Sociology Unit 4 Norms, Deviance & Sanctions

Unit 4: Norms, Deviance, & Sanctions Key Terms: ● norms - collective representations of acceptable group conduct as well as individual perceptions of particular group conduct. ● laws - the whole of legal norms in society as well as the practices and institutions that are associated with those norms. ● Deviance - the fact or state of departing from usual or accepted standards, especially in social or sexual behavior. ● sanctions - mechanisms of social control. ● street crime - any criminal offense in a public place. ● white-collar crime - a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation. ● incarceration - the state of being confined in prison; imprisonment. ● Jail - a place for the confinement of people accused or convicted of a crime. ● Prison - a building in which people are legally held as a punishment for a crime they have committed or while awaiting trial. ● deterrent - a thing that discourages or is intended to discourage someone from doing something. ● restitution - a payment made by the perpetrator of a crime to the victims of that crime. Judges often order restitution be paid in cases where victims suffered some kind of financial setback as the result of a crime. ● symbolic interactionist perspective - viewing society as composed of symbols that people use to establish meaning, develop views about the world, and communicate with one another. o differential association theory - a theory that holds the proposition that through interaction with others, individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques, and motives for criminal behavior. o control theory - deals with the control of continuously operating dynamical systems in engineered processes and machines. o labeling theory - posits that self-identity and the behavior of individuals may be determined or influenced by the terms used to describe or classify them. ● functionalist perspective - sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. ● structural-strain theory - theory states that social structures may pressure citizens to commit crimes. ● conflict theory - perspectives in sociology and social psychology that emphasize a materialist interpretation of history, dialectical method of analysis, a critical stance toward existing social arrangements, and political program of revolution or, at least, reform. Deviance ● Deviance simply means being non-normative or different. While this term does include some things that we might think of as bad or harmful like crime, it also includes things we might just think of as outside the mainstream. ● For example, if eating a burger on the 4th of July is considered ‘normal’ then being vegan and eating tofu is deviant. o Being vegan in a society where most people eat meat is deviant, because deviance is not just reliant on numbers. Deviance is anything that deviates from what people generally accept as normal. o Dying your hair rainbow is deviant and will get you strange looks from strangers. The strange looks are a form of social control which is an attempt by society to regulate people's thoughts and behaviors in ways that limit, or punish, deviance. ● Strange looks are what are known as negative sanctions, negative social reactions to deviance. ● The opposite, are positive sanctions – affirmative reactions, usually in response to conformity. ● Formal sanctioning of deviance occurs when norms are codified into law, and violation almost always results in negative sanctions from the criminal justice system – the police, the courts, and the prison system. ● The idea that deviance is essentially a matter of impulse control is called containment theory, or having a personality that contains deviant actions. ○ This theory has received support in recent research, including a 2011 study on 500 male fraternal twins that assessed their self-control, resilience, and ability to delay gratification. Researchers found that the brother that scored lower on these measures in childhood was more likely to be criminally deviant in adulthood. ● Deviance varies based on cultural norms. Nothing is inherently deviant and norms vary from culture to culture. Slavery is an example of this. In the early 1800s, slavery was considered so normal in America that rejecting it was considered deviant. ● Conflict theory posits that norms and laws reflect the interests of the powerful. So the powerful can defend their power by labeling as deviant anything that threatens that power. ● For instance, in capitalist societies, deviant labels are often applied to those who interfere with the way capitalism functions and since capitalism is based on the private control of wealth, stealing is clearly labeled as deviant. The Foundations of Society ● Culture is the way that non-material objects – like thoughts, action, language, and values – come together with material objects to form a way of life. ● Culture can be broken down into two components: things and ideas. Material culture is the culture of things. ○ Visible things like books, buildings, food, and clothing. ○ Nonmaterial culture is the culture of what we have grown to know over time, or the culture of ideas. This can include assigning red as a symbol for stop and green as a symbol to represent go. ■ Nonmaterial culture is made up of the intangible creations of human society – values, symbols, customs, ideals. ● Language allows us to share the things that make up our culture, a process known as cultural transmission. ○ One view of language is that it not only lets us communicate with each