How do sociologists go about understanding human life in society? The first step is to develop what we call the sociological perspective, which is also referred to as taking a sociological approach or thinking sociologically. In any case, it means looking at the world in a unique way and seeing it in a whole new light. You may be naturally inclined to think sociologically, but, for many, the following practices are helpful.
Practical vs. Scientific Knowledge
You already possess many of the skills of an astute analyst of social life, but you take your knowledge for granted because you gained it as an everyday actor. In this course, you will build a new identity: social analyst. These are two very different ways of experiencing the same social world.
Everyday actors approach their social world with what is referred to as “reciped,” or practical, knowledge (Schutz 1962), which allows them to get along in their everyday life. However, practical knowledge is not necessarily as coherent, clear, and consistent as it could be. For example, you are probably very skilled at using a smartphone. It brings you into daily contact with friends and family, puts you in touch with the pizza delivery guy, and allows you to register for classes and find out your grades at the end of the term. But you probably can’t explain how it works in a technical way; you know only how it works for you in a practical, everyday way. This is the important feature of the everyday actor’s knowledge: It is practical, not scientific.
To acquire knowledge about the social world that is systematic, comprehensive, coherent, clear, and consistent, you’ll need to take a different approach. The social analyst has to “place in question everything that seems unquestionable” to the everyday actor (Schutz 1962, p. 96). In other words, the social analyst takes the perspective of a stranger in the social world; a social analyst tries to verify what the everyday actor might just accept as truth. For instance, people tend to believe that women are more talkative than men. This might seem so evident, in fact, as not to be worth investigating. The social analyst, however, would investigate and deliver a more complex conclusion than you might think.
There are strengths and weaknesses in both approaches: The analyst sees with clarity what the actor glosses over, but the actor understands implicitly what the analyst labors to grasp. Once you’ve learned more about the theories and methods that come next, you’ll be able to combine the virtues of both analyst and actor. The result will be a more profound and comprehensive understanding of the social world.
Beginner’s Mind
One technique for gaining a sociological perspective comes from Bernard McGrane (1994), who promotes a shift in thinking borrowed from the Zen Buddhist tradition. McGrane suggests that we practice what is called beginner’s mind—the opposite of expert’s mind, which is so filled with facts, projections, assumptions, opinions, and explanations that it can’t learn anything new. If we would like to better understand the world around us, we must unlearn what we already know. Beginner’s mind approaches the world without knowing in advance what it will find; it is open and receptive to experience.
Perhaps our greatest obstacle to making new discoveries is our habitual ways of thinking. “Discovery,” McGrane says, “is not the seeing of a new thing—but rather a new way of seeing things” (1994, p. 3). One way to achieve this kind of awareness is to practice being present in the moment. You might have tried this already if you’ve done any training in what is called “mindfulness.” The problem is that we are often preoccupied with thoughts and feelings that prevent us from fully participating in reality. If we can find some inner stillness and stop our normal mental chatter, McGrane says, then there is a possibility for true learning to occur. It is in this quiet space that a personal “paradigm shift” (a new model for understanding self and society) can take place.
DATA WORKSHOP
Analyzing Everyday Life
Doing Nothing
Zen sociologist Bernard McGrane suggests that we actually “do” sociology, rather than just study it. His book The Un-TV and the 10 MPH Car (1994) features exercises designed to help students experience the mundane, routine, and everyday level of society in a new way. This Data Workshop is an adaptation of one of his experiments. You will be practicing beginner’s mind, one of the ways to gain a sociological perspective, or to think like a sociologist.
Step 1: Conducting the Experiment
This exercise requires that you stand in a relatively busy public space (a shopping center, street corner, park, or campus quad) and literally do nothing for ten minutes. That means just standing there and being unoccupied. Don’t wait for someone, take a break, sightsee, or otherwise engage in a normal kind of activity. Also don’t daydream or think about the past or the future; don’t entertain yourself with plans or internal dialogues. Don’t whistle, hum, fidget, look in your bag, play with your phone, take notes, or do anything else that might distract you from just being there and doing nothing. Do, however, observe the reactions of others to you, and pay attention to your own thoughts and feelings during these ten minutes.
Step 2: Taking Notes about the Experience
Immediately after conducting the experiment, write some informal notes about what happened or did not happen. These notes can be loosely structured (with sentence fragments or bullet points), and they should be casual and written in the first person. Discuss the experience and its meaning to you in as much detail as possible. Include a description of other people’s reactions as well as your own thoughts and feelings before, during, and after the experiment.
