirring talk about the meaning of a Mayan calendar with the doomsday date. Another movie, “The Road,” which opens Nov. 25, looks at a man and his son’s post-apocalyptic struggle to survive.

One sociological explanation for the trend:

Sociologists say the interest in books, movies and lectures on the subject increases with bad times, such as those scarred by hurricanes, famines, tsunamis, war and economic collapse.

Commentary from a sociologist:

Margaret Gonsoulin, a sociology professor at California State University, Fresno, says the fascination with end times in pop culture reflects a hunger for meaning in the anxiety people feel in bad times.

“They want to know about the future,” she says. “But these sorts of ideas about end times mean different things to different people.”

Read more

The Wall Street Journal reports this week that requests to expunge criminal records are on the rise in this tough economy.

In Michigan, state police estimate they’ll set aside 46% more convictions this year than last. Oregon is on track to set aside 33% more. Florida sealed and expunged nearly 15,000 criminal records in the fiscal year ended June 30, up 43% from the previous year. The courts of Cook County, which includes Chicago and nearby suburbs, received about 7,600 expungement requests in the year’s first three quarters, nearly double the pace from the year before.

The criminological commentary…

The increase comes as unemployment has risen above 10%, allowing potential employers to be choosier than they have been in decades. More Americans have criminal records now, criminologists say, in part because a generation has come of age since the start of the war on drugs.

And…

In 1967, 50% of American men had been arrested. Since then, arrests made in connection with domestic violence and illegal drugs have pushed the number to 60%, estimates Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. The annual number of arrests for possession of marijuana more than tripled to 1.8 million from 1980 to 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

But is expungement a cure-all for those with a record? Maybe not, given ease of access to such information via the Internet for would-be employers:

Expungement doesn’t wipe away all traces. Local news Web sites routinely post arrest mug shots, which are nearly impossible to eradicate from the Internet. Search engines can turn up a smattering of decades-old news and police reports, plus caches of newer ones. Arrests that have been legally expunged may remain on databases that data-harvesting companies offer to prospective employers; such background companies are under no legal obligation to erase them.

USA Weekend recently highlighted the growing fascination that Americans have with our favorite blood-sucking friends: vampires.   This phenomenon is underscored by the recent success of the Twilight series, HBO’s second-most watched series ever True Blood, and the popularity of the new CW network show The Vampire Diaries.

Karen Sternheimer, sociologist at the University of Southern California, provides commentary: 

“One reason for the intense teenage interest in newer stories, especially Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, is the sense that the vampires are outsiders among us. In True Blood, they’re simply trying to fit into society. Often, they’re also seen as more vulnerable and less predatory.  Vampires look like us, but they’re different, and those are experiences that a lot of young people can relate to, especially dealing with not just the physical aspects of relationships when you’re young but also the emotional aspects, the danger vs. the draw of that so-called ‘forbidden love’ that really resonates with a lot of young women.”

Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels (upon which True Blood is based), provides additional commentary: 

“Vampires never have to go on Social Security, they never have to have a hip replacement, they’re never going to need bifocals  They just won’t have the problems of aging that humans face, and that’s very appealing, especially perhaps to Americans.”

On that note, pay attention to how many little vampires you see roaming the streets tomorrow night.

The recently released 2008 American Community Survey (from the U.S. Census Bureau) finds about 4 million “multigenerational” American households, reports the Houston Chronicle. This trend seems to be enjoying renewed popularity, sociologists note:

While the number of multigenerational households has remained steady since the 2000 Census, sociologists and demographers say they expect to see an increase. Immigration and out-of-wedlock childbearing generally spur high rates of multigenerational households in certain geographical areas, and they will continue to be factors, experts said.

What’s pushing the trend now is the recession and baby boomers. With layoffs and furloughs, people are moving back in with their parents or other family members to save money. Also, many baby boomers are taking care of their elderly parents as the cost of long-term care soars. Baby boomers themselves are growing old, too. Their children will be preparing to take care of them, experts said.

“People are going back to living the way they did in the beginning of the 20th century,” said Ray Eve, head of the sociology department at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Eve said economics was a driving factor then, just like it is now.

This illustrates how the idea of “family” shifts over time:

Society has had a long fascination with the idea of the traditional family — father, mother and children — but the reality is it has never really existed, said Holly Heard, a sociology professor at Rice University.

