Lack of Judgment (Addendum)
June 17th, 2008I didn’t back up my assertion of decreasing adolescent sexual activity last night with much evidence, but Gene Expression‘s investigation is worth the read.
Lack of Judgment, All Right…
June 16th, 2008
CNN:
Passing notes in study hall or getting your best friend to ask a boy if he likes you or, you know, LIKES you, is so last century. Nowadays, teenagers are snapping naked pictures of themselves on their cell phones and sending them to their boyfriends and girlfriends.
Many of these pictures are falling into the wrong hands — or worse, everyone’s hands, via the Internet — and leading to criminal charges.
[...] Psychologists said the phenomenon reflects typical teenage hormones and lack of judgment, with technology multiplying the potential for mischief.
I’ll be honest: sensationalist, condescending media coverage of adolescent behavior is near the top of my list of topics that challenge my objectivity. But whatever my emotions, how articles like this proliferate is an interesting academic puzzle.
That the kids are alright—relative to previous years, anyway—isn’t a secret among sociologists. Most measures of what we define as deviant behavior among youths have been declining for decades. The most respected ongoing study of teen drug use, Monitoring the Future, finds that except for a spike in the mid-1990s, rates of use have consistently held steady or declined since 1979 [pdf]. A CDC study published the same day as the CNN article above found significant “overall improvements in health-related behaviors,” including rates of sexual activity, drug use, and attempted suicide.
Mainstream media coverage about deviant youth behaviors during this time, however, has tended to fixate on negative trends, often manufacturing hysterical mountains out of statistical molehills. The Just Say No crusade was launched in the midst of free-falling rates of drug abuse. Considerable fears of school shootings persist, despite the fact that no more than 42 students have been violently killed in any year since 1992. Although the aforementioned positive CDC story hasn’t received much media attention, a different CDC study from March estimating that 1 in 4 American teenage girls has an STD was featured prominently by ABC, CNN, FOX News, the New York Times, and USA Today.
Clearly, there are historical, economic, communicative, and even biological forces partly responsible for this phenomenon. But I wonder if this popular aversion to a positive outlook about younger generations has a particular resonance in American society.
“Blaming the victim” is commonly used in a criminological sense, but the origin of the term is actually sociological, and it has a different meaning in that context. William Ryan used it to describe the Moynihan Report’s “[attempt] to divert responsibility for poverty from social structural factors to the behaviors and cultural patterns of the poor.”
When it comes to youth today, there are many compelling social structural factors at work: nearly 1 in 5 living in poverty (the highest percentage of any age group), 11 percent of those under 18 and 29 percent between 18 and 24 without health care [pdf], unstable families, restricted civil liberties, and a compulsory educational system that both American political parties agree is in need of major reforms. These factors have been enumerated and scrutinized by social scientists such as Robert Epstein, John Gatto, Henry Giroux, and Mike Males, but aren’t cited nearly as often as perceived moral failings.
Why might we be motivated to emphasize behavioral and cultural factors at the expense of social structural factors when kids and teens behave badly? One possible reason is that American society is particularly susceptible to adopting a victim-blaming perspective. The tenet that ours is a “land of opportunity” in which anyone is capable of achieving material and social success is to a large extent one that denies or diminishes the influence of repressive social structures. Certainly many Americans have made astonishing achievements in spite of their lowly socioeconomic backgrounds, and certainly our degree of social mobility exceeds that of many other countries. But that doesn’t mean that repressive social structures don’t exist, that they aren’t strong enough to exclude many others from the possibility of mobility, or that those trumpeted rags-to-riches tales aren’t mere aberrations.
The secular “land of opportunity” narrative is reinforced by our religious roots. Blaming the victim, to a large extent, requires a belief in a just world, which lends itself to the brand of predestined Protestantism that proliferated in America’s early days. One of the granddaddies of sociology, Max Weber, argued in his classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that material and secular success became equated with spiritual success in the vacuum of religious authority following the Reformation. Though Protestantism certainly doesn’t contend anymore that bad things don’t happen to good people, for many years many denominations did.
Age in many ways is no different than gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. All are potential demographic vehicles for social stratification. All have been axes along which much historical subjugation has occurred, as the hegemonic category has enforced structural inequities. And all have been occasions for victim-blaming.
Today, respected media sources quote psychologists who sneer at “typical teenage hormones and lack of judgment.” Fifty years ago, they might have cited “experts” who would bemoan typical female hormones. Or typical African-American lack of judgment.
