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Hi, thanks for joining me for a discussion on social structure.
Okay, so if we were together, I would ask you if you've ever read the book Outliers, which is an interesting book. So, in the book, Gladwell points out that he discovered that
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early year birthday folks appear on pro hockey rosters. Hockey rosters have more folks who have birthdays that are in the first part of the year: January, February, March, for example. And he sets out to figure out why, and what he discovers is it really has to do with how we organized youth hockey leagues, or youth sports leagues in general. We tend to lump all the kids born in one calendar year together, right?
But what happens is: the kids born in January, for example, are roughly about 10%--on average 10%--more developed than kids born in later months of the year. And this doesn't sound like a big deal, but it becomes what we call an accumulation of advantage. You'll want to know that later: an accumulation of advantage. It works like this:
I start out a little bigger, a little more coordinated
, a little more cognitive development, etc. And what starts out as a little turns into a large advantage over time because what happens on these leagues is the kids who are better, faster, etc tend to get more playing time. So, by the end of the year, what started as a small advantage accumulates to a larger advantage, and then that advantage just keeps getting larger over time each year.
Now, okay, big deal. That's hockey, right? Who really cares? Well, that same kind of accumulation of advantage happens in other settings as well.
For example, a study that looked at public school students born between 1994 and 2000 found that August-born children, who weren't held back from starting school another year, statistically perform more poorly than their classmates. In other words, being one of the younger kids in your class statistically means you're probably going to perform more poorly than your other classmates. Now a lot of you are like, "I'm one of the younger born people my class and that wasn't the situation." I hear you. I'm a November baby. I don't know why but I didn't go to kindergarten. We must not have had to go. I don't know why I didn't go maybe because I could read before I started school. I'm not really sure. But
yeah, I'm a November baby, and I was much younger than everybody all the way through school. It was always like that. And I have a PhD, and I did very well in school. But again sociology's about the averages and the patterns, right? There's always going to be outliers in the data. But we're talking about on average, this is what they found.
Okay, the same study found that September-born students, so this was in Florida schools that have a September 1st cutoff. September-born students were 2% more likely to attend college than classmates with August birthdays.
And 3% more likely to graduate. So, in other words, it
is a September cutoff, so the kids born in September... they've been held back an entire year because the cutoff was September 1st. Does that makes sense?. So,
the August birthday kids are the youngest of the group, and those September kids are actually older because of this September 1 cutoff. So, they held a year and started the following year. Okay. So, those kids were 2% more likely to attend college, and a little more than 3% more likely to graduate, and 15% less likely to find themselves in delinquent situations with the criminal justice system under the age of 18. S,o what this tells us is:
how we group students matters. And this is something that we would call structure. What do we mean by strucutre?
Okay, so structure. We talked a little bit about it in a previous lecture. Structure is like the things in your life that give it organization. So family, education, government, media. These are things called "structure." They're like external forces that sort of create how our lives work.
So,
those sports leagues, that's a structure. And they have certain rules that work a certain way, right? And those rules may advantage or disadvantage you. So, our life is really determined to an extent by the structural elements in our society.
A big argument in sociology is: how much of our lives is determined by external structure, and how much of it is determined by agency. This is loosely-defined as our free will. If we were together I'd say, "Think about your decision to go to college,"
and I'd have you put your hand up for how many of you went here because this was the closest school to home, or because it was the cheapest school for you to go to, and a bunch of you'd raise your hands. And I'd say, "okay, structure caused you to come here." And then we'd go through some of the other reasons folks came. Scholarships, that's structure.
It was one of the closest schools that took people with your GPA and your test scores, etc.: that's structure. Basically we'd go through everybody's reason for coming here and most of it is going to be structure. So, what we look at as just a decision that we make is actually often structure, and then I'd offer my own example.
I lived in Kentucky when I was in high school, and I went to undergrad at University of Tampa in Florida.
It was not the closest school. It was certainly not the cheapest school.
My mother was really unhappy about it. How did I end up there? Well, I had a subscription to a magazine called Psychology Today when I was in high school, which I realize is very strange and very nerdy. And in one particular issue, University of Tampa had a little quarter page ad that just ran down kind of the side of a page. And I thought the pictures of the campus were the most beautiful campus I'd ever seen in my entire life. And they talked about some of the majors they had, and they seemed so exotic to me. And this is pre-internet, okay? So, give me a little break, but they had majors like marine biology. I have no interest in marine biology, but I thought it was super cool to think about going to a place that had things like marine biology as a major.
