The Sunday Assembly, an organization dubbed by the media as the first “atheist church,” more than doubled its number of “congregations” over one weekend. This group almost replicates the church model in that they meet on Sundays, they sing songs and listen to speakers, they bring snacks and coffee, and they focus their “assemblies” on building community and living a good life—they just simply do all of this with no reference to a deity or the supernatural. At first glance this seems paradoxical. Why do nonbelievers want to create something so much like the church that believers frequent? Sociologists point to one major reason – community.

The drive to come together and share space and ideas with others is a fundamental way humans build identity and community. As far back as Emile Durkheim, sociologists have shown how sharing beliefs and rituals both create and sustain identities, communities, and society. Today, sociologists are finding the same thing happening among nonbelievers who are riffing on the structure and rituals of religious institutions in order to build their own community.
Community building has historically centered around religious institutions. As Americans leave churches at an increasingly higher rate, they are left at a loss with how to form communities without the church model. In many ways, the atheist church phenomenon is due to what sociologists call “institutional isomorphism,” which shapes the available models for building community.
The church model is not the only thing that nonbelievers are borrowing either. Groups of nonbelievers have used social movement rhetoric from civil rights groups, especially LGBTQ rights, to build a movement around non-believing identities. This kind of appropriation is common, however, and sociologists argue that all movements do some version of this, looking to past movement successes to build from when creating their own strategies.

The Rockefellers, powerful American industrialists with vast wealth built from the oil industry, are now ditching fossil fuels. According to an announcement from the Rockefeller Brother’s Fund, the organization has pledged to withdraw their investments from fossil fuels and instead invest in clean energy. Corporations and institutions respond to pressure when social norms shift and change, especially when it impacts their public image and the bottom line.

Corporations can be pressured to enact socially responsible behaviors through government policy, nonprofits, civil society groups, social movements, and internal culture and leadership.
Yet, this announcement may also represent a corporate public relations and greenwashing campaign that fails to address the underlying causes of climate change. Either way, the direct impact on energy industries may be less important than the symbolic impact of the gesture.

Every year, the MacArthur Foundation releases a list of fellows recognized for “originality and dedication” in their respective fields. 2014’s list honors social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, whose work on implicit biases showed up on TROT last week. Known informally as the “genius grant,” the MacArthur fellowship offers funds for a wide range of scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs to pursue new directions in their work. But what exactly is a genius? How do we decide who has that special something? Social science suggests we should not only look at geniuses themselves, but also at how socialization and networks among people craft innovation.

Biographical studies show that genius and other talents are not born, but rather cultivated through an extraordinary amount of practice, habit-forming, and parenting.
Institutions and social networks also play a big role. “Genius” level work in the arts and sciences must be recognized by peers and labeled as such.

For the first time since 2006, the Census finds a .5 percentage drop in the poverty rate, with children and Hispanics seeing the biggest declines. Before taking these encouraging statistics at face value, it is important to put them into context. Briefs produced by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Equality and the Center for American Progress outline important factors that often get ignored when focusing on the poverty rate alone, including the consistent struggle for young adults and minorities to find work and the ever-increasing working poor that often get left out of the poverty conversation entirely.

The high poverty rate among young adults is cause for concern. Experiencing poverty in early adulthood has been found to hinder future earnings, especially within minority populations. Young people may stay hungry if our definition of poverty doesn’t grow up with them.
While the poverty rate may have dropped slightly, this is largely due to the increase in the working poor. Millions of families are trapped in the middle, earning just enough to be considered above the poverty line but making far from enough to be considered economically secure. Poverty among working adults is linked to a broader decline in labor unions.
Most of the discussion around the poverty rate centers on what David Cotter calls “person poverty” as opposed to “place poverty.” In his analysis of Census data, Cotter finds that, regardless of any individual characteristic, households in rural America are more likely to experience poverty than their metropolitan counterparts.

Our partner Scholars Strategy Network has tons of great briefs on this issue, including this one on the need for a more comprehensive measure of poverty.

Recent shootings in Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina keep us asking how racial bias affects the use of deadly force by the police. How and why does differential treatment by race continue to persist in law enforcement? Part of the answer has to do with the culture and history of policing (see our pervious post Reflecting on Ferguson). Another part involves what psychologists call “implicit biases.” Implicit biases are the unconscious ways in which people treat others differently. Studies of implicit bias have consistently shown that people tend to prefer white to African-American, young to old, and heterosexual to gay. Many social scientists conclude these implicit biases reflect societal biases, because continuous exposure to these assumptions in media and daily interactions leads to biased cognitive associations like “white-innocent” or “black-criminal.”