Although racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices still persist, most Americans have accepted after long struggles that traditionally subordinate populations aren’t biologically inferior, morally bankrupt, intellectually deficient, or a dangerously deviant fifth column set against the destruction of all that is good and healthy in our society. Yet even the most politically correct adults, after the next school shooting, will attribute those very misguided qualities to their children’s cohort without irony.
Rancher = Sociologist?
June 15th, 2008Heh. From Slashdot:
Geohashing, an obscure xkcd pastime which involves going to random coordinates generated by md5 hashing, the date, and the opening status of the stock market, appears to have just gotten far more interesting. The official wiki reports a warning for other geohashers intending to go to the spot designated for June 14th in the San Francisco area, as several avid fans of xkcd were met by an angry rancher and firearms.
“Apply this!”
Rebuttal
June 11th, 2008I love xkcd, but today’s cartoon is misleading and incomplete.
Obviously, this rubric ignores sociology’s standing a priori as the superior academic discipline. But the beginning of a corrective argument is contained in the mouseover:
On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.
This analogy should be extended and applied to all of the aforementioned fields.
(As mathematicians like to say before they rub one out, “Q.E.D.”)
What Kind of Dining Set Defines Me as a Person?
June 4th, 2008
During my pilgrimage to City Lights bookstore, I came upon a book entitled Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity.
Unfortunately, I didn’t buy the book, and Amazon’s search inside feature let me down, so I can’t quote the passage I read in the Introduction. But in short, the author, Hal Niedaviecki, writes about his decidedly nonconformist history and the increasing frequency with which he’s funneled referential birthday cards about his individuality.
His well-meaning parents, witless to the irony of a multibillion dollar corporation responsible for untold conformist holiday behavior embracing individuality, feel validated by their selections. But Hal is depressed. His very uniqueness has been co-opted by capitalism.
The identification of this phenomenon isn’t new (which was the ultimate reason I didn’t buy the book). Thomas Frank and Christopher Lasch wrote about this in the 1990s. Naomi Klein has been crusading against it for almost as long, as has Kalle Lasn. Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal book The Tipping Point is to a considerable extent about how consumer phenomena are products of social movements backed by economic investment.
One thing I find lacking in this discussion is the distinction between economic and social conformity. On one hand, there seems to be an unmistakable trend toward elevating consumption into an “experience” or identity instead of a mere economic transaction by connecting products to the trappings of social norms and values. This practice, in my opinion, is made possible by the explosion of psychological and sociological knowledge in the twentieth century. With the diminishing returns of economic maturity and sudden plenitude of social scientific knowledge, in many instances it’s simply cheaper to change the consumer than to change the product.
[Note: By far the best exploration of these related phenomena I’ve encountered is a BBC documentary entitled The Century of the Self (available for free online divided into four hour-long parts: 1 2 3 4). Starting with Freud and ending with Bill Clinton’s focus group-driven 1996 campaign, it traces how advances in the social sciences were leveraged for practical use in other fields, such as advertising and politics.]
From a sociological perspective, the primary tendency being exploited is our society’s disposition to associate various roles and subcultures not merely with a particular set of norms and values, but also a particular set of products its members are expected to consume, which predates the recent revolutions in advertising. Thorstein Veblen, an early sociologist writing at the turn of the 20th century, noted in his classic work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, how members of the upper classes consciously adopt and cultivate a lifestyle of “conspicuous consumption,” procuring and displaying products with exclusive symbolic value, even at the expense of functionality (e.g., eating utensils made of silver instead of more durable metals).
More recently, Michael Solomon and Henry Assael have argued for a gestalt approach to symbolic consumption, producing evidence that consumers are motivated to assemble a “product constellation” to “define, communicate, and enact social roles.”
However, there’s a very different type of social conformity that exists outside of consumer behavior. This variable is probably more accurately described as a social cohesion, a relative consensus (or lack thereof) over those social norms and values. In other words, how much diversity exists in a society over the definition of desirable norms and values, and how entrenched or ossified are those that currently prevail in the society as a whole?
This variable has been explored to some extent in cross-cultural studies, such as this one by Jung-Soo Yi [pdf], which have employed a dichotomy of “collectivist” and “individualist” cultures to describe differences in social cohesion between, for example, Japan or Korea, and Canada or the United States. Of particular interest are studies that have examined the unique position of members of one type of culture assimilating into the other, such as those contained in Greenfield and Cocking’s Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development.
Although academic literature has focused primarily on identifying and contrasting levels of social cohesion in different cultures, there’s no reason it can’t also be applied to measure changes in one culture over time. Most would argue that there’s been a lessening of cohesion in American society during the last half of the twentieth century by this rubric. The popular narrative suggests that America enjoyed a cohesive afterglow in the years following World War II, which was fractured by the consciousness revolution in the 1960s and fragmented into a million pieces by Generation X in the 1980s and 1990s.