People often have lived with extended family members, and they do more so now than 20 years ago, Heard said.

For the early part of the 20th century to the 1950s, multigenerational households were fairly common. After World War II, people became more affluent, and family members moved out because they could afford to live on their own. A shift began to occur in the 1980s, when the recession hit, sociologists said.

Despite the day-to-day challenges that may come with three or more generations sharing one home, sociologists note benefits, as well:

Studies show some physical and psychological benefits for multiple generations living together, sociologists said.

People who live with relatives tend to have better health and are less suicidal. Children are also less likely to be delinquent because they have additional family members to nurture and take care of them, they said.

Explore more housing data from the American Community Survey.

Earlier this week Forbes.com ran a story about pet culture in the U.S. in the 21st century, which has transformed our four-legged pets into our children.

About the trend:

America’s cultural pendulum has swung toward pets. 71% of U.S. households own a pet, and most are willing to spend vast amounts of time and money to keep Sparky and Fluffy happy. The pet industry has tripled in the past 15 years. The APPA estimates pet spending will reach $45.4 billion this year, an increase of $2 billion since 2008–despite the crippling recession.

In the last few years, they’ve exploded into popular culture, too. As Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson are splashed across the celebrity glossies with their furry friends, the broader media followed suit. People.com offers the offshoot People Pets.com, AOL draws audiences with its new site Paw Nation, and icanhascheezburger.com gets hundreds of submissions daily of user-generated lol cats (laugh-out-loud funny photos of cats). Bo, America’s “First Dog,” is still making headlines.

And sociological commentary…

“People are fascinated by pets. We act and spend on them as if they were our children,” says NYU sociology professor Colin Jerolmack, who studies animals in society. “We’ve civilized them to the point that they are no longer a part of wild nature.” It wasn’t always so. Just over a century ago in the 1800s it was very rare to have a pet, Jerolmack says. They were luxury items and status symbols of the bourgeoisie, showcasing that a family had the means and resources to own a pet. Animals then were purely functional; dogs were often used to hunt, and cats used to scare off mice. As society developed and technology advanced, the utilitarian use of pets waned.

And from another sociologist…

Author of Understanding Dogs, sociologist Clinton Sanders, says pet obsession has been rapidly growing during the past 20 years. “The danger is that we don’t let animals be animals anymore,” he says. “It does them a disservice and results in some ignorant kinds of treatment.

“Dogs,” he says, “would be perfectly content eating the same food every day for the rest of their lives. It tastes good, fills them up and never disappoints. A dog’s owner, on the other hand, might say, ‘I would never want the same meal again and again, how boring.’ Then she goes to the store and buys her pup a variety of options, which in turn disrupts the dog’s digestive tract.” But, Sanders insists,”Dogs aren’t like us.”

Similarly, interpreting their behavior as if they were human can lead to false assumptions. Says Sanders, “People might believe the dog peed on their bed because she was angry that they were gone, but what if the dog has a urinary tract infection? It’s an inappropriate way of understanding their behavior.”

But why are we so crazy about our pets? NYU sociologist Colin Jerolmack, quoted above, has an answer…

Why have they become so important to us? NYU’s Jerolmack speculates that it may be due to people’s decreasing connection to each other. In an era of online social networks, long work hours and distances between families, we have far fewer strong social ties and many more weak ties, he says. “We’re spending a lot more time alone or with our immediate family. The companionship of pets has become much more valuable today.”

Furthermore, relationships with pets are much less emotionally messy. They love you no matter what you look like or if your breath stinks. And they show affection consistently. Pets have become a relatively easy and loveable replacement of children or a strong community, which, Jerolmack warns, may lead to an impending culture clash.

“In the city, we’re already seeing debates over park space going to kids or dogs,” says Jerolmack. “There will be more people demanding social recognition of pets, wanting to bring their pets everywhere. And with an industry relying on them, I don’t see us going backwards.”

Read more.

Widely read in numerous sociology classes, the writings of Barbara Ehrenreich have become classics. Her most recent book, Bright-Sided, was discussed earlier this week on National Public Radio.

NPR’s ‘Talk of the Nation’ reports:

When author Barbara Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer, she was bombarded with wildly optimistic, inspirational phrases. But a cheerful outlook, she argues, does not cure cancer.

