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INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY

EVE BLOBAUM

LECTURE NOTES

INTRODUCING SOCIOLOGY

I) The Power of Situations

A) How was your behavior affected by the situation, by your role in the situation, byother peoples roles?

B) Have you ever run into someone outside of the situation in which you normally

see them? Did you recognize them as easily, if at all? If not, why not?

C) Do you act differently in different situations? Do you act differently in the same

situation but when you have different role (for example, if you were an instructor

instead of a student)?

D) Why do some students always sit in the back of the classroom while others alwayssit in front?

E) Why do people generally not look at others on an elevator, and always face thefront?

F) Why do we work so hard at pretending we arent embarrassed when we have to

get naked in front of a doctor?

G) Why do people from small towns tend to act differently than people from bigcities?

H) Why do we dress male babies in blue and female babies in pink?

I) Why do people tend to group themselves by race? (on campus, in neighborhoods)

II) What difference does background/experience make?

A) Your family, your religion, your education?

B) What about the media?

How many have heard of the Taliban? The Mutaween? School fire on March

11, 2002 at the girls intermediate school in Mecca. Fourteen girls died.

III) Sociology is more than just common sense

A) Based on empirical observations and evidence. NOT anecdotal.

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i) I know someone who works at the free dental clinic and she said

ii) My Aunt Emma Syndrome

B) Sometimes common sense leads us astray.

i) Examples on p. 7 of your textbook.

ii) Psych example.

(a) If I asked the whole class to spend four hours doing a mundane task

(sorting bolts), and I paid half of you for your time but not the other half,

which half of the group would you expect to be more likely to say that

they enjoyed this activity?(b) Do the results accurate reflect our expectations?

C) Capital punishment example.

i) Philosophy of punishment.

ii) Homicide data.

iii) Is this the only interpretation of that data? What else could it mean?

IV)The goal(s) of social science:

A) to make accurate predictions about behavior

B) to inform social policy

V) Sociological imagination

A) Recognizing and understanding the relationship between individual experiencesand public issues.

B) How do we explain unemployment?

i) Individual factors

ii) Social factors (post-industrial economy; a technician in a TV factory)