I’m fascinated by how these two social trends—the commodification of conformity by economic interests, and the attenuation of social cohesion—have interacted with and often reinforced one another. With less social cohesion than a century ago, privilege is no longer a requirement to engage in conspicuous consumption. Everyone consumes to distinguish his or herself from everyone else. A hundred years after Veblen, Chuck Palahniuk’s office-drone everyman, despite an utter lack of wealth, status, or power, voices the same sentiment that Veblen saw in the privileged men of his time as they purchased silverware: “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?”
More subcultures create more business opportunities. There exists a potential market for every ethos, no matter how idiosyncratic, to express itself through consumption. And as long as it’s profitable, businesses will continue to provide that service, regardless of the consequences.
After all, even Lasn’s anti-brand organization, Adbusters, now sells a line of “ethical alternatives.”
Light Reading
May 31st, 2008My thesis proposal, Effects of Cultural Capital on Selection and Frequency of Use of Social Network Websites, can be downloaded here. Please keep in mind that this project is in its embryonic stages and very much subject to change.
Abstract: Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital posits that parental educational attainment and parental income are major determinants of future outcomes and behavior. Cultural capital inherited early in life impacts acquired educational capital and taste preferences, and perpetuates class divisions. Researchers such as danah boyd have hypothesized that class divisions are being reflected in behavior on social network sites (SNSs) like MySpace and Facebook.
This study will use random sampling methods to acquire results from two data sources: subjects’ responses to an electronic questionnaire, and content analysis of the subjects’ SNS profile(s). The purpose of the study is to evaluate the theoretical model depicted below, derived from a combination of Bourdieu’s theories and existing research on SNSs.
My Boss’s Spouse’s Friend Made Me Do It
May 27th, 2008
Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler’s work on social networks is getting a lot of attention from both online and traditional media. From yesterday’s Washington Post:
The pair reported last summer that obesity appeared to spread from one person to another through social networks, almost like a virus or a fad.
In a follow-up to that provocative research, the team has produced similar findings about another major health issue: smoking. In a study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the team found that a person’s decision to kick the habit is strongly affected by whether other people in their social network quit—even people they do not know. And, surprisingly, entire networks of smokers appear to quit virtually simultaneously.
I found this to be an intriguing and slightly amusing finding in the context of the U.S. government’s war on drugs. As any American knows, preventive efforts in this country to curtail drug abuse have tended to place considerable emphasis on the acquisition of specific social skills, such as the “Just Say No” campaign or the D.A.R.E. program’s reliance on resisting “peer pressure.”
I’ve always thought it was an odd strategy on the face of it, ignoring as it does the native desire to experiment and the physiological rewards of recreational use. While there’s undoubtedly a social element to drug abuse, the notion that millions of innocent children are being seduced into drug use by their serpentine friends (despite the best efforts of their omniscient makers) has always struck me more as a self-serving Judeo-Christian fantasy than a cogent sociological explanation.
For the most part, the academic literature supports my skepticism. Evaluative studies on the efficacy of D.A.R.E., such as those listed below, have consistently shown that D.A.R.E.’s effect on drug use is statistically insignificant at best.
- Dukes et al. 1996. A three-year follow-up of Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.). Evaluation Review, 20, 49-66. [SAGE subscription required]
- Wysong et al. 1994. Truth and DARE: Tracking drug education to graduation and as symbolic politics. Social Problems, 41, 448-472. [JSTOR subscription required]
In 2001, a Surgeon General’s report categorized D.A.R.E. as a school-based program that “Does Not Work,” citing its “social skills training and…developmental [inappropriateness].”
More substantive theories span biology, psychology, and sociology, and collectively reflect the myriad of factors influencing individuals with regard to drug use. (A good summary of these theories appears in Erich Goode’s Drugs in American Society.) Biological theories rely on genetic factors or postulated metabolic imbalances. Psychological theories cite reinforcement, “problem-behavior proneness,” or psychological pathologies.
In sociology, Robert Merton’s anomie theory of deviant behavior suggests that deviance occurs in the absence of traditional avenues to success and has been invoked to explain drug use. Travis Hirschi’s social control theory suggests that deviance occurs in the absence of social controls and consequences. Alternately, Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson’s self-control theory posits that a lack of self-control caused by inadequate parental socialization is the primary cause of deviant behavior.