In her new book, Bright-Sided, Ehrenreich explores the negative effects of positive thinking, and the “reckless optimism” that dominates America’s national mindset.

“We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles,” Ehrenreich writes, “both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”

A brief excerpt from the book…

How can we be so surpassingly “positive” in self-image and stereotype without being the world’s happiest and best-off people? The answer, I think, is that positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology — the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it. That ideology is “positive thinking,” by which we usually mean two things. One is the generic content of positive thinking — that is, the positive thought itself — which can be summarized as: Things are pretty good right now, at least if you are willing to see silver linings, make lemonade out of lemons, etc., and things are going to get a whole lot better. This is optimism, and it is not the same as hope. Hope is an emotion, a yearning, the experience of which is not entirely within our control. Optimism is a cognitive stance, a conscious expectation, which presumably anyone can develop through practice.

The second thing we mean by “positive thinking” is this practice, or discipline, of trying to think in a positive way. There is, we are told, a practical reason for undertaking this effort: positive thinking supposedly not only makes us feel optimistic but actually makes happy outcomes more likely. If you expect things to get better, they will. How can the mere process of thinking do this? In the rational explanation that many psychologists would offer today, optimism improves health, personal efficacy, confidence, and resilience, making it easier for us to accomplish our goals. A far less rational theory also runs rampant in American ideology — the idea that our thoughts can, in some mysterious way, directly affect the physical world. Negative thoughts somehow produce negative outcomes, while positive thoughts realize themselves in the form of health, prosperity, and success. For both rational and mystical reasons, then, the effort of positive thinking is said to be well worth our time and attention, whether this means reading the relevant books, attending seminars and speeches that offer the appropriate mental training, or just doing the solitary work of concentration on desired outcomes — a better job, an attractive mate, world peace.

Listen to the report here.

Read the NPR transcript.

The New York Times ran a story at the end of last week about the media flurry surrounding celebrity deaths over the last several months. The article takes a closer look at the context and meaning of all the alarm.

The trend…

ONE after the other, they were dying: Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon, all in the same week earlier this summer. Next were Walter Cronkite, John Hughes and, in late August, at a pitch point of public grief, Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Then on Monday, Patrick Swayze died after a widely publicized struggle with pancreatic cancer, only to be followed by Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary Wednesday night.

It has been, by all appearances, the endless funereal season, with a news media swarm on the departed and a parade of nostalgic tributes, as bloggers and Twitterers went on “celebrity death watch.” Even before Senator Kennedy succumbed to brain cancer Aug. 25, columnists wrote pleading laments like one in The Washington Post that said, “God, please stop taking away our celebrities.”

But the trend may be exaggerated.

But in fact, no more celebrities had died than in past summers, according to Lou Ferrara, a managing editor in charge of entertainment and lifestyle coverage for The Associated Press.

The perception of numerous celebrity deaths was not supported by the number of obituaries the news agency wrote, he said, because it was not a matter of how many died, but who.

What does all of this mean? The sociologist explains…

This summer could come to be known as the summer when baby boomers began to turn to the obituary pages first, to face not merely their own mortality or ponder their legacies, but to witness the passing of legends who defined them as a tribe, bequeathing through music, culture, news and politics a kind of generational badge that has begun to fray.

“This is a historical development in cultural history,” said Todd Gitlin, 66, the sociologist and author of “The Sixties,” who teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism. “It’s the ebbing of figures who have a wide enough span of appreciation and admiration so they appeal to significant numbers of people, like incarnations of virtue. So people take a new measure of themselves when they ask, ‘Will there ever be anybody else like X’ ”?

Read more.

The Chicago Tribune ran a story this week about the rash of bad behavior by politicians, celebrities, and athletes alike in recent months.

The breakdown:

After watching South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilsonheckle the president during a joint session of Congress,Serena Williams cuss out a line judge at the U.S. Open andKanye West snatch the microphone from a 19-year-old newcomer, to champion a much-honored megastar, on theMTV Video Music Awards, you may have had the following thought:

What the (bleep) is wrong with people these days?

Those three incidents during the past week represent the latest trifecta of public incivility in a year in which town-hall health-care discussions routinely have devolved into shouting matches, President Barack Obama has been compared to and depicted as Adolf Hitler and figures across the political spectrum have flung epithets unprintable in a family newspaper.

