1. Define the Sociological Imagination in your own words. Then explain how this concept can help us understand school shootings. Discuss one sociological concept that can also help us uncover complexities related to this problem from How School Shootings Spread | The New Yorker

 Be sure to include specific reference to the New Yorker article by Malcom Gladwell 

2. How can our understanding of school shootings benefit from a more expansive and interdisciplinary perspective? 

3. Using The Sociological Perspective _ Sociology , explain two central concepts of the sociology discipline in your own words. 

4. One of the disciplinary assumptions of sociology is that no individual is without influence from environmental and social factors, such as the economy, culture, etc.

answer this question with only 

True Or False

see links below for attached readings to answer quiz questions 

On the evening of April 29th last year, in the southern Minnesota town ofWaseca, a woman was doing the dishes when she looked out her kitchen
window and saw a young man walking through her back yard. He was wearing a
backpack and carrying a fast-food bag and was headed in the direction of the
MiniMax Storage facility next to her house. Something about him didn’t seem right.
Why was he going through her yard instead of using the sidewalk? He walked
through puddles, not around them. He fiddled with the lock of Unit 129 as if he
were trying to break in. She called the police. A group of three officers arrived and
rolled up the unit’s door. The young man was standing in the center. He was slight
of build, with short-cropped brown hair and pale skin. Scattered around his feet was
an assortment of boxes and containers: motor oil, roof cement, several Styrofoam
coolers, a can of ammunition, a camouflage bag, and cardboard boxes labelled “red
iron oxide,” filled with a red powder. His name was John LaDue. He was seventeen
years old.

One of the officers started to pat LaDue down. According to the police report,
“LaDue immediately became defensive, stating that it is his storage unit and asked
what I was doing and pulling away.” The officers asked him to explain what he was
up to. LaDue told them to guess. Another of the officers, Tim Schroeder, said he
thought LaDue was making bombs. LaDue admitted that he was, but said that he
didn’t want to talk about it in the storage locker. The four went back to the Waseca
police station, and LaDue and Schroeder sat down together with a tape recorder
between them. “What’s going on today, John?” Schroeder asked. LaDue replied, “It’s
going to be hard for me to talk about.” The interview began at 7:49 P.M. It continued

Annals of Public SafetyOctober 19, 2015 Issue

Thresholds of Violence
How school shootings catch on.

By Malcolm Gladwell

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/annals-of-public-safety

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19

https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/malcolm-gladwell

for almost three hours.

He was making Molotov cocktails, LaDue said, but a deadlier variant of the
traditional kind, using motor oil and tar instead of gasoline. From there, he intended
to move on to bigger and more elaborate pressure-cooker bombs, of the sort used by
the Tsarnaev brothers at the Boston Marathon bombing. “There are far more things
out in that unit than meet the eye,” he told Schroeder, listing various kinds of
explosive powder, thousands of ball bearings, pipes for pipe bombs, fifteen pounds of
potassium perchlorate, nine pounds of aluminum powder, and “magnesium ribbon
and rust which I use to make thermite, which burns at five thousand degrees
Celsius.”

Schroeder asked him what his intentions were.

“I have a notebook under my bed that explains it,” LaDue replied.

Schroeder: “O.K. Can you talk to me about those intentions that are in the
notebook?”

LaDue: “O.K. Sometime before the end of the school year, my plan was to steal a
recycling bin from the school and take one of the pressure cookers I made and put it
in the hallway and blow it up during passing period time. . . . I would detonate when
people were fleeing, just like the Boston bombings, and blow them up too. Then my
plans were to enter and throw Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs and destroy
everyone and then when the SWAT comes I would destroy myself.”

In his bedroom, he had an SKS assault rifle with sixty rounds of ammunition, a
Beretta 9-mm. handgun, a gun safe with an additional firearm, and three ready-made
explosive devices. On the day of the attack, he would start with a .22-calibre rifle and
move on to a shotgun, in order to prove that high-capacity assault-style rifles were
unnecessary for an effective school attack.

Schroeder: “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

LaDue: “Yes, I have a sister. She’s one year older than me.”

O

Schroeder: “O.K. She goes to school too?”

LaDue: “Yes.”

Schroeder: “She’s a senior?”

LaDue: “She is.”

Schroeder: “O.K. So you would have done this stuff while she was at school as well?”

LaDue: “I forgot to mention a detail. Before that day, I was planning to dispose of
my family too.”

Schroeder: “Why would you dispose of your family? What, what have they done?”

LaDue: “They did nothing wrong. I just wanted as many victims as possible.”

n February 2, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington, a fourteen-year-old named
Barry Loukaitis walked into Frontier Middle School dressed in a black duster

and carrying two handguns, seventy-eight rounds of ammunition, and a hunting
rifle. He killed two students and wounded a third before shooting his algebra teacher
in the back. In the next two years, there were six more major incidents, in quick
succession: sixteen-year-old Evan Ramsey, in Bethel, Alaska; sixteen-year-old Luke
Woodham, in Pearl, Mississippi; fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal, in West
Paducah, Kentucky; thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson and eleven-year-old
Andrew Golden, in Jonesboro, Arkansas; fourteen-year-old Andrew Wurst, in
Edinboro, Pennsylvania; and fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel, in Springfield, Oregon. In
April of 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold launched their infamous attack on
Columbine High, in Littleton, Colorado, and from there the slaughter has
continued, through the thirty-two killed and seventeen wounded by Seung-Hui Cho
at Virginia Tech, in 2007; the twenty-six killed by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook
Elementary School, in 2012; and the nine killed by Christopher Harper-Mercer
earlier this month at Umpqua Community College, in Oregon. Since Sandy Hook,
there have been more than a hundred and forty school shootings in the United
States.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

School shootings are a modern phenomenon. There were scattered instances of
gunmen or bombers attacking schools in the years before Barry Loukaitis, but they
were lower profile. School shootings mostly involve young white men. And, not
surprisingly, given the ready availability of firearms in the United States, the
phenomenon is overwhelmingly American. But, beyond those facts, the great puzzle
is how little school shooters fit any kind of pattern.

Evan Ramsey, who walked into his high school with a 12-gauge shotgun and killed
two people, had a chaotic home life. His mother was an alcoholic who lived with a
series of violent men. In one two-year stretch, he lived in ten foster homes and was
both sexually and physically abused. When Evan was six, his father sent an ad to the
local newspaper which it declined to publish, so he packed two guns, chained the
door of the newspaper, set off smoke grenades, and held the publisher at gunpoint.

But Kip Kinkel, who shot his parents, then killed two others and wounded twenty-

five at his high school, had not been traumatized. He had a loving family. He was the
child of schoolteachers so beloved that seventeen hundred people came to their
memorial service. Kinkel was psychotic: he thought the Chinese were preparing to
attack the United States, that Disney had plans for world domination, and that the
government had placed a computer chip inside his head.

Meanwhile, the architect of the Columbine killings, Eric Harris, was a classic
psychopath. He was charming and manipulative. He was a habitual lawbreaker: he
stole, vandalized, bought guns illegally, set off homemade bombs, and at one point
hacked into his school’s computer system. He wrote “Ich bin Gott”—German for “I
am God”—in his school planner. His journals were filled with fantasies about rape
and mutilation: “I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can. I want
to gut someone with my hand, to tear a head off and rip out the heart and lungs
from the neck, to stab someone in the gut, shove it up to their heart.” A school
shooter, it appears, could be someone who had been brutally abused by the world or
someone who imagined that the world brutally abused him or someone who wanted
to brutally abuse the world himself.

The LaDue case does not resolve this puzzle. LaDue doesn’t hear voices. He isn’t
emotional or malicious or angry or vindictive. Schroeder asks him about violent
games, and he says he hasn’t been playing them much recently. Then they talk about
violent music, and LaDue says he’s been playing guitar for eight years and has little
patience for the “retarded” music of “bands like Bullet for My Valentine or Asking
Alexandria or some crap like that.” He likes Metallica: solid, normal, old-school
heavy metal. “I was not bullied at all,” LaDue tells Schroeder. “I don’t think I have
ever been bullied in my life. . . . I have good parents. I live in a good town.”