Other sociological theories acknowledge more directly the influence of an individual’s particular social group. Social learning theory, derived from a combination of Edwin Sutherland’s theory of differential association and psychological behaviorism, suggests we learn acceptable behavior from our social group, which may or may not conform to the standards of society at large. Howard Becker’s subcultural theory posits that a social group’s attitude toward drug use is partly responsible for the formulation of its individual members’ attitudes toward drug use.
Could Christakis and Fowler have discovered some sort of social alignment mechanism by which behaviors are transmitted beyond the range of one’s immediate social group, beyond the scope of social learning and subcultural theories?
If the meme of direct peer pressure was enough to ignite a social panic, think how paranoid we’ll become if we find out that we’re pressured to do drugs by people we don’t even know.
Linguistic Alchemy
May 25th, 2008
Jon Taplin has a post today on journalism’s future (a topic about which he’s uniquely qualified to address).
Everyone knows the future of journalism is on the web, but just putting the New York Times print edition on the web is not transformative.
I think what is transformative is the work Frontline, the PBS series has been doing in integrating broadcast and web resources into some new hybrid of journalism. The best example is the Interactive video timeline they created around their epic series Bush’s war. The ability to navigate through both the video assets, the interview transcripts and search by individual participant seems to me to get close to the promise of truly interactive television.
His post harkens back to a post I read earlier this week on the Daily Kos, in which Kos targets a line in a NBC press release about how the network “as part of a free press in a free society, makes its own editorial decisions.”
Once upon a time, there were time constraints on the air, or space constraints in print. But these days, unedited footage and transcripts can be posted online. Those “editorial decisions” are nothing more than editorial meddling, gatekeeping at its worst.
There’s no reason for NBC to hide the rest of the footage. Put it all online. Let people decide for themselves whether Bush was improperly edited or not. Do the same for all interviews.
[...] It won’t just help generate a more informed electorate, but it will provide a fantastic accountability for those journalists themselves—with the source material available, their ability to skew their pieces according to their own biases will be seriously restricted.
Taplin’s and Kos’s visions share two commonalities: increased availability of content, and increased consumer autonomy. The Internet provides the opportunity for both, and exemplary online operations such as PBS and the Daily Kos take advantage.
I worry, though, that this elysian digital frontier will butt up against basic social psychology. Brains are extraordinary things. They process input at a prodigious rate and perform an estimated 10^16 operations per second, of which we are only aware of a small fraction.
Yet our capacities are finite, and for hundreds of thousands of years the ability to take mental shortcuts has been naturally selected.
This shortcut-taking tendency is the engine behind a whole host of social processes, from prejudicial behavior to logical fallacies. The same neurological phenomenon that serves us so well in discarding unremarkable information can also lead us considerably astray in a wide variety of situations.
This judgmental impairment is especially relevant here, where we are consistently taught that we Americans, by forming our own assessments and exercising our own judgments in the political realm, provide a crucial check and balance in our democratic process.
We want to believe that we can comprehend the best direction for our country, no matter how bewildering and complex the domestic and geopolitical climates appear at first blush. The mainstream media provides that service by condensing these monumental issues into simplistic language and broad plot devices familiar to any member of our culture.
As a nation, we believe that this linguistic alchemy is possible, and moreover, that it’s all we require to make an informed decision. So we pick presidents based on who we’d rather down a pint with, perform acts of monstrous reductionism with regard to Muslims, and scapegoat subpopulations for their supposed failure to adhere to our idiosyncratic standards.
The mere presence of more content, or better delivery, won’t eradicate this pretentious social norm. Although those who already challenge themselves by absorbing as much information as possible will continue to flock to these new media, the majority of us will continue to consume the most bite-sized morsels of information we can find, even if we’re unknowingly seduced into believing biased or naive reports, and even if we have the opportunity to gain a fuller picture simply by logging on.
What psychology and sociology giveth, new infrastructures or media can’t taketh away.
What I Choose Is My Voice
May 23rd, 2008
Emily Gould (of Gawker fame) has a cover story appearing in this Sunday’s New York Times magazine.
A manic-depressive romp through panic attacks, wrecked romantic relationships, and schizophrenic seclusion, it traces her rise and fall as an Internet celebrity. Simultaneously rewarded and reviled—psychologically, financially, socially, even romantically—for being herself, she became invested in the idea that meeting her needs was dependent upon a public self-absorption that became increasingly dissonant and detrimental.
Needless to say, hers is a contentious narrative, as evidenced by her former employer’s catty coverage, or New York Magazine’s deprecating eye rolls here and here.
I’m not interested in evaluating the truth of her personal epic. But I find the venom directed toward her fascinating.
The assertion that “Emily Gould has made a writing career of her personal life and built a personal life around her writing career” doesn’t appear to be in dispute. She admits as much in her account.