The incidents, notable as much for their breaches of decorum as for their content, follow a general pattern: incident, outrage, hundreds of thousands of YouTube hits, apology and, maybe, punishment. What’s unclear is whether such outbursts are signs of shifting times or just a news cluster that gives us an excuse to wring our hands and look back at polite ol’ days that may never have existed.

Sociologist Gary Alan Fine is asked for his comments, and thoughtfully responds that this is likely not a new pattern of behavior, but a new pattern of interest…

Northwestern University sociology professor Gary Fine was reluctant to draw big conclusions, noting that Williams follows a long line of athletes — among them tennis players Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe — who have berated umpires, that presidents have been heckled in some form at least since Lyndon Johnson and that the British Parliament shows far less respect toward its head of government.

What the current controversies really indicate, Fine said, is what kind of news most people prefer.

“People like to pretend that they care about policy, but they really care about people and stories,” Fine said, noting that the Wilson outburst “provided a story about what is otherwise a complicated, confusing and, dare I say, boring debate about the details of health care.”

Read more.

Several media outlets have been buzzing about a recent sociological study that has been used to explain the proliferation and perseverance of a number of myths related to current debates about U.S. healthcare reform.

Bernie Mooney of Examiner.com writes:

Whether you support healthcare reform or not, one thing should be a given, that whatever decision you reach should be based on the facts. Despite efforts to inform people of what the bill is and what it isn’t, many still believe the myths about the not-yet finalized bill.

You would think that with easy access to the overwhelming amount of information available on the internet and elsewhere, people would be more informed. Maybe that’s the problem. With access to massive amounts of information, people can cherry pick the information that most validates and supports their original view. People want to be right, so they seek out information that supports their worldview rather then information that challenges it. Is this stupidity or is there a more deep-rooted psychological reason for this?

There just might be something at play here beyond simple stupidity. A study done by researchers from four major research institutions* may explain it. The study, There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification, was published in the journal Sociological Inquiry. They focused on the belief, held by many Americans, that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 despite all evidence to the contrary.

About the study:

Dr. Steven Hoffman, co-author of the study, said of the findings, “Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as ‘motivated reasoning,’ which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.”

“We form emotional attachments that get wrapped up in our personal identity and sense of morality, irrespective of the facts of the matter. The problem is that this notion of ‘motivated reasoning’ has only been supported with experimental results in artificial settings. We decided it was time to see if it held up when you talk to actual voters in their homes, workplaces, restaurants, offices and other deliberative settings.”

Hoffman says, “For the most part people completely ignore contrary information. We did not find that people were being duped by a campaign of innuendo so much as they were actively constructing links and justifications that did not exist.”

“They wanted to believe in the link,” he says, “because it helped them make sense of a current reality. So voters’ ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information, whether we think that is good or bad for democratic practice, does at least demonstrate an impressive form of creativity.”

Newsweek also picked up on the story. Health columnist Sharon Begley writes:

Some people form and cling to false beliefs about health-care reform (or Obama’s citizenship) despite overwhelming evidence thanks to a mental phenomenon called motivated reasoning, says sociologist Steven Hoffman, visiting assistant professor at the University at Buffalo. “Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief,” he says, “people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.” And God knows, in the Internet age there is no dearth of sources to confirm even the most ludicrous claims (my favorite being that the moon landings were faked). “For the most part,” says Hoffman, “people completely ignore contrary information” and are able to “develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information.”

His conclusions arise from a study he and six colleagues conducted. They were looking at the well-known phenomenon of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Some people, mostly liberals, have blamed that on false information and innuendo spread by the Bush administration and its GOP allies (by former members of the Bush White House, too, as recently as this past March). (As Dick Cheney said in June, suspicion of a link “turned out not to be true.”) But the researchers think another force is at work. In a paper to be published in the September issue of the journalSociological Inquiry(you have to subscribe to the journal to read the full paper, but the authors kindly posted it on their Web site here), they argue that some Americans believe the Saddam-9/11 link because it “made sense of the administration’s decision to go to war against Iraq . . . [T]he fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11,” they write.

Read more from Examiner.com
Read more from Newsweek.
UPI.com also picked up the story…
The New York Times also picked up the findings…