other, but that it also affects how people within a culture see the world around them. ○ The theory, known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, argues that a person’s thoughts and actions are influenced by the cultural lens created by the language they speak. ● Western countries like the United States tend to value individualism and stress the importance of each person’s own needs, whereas Eastern countries like China tend to value collectivism and stress the importance of groups over individuals. ○ These different values are part of why you’re more likely to see young adults in the US living separately from their parents and more likely to see multigenerational households in China. Norms are the rules and expectations that guide behavior within a society. A few social norms include: ● Giving your seat up for an elderly person ● Shaking hands when you meet someone. ● Making direct eye contact with the person you are speaking with. A norm simply relates to what we think is “normal”, whether something is either culturally accepted, or not. There are three types of norms: taboos, mores, and folkways. Social Development ● Have you ever met a friend's parents and realized that they were exactly like their mom or dad? ● Some argue that the two may be alike because they are genetically related. Others may say that it's because that friend grew up around their mom/dad. This brings up the topic of nature vs. nurture, a commonly debated topic in sociology. ○ Nature is the part of human behavior that’s biologically determined and instinctive. ○ The nurture part of behavior is based on the people and environment you’re raised in. ● There are lots of different theories about how we develop personalities, cognitive skills, and moral behavior, many of which come from psychologists. ○ Famous Psychologist Sigmund Freud, thought we were born with something called an id. The id is just the most basic needs like a desire for food, comfort, or attention. He believed that as we grow, we develop the ego and superego to balance the id. Ego is the voice of reason, your conscious efforts to rein in the pleasure-seeking id and your superego is made up of the cultural values and norms that you internalize and use to guide your decisions. ● Herbert Mead, who was one of the founders of the sociological paradigm, heavily focused some of his work on how we develop a “self”. He believed that we figure out who we are through other people. All social interactions require you to see yourself as someone else might see you – something Mead described as “taking on the role of others.” ● Every life stage from when you’re born to when you die features different expectations that inform what is known as as markers of social development. Moving out, getting married, having kids – they’re all societal markers of social development as an adult. Social Interaction ● Social interaction is simply the process by which people act and react in relation to others. ● Any place you find social interaction, you're going to find social structure. Social structure consists of the relationships among people and groups. ○ This structure gives direction to, and sets limits on our behavior. ● Ascribed statuses are those in which a person has no choice; they're either assigned at birth or assigned involuntarily later in life. ● An achieved status is earned, accomplished, or obtained with at least some effort on the person’s part. A master status is the status others are most likely to use to identify you. This can be achieved, like “professor,” or ascribed, like “cancer patient.” ● If status is a social position, then roles are the sets of behaviors, obligations, and privileges that go with that status. ● By interacting with the people around you, and expecting certain behaviors in the context of roles, you actually create the social reality that shapes those interactions that you’re having. ● This shows that your social reality is not just about you. It's about everyone you're interacting with, and their expectations, too. It's about maintaining a performance. ● The idea of social reality being a performance is central to a sociological understanding of how people interact. It’s what’s known as the dramaturgical analysis of social interaction. ○ This approach, by Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman, understands social interaction as if it were a play performed on stage for an audience. Goffman believed that people perform roles for each other, and the point of social interaction is always to maintain a successful interaction that’s in line with expectations. Social Groups ● A social group is simply a collection of people who have something in common and who believe that what they have in common is significant. ● A group is partly defined by the fact that its members feel like they're part of a group. ● Group dynamics are the way that individuals affect groups, and groups affect individuals. ○ A leader is just someone who influences other people in the group. There are generally two types of leadership: ○ An instrumental leader that is focused on a group's goals, giving orders and making plans in order to achieve those goals. ○ An expressive leader, by contrast, is looking to increase harmony and minimize conflict within the group. ○ Group conformity is where members of a group hew to the group’s norms and standards. Groupthink is the narrowing of thought in a group, by which its members come to believe that there is only one possible correct answer. Groups are very important to how society itself is organized!