More people are talking about the dangers of lead poisoning public water systems—and children. Public water systems are not the only way to be exposed to lead poisoning, however; the human body can ingest lead through paint chips, gasoline exhaust, and industrial processes. Previous research on environmental health hazards has illustrated that a person’s neighborhood (a product of class factors) best predicts their risk of being exposed to these dangers. Studies also show that predominantly black or white neighborhoods experience different levels of environmental health hazards. Now, writing in the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Heather Moody, Joe T. Darden, and Bruce William Pigozzi demonstrate the significance of class and race in black-white gaps in childhood blood-lead-levels (BLLs).

The authors use Census data from the Detroit metropolitan area alongside Michigan Medicaid data to examine black and white childhood BLLs. Drawing on a sample of over 160,000 children, the authors compare BLLs between black and white children of the same age across socioeconomic positions. As expected, children of all races had lower BLLs the higher their class. Unexpectedly, however, the authors find gaps in BLLS by race that grow with class. The gap between black and white childhood BLLs is very low among the poorest, but rises in more affluent neighborhoods.The gap between black and white childhood blood-lead-levels is very low among the poorest, but rises in more affluent neighborhoods.

Some ideas to explain this paradox include the possibility that black families may be relegated to older or less desirable houses within wealthier neighborhoods (infamous historical “redlining” comes to mind). Thus, even though class is a strong predictor of your risk for lead exposure, race still plays an important role. These findings also challenge assumptions that class mobility can erase racial inequality absent other interventions.

We often think that religion helps to build a strong society, in part because it gives people a shared set of beliefs that fosters trust. When you know what your neighbors think about right and wrong, it is easier to assume they are trustworthy people. The problem is that this logic focuses on trustworthy individuals, while social scientists often think about the relationship between religion and trust in terms of social structure and context.

New research from Olson and Li (using data from the World Values survey) examines the trust levels of 77,405 individuals from 69 countries collected between 1999 and 2010. The authors’ analysis focuses on a simple survey question about whether respondents felt they could, in general, trust other people. The authors were especially interested in how religiosity at the national level affected this trust, measuring it in two ways: the percentage of the population that regularly attended religious services and the level of religious diversity in the nation.

These two measures of religious strength and diversity in the social context brought out a surprising pattern. Nations with high religious diversity and high religious attendance had respondents who were significantly less likely to say they could generally trust other people. Conversely, nations with high religious diversity, but relatively low levels of participation, had respondents who were more likely to say they could generally trust other people.The positive effects we attribute to cultural systems like religion are not guaranteed.

One possible explanation for these two findings is that it is harder to navigate competing claims about truth and moral authority in a society when the stakes are high and everyone cares a lot about the answers, but also much easier to learn to trust others when living in a diverse society where the stakes for that difference are low. The most important lesson from this work, however, may be that the positive effects we usually attribute to cultural systems like religion are not guaranteed; things can turn out quite differently depending on the way religion is embedded in social context.

We expect co-ops to be places where employees and customers are free to be themselves, empowered by collective ownership and unencumbered by the corporate control of scheduling, dress code, and workplace policies. However, sociologist Elizabeth Hoffmann finds worker cooperatives are not always utopian work spaces. Instead, they rely heavily on a specific kind of emotional labor to achieve conformity and productivity among their employees.

Hoffmann studied emotional labor like verbalizing support for your coworkers and smiling while on the job in worker cooperatives in the U.K. and the U.S. across four industries: coal mining, chemical manufacturing, taxicab driving, and organic food distribution. Through interviewing co-op employees and observing their behavior on the job over a number of years, Hoffmann found that working at a co-op can actually demand more emotional labor than working for a conventional company. For example, while employees at co-ops are encouraged to display emotions not typically condoned in other work environments, like anger or love, they are also expected to truly identify with the cooperative’s ideology and ethos. And while workers in conventional workplaces are expected to maintain a façade of good relationships with customers and co-workers, worker cooperatives often expect their employees to truly feel the emotions they display at work. Not only should they smile and help, the workers at the co-ops that Hoffman studied expected that employees actually want to help their co-workers.

So while co-ops appear to promote individuality and choice among their workers, they often require a much deeper, possibly more insidious level of conformity and self-control than one might imagine. Perhaps it’s just one more case of how the most powerful forms of social control are those we exert—or are expected to exert—on ourselves.

Binge drinking has been tied to both genetic propensity (nature) and peer influence (environment). Using data from the College Roommate Study and National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, Guang Guo, Yi Li, Wang Hongyu, Cai Tianji, and Greg J. Duncan investigate the interplay between these social and biological influences in the case of college binge drinking.

The authors hypothesize that genetics modify the effects peer influences on binge drinking. For example, the impact of peer pressure on one’s likelihood to engage in a drinking game would depend genetic predispositions toward heavy drinking. Guo and colleagues use a type of “natural experiment” – where randomization is present, but not introduced by the experimenter via manipulation – in which college roommates are randomly assigned, thus removing the influences of friend selection (since people who are more likely to drink are more likely to be friends) and potential correlations between the genes and environment. Based on genetic markers empirically linked to alcohol use, the researchers split the sample into three groups in terms of their genetic propensity for alcohol use (low, medium, and high).