This exercise may seem deceptively simple at first, but the subtle change from “doing something” to “doing nothing” makes everything different. It helps turn the ordinary world into a strange place. It makes you more aware of your own sense of self (or lack thereof) and how identity is constructed through interaction. You may find it challenging to put aside the mental and physical activities that you normally engage in to pass the time. And you may feel uncomfortable standing in a public place when other people can’t quite figure out who you are and what you’re doing. Finally, you will no longer be able to take for granted how the meaning of a situation is being defined or interpreted. Divested of your role as an everyday actor, you’ll learn how the most mundane activities (like just standing around) can become major objects of sociological inquiry.
There are two options for completing this Data Workshop:
PREP-PAIR-SHARE
Complete the exercise and bring your written notes to class. Partner with another student and take turns presenting your findings. Discuss the ways in which your experiences were similar or different. What was it like to “do” sociology? Did you see things in a new way? What was the most interesting part about conducting the experiment?
DO-IT-YOURSELF
Complete the exercise and write a two- to three-page essay based on the main concepts and prompts from this Data Workshop. Describe your experience and the results of your research. How did the experiment help you learn to think more like a sociologist? You may want to include snippets of your informal written notes to illustrate your points. Attach the informal notes to your finished essay.
More information
She simply stands while all the people around her are walking or talking on the phone.
Doing Nothing How does standing in a crowded place and doing nothing change how you experience the ordinary world?
IN RELATIONSHIPS
It’s Official: Men Talk More Than Women
The practice of sociology may seem to be about just a bunch of common sense. But this is true only part of the time. Some of what you learn may indeed seem familiar and may confirm some of the conclusions you’ve made about it. Drawing on the personal knowledge you have accumulated in life will be a valuable asset as a starting place, but it can also be a stumbling block to deeper understanding. There are times that the things that “everyone knows” turn out not to be true, or at least not as simple as we might have thought.
Take, for instance, the widely held belief that women talk more than men. Experience seems to confirm that this is true, obviously! Women are chatty, and a lot of men, if not the strong silent type, definitely have trouble getting a word in edgewise. And women have a hard time getting men to talk when they want them to; sometimes, to get a man to tell you what he’s thinking, you have to drag it out of him. While you may recognize this description of the different genders and may be able to relate with your own anecdote of such an encounter (or perhaps many such encounters), your casual assumptions about who talks more may need some revising. Numerous sociological studies that analyze conversational dynamics show that, despite stereotypes to the contrary, it’s actually men who are slightly more talkative (Leaper and Ayres 2007). How could that be?
Well, it depends on the context. Men are more talkative with their wives and with strangers. Women are more talkative with their children and with college classmates. With close friends and families, men and women are equally talkative. Studies have also shown other, perhaps more easily predictable, gender differences. For example, men use speech that is more assertive (they want to persuade others), whereas women use speech that is more affiliative (they are more focused on connecting with others). Sociologists have long noted that men are also more dominant in conversations, cutting off and interrupting women more often (Anderson and Leaper 1998; Hancock and Rubin 2015; Kollock, Blumstein, and Schwartz 1985; Zimmerman and West 1975).
“Mansplaining” is another way that men assert their dominance in conversations (Solnit 2008). The word is rather new, but the idea has been around for decades (Manne 2020). Mansplaining is the tendency, especially for men, to explain things in a condescending or patronizing way, with the presumption that the one doing the explaining knows more than the listener (even when this is clearly not the case). Men are more likely to “mansplain” in conversations with women, reinforcing gender stereotypes about who has more power and, in these cases, more knowledge. Perhaps because so many people have been on the receiving end of mansplaining, the word has gained acceptance into the current lexicon as well as the Oxford English Dictionary (Steinmetz 2014). There are also words for it in French (mecspliquer), German (herrklären), and even Icelandic (hrútskýring). It has become a useful label for a widely recognized behavior. Of course, it’s not only men who engage in mansplaining to women; sometimes men mansplain to other men, and sometimes women do it to men or to each other (McClintock 2016).
These findings seem to defy what has been considered a biological fact, that the female brain is wired to be more verbal. But because who talks more varies by situation, the evidence seems to indicate that language and conversational differences are influenced more by social forces than biological forces, including power dynamics. So despite how it might feel from your own personal experience, sociology has debunked some common myths about women and men, requiring us to rethink simplistic gender stereotypes.