I got really enchanted with the place, and I applied, and I did get a scholarship. That's absolutely true. But the school was so much more expensive than anywhere else. I could have gone to a state school more cheaply. UT was private and it was out of state. So, it still wasn't maybe necessarily the most logical decision. My mom was still really, really unhappy about it. Anyway that being the story, we would have a discussion about: was that structure or was that agency? And I heard arguments on both sides. Some folks have said, "Well, that's just 100% agency. That's where you wanted to go and you went." And then other people have said, "well, if you hadn't seen the ad in
the magazine, you wouldn't have went and that's media, so, that's structure." So, sometimes it's difficult to kind of tease out if something is agency or is it structure.
Now, it's important to realize structure is neither good or bad. It's just something we have to recognize that has prominence in our lives. It can create constraints for us based on our opportunities, our statuses, age, class, occupation, race, gender, etc. But a lot of sociology's involved in trying to understand the structural causes of individual behavior. It is an ongoing discussion in the field.
Don't copy this down. You will never see this again. This is just for the purposes of discussion. Okay. So, we think about structure, these social institutions, and our statuses and our social groups create kind of a framework for our lives, which is a structure. So those are some examples of social institutions, statuses, and social groups, and all of these things provide structure in our lives. Social structures.
The underlying structure is not really visible. And structures give our social life a regularity that it might not have otherwise. So, the importance of structure is most apparent in the circumstances where there is no structure. The structure really refers to the enduring, orderly, and patterned relationships between the elements of society. Structure creates boundaries that define which people or groups are the insiders, and which are the outsiders.
And there's a situation called social marginality, which is the state of being part insider and part outsider in a social structure. If we were together, we would talk about some examples of that. So if a
class that is typically for freshmen and you're a senior in the class, you are both insider and outsider. A situation where you are part of the group, but you are the only person of color in the group, for example. You may feel insider and outsider. I come from a kind of working-class background, you know, my dad though wildly intelligent, widely known as the most intelligent person folks knew, didn't graduate high school. He dropped out of high school at fifteen to take care of his family. His dad had black lung. My dad was a bricklayer. My mom was educated. She was a teacher.
But you know, there's there wasn't money growing up. I went to bed hungry and and things like that. My dad is from like real serious poverty. Dirt floors and no toilets and stuff like that. And so there's a lot of us in academia who call ourselves first-gen students, or blue collar scholars, or something like that. And that would be a situation of being part insider and part outsider. We're insiders, we're part of the academy, but we also sometimes feel like outsiders because we don't necessarily have the background of a lot of other academics. There's lots of situations where you may experience being both insider and outsider.
Universities have structure. Again, you don't need to copy this down. You're not going to see it again. It's just to discuss it. So, at a college or university, for example, you have the president, the provost, the dean, the faculty. Notice there at the bottom, you've got the janitors, who play a super important role, right? I mean imagine if we didn't have them on campus how quickly everything would pile up and just be untenable. But there's still this social hierarchy that doesn't seem to really have any bearing on the importance of the work that you're doing. Look where the students are and they pay tuition.
Don't copy this down either, you won't see this again either. The purpose of this is just to show that even from primitive days foreward,
we've always had structure but the structure may look different from society to society.
Now a Functionalist would tell you
that social institutions exist because they perform five tasks and those tasks are: replacing members, teaching new members, producing, distributing and consuming goods and services, preserving order and providing and maintaining a sense of purpose. You will want to know those later. So, you may want to run that slide back and listen to that again.
Conflict theorists would tell you that social institutions are organized to meet basic social needs, but they don't believe that social institutions actually work for the common good of everyone. They would tell you major institutions help maintain privileges of the most powerful folks and groups within society. And that social institutions have inherently conservative natures, and that they operate in gendered and racist environments. You'll want to know that later. You may want to run this slide back, too.
The Symbolic Interactionist would tell you that social institutions impact everyday behavior. And that our behavior is conditioned by our roles and our statuses. So, you remember that criticism that symbolic interactionist doesn't take into account social structure? I would argue that's really not the case at all.
Okay, so, these are some pictures of Detroit.
Detroit was once the fourth largest city in the country, and is now so depopulated that some stretches actually resemble the outlying farmland, and others are altogether wild. In effect, just about a third of Detroit, which is about 40 square miles has evolved past decrepitude into vacancy and prairie. It's an urban void nearly the size of San Francisco. The city used to be synonymous with the auto industry, but now a fifth of the households have no cars. And even 300 bodies a year are exumed from the cemetery and moved because some of the people who were once Detroiters or the children of Detroiters don't think the city is good enough for their dead. Now, it is not easy to have a body exhumed. So to have a body exhumed and moved, you must feel very passionate about it and have made a very impassioned plea to folks in charge. So, what we're looking at here is what happens when you have absence of structure because what happened in Detroit?
