social psychology

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized the notion of the habitus. The term refers to both the knowledges and physicalities that maintain distinctions between groups (examples in a sec). It’s a great concept for helping us understand the reproduction of class differences without relying strictly on economics. It takes more than money to make money, it also takes knowing the right things, the right people, and the right way to act.

The habitus, then, is one way to show that you “belong” to the group. Imagine being on a really fancy job interview for a really fancy job. Can you talk knowledgably about what vintage of which wine was really excellent in any given year? Do you know which fork is the salad fork? What parts of your body are allowed on the table? When? How quickly do you eat? What is the sign that you are finished with your food?

People who grow up in wealthy families that prioritize these things tend to absorb this knowledge naturally while growing up, just as a kid who grows up on a farm knows how to wrassle a lamb for fixin,’ mend a barbed wire fence, and spot a good steer at the auction. Both of these types of knowledges are useful, but they don’t transfer; my colleagues, for example, are forever unimpressed that I can tell the breed of most horses just by looking.

In any case, while these examples refer to class and rural or urban upbringings, Missives from Marx offered a great example of the habitus as a marker of religious belonging.

In the video below, made by evangelicals, the evangelical habitus is satirized. “Lost at an evangelical meeting?” the video asks, “Here’s how to do evangelicalism!”

* Title, post idea, and video stolen from Missives From Marx.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

rachel56 sent in a fascinating story. Charley’s Grilled Subs is a super-successful franchise with locations in 16 countries. The restaurant specializes in Philly-style cheese steaks. If you go to their website and watch the video telling Charley’s story (here), this guy plays Charley:

But, in fact, that’s not Charley.  This is:

So here we have a Korean-American owner of a business that is Philadelphia themed.  I’m going to assume, and feel free to call me out on this, that he decided to portray “Charley” as white because he (or his marketers) imagined that Americans (whoever they are) think like this: Philly = America = white.  The idea that Charley is Korean might cause cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive dissonance is the state of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time, such as Charley = Philly = America and Charley = Korean, when American does not = Korean.

When I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, I used to frequent a fast food noodle place called “Chin’s Asia Fresh.”  I always wondered if there was really a Chin or if it was a made-up character.  According to the website there is a Leeann Chin who, growing up in Canton, China, “learned cooking traditions from her mother and an eye for the best ingredients from her father.”  Of course, as is clear from Charley’s story, the “history” sections of restaurants can be fiction so… I guess I still wonder.   Of course, it would be advantageous for the Chin’s chain to market itself as authentically Asian, just as it is apparently advantageous for the Charley’s chain to market itself as “authentically” “American” (i.e., white).

All of this is a great example of how image is constrained and enabled by racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dan Ariely, in this great talk, describes some of his surprising research on cheating.

He finds that almost everyone will cheat, but only a little bit.  People are less likely to steal money, than other things (e.g., office supplies).  “Priming” works, too: If people are reminded to be moral, they are less likely to cheat.

If we see people we think are like us cheat, we are more likely to cheat than we would have otherwise (but we have the opposite reaction to cheaters that we see as not like us).  Ariely then applies his findings to the Enron scandal.

A fun and fascinating 16 and a half minutes:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Let’s say that you work in an office with several people, and everyone is expected to meet certain performance standards. You’re an outstanding performer, considered one of the best in the firm. A couple offices down from you is a guy named Wendel, and you feel sorry for Wendel because he’s not quite able to meet the performance standards and is always teetering on the edge of losing his job. Your sense of Wendel is that he’s a good guy who just never gets the right breaks, and if he were given more chances to succeed he could probably pull himself out of his slump.

One day, you’re working on a project team with Wendel and notice that he’s screwed up a major report bigtime—big enough that he’s sure to get fired if anyone else sees it—but so far only you have seen it and you have a brief opportunity to cover up Wendel’s mistakes. If you cover them up, in effect lying by passing off your work as Wendel’s, you’ll probably get away with it and Wendel will go on to work another day. If you don’t, he’s finished.