When the interview is concluded, the police drive over to see LaDue’s parents. They
live a few minutes away, in a tidy two-story stucco house on a corner lot. The
LaDues are frantic. It is 10:30 P.M., and their son is never out past nine on a school
night. His mother is trying to track him down on her laptop through his cell-phone
account. They are calling all the people he has most recently texted, trying to find
him. Then the police arrive with the news that their son has threatened to kill his

family and blow up Waseca High School—and the LaDues are forced to account for
a fact entirely outside their imagining. No, his son has never been diagnosed with
mental illness or depression, David LaDue, John’s father, tells the police. He isn’t
taking any medication. He’s never expressed a desire to hurt anyone. He spends a lot
of time in front of his computer looking at YouTube videos. He likes to experiment
with what his father calls his “interesting devices.” He wears a lot of black. Isn’t that
what teen-agers do? David LaDue is desperate to come up with something—
anything—to make sense of what he has just been told. “David told me that after his
son had stayed with his brother for a couple of months at the beginning of last
summer, he had returned proclaiming to be an atheist, stating that he no longer
believed in religion,” the police report says.

Then:

David LaDue also spoke of an

incident when Austin Walters and

John LaDue had gone deer

hunting. John had reportedly shot

a deer that had not died right away

and had to be “finished off.” David

LaDue stated that he heard that

Austin’s cell phone was used to

make a video of the deer that he

felt was inappropriate, although he

had never seen the video. David

LaDue showed me a photo on his

laptop of John LaDue leering,

holding a semi-automatic rifle next

to a deer that had been killed.

David LaDue pointed to the

picture stating that “this” was the

facial expression he was talking

about that he thought was

concerning.

It is the best he can do.

It was the best anyone could do that night. Waseca is a community of some ten
thousand people amid the cornfields of southern Minnesota: one high school, a
Walmart, a beautiful lake just outside town. Minneapolis is well over an hour away.
There was simply no room, in anyone’s cultural understanding, for the acts John
LaDue was describing. By the end, a kind of fatigue seemed to set in, and the
normal codes of Midwestern civility reasserted themselves. All that the interrogation
or confession or conversation—whatever it was—between Schroeder and LaDue
seems to have established is that we need a new way to make sense of the school-
shooting phenomenon.

Schroeder: “Until we can figure out, ah, what exactly is where we are all at, we’re just
going to take you up and, um, put you in a cell, or holding cell for the time being,
until we can get it figured out.”

LaDue: “O.K.”

Schroeder: “O.K.”

LaDue: “Hmm, hmm.”

Schroeder: “I’ll let you put your shoes on. Yah, I’ll hold on to your phone for
now. . . . All right. Before we, I’ll let you put your shoes on.”

LaDue: “I’m wearing contacts by the way. What should I do with them?”

Schroeder: “You can keep them in.”

LaDue: “O.K. . . . Are you going to handcuff me?”

Schroeder: “I am going to cuff ya.”

LaDue: [inaudible]

Schroeder: “I’m going to double pat you down again.”

I
Then, almost apologetically, he adds, “I know I already did once.”

n a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark
Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: “situations where outcomes do not seem

intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.” What explains a
person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or
what they think is right? Granovetter took riots as one of his main examples, because
a riot is a case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite
normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence.

Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might
be altered in the moment. An early theory was that a crowd cast a kind of
intoxicating spell over its participants. Then the argument shifted to the idea that
rioters might be rational actors: maybe at the moment a riot was beginning people
changed their beliefs. They saw what was at stake and recalculated their estimations
of the costs and benefits of taking part.

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes
of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each
of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social
process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those
around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the
number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them.
In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people
with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at
the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone
else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of
two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s
accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never
break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him
who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous
upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera
from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was

T

grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Granovetter was most taken by the situations in which people did things for social
reasons that went against everything they believed as individuals. “Most did not
think it ‘right’ to commit illegal acts or even particularly want to do so,” he wrote,
about the findings of a study of delinquent boys. “But group interaction was such
that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for
stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join,
once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.” You can’t just look at
an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.

His argument has a second implication. We misleadingly use the word “copycat” to
describe contagious behavior—implying that new participants in an epidemic act in
a manner identical to the source of their infection. But rioters are not homogeneous.
If a riot evolves as it spreads, starting with the hotheaded rock thrower and ending
with the upstanding citizen, then rioters are a profoundly heterogeneous group.

Finally, Granovetter’s model suggests that riots are sometimes more than
spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a
history. Granovetter thought that the threshold hypothesis could be used to describe
everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people
decide it’s time to leave a party. He was writing in 1978, long before teen-age boys
made a habit of wandering through their high schools with assault rifles. But what if
the way to explain the school-shooting epidemic is to go back and use the
Granovetterian model—to think of it as a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which
each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with
those who came before?

he first seven major shooting cases—Loukaitis, Ramsey, Woodham, Carneal,
Johnson and Golden, Wurst, and Kinkel—were disconnected and idiosyncratic.

Loukaitis was obsessed with Stephen King’s novel “Rage” (written under King’s
pseudonym Richard Bachman), about a high-school student who kills his algebra
teacher with a handgun. Kip Kinkel, on the morning of his attack, played Wagner’s

“Liebestod” aria over and over. Evan Ramsey’s father thought his son was under the
influence of the video game Doom. The parents of several of Michael Carneal’s
victims sued the makers and distributors of the movie “The Basketball Diaries.”

Then came Columbine. The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and
Klebold laid down the “cultural script” for the next generation of shooters. They had
a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote
lengthy manifestos. They recorded their “basement tapes.” Their motivations were
spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a
revolution.” Larkin looked at the twelve major school shootings in the United States
in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent
cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven
school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007, Larkin says six
were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the
same period, Larkin says all were Columbine-inspired.

Along the same lines, the sociologist Nathalie E. Paton has analyzed the online
videos created by post-Columbine shooters and found a recurring set of stylized
images: a moment where the killer points his gun at the camera, then at his own
temple, and then spreads his arms wide with a gun in each hand; the closeup; the
wave goodbye at the end. “School shooters explicitly name or represent each other,”
she writes. She mentions one who “refers to Cho as a brother-in-arms”; another who
“points out that his cultural tastes are like those of ‘Eric and Dylan’ ”; a third who
“uses images from the Columbine shooting surveillance camera and devotes several
videos to the Columbine killers.” And she notes, “This aspect underlines the fact
that the boys actively take part in associating themselves to a group.”

Larkin and Paton are describing the dynamics of Granovetter’s threshold model of
group behavior. Luke Woodham, the third in this progression, details in his journal
how he and a friend tortured his dog, Sparkle: “I will never forget the howl she
made. It sounded almost human. We laughed and hit her hard.” A low-threshold
participant like Woodham didn’t need anyone to model his act of violence for him:
his imagination was more than up to the task.

But compare him to a post-Columbine shooter like Darion Aguilar, the nineteen-
year-old who last year killed two people in a skate shop in a Maryland shopping mall
before killing himself. Aguilar wanted to be a chef. He had a passion for plant
biology. He was quiet, but not marginalized or bullied. “He was a good person. He
always believe[d] in inner peace,” a friend of his told the Washington Post. “He was
just a really funny guy.” In the months before the shooting, he went to a doctor,
complaining of hearing voices—but his voices were, according to police, “non-
specific, non-violent and really not directing him to do anything.” The kid who
wants to be a chef and hears “non-specific, non-violent” voices requires a finely
elaborated script in order to carry out his attack. That’s what Paton and Larkin
mean: the effect of Harris and Klebold’s example was to make it possible for people
with far higher thresholds—boys who would ordinarily never think of firing a
weapon at their classmates—to join in the riot. Aguilar dressed up like Eric Harris.
He used the same weapons as Harris. He wore a backpack like Harris’s. He hid in
the changing room of the store until 11:14 A.M.—the precise time when the
Columbine incident began—and then came out shooting. A few months later, Aaron
Ybarra walked onto the campus of Seattle Pacific University and shot three people,
one fatally. Afterward, he told police that he could never have done it without “the
guidance of, of Eric Harris and Seung-Hui Cho in my head. . . .Especially, Eric
Harris, he was a, oh, man he was a master of all shooters.”