Well, you had the collapse of the auto industry, at least the collapse here in the United States. They still make autos. They just moved most of that oversees, right? And then you had their elected officials, who ended up embezzling, which is a fancy word for stealing. They embezzled money from the city. So, between not having enough taxpayers to carry the tax burden to provide services, and folks stealing the money that was there... And so what you're looking at here in these pictures: this is the absence of structure.
Now,
this is an upsetting slide. If we were together I would say "what are we looking at here?" And you would tell me you're looking at the Holocaust, and we would talk about the fact that these camps were out on farmland or whatever, but there were cities, neighboring cities, and the stench of the bodies could be smelled, and when they came and liberated the camps, they asked folks, "what did you think was going on over there?" And they said, "Oh I didn't know." And when they taked to the guards who worked there and they said, "Why did you do all this stuff?" what did the guards say, do you remember? They said, "I was just doing my job," and people were horrified by that. What do you mean, you were just doing your job? How could you do these things? And this event created a lot of questions for folks. Were all of the folks participating in all this evil or was there something else at play? What caused this to happen, what allowed this
to happen?`
Now you are probably familiar with the Milgram experiment, and I believe it was in the reading in your book.
So, Milgram, he ran this experiment in part in response to what happened in Holocaust. He kind of wanted to know, will people do things that they wouldn't have done ordinarily because they feel like they're doing their job, and they'ret listening to experts, etc. Now again, this is another one of these situations where people say, "Well this was all so long ago and no one would act this way now." Well, they actually replicated this study a couple years ago, and they actually got the same results. And in that study, they included women and they found that actually a higher percentage of women went all the way to the top voltage than the men did. If you're not familiar with the study, you don't remember it from your reading, I just want to remind you
that he had participants watch somebody get hooked up to an electric shock thing and the person hooked up said, "Oh I have this heart problem." And then he had them ask them questions. Every question they got wrong they gave a successively higher amount of shock, and they listened to a recording of somebody saying "ow! My heart is bothering me" and all this kind of stuff. And I want to say it was like 65, 70% of folks went all the way to the amount of voltage that will cause someone to die.
Now, you can never get away with a study like this today. And I know you're like, "lady, you just told me that they ran this a few years ago." They did. They had to make some adjustments because of IRB.
Honestly, I was still kind of surprised that even with the adjustments that they got permission to run the study again because it seems like it could be very damaging for folks to realize that they're capable of doing this.
The study found that the reasons that folks obeyed had to do with both culture and perceived expertise. So, specifically our culture socializes us to obey certain authority figures, like police officers, teachers, parents. Now, the perceived expertise of the experimenter, the person in charge, contributes to the participants' decision to follow the instructions. Milgram said that if in the study an anonymous experimenter could successfully command adults to subdue a 51-year-old man and force on him painful electric shocks against his protest, one can only wonder what the government with its vastly greater authority and prestige can command from its subjects.
His conclusion was this: a substantial proportion of folks do what they are told irrespective of the content of the act, and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive
that the command comes from a legitimate authority. Now again, you're thinking this was a long time ago. Well, I'd like share a news piece with you: So, about five years ago, a woman was managing McDonald's, and she got a call from a police officer, who told her that one of her employees was wanted for questioning for some crime. And he asked that she bring the employee in there to the office. And she brought the employee in and she spent the next several hours torturing the employee. And when she had to go to the bank to make a deposit, she brought the assistant manager in, who was a man, and he continued. They even had the teenage girl stripped down... do calisthenics, all kinds of different things. This went on for hours.
Spoiler: she was never talking to the police. She was talking to a man who just called up and took a roll of the dice. Never even gave her a name of anybody, just said "You have an employee working for you who is about this number of years old, long brown hair, girl" and she did.
Again, this was an otherwise a reasonable adult. And you're thinking, "I would never do that."
I hope that you wouldn't. I hope that I wouldn't either, but the data certainly tells us that if we think that a command is coming from a legitimate authority, we apparently can do things that we would never do otherwise. And if you're curious, both the manager and assistant manager did lose their jobs, and they were arrested and charged. I think they actually did a little time in jail.