Controlling for various respondent and roommate characteristics, the researchers find that having a roommate who drinks increases binge drinking, on average, by 20-40%. Peer influence, though, only has an effect among those with a medium propensity to drink: the influence of peer influence is eight times higher for medium propensity drinkers than for either low or high propensity drinkers. In other words, low propensity drinkers and high propensity drinkers are largely unaffected by peer influences to drink in college, whereas those “on the bubble” are more likely to drink when their roommate imbibes. The study highlights how social and biological factors work in tandem, illustrating a further mechanism by which social interventions can impact individuals differently. In the meantime, universities’ “one size fits all” safe drinking initiatives are unlikely to make much difference in students’ binge drinking behaviors.Low and high genetic propensity drinkers are largely unaffected by peer influences to drink in college; those medium-propensity students “on the bubble” are, however, more likely to binge drink when their roommate does.

Social scientists debate the extent to which education and cognitive ability influence individual prejudices against blacks and support for policies that seek to lessen racial inequality. On one hand, higher education levels (cognitive abilities) may lead the embrace of ideologies of racial equality and tolerance. On the other hand, support for racial equality in principle is not the same as support for specific policies seeking to reduce racial inequalities. That difference could indicate that white people with higher cognitive abilities are not necessarily less racist—perhaps they are more able to express their beliefs without appearing overtly racist.

Sociologist Geoffrey T. Wodtke set out to investigate. In a new paper, Wodtke examines the responses of over 44,000 whites in various cohorts from 1972 to 2010 using data from the General Social Survey. Unlike prior studies, he reports participants’ verbal abilities (one aspect of cognitive ability) through the Gallup-Thorndike Verbal Intelligence Test on racial attitudes including anti-black prejudice, integration, discrimination, and policies aimed at racial equality. Wodtke also tests whether the period of people’s political socialization—before the civil rights movement or after—impacts the extent to which respondents’ verbal ability influences their prejudices for or against blacks and racial equity policies.Attitudes in principle have not translated into support for policies supporting racial equality. And rhetorical abilities aside, attitudes mean little without action.

Wodtke’s findings demonstrate that whites with higher verbal abilities are less likely to support anti-black prejudice and racial segregation, and they are more aware of the discrimination that blacks face. At the same time, they are not more likely—in some cases, they are even less likely than others—to favor specific policies seeking to reduce racial inequality, such as the busing programs of the 1970s, financial aid for minority schools, and government assistance programs. Additionally, the apparently liberalizing effects of education do not appear across generations. Wodtke finds that whites’ verbal abilities have a much smaller impact on racial attitudes among those generations socialized prior to the civil rights movement, and even among post-civil rights, high verbal aptitude whites, attitudes on racial inequality in principle for have not translated into more support for policies supporting racial equality. Rhetorical abilities aside, attitudes mean little without action.

Gender segregation at work is one of the biggest contributors to the wage gap between women and men–in 2014, women cashed in at about 79 cents per men’s dollar. Much of the difference is explained by the fact that women overwhelmingly dominate “pink-collar jobs” that generally pay less, like teaching, nursing, and waitressing, and men dominate in higher-paying positions, like physicians, sales directors, and CEOs. However, even when men and women start in the same field, men are much more likely to advance. For instance, in June, The Washington Post reported that the number of Fortune 500 companies led by women was at an all-time high: 5%. (Less heralded? That women make up 45% of the labor force in these companies.)

While the number is small, clearly some women do make it to the top. So, when women are employed in upper level positions, what happens to women left near the bottom?

Researchers Stainback, Kleiner, and Skaggs studied the association between women in leadership positions and gender segregation in lower-level positions across 86 Fortune 1000 firms in Texas. Using statistical models, they tested the level of gender segregation across eight non-managerial occupational categories based on the percentage of women in managerial and executive positions. Overall, the researchers found that having more women in leadership positions is associated with less gender segregation in lower level jobs. However, this relationship gets much smaller when the percentage of women on corporate boards approaches 20%.

Since none of the firms actually has women as 20% of its corporate board, their finding is telling of the gross inequality between men’s and women’s representation in executive positions. Put differently, because corporate board membership hasn’t surpassed 20% female, the authors cannot make any conclusions about what would happen if it did.

Still, the association between more women at the top and less gender segregation below leads the authors to conclude that women who make it to the top can–and do–act as “agents of change” across organizations.

Dumpster diving and urban foraging—that’s how “freegans” shop. Freegans participate minimally in the conventional economy through an environmentally sustainable lifestyle, including living off others’ waste. Based upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork with freegans, UC-Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Alex Barnard argues that this lifestyle constitutes an innovative alternative to consumer-driven city life.

Barnard’s ethnographic study of New York City’s freegans took place over two years. Barnard attended “trash tours” (dumpster dives announced to the general public), freegan communal “feasts,” organizational meetings, and “skillshare” events to observe the subculture’s performative claims-making practices. To supplement his participant observations, including six months of subsisting on discarded food, Barnard conducted 20 interviews of active members of freegan.info.

