Robert Merton's Strain Theory

Robert Merton came up with concepts based off Emile Durkheim's work, that supposedly were meant to produce anomic conditions in society: culturally defined goals and socially approved means for obtaining them. What these concepts basically involve are whether you have succeeded in life, being wealthy, getting a degree, or whether you were unable to obtain such goals are proceeded to achieve the "American dream" in another unique or deviant way. Merton's variety of social adaptions are as followed:

• Conformity: Individuals obtain cultural goals and individualized means by obtaining society's social goals, such graduating from college, or getting a decent paying job. These individuals also have the resources to reach these goals without rebelling and exercising criminal actions.

• Innovation: Individuals achieve cultural goals but not by individualized means. These individuals know what they have to do to achieve in life and how to do it without breaking laws, but can't always achieve them. Those who cannot achieve such a simple goal as going to college, believe they are not smart enough or live in poverty. So to get what they need and want in life, they typically resort to criminal behavior such as stealing or selling drugs. 

• Ritualism: Ritualists are those individuals in life who are very much law-abiding citizens, but have given up and accepted that they will never live the "American Dream". These are the people that you usually see working a full time job that requires no degree and living in a house that's not ideal to most people, but it works. They live a less than average lifestyle, but do not exercise criminal behaviors. 

• Retreatism: Reatreatists are completely against both the goals and means of society. These are individuals who know they will never go anywhere in life and have completely given up hope. They often withdrawal themselves from society after acknowledging this. They resort to drugs because they know nothing else and drugs make them feel better about themselves for a little while. An example of retreatists could be people who are in and out of prison.

• Rebellion: Individuals who rebel are in completely different categories than the ones listed above. These are people who are all about doing their own thing and making their life meaningful in their own way. They rebel from social norms and goals create their own. 

Out of all these concepts, rebellious individuals are the ones that I find the most fascinating. They are either completely against the government or they just don't believe in living a "normal" life and doing anything they can to show how unique they are to the world. In some ways, I believe that more people should be like this. 

Parson's Pattern Variables

Talcott Parson came up with a set of concepts known as pattern variables that compared relationships in different cultures throughout the social system. The five pattern variables are as described as I saw it below:

• Affectivity-affective neutrality: Actors who are affective show emotion such as love, laughter, happiness, and anger. Actors who are affectively neutral are serious and hide their emotions from other people. i.e. based on culture, Americans tend to be more affective, and Asians tend to be more affectively neutral. Americans speak with dramatization, and Asians speak more monotone.

• Diffuseness-specificity: diffusion is basically expecting that your significant other is going to do ‘this’ or ‘that’ for you or act towards you in a certain way without any question. These are actors who have been dating for a long time, are married, or are considered hopeless romantics. Specificity is where you expect little out of the relationship and are perfectly content with that for the time being. An example of this could be actors who have just started dating or even actors who are friends with benefits.

• Universalism-particularism: Universalism is based more on a particular set of rules that is set by society or entrepreneurs. Particularism is focused more on the relationships they have with their family or friends and not just on the basic rules of society. The workers and corporate of Taco Bell don’t care that they are feeding you garbage, it is just a job to them; this is considered universalism. Owners and workers of vegan restaurants care about what people eat and care that they stay healthy, they are particular.

• Achievement-ascription: Actors who experience achievement know what it’s like to have worked really hard in their lifetime to be recognized for it. Actors with an ascribed status may get free rides for some things in their life and may not have to try as hard. An example could be a white, middle class American getting into UW-Madison and achieving their goal because they got a 3.8 GPA in high school and a 28 on the ACT. A middle class African American got accepted into the same school with a 3.0 GPA and a 21 on his ACT because of his ascribed characteristics.

• Collectivity-self orientation: When the actor does what he thinks is in his best interest, that’s self orientation, he puts himself before anyone else. Being collectively orientated is when the actor thinks about the other people’s best interests and not just his own. Someone who is self orientated in a relationship will do what he thinks is best for him alone and not his significant other. Someone who is collectively orientated in a relationship will decide his future while keeping his significant other in mind. 

Self, Me, & I

George Herbert Mead concentrated one of his theories on distinguishing the differences between the self, me, and I. And to do this, you have to somewhat be aware that you in fact are part of a greater society and have to be able to recognize the differences between yourself and others. What Mead says about the Self is that "the self has the characteristic that is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from other objects and from the body...the bodily experiences are for us organized about a self." To me, this means that the body is more of the physiological characteristics, and that the self is more of just the mental part and what's going on in your brain. The self is all of your thoughts and what makes you function on a day to day basic. Mead is basically saying that your physiological body and mind are two separate things. Mead claims that the I "is the response of the individual to the attitude of the community as this appears in his own experience." So this is basically you're initial reactions and personalized thoughts that you have about the generalized other. It is the innate or instinct that we have as humans, but we don't always follow through with it and we do what we believe would be more socially acceptable instead of deviating. Mead states that the Me is "the adjustment to that organized world which is present in our own nature is on that represents the 'me' and is constantly there." In other words, the Me is your thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, and interactions towards others, and what the socially acceptable things may be. This may or may not be what Mead was getting at, but to me I see the "Me" and "I" as sort of Freud's theory of the ego and superego. The "I" would appear to be the ego, where really you feel like telling your boss off because he's a psychopath, but then the "Me", or superego, kind of tells you that that may not be the best idea because you don't really feel like losing your job today and living out on the streets because you can't afford to pay rent. Here is a short, kind of funny video distinguishing the differences between "Me" and "I" that gets the point across pretty well.