This is why doing sociology is in some regards a radical undertaking. It requires of us a willingness to suspend our own preconceptions, assumptions, and beliefs about the way things are. As sociologists, we need to learn to question everything, especially our own taken-for-granted notions about others and ourselves. Once these notions have been set aside, even temporarily, we gain a fresh perspective with which to uncover and discover aspects of social life we hadn’t noticed before. We are then able to reinterpret our previous understanding of the world, perhaps challenging, or possibly confirming, what we thought we already knew.
“I’m speaking” During the vice presidential debate, former vice president Mike Pence interrupted then-senator Kamala Harris ten times, more than twice as often as Harris interrupted him.
Culture Shock
Peter Berger (1963) describes the kind of person who becomes a sociologist: someone with a passionate interest in the world of human affairs, someone who is intense, curious, and daring in the pursuit of knowledge. “People who like to avoid shocking discoveries . . . should stay away from sociology,” he warns (p. 24). The sociologist cares about the issues of ultimate importance to humanity, as well as the most mundane occurrences of everyday existence.
Another way to gain a sociological perspective is to attempt to create in ourselves a sense of culture shock. Anthropologists use the term to describe the experience of visiting a foreign culture. The first encounters with the local natives and their way of life can seem so strange to us that they produce a kind of disorientation and doubt about our ability to make sense of things. Putting all judgment aside for the moment, this state of mind can be very useful. For it is at this point, when we so completely lack an understanding of our surroundings, that we are truly able to perceive what is right in front of our eyes.
As sociologists, we try to create this effect without necessarily displacing ourselves geographically: We become curious and eager visitors to our own lives. We often find that what is familiar to us, if viewed from an outsider’s perspective, is just as exotic as some foreign culture, only we’ve forgotten this is true because it’s our own and we know it so well. To better understand this state of mind, you might imagine what it would be like to return home after being shipwrecked and living alone on a desert island. Or, if you’ve traveled abroad or moved away to attend college or for a job, perhaps it’s something you’ve already experienced but didn’t know what to call.
The Sociological Imagination
C. Wright Mills
One of the classic statements about the sociological perspective comes from C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), who describes a quality of mind that all great social analysts seem to possess: the sociological imagination. By this, he means the ability to understand “the intersection between biography and history,” or the interplay of the micro world of the self and individual psychology and the macro world of larger social forces; this is sociology’s task and its “promise” (Mills 1959).
We normally think of our own problems as a private matter of character, chance, or circumstance, and we overlook the fact that these may be caused in part by, or at least occur within, a specific cultural and historical context. For example, if you can’t find a job, you may feel that it’s because you don’t have the right skills, educational background, or experience. But it may also be the result of problems in the larger economy such as outsourcing, downsizing, restrictive policies, changing technologies, or migration patterns. In other words, your individual unemployment may be part of a larger social and historical phenomenon.
Most of the time, we use psychological rather than sociological arguments to explain the way things are. For instance, if someone is carrying a lot of credit card debt, psychological reasoning might focus on the person’s lack of self-control or inability to delay gratification. Sociological reasoning, however, might focus on the impact of cultural norms that promote a lifestyle beyond most people’s means or on economic changes that require more Americans to rely on credit cards because their wages have not kept up with inflation.
The sociological imagination searches for the link between micro and macro levels of analysis. We must look for how larger social forces, such as race, class, gender, religion, economics, or politics, are involved in creating the context of a person’s life. Mills’s characterization of sociology as the intersection between biography and history reminds us that the process works in both directions: Although larger social forces influence individual lives, individual lives can affect society as well.
One of the most important benefits of using the sociological imagination is access to a world beyond our own immediate sphere, where we can discover radically different ways of experiencing life and interpreting reality. It can help us appreciate alternative viewpoints and understand how they may have come about. This, in turn, helps us better understand how we developed our own values, beliefs, and attitudes.
Sociology asks us to see our familiar world in a new way, and doing so means we may need to abandon, or at least reevaluate, our opinions about that world and our place in it. It is tempting to believe that our opinions are widely held, that our worldview is the best or, at least, most common. Taking a sociological perspective forces us to see fallacies in our way of thinking. Because other individuals are different from us—belonging to different social groups, participating in different social institutions, living in different cities or countries, listening to different songs, watching different TV shows, engaging in different religious practices—they may look at the world very differently than we do. But a sociological perspective also allows us to see the other side of this equation: In cases where we assume that others are different from us, we may be surprised to find that their approach to their everyday world is quite similar to ours.