The themes and questions Barnard found in the freegan life centered around how freegans create what they consider a moral place in a capitalist city they characterize as immoral. One freegan describes NYC as an “evil haven of decadence and debauchery.” A distinctive lifestyle and relationship to the physical world helps freegans create and sustain a sense of morality, and freegans use nature as a framework for deciphering right from wrong. Nature, they believe, is free from social influence—a moral concept “outside of us.”

Barnard anticipates a logical question by explaining that freegans choose to live in the city rather than move to the purer countryside as an act of resistance. Moving to literal greener pastures would do little to push back against the capitalist system. Further, as freegans derive a sense of morality from using waste as a natural resource, they see themselves as offsetting the mainstream population’s wasteful practices. Even in a “sin city,” individuals and groups find ways to use space to live in a way that aligns with their values.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that “at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning… we stand in the most segregated hour of America.” From “kneel-ins” of the civil rights era to surveys and think pieces today, we often talk religious segregation as the result of individual choices: what do congregants want from church? How do they choose a church, and why do they leave? How do they work for change when church doesn’t work for them? New research from Bradley Wright and colleagues, however, reminds us that larger institutional and cultural factors that keep churches segregated.

The authors set out to ask whether churches themselves were less likely to welcome new members from different racial groups. They drew a national sample of 3,120 churches to cover mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant, and Catholic denominations, and they sent each a form email from a family planning to move into the area and looking for more information about the church. In each email, they randomly changed the name of the sender to suggest that they were White, Black, Hispanic, or Asian. They then measured whether the church office responded, how many follow-up emails they sent, how long responses took, and the length, warmth, religious tone, and the quality of information for each email response.

Their tests revealed some surprising results. Evangelical and Catholic churches did not show significant differences in their response rates, but mainline Protestant churches were significantly more likely to respond to inquiries from white senders. Black senders were 11% less likely to get a response, Hispanics were 14% less likely, and Asians were 27% less likely than Whites. Mainline Protestant churches also took significantly longer to respond to senders of color, and when they did their responses had lower quality information and were more likely to be terse—offering only one or two sentences that did not directly address the senders’ questions.

This research reminds us that racial homophily—the preference for a community where everyone looks the same—is not just a matter of individual choices. It is baked into institutional processes, and it often persists in fairly mainstream, moderate groups where people just want to feel “normal” and avoid conflict. For American religion, it isn’t just about who chooses the pews; we have to look at who builds them, too.

Keeping secrets, both your own and others’, may seem like very personal business. However, it turns out that what sensitive information gets shared, and with whom, follows some clear social patterns. This is one of the big take-aways of Sarah Cowan’s study of how information about abortion and miscarriage circulates through social networks.

Cowan starts from the fact that even though abortion is a more frequent event in the U.S. than the miscarriage of a recognized pregnancy, “more Americans hear of women who have had miscarriages than they hear of women who have had abortions” (483). Using a nationally representative survey of 1,600 American adults, in fact, Cowan finds that each miscarriage “secret” was told to 2.63 people and kept from 0.2 people on average, whereas abortion secrets were told to only an average of 1.24 people and kept from 0.8 people.

Cowan suggests that the data show that abortion is a more stigmatizing than miscarriage (that is, it deviates further from social norms) as a piece of personal information. She cites higher levels of social disapproval and previous studies indicating that women frequently report their abortions as miscarriages to their doctors. In other words, stigmatized or potentially stigmatized information is less likely to be shared with others.

In addition, Cowan finds that secret telling/keeping is impacted by the presumed attitudes of its potential recipient. In this case, respondents who have more accepting views toward abortion are more likely to hear others’ abortion secrets. Controlling for how likely one is to hear secrets, for example, Cowan shows that staunch “pro-life” Americans are 58% less likely than are those who think abortion should be “generally available” to hear an abortion secret.

Cowan’s results highlight how selective information sharing and secret telling is, and that people are often only told of secrets with content they already approve of. This selective information flow can lead us to perceive that our social networks match our beliefs at a greater extent than they actually do.

It isn’t every day that scientific research involves a bloody cage match, but that’s the life of a sociologist. In his Social Problems article, UCLA graduate student Neil Gong reports on his observations in a no-holds-barred fighting and weapons group, a club where there are no rules to maintain order or safety in the ring. The group’s only decree is that fighters should remain “friends at the end of the day.” After observing bouts and participating, Gong describes how fighters create and follow unofficial rules. He details three ways in which the participants regulate happenings in the arena.

First, the participants cultivate a code of honor, including shared, core understandings of “dirty” or dishonorable moves in the ring. Second, Gong finds that hesitation helps maintain order; since the fighters rely on rules and regulations in the rest of their lives, hesitation about how to handle unexpected moments in the ring tend to keep things in check. And third, rules external to the club, such as self-defense laws in general society, quietly enter these spaces, helping to shape the tools and tactics participants are willing to use.Because people in social contexts stick to norms, there’s no such thing as fighting without rules.

In essence, even when there are no official “rules,” people in social contexts stick to a general set of norms and ideas for maintaining order. Gong’s hard-hitting research highlights how there are always rules… even when there aren’t.