What will you do?

We normally associate acting dishonestly with causing harm to others, but it’s also quite possible that a dishonest act can help someone, like Wendel.  Under what conditions we’re prone to act dishonestly to hurt or help another is what a new study in the journal Psychological Science investigated.

Researchers created a mock scenario in which study participants were randomly assigned to one of two roles: solver or grader. Each solver was also randomly assigned to a grader. Participants in both roles became either ‘‘wealthy’’ or ‘‘poor’’ through a lottery in which they had a 50% probability of winning $20. This lottery, together with the random pairing of solvers and graders, created four pair types: wealthy grader and wealthy solver; poor grader and poor solver; wealthy grader and poor solver; and poor grader and wealthy solver. After the lottery, solvers solved multiple anagrams. Graders then graded solvers’ work. Graders had the opportunity to dishonestly help or hurt solvers by misreporting their performance. If a grader overstated a solver’s performance, then the solver earned undeserved money. If the grader understated the solver’s performance, then the solver did not earn deserved money.

The results: When a wealthy grader was assigned to a poor solver, the grader overwhelmingly misreported the score to help the solver (about 70% of the time). When a wealthy grader was assigned to a wealthy solver, the grader nearly always reported the score honestly (90%).  On the other side of the coin, when a poor grader was assigned to a poor solver, the grader nearly always misreported the score to help (95%). When a poor grader was assigned to a wealthy solver, however, the grader misreported the score negatively to hurt the solver about 30% of the time. A graph of the results is below.

The reasons for these results, the researchers surmise, are less about financial self interest and more about emotional responses to inequity.  Individuals increase their dishonest hurting behavior and reduce their helping behavior when they are worse off than the other person.  Conversely, they increase dishonest helping behavior when they are better off than the other person.

What we seem to be back to with this study is the realization that we’re not so rational after all.  Dishonesty, in either direction, appears to be motivated by emotional reaction more than rational evaluations of self interest – at least in the context of relatively small sums of money (it would be interesting to see what would happen if we jacked the amount up a few hundred bucks).

So, not to forget about Wendel – how’d he make out in your mind?

Source: Gino, F., & Pierce, L. (2009). Dishonesty in the Name of Equity Psychological Science DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02421.x

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David DiSalvo is a science and technology writer who regularly blogs at Neuronarrative and Brainspin on the True/Slant network. He is also a freelance writer for Scientific American Mind magazine.

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Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight.com posted a summary of the book Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics:

…authoritarianism is really about order–achieving it, maintaining it, and affirming it–and especially when citizens are uncertain or fearful. This, they say, is why authoritarians seek out and elevate, well, authorities–because authorities impose order on an otherwise disordered world. They provide a useful review the existing literature on authoritarian traits, which have been connected to negative racist stereotyping, a belief in biblical inerrancy, a preference for simple rather than complex problem-solving, and low levels of political information.

The authors, Marc Hetherinton and Jonathan Weiler, provide a breakdown of average levels of authoritarianism in the U.S. based on various characteristics:

Over at the Huffington Post, Weiler discusses the connection between authoritarianism and racial attitudes:

Authoritarian-minded individuals are, after all, likely to judge more negatively minority groups and those negative judgments, in turn, inform a host of political positions…

We find that in a politics organized by authoritarianism, even non-racial issues are becoming a matter of race and, more broadly, are taking on more visceral symbolic significance…

In sum, there is reason to think that beneath the arguments about government intrusion into the health care market, death panels, and such, a much more visceral dynamic is at work. To be perfectly clear, it is far from the case that every opponent or skeptic of significant health-care reform is a racist or racially motivated in her or his thinking. But there is, at the least, very strong circumstantial evidence that views of race and beliefs about health care reform are linked significantly among many Americans, which probably explains why the debate on health care reform has caused a much stronger uproar in 2009 than it did in 1994.

