r/sociology

If we are to attribute the issues to social structures, doesn't that make individual responsibility go poof? The individual lacked other options due to their social structures: cultural, economical, psychological etc?

How is individual responsibility and structural conditioning balanced in any given situation?

I'm very novice in this so if the question is something basic, please guide me to the reading material.

I know patriarchy is an impactful reality, but I’ve always had trouble deciphering its effects in my own life. 

I’m generally introverted, keep to myself, and may considered less conventionally “feminine” than average. Because of my introversion, I’ve dealt with many men in my life mainly on an individual basis. 

My instinct has always been to psychologize their unusual tendencies, rather than to attribute it to broader ideology. 

For example when I was in a small work unit with 2 other men, they both demonstrated some traits associated with toxic masculinity:  self-absorbed, loud, ambitious, and reactive.

In the case of my working-level colleague, he seemed to adopt these qualities as a defense mechanism against a traumatic childhood upbringing. He was abandoned by his father early on, and resented that the latter was a “spineless coward”. Being self-absorbed and loud would allow him to be seen and heard after traumatizing neglect. At the same time, his aggressive ambition was obviously meant to impress our team lead- whose disappointment he feared so intensely, you could say he had adopted him as a secondary father figure. 

Similarly, I recently met a man who can only be described as predatory. He seemed friendly and well-adjusted, but eventually tried to ensnare me in a servile arrangement where he could control everything I do. Having stepped away, I can only see him as a textbook narcissist with sadistic tendencies. He likewise had a dysfunctional upbringing - an emotionally disregulated and invasive mother. Couldn't his personality disorder be driving him to seek revenge against his mother via other woman, “conquering” the feminine figure which had once dominated him?

I’ve also dealt with many dysfunctional men in my family, and feel that I can trace all of their behaviours to past experiences or personality disorders (not claiming objective diagnoses btw, just based on my own guesses).

In other words, I fail to understand how a rigid social script is the main cause of toxicity in these individuals, when the defining factor across all these situations seems to be underlying trauma and pathology.

Ultimately, each of these individuals performed masculinity in different ways, with distinctly dysfunctional behaviours informed by their unique traumas. 

These are only a few examples. I also tend to interpret women’s behaviours in a similar way.

What am I missing?

Is sexism more obvious and damaging within a large group of men, where the performance of masculinity would be more caricatured, and its harms more amplified?

Alternatively, could I have been sheltered from overt sexism due to my own muted performance of femininity? 

Thoughts?

I fucking did it ! I'm just waiting for the evaluation, and after the many minor corrections I'll have to do, I'll be fucking finished ! It took me way too long, survived a depression, a divorce, etc. But I lived and I fucking finished it !

Don't get me wrong. I love research. I love the feeling of discovering something. I'm still as passionate about subject and just learning in general, but I hated the academic institution. They just watch you stumble and fall, and never really take responsibility for their educational role... My first director is a good man, but he didn't have any pedagogy, let alone andragogy. It ended badly, and I almost quit but I was lucky and found another director that was good.

Anyways, best of luck to you all

Sex occurs in nature; all animals engage in it and some even do it for pleasure, so when did humans decide to shame each other and themselves about it? When and why did we start developing taboos? And, bonus question, where did kinks and fetishes come from?

The Bible provides the explanation of the fall of man, which I think metaphorically represents the time when humans invented a concept of good v evil, but what other theories are out there?

The weaponization of trauma can be presented as a sociopsychological explanation of how personal suffering is sometimes transformed into perceived moral or epistemic authority in social interaction In everyday communication people rarely evaluate arguments in a purely logical way instead they rely on perceived experience emotional intensity and social signals as quick indicators of credibility because lived experience does provide real informational value it often becomes a heuristic for judging who is “right” in a discussion however this heuristic becomes distorted when experience is treated as universally authoritative rather than context dependent Research in moral cognition such as that discussed in The Illusion of Moral Superiority suggests that individuals naturally build and protect a coherent moral identity when someone goes through intense emotional or traumatic experiences those events are not stored as neutral facts but are integrated into identity in a way that increases their subjective importance this can lead to a situation where personal experience feels not only meaningful but also inherently correct even when applied outside its original context