Between Columbine and Aaron Ybarra, the riot changed: it became more and more
self-referential, more ritualized, more and more about identification with the school-
shooting tradition. Eric Harris wanted to start a revolution. Aguilar and Ybarra
wanted to join one. Harris saw himself as a hero. Aguilar and Ybarra were hero-
worshippers.

Now imagine that the riot takes a big step further along the progression—to
someone with an even higher threshold, for whom the group identification and
immersion in the culture of school shooting are even more dominant considerations.
That’s John LaDue. “There is one that you probably never heard of like back in 1927
and his name was Andrew Kehoe,” LaDue tells Schroeder. “He killed like forty-five
with, like, dynamite and stuff.” Ybarra was a student of Virginia Tech and

J

Columbine. LaDue is a scholar of the genre, who speaks of his influences the way a
budding filmmaker might talk about Fellini or Bergman. “The other one was
Charles Whitman. I don’t know if you knew who that was. He was who they called
the sniper at the Austin Texas University. He was an ex-marine. He got like sixteen,
quite impressive.”

LaDue had opinions. He didn’t like the “cowards” who would shoot themselves as
soon as the police showed up. He disapproved of Adam Lanza, because he shot
kindergartners at Sandy Hook instead of people his own age: “That’s just pathetic.
Have some dignity, damn it.” He didn’t like some “shaking schizophrenic dude you’d
look at in class and move away from.” He preferred a certain subtlety, “someone you’d
say, I never knew he would do something like that. Someone you would not suspect.”
One person fit the bill: “My number one idol is Eric Harris. . . . I think I just see
myself in him. Like he would be the kind of guy I’d want to be with. Like, if I knew
him, I just thought he was cool.”

ohn LaDue was charged with four counts of attempted murder, two counts of
damage to property, and six counts of possession of explosives. It did not take

long, however, for the case to run into difficulty. The first problem was that under
Minnesota law telling a police officer of your plans to kill someone does not rise to
the level of attempted murder, and the most serious of the charges against LaDue
were dismissed.

The second problem was more complicated. The prosecution saw someone who
wanted to be Eric Harris and plainly assumed that meant he must be like Eric
Harris, that there must be a dark heart below LaDue’s benign exterior. But the
lesson of the Granovetterian progression, of course, is that this isn’t necessarily true:
the longer a riot goes on, the less the people who join it resemble the people who
started it. As Granovetter writes, it is a mistake to assume “that if most members of a
group make the same behavior decision—to join a riot, for example—we can infer
from this that most ended up sharing the same norm or belief about the situation,
whether or not they did at the beginning.” And this June, at a hearing where the
results of LaDue’s psychiatric evaluation were presented, it became clear just how

heterogeneous the riot had become.

The day’s testimony began with the forensic psychologist Katheryn Cranbrook. She
had interviewed LaDue for two and a half hours. She said she had examined many
juveniles implicated in serious crimes, and they often had an escalating history of
aggression, theft, fighting at school, and other antisocial behaviors. LaDue did not.
He had, furthermore, been given the full battery of tests for someone in his position
—the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY), the youth version of
the Psychopathy Checklists (PCL), and the Risk Sophistication Treatment
Inventory (R.S.T.I.)—and the results didn’t raise any red flags. He wasn’t violent or
mentally ill. His problem was something far more benign. He was simply a little off.
“He has rather odd usage, somewhat overly formal language,” Cranbrook said. “He
appears to lack typical relational capacity for family members. . . .He indicates that
he would have completed the actions, but he doesn’t demonstrate any concern or
empathy for the impact that that could have had on others.” The conclusion of all
three of the psychologists who spoke at the hearing was that LaDue had a mild-to-
moderate case of autism: he had an autism-spectrum disorder (A.S.D.), or what used
to be called Asperger’s syndrome.

The revelation turned the case upside down. The fact that LaDue confessed to
Schroeder so readily made him sound cold-blooded. But it turns out that this is
typical of people on the autism spectrum in their encounters with police: their
literal-mindedness leads them to answer questions directly. LaDue was fascinated—
as many teen-age boys are—by guns and explosions. But he didn’t know the
acceptable way to express those obsessions. “John has a tendency to say sort of jarring
things without much ability to gauge their impact on people,” Mary Kenning,
another of the psychologists who examined him, said at the hearing. He spoke
without empathy when he discussed killing his family, which made him sound like a
psychopath. But the empathy deficits of the people on the autism spectrum—which
leaves them socially isolated and vulnerable to predation—are worlds apart from
those of the psychopath, whose deficits are put to use in the cause of manipulation
and exploitation.

Much of what is so disturbing about LaDue’s exchanges with Schroeder, in fact, is
simply his version of the quintessential A.S.D. symptom of “restricted range of
interests.” He’s obsessive. He insists on applying logic and analysis to things that
most of us know we aren’t supposed to be logical and analytical about. What should
he wear? The standard uniform for school shooters is a duster. But it didn’t make
sense to wear a duster to school, LaDue explained, “because that’s a bit suspicious.”
He’d store it in his locker. Where should the bombs go? Harris and Klebold had
chosen the cafeteria. But LaDue felt that was too obvious—and, logistically, placing
them in the hallway by the water fountains made more sense. When should he
attack? April made the best sense, “because that’s the month that all the really bad
tragedies happened like . . . Titanic, Columbine, Oklahoma City bombing, Boston
bombing.” And what went wrong at Columbine, anyway? It was supposed to be a
bomb attack. So why didn’t the devices planted by Harris and Klebold explode?
“They were trying to create a circuit which would ignite some gasoline to hit the
propane and cause a BLEVE—which is a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion . . .
which is basically the same thing as say a pipe bomb except with, like, gases,” LaDue
patiently explained to Schroeder, before launching into a long technical digression
on the relative merits of hydrazine, ammonium perchlorate, Cheddite, nitroglycerin,
and flash powder. He was even more scathing about the Boston bombers’ use of
pressure-cooker bombs. He thought they made a “crappy design of it.” They used
nails and black powder from fireworks. It would have made far more sense to use
flash powder and ball bearings, LaDue thought, because “spherical shrapnel” are
“superior to nails in damage.” LaDue tells Schroeder that he has two YouTube
channels devoted to his work. But anyone who watches the assembled videos
expecting to see something macabre will be disappointed. They are home movies of
LaDue testing whether tiny fuses will ignite when placed inside a plastic water
bottle, or whether he can successfully blow a quarter-size hole in the side of a plastic
playground slide. In the world before Columbine, people like LaDue played with
chemistry sets in their basements and dreamed of being astronauts.

The idea that people with autism-spectrum disorders can stumble into patterns of
serious criminality has a name: counterfeit deviance. It has long been an issue in
cases involving A.S.D. teen-agers and child pornography. “They are intellectually

intact people, with good computer skills but extraordinary brain-based naïveté,
acting in social isolation, compulsively pursuing interests which often unknowingly
take them into forbidden territory,” the lawyer Mark J. Mahoney writes in a recent
paper. They come upon an online image that appeals to their immature sexuality and
don’t understand its social and legal implications. The image might be “marked” for
the rest of us, because the child is in some kind of distress. But those kinds of
emotional signals are precisely what A.S.D. teen-agers struggle to understand. They
start to obsessively collect similar images, not out of some twisted sexual urge but
simply because that’s the way their curiosity is configured. What gets these young
adults into trouble with the law “is not abnormal sexual desires,” Mahoney writes,
“but their tendency to express or pursue normal interests in a manner outside social
conventions.”