For an example of this type of racial resentment, see our recent post on Rush Limbaugh’s description of “Obama’s America.”

Jean Piaget, a psychologist who published his most influential works from the late 1920s through the 1950s, is most known for his theory of stages of cognitive development. He suggested a four-stage model that children go through as they develop more complex reasoning skills.

Children start out in the sensorimotor stage, which lasts until they’re roughly 2. They have no sense of themselves as individuals, obviously, and wouldn’t recognize their hand as “theirs.” They aren’t afraid of heights or touching something hot because they can’t grasp the idea of falling or something being hot–those ideas are too abstract.

Here’s a video that illustrates some of the limits of reasoning at this age:

In the preoperational stage (Piaget said it lasted from around age 2 until about 7), kids start being able to grasp symbols. For instance, they can draw a series of squares with a triangle on top to represent a house. They also start to learn the alphabet, which is, of course, the set of symbols we use to read and write.

On the other hand, they don’t understand abstract concepts like amounts, speed, or weight. In one of Piaget’s most famous experiments, he showed that children at this stage can’t comprehend that if you pour liquid from a short, wide glass into a tall, narrow glass, it’s still the same amount:

By the concrete operational stage (roughly 7-12 years old) kids comprehend ideas like weight, amount, and speed, and can understand that the amount of liquid in the two glasses is the same:

They can also understand causal relationships, though not necessarily explain the reasoning behind them. Here, the younger kid says what would happen if you hit a glass with a feather based on what he knows about feathers, whereas the older child reasons from the previous statement and answers according to the logic proposed (despite it being obviously inaccurate):

Finally, Piaget said that in the formal operational stage (after about age 12) kids can understand abstract concepts and reason logically. If you ask them what “justice” means, they can explain it. The girl in the last video, who reasoned from the previous statement (which had been presented as true), illustrates formal operational thinking.

Of course, there are questions about Piaget’s model (described in Kimmel and Aronson, 2009, Sociology Now). Do we really only go through each stage once? Might we have to go through some of them again when we hit new life challenges or milestones? Do we have to completely master one stage before we can progress, or is it possible to have some overlap? Are these stages universal? Would we expect childhood mental development to occur in the same way in a society where people are middle-aged by 20 as they would in one where they aren’t middle aged until 35 or 40? Might the fact that kids in some societies are given more “adult” tasks at a young age affect their mental development?

Of course, another issue comes up about the formal operational stage…Kohlberg and Gilligan (1971, “The Adolescent as Philosopher,” Daedalus, p. 1051-1086) estimated that about 30% of people in the U.S. never actually develop advanced abstract reasoning skills. I will make no further comment on that.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this but, after clicking through this Time magazine slide show of Bruno hype by Sacha Baron Cohen, I noticed that there appears to be a rule regarding his entourage: all its members must differ from him in one consistent way and, in that same way, they must all be alike.  This translates, in these images, into his entourage always being (a) women or (b) men of color, but never both:

Any thoughts? Is there some social psychologist out there with some speculation? Readers, what do you think?

P.S. – To the person who commented in the thread of our last Bruno-related post about never wanting to see his face again: I say, “Sorry.”

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

The contact hypothesis postulates that being near people of a different social group (e.g., race, class, sexual orientation, etc) translates into greater tolerance for that type of person. In other words, it’s harder to hate all Latinos (for example) when your neighbor is Latino and, damn it, you kind of like him.  Andrew Sullivan posted this figure:

Jose at Thick Culture suggests that this could be evidence for the contact hypothesis.  But he also asks whether it might also be true that less homophobic people are more likely to come into contact with gays and lesbians because of a third variable that correlates with both (like choosing to live in a big city), making the relationship spurious.

(What’s a spurious relationship?  Here’s one:  People who eat ice cream are more likely to drown.  Both incidence of ice cream eating and rates of drowning are related to summertime.  The relationship between ice cream and drowning is spurious.  That is, there is no relationship.  Yet they appear related because they are both related to a third variable.)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.