Studies on perceived stress and moral judgment show that emotional intensity increases confidence in interpretation even without improving accuracy this means that the stronger the emotional impact of an experience the more certain a person may feel about the conclusions drawn from it even if those conclusions are not universally valid this creates a cognitive bias where feeling certain is mistaken for being correct Rachael Dietkus’ work on trauma weaponization highlights how society often reinforces personal suffering through validation and moral protection in many social environments expressing trauma can generate empathy attention or moral credibility over time this can unintentionally encourage the use of personal experience as a form of authority in discussions that are not directly related to that experience Within this dynamic personal suffering can begin to function as a symbolic form of status people may compare experiences of hardship as a way of positioning themselves in moral hierarchies when this occurs discussion shifts away from evaluating ideas based on coherence or evidence and moves toward evaluating who has the most legitimate experience A key issue in this process is overgeneralization conclusions formed in emotionally intense situations are often extended to unrelated domains because emotional weight is interpreted as general truth rather than situational significance this leads to a breakdown in the boundary between subjective experience and objective claim At a broader social level this creates tension in how knowledge is valued if lived experience is ignored it can lead to invalidation and loss of important perspective but if it is treated as automatically authoritative it can prevent critical evaluation of ideas the result is an unstable balance between dismissing experience and overvaluing it

Overall this body of research shows that the transformation of suffering into perceived authority is not a simple matter of ego or manipulation but a complex interaction between cognitive bias identity formation emotional memory and social reinforcement it explains why in many discussions emotional intensity can unintentionally outweigh logical structure even in topics where experience does not directly determine truth

This is based in an old post of mine and in these works: Perceived Stress and Society Wide Moral Judgments The Illusion of Moral Superiority (Ben M Tappin & Ryan T McKay)

What's on your plate this week, what are you working on, what cool things have you encountered? Open discussion thread for casual chatter about Sociology & your school, academic, or professional work within it; share your project's progress, talk about a book you read, muse on a topic. If you have something to share or some cool fact to talk about, this is the place.

This thread is replaced every Monday. It is not intended as a "homework help" thread, please; save your homework help questions (ie: seeking sources, topic suggestions, or needing clarifications) for our homework help thread, also posted each Monday.

David Hume’s idea about human behavior is that reason is not the main driver of human action and that emotions or “passions” guide what we do while reason often comes after to justify it this is the starting point of his view of human nature and in a lot of ways it makes sense because it explains why people often act emotionally first and only later build a logical explanation for what they did.

Hume defended this idea by arguing from observation rather than abstract theory. In A Treatise of Human Nature, he claims that reason alone cannot motivate action, because reason only deals with facts and truth, while motivation comes from desire or feeling. In his view, a person cannot be moved to act by logic alone unless there is already an emotional drive behind it. He also argues that moral judgments are based on sentiment rather than pure rationality, meaning that what we call “good” or “bad” is rooted in human feeling. From this perspective, reason is not the ruler of human behavior, but something that serves and organizes what passion already pushes toward action.

My opinion is that this idea is partly correct, but becomes incomplete and even misleading when people try to use it as a way to fully explain or predict human behavior in a logical way. Hume explains motivation, but people often extend his idea into something stronger than what it actually is they try to turn human behavior into a predictable emotional system, as if understanding the cause of a feeling automatically allows full prediction or control of a person that is where the mistake begins.

People love to believe that human behavior can be predicted through pure logic, as if every action, emotion, or reaction is the result of a perfectly structured chain of cause and effect. But this idea is fundamentally flawed, not because humans are completely irrational, but because people constantly mistake explanation for certainty and pattern recognition for true understanding. The biggest mistake people make when analyzing others is assuming that every action must come from a clear and logical psychological source If someone is distant, there “must” be trauma behind it. If someone acts arrogant, there “must” be insecurity behind it if someone becomes attached, cold, angry, obsessive, avoidant, manipulative, emotional, detached, or contradictory, people immediately try to reduce it into a logical formula that explains everything but humans are not mathematical systems.

The human mind is influenced by emotions, impulses, hormones, environment, temporary feelings, memory, stress, personality, perception, contradictions, subconscious fears, social pressure, and countless internal processes that even the person themselves may not fully understand tying to explain all human behavior through pure logic ignores the fact that people are often inconsistent with their own beliefs, desires, and identities. From a purely logical perspective, these contradictions seem impossible or hypocritical, but emotionally they can coexist perfectly fine inside the same framework of experience.