Another experiment, which I believe is mentioned in your book. And if not, you probably heard of it, is called the Zimbardo Prison Experiment. Zimbardo tried to show that environmental situational factors cause negative behavior and thought patterns founds in prisons, not the personality of actors. And he did this by conducting a prison simulation with quote "normal,"--quote because there is no normal. Normal is a setting on a dryer--playing the roles of guard and prisoner.
He placed an ad in papers around the country. 75 folks volunteered, 24 were selected. They had to undergo tests to be judged emotionally stable and physically healthy. They had no history of psychiatric problems. Never had any trouble with the police. They were all White, middle-class students from across the United States, who didn't know each other, who were randomly allocated to the role of prisoner or guard. So, everybody in that study knew that by the
roll of the dice they could have been a prisoner or guard. They signed a consent form, which specified that their human rights will be suspended, and they were paid $15 a day for up to two weeks because he planned to run the experiment for 2 weeks.
He took the basement corridor in the Stanford University social psychology department in the basement, and made it into a set of prison cells ,and a solitary confinement room, a yard, an observations screen, where he video- and audiotaped what was happening.
Without warning, folks who were designated as prisoners were arrested by the local police outside their houses, by surprise. They were charged with a felony, read their rights, searched, handcuffed, and taken to a real police station for fingerprinting and processing. I would have been out right then. "You're not fingerprinting me." They were then blindfolded and taken to the prison basement. When they arrived, they were stripped naked, and given a loose-fitting smock. No underwear. The ID number was printed on the front and back, and they had a chain bolted around one ankle, had a nylon stocking to cover their hair, and they were referred to only by their number, and allocated to a cell. 3 to a cell. The prisoners stayed in prison 24 hours a day with a schedule, work assignments, rest periods, and mail and toilet visits.
Those allocated to guard wore military style khaki uniforms and silver reflector sunglasses. so that you couldn't make eye contact with them. They carried clubs, whistles, handcuffs, keys to cells. There were some guards... somebody was on guard twenty-four hours a day, but all the guards worked 8-hour shifts. They had complete control over the prisoners, but they weren't given any specific instructions, except to maintain a reasonable degree of order.
Some of the guards had such a good time that they worked more than their 8-hour shift. Some of them ended up staying 24 hours a day, which in and of itself is problematic.
Remember he wanted to run this two weeks. Well, there was a little initial rebellion by the prisoners and that was crushed. And after that was crushed, they started to act very passively as the guards stepped up their aggression. They began to feel hopeless and not in control of their lives. Every guard at some point or another behaved in an abusive authoritarian way. Most seemed to really enjoy the new power and control they had. They woke prisoners in the middle of the night, got them to clean toilets with their bare hands. They redefined all the prisoners rights as privileges. So like, going to the toilet, eating, wearing your eyeglasses... all that became rewards. They were punished with little or no justification, verbally insulted. Like I said, the guards had such a good time they did extra hours with no pay. All the participants seemed to forget that they were just acting. Even when they didn't think anyone was watching them they still played their roles.
After just 36 hours, one prisoner had to be released because of uncontrolled crying, fits of rage, disorganized thinking, severe depression.
Clinically, what's called a nervous breakdown.
Three others develop the same symptoms and were released on successive days. So, after 36 hours, they released the first prisoner. The next day another one, the next day another one, the next day another one. Another prisoner got a rash over his entire body. Prisoners became demoralized, apathetic, started to refer to themselves and each other by their numbers. Zimbardo wanted to run the experiment for 2 weeks, but he had to end it after 6 days. Sometimes you'll read he ended it because of the prisoners' reactions, but that's not actually what happened.
His girlfriend came and visited his experiment ,and he was so pleased--by the way, his girlfriend was a graduate students and he was a professor. So anyway, his girlfriend came and visited the experiment that he was so proud of, and she was horrified at what she saw, and she ran out, and he ran after her, and he was really angry, like, "you're supposed to be a serious psychology researcher just like I am. Can't you see what I'm doing here?" and she basically said, "I don't even know who you are anymore." So, he actually ended the experiment at the threat of losing his girlfriend. It really didn't have anything to do with what he was seeing.
The full debriefing and assessment of participants took place weeks, months, and years after the experiment ended.
The findings of the experiment were that it was in fact situational factors, s
tructure, not personality factors, that were more important in shaping folks' behavior.
His findings basically tell us that all of us are capable of acting out of character when we are placed in certain situations.
I will put this link in the folder so that you can watch this. We would have watched it together in class. There are some questions on your exam from this brief documentary.
And then if you will get with the folks that you work with, that you've been grouped with in your shell, and complete this activity for me and turn it in. Again, one page for both partners.