Was John LaDue’s deviance counterfeit? He told Cranbrook that he would have
gone ahead with his plan had he not been stopped, and she believed him. The
second of the psychologists to examine him, James Gilbertson, also felt that LaDue’s
threat was real: his obsessive preparation had created a powerful momentum toward
action. But at every turn his reluctance and ambivalence was apparent: he was the
ninety-ninth person in, warily eying the rock. At one point, Schroeder asked him
why, if April—as the month of Titanic, Waco, Oklahoma City, and Columbine—
was so critical symbolically, he hadn’t attacked the school already. It was April 29th,
after all. LaDue, who had been a model of lucidity throughout, was suddenly
flustered. “Um, I wanted to do it around April, but I decided not to do it April 19th
because I think, no, April 19th wouldn’t work, because that was a Saturday, I think
April 14th was it, because, um, I figured I didn’t want to do it April 18th because I
figured, because 4/20 was coming up”—4/20 being national marijuana day—“and I
figured maybe they would have some dogs there, and find the stuff I had planted in
the hallway. . . .But that’s not the case now, cause now it’s May and I just wanted to
get it done before school was out.”

He had planned every aspect of the attack meticulously, except for the part where he
actually launches the attack. He was uncomfortable. When Schroeder pressed him
further, he came up with more excuses. “I had a cooker to buy,” he said, meaning he

T

had yet to purchase the central component of his bombs. And then: “I had to steal a
shotgun too.” He had been stalling, prolonging the planning, delaying the act. Then
the two of them started talking about ammunition, and LaDue came up with a third
excuse: he had bought twenty clips, but “they didn’t fit on the bolt because they were
too wide and they had a feeding problem going in there.”

The low-threshold shooters were in the grip of powerful grievances. But LaDue
doesn’t seem to have any real grievances. In his notebooks, instead, he seems to spend
a good deal of effort trying to manufacture them from scratch. School-shooter
protocol called for him to kill his parents. But he likes his parents. “He sees them as
good people, loving him, caring about him,” Gilbertson said. “But he has to take
their life, according to [his] manifesto, to prove that he’s up to the task, to prove he
has no human feelings anymore, that he’s scrubbed out.” After he set off a minor
explosion at a local playground, he wrote a letter to the police. “I guess you guys
never found it,” he said of the letter. “Did you? I put it in someone’s mailbox and told
them to give it to you guys, but they never did.” He seems well aware that his
obsession has put him on a dangerous course. “O.K, um, first, I’d like a check from a
psychiatrist or something,” he says at one point. And then again: “I just want to find
out what’s wrong with me actually”; “I more just want a psychiatric test and that’s
really it, though”; “I wanted to ask [for a psychologist] many times, but, obviously, I
didn’t want my parents knowing about it, because I wanted to keep it under the
radar.” When the three policemen showed up at his storage locker, it must have been
a relief. “I figured you guys would be looking for me,” he later told police.

he John LaDue case took a final turn last month. The hearing was at the
Waseca County Courthouse, a forbidding Gothic building on the main

downtown strip. LaDue, dressed in an orange jumpsuit with “Waseca County
Prison” stencilled on the back, was led by two marshals. He had spent the previous
seventeen months in a few different juvenile facilities before being transferred, in
July, to the local prison. His hair was longer. He wore thick black-framed glasses. He
didn’t look at any of the spectators who had come to the hearing. The prosecutor and
LaDue’s attorney announced that they had reached a new plea agreement. LaDue
would plead guilty to explosives charges in exchange for an extended course of

psychiatric treatment and five to ten years of probation. The judge walked him
through the particulars of the plea deal, and he answered every question in a deep,
oddly adult voice. He was respectful and polite, except when the prosecutor asked
him if he understood the difference between an incendiary device and an explosive
device. An explosive device, she added, as if she were talking to a child, was
something that could “go boom.” When he answered (“Yep”), a brief flare of
irritation entered his voice: Are you kidding me?

After the hearing, David LaDue stood on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse
and answered questions. He is shorter and stockier than his son, forceful and direct.
He said that in order to meet with John the previous evening—and discuss the plea
deal—he had to work two sixteen-hour shifts in succession. He was exhausted. He
was there, he said, “because I love him, I can’t let go and walk away and forget about
it and put it out of my mind.” He wanted to remind the world that his son was
human. “He had love,” LaDue said. “He liked affection like anybody else. I saw the
expression on his face when he talked to his sister. I saw things in him that he would,
certainly at that time, would have denied.” He talked about how difficult it was for
men—and for teen-age boys in particular—to admit to vulnerability. “You know, he
graduated at the top from Prairie Lake,” he continued, proudly, referring to the
juvenile-detention facility where his son had finished his final year of high school.
“He got an A in calculus. We were mailed his diploma. . . . There’s no way I could
have done that.”

In the day of Eric Harris, we could try to console ourselves with the thought that
there was nothing we could do, that no law or intervention or restrictions on guns
could make a difference in the face of someone so evil. But the riot has now engulfed
the boys who were once content to play with chemistry sets in the basement. The
problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who
are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer
need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts. ♦

An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that Evan Ramsey killed his
mother. It also misstated Kehoe’s first name.

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Sociology v1.0.1 Steven E. Barkan Citation details

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1.1 The Sociological Perspective

Learning Objectives

1. Define the sociological perspective.

2. Provide examples of how Americans may not be as “free” as they think.

3. Explain what is meant by considering individuals as “social beings.”

Most Americans probably agree that we enjoy a great amount of freedom. And yet perhaps we have

less freedom than we think. Although we have the right to choose how to believe and act, many of

our choices are affected by our society, culture, and social institutions in ways we do not even

realize. Perhaps we are not as distinctively individualistic as we might like to think.

The following mental exercise should serve to illustrate this point. Your author has never met the

readers of this book, and yet he already knows much about them and can even predict their futures.

For example, about 85% of this book’s (heterosexual) readers will one day get married. This

prediction will not always come true, but for every 100 readers, it will be correct about 85 times and

wrong about 15 times. Because the author knows nothing about the readers other than that they live

in the United States (and this might not be true for every reader of this Flat World Knowledge

book), the accuracy of this prediction is remarkable.

The author can also predict the kind of person any one heterosexual reader will marry. If the reader

is a woman, she will marry a man of her race who is somewhat older and taller and who is from her

social class. If the reader is a man, he will marry a woman of his race who is somewhat younger and

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shorter and who is from his social class. A reader will even marry someone who is similar in

appearance. A reader who is good-looking will marry someone who is also good-looking; a reader

with more ordinary looks will marry someone who also fits that description; and a reader who is

somewhere between good-looking and ordinary-looking will marry someone who also falls in the

middle of the spectrum.

Naturally, these predictions will prove wrong for some readers. However, when one takes into

account all the attributes listed (race, height, age, social class, appearance), the predictions will be

right much more often than they are wrong, because people in the United States do in fact tend to

choose mates fitting these general descriptions (Arum, Roksa, & Budig, 2008; Takeuchi, 2006).

If most people will marry the type of person who has just been predicted for them, this may mean

that, practically speaking, one’s choice of spouse is restricted—much more than we might like to

admit—by social class, race, age, height, appearance, and other traits. If so, the choice of a mate is

not as free as we might like to think it is.

For another example, take the right to vote. The secret ballot is one of the most cherished principles

of American democracy. We vote in secret so that our choice of a candidate is made freely and

without fear of punishment. That is all true, but it is also possible to predict the candidate for whom

any one individual will vote if enough is known about the individual. Again, our choice (in this case,

our choice of a candidate) is affected by many aspects of our social backgrounds and, in this sense,

is not made as freely as we might think.