Rather, the majority of the negative comments is preoccupied with arguing that her perception of the attention she deserves is incompatible with the actual attention she deserves (examples here, here, and here). If I’m at heart as vapid, self-absorbed, and unfulfilled as you, they sneer, at least I have the sense to keep it to myself.
This is, at heart, an argument over a social norm. Classicists studying ancient Athens call it a “performance culture.” Erving Goffman, in his 1959 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, called it “impression management.” It refers to our (frequent) attempts to impress upon others the perceptions we want them to have of us.
Both classicists and sociologists use the analogy of theater to illuminate how this process works. The ancient Athenian citizen, it is argued, inspired by the annual Dionysian festivals with tragic and comic plays, was always performing—in the agora, in his political duties, and in front of the gods. Plato called it “the great stage of life.” Goffman’s interpretation became known as the dramaturgical perspective. “All the world is not, of course, a stage,” he wrote, “but the crucial ways in which it isn’t aren’t easy to specify.”
It may seem odd that something as basic as juggling social roles and impressions could be a social norm. But these behaviors are taught to children at an early age and aggressively enforced in our society. In realms such as school, work, or even dating, we rely on the expectation that those we interact with will actively seek to manage other people’s impressions of them. We make decisions about our own behavior based on this expectation.
Sometimes, it’s impossible to extricate impression management from other social norms or values. Conveying a desire to have someone else think highly of you, for example, is often interpreted as a sign of respect. Partly for this reason, we get offended, frustrated, or angry when we interact with people who don’t seem to care what we think of them.
The Internet, in the process of challenging traditional notions of privacy, is also challenging the norm of impression management, and with it other associated mores such as respect. It’s not surprising, then, that those who splay their lives open like a dissected frog are attacked with unusual viciousness as prostitutes of their inner soul. The slanders of narcissism and attention-seeking are rooted in the expectation that we’re supposed to be sweeping our unsavory qualities under the rug and at least trying to make everyone love and respect us. To address them publicly (or worse, to profit socially and financially from them) is to betray an inflated opinion of oneself, an insolent opinion of others, a loin-quivering ache for attention, or all of the above.
It’s beyond my capability to judge whether impression management is “good” or “bad,” or specifically whether Emily’s reasons for eschewing/pretending to eschew it were appropriate or not. Ultimately, though, impression management is just a social construction. We can conform or not. If we don’t, however, we face real social consequences.
Appropriately, I was listening to Disarm by the Smashing Pumpkins as I read her story, specifically the part when she describes how the casual savagery she used to dispense in the name of “being herself” is turned on her. It’s a poignant reminder of how intolerant many of us are when confronted with social deviance—whether deviance from our own personal code or deviance from social constructions we’ve internalized and embraced.
Over the next couple of weeks, I sat on the sidelines and watched as the commenters — on Gawker, on other blogs and even on Emily Magazine — talked about me the same way they once talked about the targets I’d proffered for them to aim at. Many of them explicitly pointed out that this drubbing was my karmic comeuppance — after all, I’d punished other people this way. Now it was my turn. It was only fair.
(The killer in me is the killer in you.)
Writings Preview
May 21st, 2008Unfortunately, I’m not ready yet to post any of my work in the Writings section. But here’s a preview of what I’ll have in a few weeks.
Effects of Community Violence on a Population of Young Adults
In the spring of 2008, I participated in a research project examining the effects of hearing about, witnessing, and being victimized by community violence. A population of low-risk college students (ages 18-25) was sampled and assessed for PTSD, depression, delinquency, and academic achievement. Social support and perceived safety were also considered. The results of this study are currently being prepared for publication.
High-Achieving Students (Literature Review)
This summer, I’m conducting an independent study on high-achieving students. Details to follow.
Effects of Cultural Capital on Selection and Frequency of Use of Social Network Websites (Thesis Proposal)
In the fall of 2008, I’ll be composing a thesis on the effects of cultural capital on the selection and frequency of use of social network websites.
Abstract: Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu‘s theory of cultural capital posits that parental educational attainment and parental income are major determinants of future outcomes and behavior. Cultural capital inherited early in life impacts acquired educational capital and taste preferences, and perpetuates class divisions. Researchers such as danah boyd have hypothesized that class divisions are being reflected in behavior on social network sites (SNSs) like MySpace and Facebook.
The study will use random sampling methods to acquire results from two data sources: subjects’ responses to an electronic questionnaire, and content analysis of the subjects’ SNS profile(s). The purpose of the study is to evaluate the theoretical model depicted below, derived from a combination of Bourdieu’s theories and existing research on SNSs.