This is why predicting humans becomes unreliable. People assume that once they identify a “pattern” they understand the person completely, but recognizing patterns is not the same as understanding the human mind. Many analyses are built on the false assumption that humans consistently act in ways that maximize logic, stability, or even self-interest.

In reality, humans frequently act against their own interests people stay attached to things that destroy them people create explanations for actions that originally came from emotion rather than reason

Sometimes the “logical explanation” people create is just a narrative constructed after the action already happened. The brain naturally wants coherence, so it invents reasons to justify emotional behavior. This means that many explanations people confidently give about others are not objective truths, but interpretations created to make uncertainty feel more controllable.

I also think that some people become obsessed with “solving” others because they enjoy the feeling of intellectual superiority that comes from believing they found the correct answer they approach human behavior like a puzzle that needs to be completed rather than a person that needs to be understood the goal stops becoming empathy and starts becoming validation for their own intelligence

This does not mean psychology, logic, or behavioral analysis are useless. Patterns absolutely exist, and experiences do influence behavior trauma, environment, and personality all matter. In fact, this is where a defense of Hume can also be made his theory is useful for explaining motivation and the emotional foundation of action, and in that sense it correctly captures an important layer of human psychology. However, the problem begins when people take that foundation and assume it allows full predictability or complete reduction of individuals into simple emotional structures. That step goes beyond Hume’s original claim and turns it into an oversimplified model

At the same time, a defense of my own argument is that human behavior shows too much internal contradiction, context dependence, and unpredictability for any purely logical or even purely emotional model to fully capture it even if emotions drive action, emotions themselves are unstable, layered, and sometimes conflicting within the same person, which means outcomes cannot be cleanly derived or predicted

Logic is not enough, and this idea bothers me a lot because humans feel safe when they believe they are in control of a situation, being able to explain feelings, thoughts, reasons, and causes of other people’s actions or our own creates a sense of security, whether intellectual or even physical depending on the situation

Hello- I’m looking for book suggestions around the historical, sociological, anthropological, cultural, and/or philosophical concepts of aging. I’m not looking for explanations of aging, per se, but how the concept of “older” or “senescence” came into being. Why do we have the cutoffs that we do (eg age 65 = retirement age, older adult)? Where did the idea of being “old” come from? How do different cultures approach the concept of aging and older adults?

I attended a university in Utah about 20 years ago and there was a sociology professor there who i often think about.

This was my freshman year of college and first time being away from home experiencing many new things in life. Sociology was one of those interesting firsts and meeting a professor like him was a unique experience.

The part that lives rent free and the reason I think about him often was because he had a couple of kids, a boy and a girl (if I remember right). The girl had a very normal name and the sons name was Arizona Fred! He would talk about how this was a social experiment of sorts woth his children.

Arizona Fred should be in his mid 20s now and im so curious what ever happened in his life, and what this professor found with this experiment. I just need to know if Arizona Fred turned out OK in life.

I dont remember the professors name and I've tried searching over the years with no luck. Im hoping the professor or his family may frequent this site. Or someone else may have taken a class from him and have some more context or stories to share.

Please help me sleep better at night by finding out what ever came from this experiment.

Now to fulfill my duty as another casualty of capitalism.

Note that I had some pretty rigorous sociology in high school, so I know some of the terms like identity, social cohesion, social inequality, institution, power, rationalisation, culture, etc etc very formally with long definitions, and I also know some things like five stages of group formation, levels of identification, problems with modern political cohesion, etc, and some of the big names and parts of their theories (Durkheim, Weber, Marx). That being said I would like a hard, interesting textbook that is purely theoretical, and also 'introductory' to what sociology really is, as my high school education doesn't count for too much compared to actual college learning. I can do a large amount of math quite well, if that's relevant in any way. Thanks to any and all who would consider responding, have a nice day! (;

Hey y’all. I’m looking for recommendations for books or articles on the sociology of climate change. Some environmental sociology more broadly could also be of interest if you have anything good.

A friend made me aware that computational sociolology is a thing and now i am curious to see what other branches are there that i don't know of.

Hi!

Maybe a lot had read the weekly topic: being this porn and so on

so i wanted to read a good book that study the history of porn, what social function have, why exist, etc.

If someone have an interesing read, please share it!