To illustrate this point, consider the 2008 presidential election between Democrat Barack Obama

and Republican John McCain. Suppose a room is filled with 100 randomly selected voters from that

election. Nothing is known about them except that they were between 18 and 24 years of age when

they voted. Because exit poll data found that Obama won 66% of the vote from people in this age

group (http://abcnews.go.com/PollingUnit/ExitPolls), a prediction that each of these 100

individuals voted for Obama would be correct about 66 times and incorrect only 34 times. Someone

betting $1 on each prediction would come out $32 ahead ($66 – $34 = $32), even though the only

thing known about the people in the room is their age.

Now let’s suppose we have a room filled with

100 randomly selected white men from

Wyoming who voted in 2008. We know only

three things about them: their race, gender, and

state of residence. Because exit poll data found

[1]

Figure 1.1
Young people were especially likely to vote
for Barack Obama in 2008, while white men
tended, especially in Wyoming and several
other states, to vote for John McCain. These

that 67% of white men in Wyoming voted for

McCain, a prediction can be made with fairly

good accuracy that these 100 men tended to

have voted for McCain. Someone betting $1 that

each man in the room voted for McCain would

be right about 67 times and wrong only 33 times

and would come out $34 ahead ($67 – $33 =

$34). Even though young people in the United

States and white men from Wyoming had every

right and freedom under our democracy to vote

for whomever they wanted in 2008, they still

tended to vote for a particular candidate

because of the influence of their age (in the case

of the young people) or of their gender, race,

and state of residence (white men from Wyoming).

Yes, Americans have freedom, but our freedom to think and act is constrained at least to some

degree by society’s standards and expectations and by the many aspects of our social

backgrounds.

This is true for the kinds of important beliefs and behaviors just discussed, and it is also true for

less important examples. For instance, think back to the last class you attended. How many of the

women wore evening gowns? How many of the men wore skirts? Students are “allowed” to dress

any way they want in most colleges and universities (as long as they do not go to class naked), but

notice how few students, if any, dress in the way just mentioned. They do not dress that way

because of the strange looks and even negative reactions they would receive.

Think back to the last time you rode in an elevator. Why did you not face the back? Why did you not

sit on the floor? Why did you not start singing? Children can do these things and “get away with it,”

because they look cute doing so, but adults risk looking odd. Because of that, even though we are

“allowed” to act strangely in an elevator, we do not.

The basic point is that society shapes our attitudes and behavior even if it does not determine them

altogether. We still have freedom, but that freedom is limited by society’s expectations. Moreover,

our views and behavior depend to some degree on our social location in society—our gender, race,

social class, religion, and so forth. Thus society as a whole and also our own social backgrounds

affect our attitudes and behaviors. Our social backgrounds also affect one other important part of

patterns illustrate the influence of our social
backgrounds on many aspects of our lives.

Source: Obama photo courtesy of the Obama-Biden
Transition Project, http://change.gov/about/photo;
McCain photo courtesy of the United States Congress, h
ttp://www.gpoaccess.gov/pictorial/111th/states/az.pd
f.

our lives, and that is our life chances “—our chances (whether we have a good chance or little
chance) of being healthy, wealthy, and well educated and, more generally, of living a good, happy

life.

The influence of our social environment ” in all of these respects is the fundamental
understanding that sociology “—the scientific study of social behavior and social institutions—
aims to present. At the heart of sociology is the sociological perspective “, the view that our
social backgrounds influence our attitudes, behavior, and life chances. In this regard, we are not

just individuals but rather social beings deeply enmeshed in society. Although we all differ from one

another in many respects, we share with many other people basic aspects of our social backgrounds,

perhaps especially gender, race and ethnicity, and social class. These shared qualities make us more

similar to each other than we would otherwise be.

Does society ” totally determine our beliefs, behavior, and life chances? No. Individual differences
still matter, and disciplines such as psychology are certainly needed for the most complete

understanding of human action and beliefs. But if individual differences matter, so do society and

the social backgrounds from which we come. Even the most individual attitudes and behaviors,

such as the marriage and voting decisions discussed earlier, are influenced to some degree by our

social backgrounds and, more generally, by the society to which we belong.

In this regard, consider what is perhaps the most personal decision one could make: the decision to

take one’s own life. What could be more personal and individualistic than this fatal decision? When

individuals commit suicide, we usually assume that they were very unhappy, even depressed. They

may have been troubled by a crumbling romantic relationship, bleak job prospects, incurable

illness, or chronic pain. But not all people in these circumstances commit suicide; in fact, few do.

Perhaps one’s chances of committing suicide depend at least in part on various aspects of the

person’s social background.

To illustrate this point, consider suicide rates—the percentage of a

particular group of people who commit suicide, usually taken as, say,

eight suicides for every 100,000 people in that group. Different groups

have different suicide rates. As just one example, men are more likely

than women to commit suicide (Figure 1.3). Why is this? Are men

more depressed than women? No, the best evidence indicates that

women are more depressed than men (Klein, Corwin, & Ceballos,

2006) and that women try to commit suicide more often than men

Figure 1.2
Although suicide is
popularly considered
to be a very
individualistic act, it
is also true that
individuals’ likelihood
of committing suicide
depends at least

[2]

[3]

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2008). If so, there

must be something about being a man that makes it more likely that

males’ suicide attempts will result in death. One of these “somethings”

is that males are more likely than females to try to commit suicide with

a firearm, a far more lethal method than, say, taking an overdose of

sleeping pills (Miller & Hemenway, 2008). If this is true, then it is

fair to say that gender influences our chances of committing suicide,

even if suicide is perhaps the most personal of all acts.

In the United States, suicide rates are generally higher west of the Mississippi River than east of it

(Figure 1.4). Is that because people out west are more depressed than those back east? No, there is

no evidence of this. Perhaps there is something else about the western states that helps lead to

higher suicide rates. For example, many of these states are sparsely populated compared to their

eastern counterparts, with people in the western states living relatively far from one another.

Because we know that social support networks help people deal with personal problems and deter

possible suicides (Stack, 2000), perhaps these networks are weaker in the western states,

helping lead to higher suicide rates. Then too, membership in organized religion is lower out west

than back east (Finke & Stark, 2005). If religious beliefs and the social support networks we

experience from attending religious services both help us deal with personal problems, perhaps

suicide rates are higher out west in part because religious belief is weaker. A depressed person out

west thus is, all other things being equal, at least a little more likely than a depressed person back

east to commit suicide.

partly on various
aspects of their social
backgrounds.

© Thinkstock

[3]

[4]

Figure 1.3 Gender and Suicide Rate, 2006

Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau, 2010.

[5]

[6]

Key Takeaways

According to the sociological perspective, social backgrounds influence attitudes,
behavior,

and life chances.

Social backgrounds influence but do not totally determine attitudes and behavior.

Americans may be less “free” in their thoughts and behavior than they normally think
they are.

For Your Review

1. Do you think that society constrains our thoughts and behaviors as the text argues? Why
or why not?

2. Describe how one aspect of your own social background has affected an important
attitude you hold, a behavior in which you have engaged, or your ability to do well in life
(life chances).

Figure 1.4 U.S. Suicide Rates, 2000–2006 (Number of Suicides per 100,000 Population)

Source: Adapted from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control,
Division of Violence Prevention. (2009). National suicide statistics at a glance. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/violen
ceprevention/suicide/statistics/suicide_map.html.

‹ Previous Next ›

Footnotes

[1] Arum, R., Josipa R., & Budig, M. J. (2008). The romance of college attendance: Higher education stratification
and mate selection. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 26, 107–121; Alexander, T. S. (2006). On
the matching phenomenon in courtship: A probability matching theory of mate selection. Marriage & Family
Review, 40, 25–51. ↑

[2] Klein, L. C., Corwin, E. J., & Ceballos, R. M. (2006). The social costs of stress: How sex differences in stress
responses can lead to social stress vulnerability and depression in women. In C. L. M. Keyes & S. H.
Goodman (Eds.), Women and depression: A handbook for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences
(pp. 199–218). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. ↑

[3] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2008). Suicide: Facts at a glance. Retrieved from
http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/ Suicide-DataSheet-a ↑

[4] Miller, M., & Hemenway. D. (2008). Guns and suicide in the United States. New England Journal of Medicine,
359, 989–991. ↑

[5] Stack, S. (2000). Sociological research into suicide. In D. Lester (Ed.), Suicide prevention: Resources for the
millennium (pp. 17–30). New York, NY: Routledge. ↑

[6] Finke, R., & Stark, S. (2005). The churching of America: Winners and losers in our religious economy. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ↑

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1.2 Sociology as a Social Science

Learning Objectives

1. Explain what is meant by the sociological imagination.

2. State the difference between the approach of blaming the system and that of blaming the
victim.

3. Describe what is meant by public sociology, and show how it relates to the early history
of sociology in the United States.