Jane Addams: Public Sociology

In every society and country around the world, there are roles, values, morals, and a group of standards in which people live and view the world, also known as democratic social ethics. Jane Addams came up with four key elements that described what exactly democratic social ethics consisted of: no one group of people are more important than another, all people are active agents, people seek opportunity for kindliness, and personal safety of all members of a social democracy is tied to the personal safety of each.

Realistically, how often does a society actually follow these elements? In almost every society, there is at least one of these elements being violated, if not more. One specific example that sticks out in my mind is the video on kidnapping brides in Kyrgyzstan. After kind of breaking away from the Soviet Union after a long period of time, the people of Kyrgyzstan went back to their old ways and started kidnapping brides. This man in the video literally went to her house where he communicated with her brother (usually the parents) and took a woman, who was already seeing someone else, hostage until the groom's family was finally able to convince the bride to wed. And if the woman was to say no to him, then she would be banned from her family and the entire society. This here alone is breaking at least two of Addam's elements. In Kyrgyzstan, men and women are not at all even close to being equal. Men have so much more say and importance in the society, and women don't even stand a chance. Unless they are okay with being disowned, the women have to say yes against their own will. It also doesn't follow the "all people are active agents" element. Women do not have the ability to act in this society and say what is wrong and what is right, that's not up to them.

America, the land of the free and home of the brave, doesn't even come close to following all of these elements today. The government and some other people may say that men and women are treated equally in today's world, but there are still a lot of men who hold the same job title and position as women making a lot more money than them. Women are also still being sexually harassed in the workforce
too. No one says it or admits it, but men are still dominant in today's society. Not to say that we are horrible people, but there are not enough people in this country that actually still seek opportunity for kindliness. Everyone is focused on only themselves and doing what they need to do to get by. People don't think about ways they could be kind to others on a daily basis. The government is a big example right now.

Durkheim on Suicide

As a psychology major, suicide has a lot to do with the field that I'm going into and what I want to study further, so of course I'm going to pick suicide to blog about. I agree with Durkheim when he states that the purpose of even studying suicide in the first place is to make it a sociological phenomenon and not just a personal choice. There are so many outside factors and pressures that drive a person to commit suicide. The pressure to fit in, the pressure to get good grades as a student, the pressure to make some kind of meaning out of your life, people constantly badgering you about everything and anything. The outside world puts a lot of stress on someone which can cause them to become mentally unstable and even consider suicide. There are four different kinds of suicide we could talk about: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic. Egoistic is basically where you consider yourself an outsider and you don't fit in. And if you don't fit in anywhere, you're probably going to get bullied and harassed, causing one to feel so ashamed of themselves that they believe their life isn't worth living anymore. Altruistic is where you feel so strongly towards a certain society or group, that you would be willing to die for them. This is true of soldiers who go to war and they know they're going to die, but they keep on going anyways. This type of suicide could be considered more heroic or novel though because they aren't dying for themselves, they're dying for their country. Anomic is where there is very low regulation causing people to go from being stable to unstable. An example of that could be during the recession in the US. Before the recession, people had good jobs and they were for the most part financially stable, and then they wake up the next morning and bam, there job is gone. They lost all of their pay and salary and now have no way to pay the bills or go to the doctor if they're sick. Such an enormous change of pace in life doesn't settle in well for a lot of people causing them to end their lives. The last one is fatalistic suicide, where there is too much regulation, take for instance a prison. It is human nature to want to be free, and people aren't able to live well when someone has so much control over their life. When they can't do what they want, when they want, they question the point of living. People don't just wake up and decide they want to commit suicide and end their life for no reason at all. There is a lot of outside factors and stress that just builds up until a person can no longer tear it down and gives up. Because of things that have happened in their life that seem like they cannot be fixed, they commit suicide. The video I have posted posted  is about a teenager who was suicidal because she lost her mom to suicide at age 9.  Suicide is not just a personal choice, it is a sociological phenomenon that not everyone recovers from.

Blog 1 - Spencer on Evolution

Evolution has been something that I've always been fascinated by, so reading this article about Spencer's theory on evolution definitely intrigued me. I agree with almost everything he believes regarding evolution. He claims that the knowable world is much more scientific than it is religious, meaning that there may be a higher power, but evolution and science had a lot more to do with how this world was made than what religious people believe in. I fully agree with what he says there. God may have put animals and humans on Earth, but he didn't progressively change them from a less coherent to a more coherent form. Spencer also believes that all inorganic, organic, and societal phenomena undergo evolution and devolution. We as people and a society are always changing. In America, people rarely stay in their social or economic class their entire life. So many people are born into poverty and die in the middle class or rather wealthy. We as people are always growing. My favorite quote of Spencer's from this reading was "evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness". This quote really just spoke to me. Our world is going to be changing every day, every minute, every second of our life until everyone on this planet has reached greatness and fulfillment in their life. And the way our world is going, evolution isn't going to end any time soon. Below is a video evolution that gives a better understanding to those who struggle with the concept.