Implicit biases are most clearly exposed when people are forced to make quick decisions, like when an officer is deciding to shoot or holster their weapon.
Psychologists study the shoot/don’t shoot scenario with video game simulations that require civilians and police to make decisions about a person removing an object (either a weapon or non-weapon) from their pocket. Generally, police make better decisions than civilians, but a racial bias still persists.
Social scientists have several suggestions on how to reduce biases in law enforcement, including increasing the diversity of police forces and management, removing stereotypic images from the workplace, and requiring training to develop counter-stereotypic cognition.

If you are interested in learning about your own implicit biases you can take the Implicit Association Test (IAT) at Project Implicit.

Image via Annette Burnhardt via Flickr Creative Commons
Image via Annette Burnhardt via Flickr Creative Commons

Flipping burgers at McDonald’s is the iconic dead-end job of the U.S. service economy with low-wages, few benefits and certainly no labor unions. But now a national movement of fast-food and other low-paid workers is growing and organizing to improve working conditions. In the past two years there have been seven national fast-food strikes, which reflect a broader resurgence in the U.S. labor movement and new forms of social mobilization from Occupy Wall Street to the Walmart Black Friday strikes. These recent protests have mobilized often marginalized communities in ways that question the service economy model based on cheap non-unionized labor.

Service work, and fast-food in particular, is a growing sector of employment that is indicative of larger trends in the U.S. economy towards contingent, temporary employment and low wages. Violations of workplace laws like mandatory overtime and minimum wage are part of corporate cost-cutting and common in low-wage industries, and unionization could help give workers power to resist these practices.
This revitalized labor movement is also mobilizing women, people of color and immigrants who were largely left out of the traditional craft and industrial unions.
Broader decline of unionization and decrease in the minimum wage has contributed to rising income inequality, and so attempts to organize low-wage workers could help all U.S. workers and reduce this inequality. Union membership provides a wage boost for workers, especially women, people of color and those with less education.

For more on the inclusive power of unions, check out this Girl w/Pen! post.

Fears of a “terror pipeline” running from Western countries to ISIL and other militant groups are on the rise. The New York Times reports that at least a dozen men have left Minnesota to join radical Islamist groups. Community leaders and FBI officials suggest that cultural isolation, social discontent, and economic challenges drive recent immigrants abroad to fight, and expert accounts in the media argue solving these local problems is the best means of curbing the trend.

Social science has two things to say about this: first,  sincere religious belief, political ideology, and rationalistic behavior may play a stronger role than the media recognize. Second, Western media and governments may have an interest in portraying the motivations for militancy in particular ways.

Ethnographic research shows that the incentive structures of fundamentalist Islam make militancy an appealing choice. Young men who spend hundreds of hours per year in prayer groups and become leaders in their local mosque communities come to view radicalism as the only sure path to Heaven. They don’t join militant organizations because they are confused, isolated, or have no other choices, but because they sincerely believe that doing so is the right path.
This type of radical religious behavior becomes more appealing in times of political uncertainty. Given the instability of Iraq’s fledgling democracy following the U.S. occupation, conservative Muslims may see ISIL’s rise as an opportunity to reclaim the region after a more secular approach to governing failed.
Western media organizations have strong incentives to blame militancy on local social and cultural problems. In times of moral or cultural panic, audiences look to pundits to see who to blame. “Disaffected Muslim youth” may be one such constructed class.
And, once blame has been placed, media accounts perpetuate that particular frame of the situation through a “fringe effect” where angry arguments from the margins become mainstream.

For more on why people may flee micro-agressions at home, check out this Reading List.

This week Scotland goes to the polls for a fundamental decision: should it declare independence from the United Kingdom? Discover Society has an excellent summary of the issue, and everyone from The Economist, to Jacobin (on both sides), to The Simpsons’ Groundskeeper Willie has weighed in on the debate. The “Yes” side argues for “embedded independence”—separate nationhood but with strong financial and regulatory ties to the rest of the UK—claiming an independent Scotland can provide better social services to the people. The “No” side thinks the status quo with the UK and the rest of Europe is a good deal, but is willing to compromise with the devolution of some welfare and tax policies back to national control. With a black and white vote, though, social scientists often have to look at the bigger forces behind nuanced policy issues. 