Notice that we have been talking in generalizations. For example, the statement that men are more

likely than women to commit suicide does not mean that every man commits suicide and no woman

commits suicide. It means only that men have a higher suicide rate, even though most men, of

course, do not commit suicide. Similarly, the statement that young people were more likely to vote

for Obama than for McCain in 2008 does not mean that all young people voted for Obama; it means

only that they were more likely than not to do so.

A generalization ! in sociology is a general statement regarding a trend between various
dimensions of our lives: gender and suicide rate, race and voting choice, and so forth. Many people

will not fit the pattern of such a generalization, because people are shaped but not totally

determined by their social environment. That is both the fascination and the frustration of

sociology. Sociology is fascinating because no matter how much sociologists are able to predict

people’s behavior, attitudes, and life chances, many people will not fit the predictions. But sociology

is frustrating for the same reason. Because people can never be totally explained by their social

Aa” 1.2 Sociology as a Social Science Help Login Sign Up

environment, sociologists can never completely understand the sources of their behavior, attitudes,

and life chances.

In this sense, sociology as a social science is very different from a discipline such as physics, in

which known laws ! exist for which no exceptions are possible. For example, we call the law of
gravity a law because it describes a physical force that exists on the earth at all times and in all

places and that always has the same result. If you were to pick up the book you are now reading or

the computer or other device on which you are reading or listening to it and then let go, the object

you were holding would obviously fall to the ground. If you did this a second time, it would fall a

second time. If you did this a billion times, it would fall a billion times. In fact, if there were even

one time out of a billion that your book or electronic device did not fall down, our understanding of

the physical world would be totally revolutionized, the earth could be in danger, and you could go

on television and make a lot of money.

For better or worse, people and social institutions—the subject matter of sociology—do not always

follow our predictions. They are not like that book or electronic device that keeps falling down.

People have their own minds, and social institutions their own reality, that often defy any effort to

explain. Sociology can help us understand the social forces that affect our behavior, beliefs, and life

chances, but it can only go so far. That limitation conceded, sociological understanding can still go

fairly far toward such an understanding, and it can help us comprehend who we are and what we

are by helping us first understand the profound yet often subtle influence of our social backgrounds

on so many things about us.

Although sociology as a discipline is very

different from physics, it is not as different as

one might think from this and the other “hard”

sciences. Like these disciplines, sociology as a

social science relies heavily on systematic

research that follows the standard rules of the

scientific method. We return to these rules and

the nature of sociological research later in this

chapter. Suffice it to say here that careful

research is essential for a sociological

understanding of people, social institutions, and

society.

Figure 1.5
People’s attitudes, behavior, and life chances
are influenced but not totally determined by
many aspects of their social environment.

At this point a reader might be saying, “I

already know a lot about people. I could have

told you that young people voted for Obama. I

already had heard that men have a higher

suicide rate than women. Maybe our social

backgrounds do influence us in ways I had not

realized, but what beyond that does sociology

have to tell me?”

Students often feel this way because sociology

deals with matters already familiar to them.

Just about everyone has grown up in a family,

so we all know something about it. We read a lot

in the media about topics like divorce and

health care, so we all already know something

about these, too. All this leads some students to

wonder if they will learn anything in their introduction to sociology course that they do not already

know.

How Do We Know What We Think We Know?
Let’s consider this issue a moment: how do we know what we think we know? Our usual knowledge

and understanding of social reality come from at least five sources: (a) personal experience; (b)

common sense; (c) the media (including the Internet); (d) “expert authorities,” such as teachers,

parents, and government officials; and (e) tradition. These are all important sources of our

understanding of how the world “works,” but at the same time their value can often be very limited.

Let’s look at them separately by starting with personal experience. Although personal experiences

are very important, not everyone has the same personal experience. This obvious fact casts some

doubt on the degree to which our personal experiences can help us understand everything there is

to know about a topic and the degree to which we can draw conclusions from our personal

experiences that necessarily apply to other people. For example, say you grew up in Maine or

Vermont, where more than 98% of the population is white. If you relied on your personal

experience to calculate how many people of color live in the country, you would conclude that

almost everyone in the United States is also white, which obviously is not true. As another example,

say you grew up in a family where your parents had the proverbial perfect marriage, as they loved

© Thinkstock

each other deeply and rarely argued. If you relied on your personal experience to understand the

typical American marriage, you would conclude that most marriages were as good as your parents’

marriage, which, unfortunately, also is not true. Many other examples could be cited here, but the

basic point should be clear: although personal experience is better than nothing, it often offers only

a very limited understanding of social reality other than our own.

If personal experience does not help that much when it comes to making predictions, what about

common sense? Although common sense can be very helpful, it can also contradict itself. For

example, which makes more sense, haste makes waste or he or she who hesitates is lost? How

about birds of a feather flock together versus opposites attract? Or two heads are better than one

versus too many cooks spoil the broth? Each of these common sayings makes sense, but if sayings

that are opposite of each other both make sense, where does the truth lie? Can common sense

always be counted on to help us understand social life? Slightly more than five centuries ago,

everyone “knew” the earth was flat—it was just common sense that it had to be that way. Slightly

more than a century ago, some of the leading physicians in the United States believed that women

should not go to college because the stress of higher education would disrupt their menstrual cycles

(Ehrenreich & English, 1979). If that bit of common sense(lessness) were still with us, many of

the women reading this book would not be in college.

Still, perhaps there are some things that make so much sense they just have to be true; if sociology

then tells us that they are true, what have we learned? Here is an example of such an argument. We

all know that older people—those 65 or older—have many more problems than younger people.

First, their health is generally worse. Second, physical infirmities make it difficult for many elders

to walk or otherwise move around. Third, many have seen their spouses and close friends pass away

and thus live lonelier lives than younger people. Finally, many are on fixed incomes and face

financial difficulties. All of these problems indicate that older people should be less happy than

younger people. If a sociologist did some research and then reported that older people are indeed

less happy than younger people, what have we learned? The sociologist only confirmed the obvious.

The trouble with this confirmation of the obvious is that the “obvious” turns out not to be true after

all. In the 2008 General Social Survey, which was given to a national random sample of Americans,

respondents were asked, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you

say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Respondents aged 65 or older were

actually slightly more likely than those younger than 65 to say they were very happy! About 40% of

older respondents reported feeling this way, compared with only 30% of younger respondents (see

[1]

Figure 1.6). What we all “knew” was obvious from common sense turns out not to have been so

obvious after all.

If personal experience and common sense do not always help that much, how about the media? We

learn a lot about current events and social and political issues from the Internet, television news,

newspapers and magazines, and other media sources. It is certainly important to keep up with the

news, but media coverage may oversimplify complex topics or even distort what the best evidence

from systematic research seems to be telling us. A good example here is crime. Many studies show

that the media sensationalize crime and suggest there is much more violent crime than there really

is. For example, in the early 1990s, the evening newscasts on the major networks increased their

coverage of murder and other violent crimes, painting a picture of a nation where crime was

growing rapidly. The reality was very different, however, as crime was actually declining. The view

that crime was growing was thus a myth generated by the media (Kurtz, 1997).

