Teaching social theory is just plain fun. For me, it’s an opportunity to see our world in a multidimensional way. Who needs a comic book multiverse when you can look at social phenomena through different perspectives? Inspired by sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe, one of my favorite things to prompt theory students with is to present them with a news item and ask them to discuss it through different perspectives: “A good sociologist can find three plausible explanations for why they see a particular social phenomenon.” I like to remind students that ‘three’ works particularly well because it syncs up with the three big umbrellas of social theory (Conflict Perspective/Marxism, Structural Functionalism, and Interpretive), but it doesn’t have to be so simplistic.

Why do we have a housing crisis in a country with such great prosperity? Why do people shirk vaccinations and accept other drugs so readily? Why do we have such a massive incarcerated population in the United States when crime has decreased? These are complex questions that demand nuanced answers.

‘Multiverse’ as a term wasn’t coined by Marvel impresario Stan Lee but by the sociologically-attuned American philosopher William James in 1895. In his essay, boldly titled “Is Life Worth Living?” James offered the term to remind us of the “plasticity” of what we see, and to suggest how we can see a world that God has created but also one that sciences like evolutionary theory can reveal. (It’s actually quite a fun read.) Today, we know the “many worlds theory” as a problem of quantum mechanics and, as I often tell my students, “I’m not that kind of doctor.”

For sociology, James is one of the key figures who helped lay the foundation for one of the cornerstone theories of contemporary sociology: Symbolic Interactionism. James’ philosophy, called pragmatism, was based on the concept of the “social self” as a social construction, arguing that human nature arises from real-world social interactions and that these interactions are a worthy unit of analysis. He proposed that our thoughts are generated as a “stream of consciousness” and that meaning is constructed through experiences. Pragmatism lives on through George Herbert Mead and symbolic interactionism. James’ philosophy asserted that there was not a single self but multiple ones that arise from interaction—an idea that lived on through Charles Cooley’s ‘looking glass self’ and Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. (Read more, here.)

Of course, as fun as it is on the big screen (and maybe less fun in physics books), I do not think it’s sociologically useful to imagine that there are multiple universes floating out there with multiple versions of myself teaching math or literature instead of sociology. What I do think is sociologically interesting is just how much people from different life experiences can have very different interpretations of the same phenomenon. The idea of the multiverse as a sociological concept—which I assuredly wasn’t taught in graduate school—does not mean the many worlds depicted with multiple comic book heroes and villains.

I see the sociological multiverse as a potential intervention. Are we increasingly seeing the world in a more uni-versal, or one-dimensional, way? Alas, I think so. The social media filter bubbles through which we see the world are algorithmically-tweaked to reflect back to us the world we expect to see. This much we know. Written in the early 1960s—exactly midway between where James was writing and where we sit today—social theorist Herbert Marcuse could not have imagined a social media-infused world when he warned that mass media technology and modern consumerist life were repressing critical thought and freedom. And yet, Marcuse’s fear of the death of critical thinking is even more important today.

Students, reflecting the population at large, seem to be quick to answer the sociological puzzles I offer above. “There is a large unhoused population because people are lazy and don’t want to work.” “People don’t take vaccines because they are stupid.” “People are in jail because some people are just inherently bad people.” Maybe folks aren’t willing to say such callous things in class, but you get the idea. These are not just problems for students. Sociologists, perhaps rewarded via social media, are disturbingly too quick to find one-dimensional explanations for complex social phenomena. It’s class. Race. Sexism. In the words of one sociologist, “Fuck Nuance.”

But nuance is where multidimensionality exists. Nuance is where people of divergent opinions find commonality. For William James, “Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them” (read more, here). The philosophical—rather than comic-book—multiverse challenges us not to let our own truth pass without challenge. In a call-out age, challenges come with heightened social repercussions. The need to “Call In” (please see Loretta J. Ross’ brilliant short TED Talk on the subject, or read this New York Times article) is a profound invitation from the multiverse.

Teaching theory—not one theory, but all of them—with equal passion and vigor—is the way to get students to think in that multidimensional way. A clever reader might notice that I cite sociologists who are inspired by three different perspectives: Marcuse (from a more Marxist background), Stinchcombe (from a more economic and organizational sociology), and James (who helped shape the interactionist perspective). I think this is how I see teaching not as a means of teaching students what to think, but as a way of teaching them how to think.

Jonathan Wynn is professor and department chair of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His most recent book was The City & the Hospital: The paradox of medically overserved communities and his novel, The Set Up, lands in May 2025.