While the meat of the debate is about public policy, accusations of “nationalism” fly in the background. Sociologists can be critical of nationalism; Puri’s work shows how it shapes the desires of society in both progressive and troubling ways. However, authors like Calhoun remind us that national identity also helps create a necessary sense of belonging and social solidarity. Either way, national sentiment is neither unimportant nor just irrationally passionate.
Scottish public opinion on the yes/no referendum has converged over time and is now closer than ever. With much of the debate centered around social welfare policies, it is important to understand that Great Britain is a strange case; it is much more like the U.S. in terms of market-based social policy, but its public opinion shows a wide range of support for government intervention. This contradiction shows the debate about what the Scottish nation should be is rooted in disagreement about what a nation should do.

In the latest push against an FCC proposal that would create fee-based “fast lanes” on the Internet, a coalition of tech companies purposely slowed download speeds on their websites. The idea – to demonstrate to users how the new rules might slow traffic on non-paying sites – generated quite a stir: as of September 10th, the FCC received a record-breaking 1.4 million public comments on the proposal.

The coalition of protesting firms includes a roster of sites that rely heavily on user uploads: Mozilla, Etsy, PornHub, Kickstarter, Vimeo, and Reddit all voluntarily slowed traffic. Netflix also joined, displaying a message explaining to users “If there were Internet slow lanes, you’d still be waiting.” Tech giants Google and Twitter added their opposition as well. Protest organizers are asking the FCC to reclassify the Internet as a “Common Carrier” under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, thereby granting the government special regulatory powers designed to protect the web as a kind of public commons.

For most of us, the idea of a “commons” calls to mind a kind of protected natural resource, like the public lands that ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote about in his classic article, “Tragedy of the Commons.” The protesters, though, are asking the FCC to create a “commons” from a service that was built in-part by Internet service providers who now want to charge for speed. So, where might the government stake its claim on a proprietary public service? David Harvey and other social scientists have shown how and why capitalist societies engage in this kind of “commoning.”
The incredible outpouring of individual action in this protest owes a great deal to the organizing efforts of a number of large corporations, each with its own ideological and financial interests in the final ruling. What do you call a campaign that uses grassroots tactics, but takes cues from big business? “Astroturfing”, says Sociologist Edward Walker – and it’s more common than you might think.

With more video evidence released of Ray Rice assaulting his fiancée (now wife), Janay Palmer, in a New Jersey Casino elevator, the media has been buzzing over Rice’s release from the Baltimore Ravens and indefinite suspension from participation in the NFL. Rice was originally suspended for two games, but the public felt this punishment didn’t fit the crime, especially since other players had been suspended entire seasons for smoking marijuana. After the backlash over the disproportionate sentencing handed out by league President Roger Goodell and the NFL, the league altered its policies towards domestic assault conduct. From Michael Vick’s dogfighting scandal to the relatively recent Aaron Hernandez debacle, the NFL has been under heavy scrutiny over the conduct of its players. How do these big organizations handle such scandals?

Comparisons of arrest rates in the NFL and the general population show that players often have lower rates that the national average for all offenses, including domestic violence. The “NFL criminality myth” is perpetuated when sport is interpreted through a “white lens,” and parallels that of general stereotypes about blacks as crime prone.
Within the NFL, arrests for domestic violence are higher than any other crime, unlike the general population where arrests are higher for other offenses. Few players are successfully prosecuted in the courts for domestic assault, though, and they rarely face sanctions on their eligibility to play.
There is widespread agreement among the general population about which crimes are severe, and what constitutes a just punishment for those crimes (although demographics and victim/offender characteristics modify these effects slightly).  The original punishment handed down to Ray Rice did not fit into our collective conceptions of morality and justice, and public outrage is one symptom of that mismatch.
Sociologists know that when an organization’s reputation and integrity is threatened, they often attempt to fix things by distancing themselves from the problem or the perpetrator (disassociation), and/or implementing policies that attempt corrective action. Sometimes these actions are just symbolic gestures, but sometimes they also show real institutional change. In this case the NFL seems to be following the script!