Expert authorities, such as teachers, parents, and government officials, are a fourth source that

influences our understanding of social reality. We learn much from our teachers and parents and

perhaps from government officials, but, for better or worse, not all of what we learn from these

sources about social reality is completely accurate. Teachers and parents do not always have the

latest research evidence at their fingertips, and various biases may color their interpretation of any

evidence with which they are familiar. As many examples from U.S. history illustrate, government

officials may simplify or even falsify the facts. We should perhaps always listen to our teachers and

parents and maybe even to government officials, but that does not always mean they give us a true,

complete picture of social reality.

Figure 1.6 Age and Happiness

Source: Data from General Social Survey, 2008.

[2]

A final source that influences our understanding

of social reality is tradition, or long-standing

ways of thinking about the workings of society.

Tradition is generally valuable, because a

society should always be aware of its roots.

However, traditional ways of thinking about

social reality often turn out to be inaccurate and

incomplete. For example, traditional ways of

thinking in the United States once assumed that

women and people of color were biologically

and culturally inferior to men and whites.

Although some Americans continue to hold

these beliefs, as we shall see in later chapters,

these traditional assumptions have given way to

more egalitarian assumptions. As we shall also

see in later chapters, most sociologists certainly

do not believe that women and people of color

are biologically and culturally inferior.

If we cannot always trust personal experience,

common sense, the media, expert authorities, and tradition to help us understand social reality,

then the importance of systematic research gathered by sociology and the other social sciences

becomes apparent. Although sociology sometimes does confirm the obvious, often it also confirms

the nonobvious and even challenges conventional understandings of how society works and of

controversial social issues. This emphasis is referred to as the debunking motif, to which we now

turn.

The Debunking Motif
As Peter L. Berger (1963, pp. 23–24) notes in his classic book Invitation to Sociology, “The first

wisdom of sociology is this—things are not what they seem.” Social reality, he says, has “many

layers of meaning,” and a goal of sociology is to help us discover these multiple meanings. He

continues, “People who like to avoid shocking discoveries, who prefer to believe that society is just

what they were taught in Sunday School…should stay away from sociology.”

This is because sociology helps us see through conventional understandings of how society works.

Figure 1.7
The news media often oversimplify complex
topics and in other respects provide a
misleading picture of social reality. As one
example, news coverage sensationalizes
violent crime and thus suggests that such
crime is more common than it actually is.

© Thinkstock
[3]

Berger refers to this theme of sociology as the debunking motif !. By “looking for levels of reality
other than those given in the official interpretations of society” (p. 38), Berger says, sociology

looks beyond on-the-surface understandings of social reality and helps us recognize the value of

alternative understandings. In this manner, sociology often challenges conventional

understandings about social reality and social institutions.

For example, suppose two people meet at a college mixer, or dance. They are interested in getting to

know each other. What would be an on-the-surface understanding and description of their

interaction over the next few minutes? What do they say? If they are like a typical couple who just

met, they will ask questions like, What’s your name? Where are you from? What dorm do you live

in? What’s your major? Now, such a description of their interaction is OK as far as it goes, but what

is really going on here? Does either of the two people really care that much about the other person’s

answers to these questions? Isn’t each one more concerned about how the other person is

responding, both verbally and nonverbally, during this brief interaction? Is the other person paying

attention and even smiling? Isn’t this kind of understanding a more complete analysis of these few

minutes of interaction than an understanding based solely on the answers to questions like, What’s

your major? For the most complete understanding of this brief encounter, then, we must look

beyond the rather superficial things the two people are telling each other to uncover the true

meaning of what is going on.

As another example, consider the power structure in a city or state. To know who has the power to

make decisions, we would probably consult a city or state charter or constitution that spells out the

powers of the branches of government. This written document would indicate who makes decisions

and has power, but what would it not talk about? To put it another way, who or what else has power

to influence the decisions elected officials make? Big corporations? Labor unions? The media?

Lobbying groups representing all sorts of interests? The city or state charter or constitution may

indicate who has the power to make decisions, but this understanding would be limited unless one

looks beyond these written documents to get a deeper, more complete understanding of how power

really operates in the setting being studied.

Social Structure and the Sociological Imagination
One way sociology achieves a more complete understandng of social reality is through its focus on

the importance of the social forces affecting our behavior, attitudes, and life chances. This focus

involves an emphasis on social structure !, the social patterns through which a society is
organized. Social structure can be both horizontal or vertical. Horizontal social structure !

[4]

refers to the social relationships and the social and physical characteristics of communities to which

individuals belong. Some people belong to many networks of social relationships, including groups

like the PTA and the Boy or Girl Scouts, while other people have fewer such networks. Some people

grew up on streets where the houses were crowded together, while other people grew up in areas

where the homes were much farther apart. These are examples of the sorts of factors constituting

the horizontal social structure that forms such an important part of our social environment and

backgrounds.

The other dimension of social structure is vertical. Vertical social structure !, more commonly
called social inequality !, refers to ways in which a society or group ranks people in a hierarchy,
with some more “equal” than others. In the United States and most other industrial societies, such

things as wealth, power, race and ethnicity, and gender help determine one’s social ranking, or

position, in the vertical social structure. Some people are at the top of society, while many more are

in the middle or at the bottom. People’s positions in society’s hierarchy in turn often have profound

consequences for their attitudes, behaviors, and life chances, both for themselves and for their

children.

In recognizing the importance of social structure, sociology stresses that individual problems are

often rooted in problems stemming from the horizontal and vertical social structures of society.

This key insight informed C. Wright Mills’s (1959) classic distinction between personal
troubles ! and public issues !. Personal troubles refer to a problem affecting individuals that
the affected individual, as well as other members of society, typically blame on the individual’s own

failings. Examples include such different problems as eating disorders, divorce, and

unemployment. Public issues, whose source lies in the social structure and culture of a society, refer

to a social problem affecting many individuals. Thus problems in society help account for problems

that individuals experience. Mills, feeling that many problems ordinarily considered private

troubles are best understood as public issues, coined the term sociological imagination ! to
refer to the ability to appreciate the structural basis for individual problems.

To illustrate Mills’s viewpoint, let’s use our sociological imaginations to understand some important

contemporary social problems. We will start with unemployment, which Mills himself discussed. If

only a few people were unemployed, Mills wrote, we could reasonably explain their unemployment

by saying they were lazy, lacked good work habits, and so forth. If so, their unemployment would be

their own personal trouble. But when millions of people are out of work, unemployment is best

understood as a public issue because, as Mills (1959, p. 9) put it, “the very structure of

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opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible

solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not

merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.” The growing unemployment

rate stemming from the severe economic downturn that began in 2008 provides a telling example

of the point Mills was making. Millions of people lost their jobs through no fault of their own. While

some individuals are undoubtedly unemployed because they are lazy or lack good work habits, a

more structural explanation focusing on lack of opportunity is needed to explain why so many

people were out of work as this book went to press. If so, unemployment is best understood as a

public issue rather than a personal trouble.

Another contemporary problem is crime, which we explore further in Chapter 5 “Deviance, Crime,

and Social Control”. If crime were only a personal trouble, then we could blame crime on the moral

failings of individuals, and many explanations of crime do precisely this. But such an approach

ignores the fact that crime is a public issue, as structural factors such as inequality and the physical

characteristics of communities contribute to high crime rates among certain groups in American

society. As an illustration, consider identical twins separated at birth. One twin grows up in a

wealthy suburb or rural area, while the other twin grows up in a blighted neighborhood in a poor,

urban area. Twenty years later, which twin will be more likely to have a criminal record? You

probably answered the twin growing up in the poor, run-down urban neighborhood. If so, you

recognize that there is something about growing up in that type of neighborhood that increases the

chances of a person becoming prone to crime. That “something” is the structural factors just

mentioned. Criminal behavior is a public issue, not just a personal trouble.

A final problem we will consider for now is

eating disorders. We usually consider a person’s

eating disorder to be a personal trouble that

stems from a lack of control, low self-esteem, or

other personal problem. This explanation may

be OK as far as it goes, but it does not help us

understand why so many people have the

personal problems that lead to eating disorders.

Perhaps more important, this belief also

neglects the larger social and cultural forces that

help explain such disorders. For example, most

Americans with eating disorders are women,

Figure 1.8
Although eating disorders often stem from
personal problems, they also may reflect a
cultural emphasis for women to have
slender bodies.

not men. This gender difference forces us to ask

what it is about being a woman in American

society that makes eating disorders so much more common. To begin to answer this question, we

need to look to the standard of beauty for women that emphasizes a slender body (Whitehead &

Kurz, 2008). If this cultural standard did not exist, far fewer American women would suffer from

eating disorders than do now. Even if every girl and woman with an eating disorder were cured,

others would take their places unless we could somehow change the cultural standard of female

slenderness. To the extent this explanation makes sense, eating disorders are best understood as a

public issue, not just as a personal trouble.

Picking up on Mills’s argument, William Ryan (1976) pointed out that Americans typically blame

the victim when they think about the reasons for social problems such as poverty, unemployment,

and crime. They feel that these problems stem from personal failings of the people suffering them,

not from structural problems in the larger society. Using Mills’s terms, Americans tend to think of

social problems as personal troubles rather than public issues. They thus subscribe to a blaming
the victim ! ideology rather than to a blaming the system ! belief.

To help us understand a blaming-the-victim ideology, let’s consider why poor children in urban

areas often learn very little in their schools. A blaming-the-victim approach, according to Ryan,

would say that the children’s parents do not care about their learning, fail to teach them good study

habits, and do not encourage them to take school seriously. This type of explanation may apply to

some parents, in Ryan’s opinion, but it ignores a much more important reason: the sad shape of

America’s urban schools, which are decrepit structures housing old textbooks and out-of-date

equipment. To improve the schooling of children in urban areas, he wrote, we must improve the

schools themselves, and not just try to “improve” the parents.

As this example suggests, a blaming-the-victim approach points to solutions to social problems

such as poverty and illiteracy that are very different from those suggested by a more structural

approach that “blames the system.” If we blame the victim, we would spend our limited dollars to

address the personal failings of individuals who suffer from poverty, illiteracy, poor health, eating

disorders, and other difficulties. If instead we blame the system, we would focus our attention on

the various social conditions (decrepit schools, cultural standards of female beauty, and the like)

that account for these difficulties. A sociological perspective suggests that the latter approach is

ultimately needed to help us deal successfully with the social problems facing us today.

Sociology and Social Reform: Public Sociology

© Thinkstock

[7]

[8]

This book’s subtitle is “understanding and changing the social world.” The last several pages were

devoted to the subtitle’s first part, understanding. Our discussion of Mills’s and Ryan’s perspectives

in turn points to the implications of a sociological understanding for changing the social world.

This understanding suggests the need to focus on the structural and cultural factors and various

problems in the social environment that help explain both social issues and private troubles, to

recall Mills’s terms.

The use of sociological knowledge to achieve social reform was a key theme of sociology as it

developed in the United States after emerging at the University of Chicago in the 1890s (Calhoun,

2007). The early Chicago sociologists aimed to use their research to achieve social reform and, in

particular, to reduce poverty and its related effects. They worked closely with Jane Addams (1860–

1935), a renowned social worker who founded Hull House (a home for the poor in Chicago) in 1899

and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Addams gained much attention for her analyses of poverty

and other social problems of the time, and her book Twenty Years at Hull House remains a moving

account of her work with the poor and ill in Chicago (Deegan, 1990).

About the same time, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), a sociologist and the first African American to

obtain a PhD from Harvard University, wrote groundbreaking books and articles on race in

American society and, more specifically, on the problems facing African Americans (Morris, 2007).

One of these works was his 1899 book The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, which

attributed the problems facing Philadelphia blacks to racial prejudice among whites. Du Bois also

helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A

contemporary of Du Bois was Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), a former slave who became an

activist for women’s rights and also worked tirelessly to improve the conditions of African

Americans. She wrote several studies of lynching and joined Du Bois in helping to found the

NAACP (Bay, 2009).

American sociology has never fully lost its early calling, but by the 1940s and 1950s many

sociologists had developed a more scientific, professional orientation that disregarded social reform

(Calhoun, 2007). In 1951, a group of sociologists who felt that sociology had abandoned the

discipline’s early social reform orientation formed a new national association, the Society for the

Study of Social Problems (SSSP). SSSP’s primary aim today remains the use of sociological

knowledge to achieve social justice (http://sssp1.org). During the 1960s, a new wave of young

sociologists, influenced by the political events and social movements of that tumultuous period,

again took up the mantle of social reform and clashed with their older colleagues. A healthy tension

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

has existed since then between sociologists who see social reform as a major goal of their work and

those who favor sociological knowledge for its own sake.

In 2004, the president of the American Sociological Association, Michael Burawoy, called for

“public sociology,” or the use of sociological insights and findings to address social issues and

achieve social change (Burawoy, 2005). His call ignited much excitement and debate, as public

sociology became the theme or prime topic of several national and regional sociology conferences

and of special issues or sections of major sociological journals. Several sociology departments began

degree programs or concentrations in public sociology, and a Google search of “public sociology” in

June 2010 yielded 114,000 results. In the spirit of public sociology, the chapters that follow aim to

show the relevance of sociological knowledge for social reform.

Key Takeaways

Personal experience, common sense, and the mass media often yield inaccurate or
incomplete understandings of social reality.

The debunking motif involves seeing beyond taken-for-granted assumptions of social
reality.

According to C. Wright Mills, the sociological imagination involves the ability to
recognize that private troubles are rooted in public issues and structural problems.

Early U.S. sociologists emphasized the use of sociological research to achieve social
reform, and today’s public sociology reflects the historical roots of sociology in this
regard.

For Your Review

1. Provide an example in which one of your own personal experiences probably led you to
inaccurately understand social reality.

2. Provide an example, not discussed in the text, of a taken-for-granted assumption of
social reality that may be inaccurate or incomplete.

3. Select an example of a “private trouble” and explain how and why it may reflect a
structural problem in society.

4. Do you think it is important to emphasize the potential use of sociological research to
achieve social reform? Why or why not?

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Footnotes

[1] Ehrenreich, B., & English, D. (1979). For her own good: 150 years of the experts’ advice to women. Garden
City, NY: Anchor Books. ↑

[2] Kurtz, H. (1997, August 12). The crime spree on network news. The Washington Post, p. D1. ↑

[3] Berger, P. L. (1963). Invitation to sociology: A humanistic perspective. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. ↑

[4] Berger, P. L. (1963). Invitation to sociology: A humanistic perspective. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. ↑

[5] Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. London, England: Oxford University Press. ↑

[6] Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. London, England: Oxford University Press. ↑

[7] Whitehead, K., & Kurz, T. (2008). Saints, sinners and standards of femininity: Discursive constructions of
anorexia nervosa and obesity in women’s magazines. Journal of Gender Studies, 17, 345–358. ↑

[8] Ryan, W. (1976). Blaming the victim. New York, NY: Vintage Books. ↑

[9] Calhoun, C. (2007). Sociology in America: An introduction. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Sociology in America: A
history (pp. 1–38). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ↑

[10] Deegan, M. J. (1990). Jane Addams and the men of the Chicago school, 1892–1918. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction. ↑

[11] Morris, A. D. (2007). Sociology of race and W. E. B. Du Bois: The path not taken. In C. Calhoun (Ed.),
Sociology in America: A history (pp. 503–534). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ↑

[12] Bay, M. (2009). To tell the truth freely: The life of Ida B. Wells. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. ↑

[13] Calhoun, C. (2007). Sociology in America: An introduction. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Sociology in America: A
history (pp. 1–38). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ↑

[14] Burawoy, M. (2005). 2004 presidential address: For public sociology. American Sociological Review, 70, 4–
28. ↑

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