99 Fun Facts About Sociology

Which French philosopher gave sociology its name and founded the doctrine of positivism?

Auguste Comte. His motto still flies on Brazil's flag: when the republic replaced the empire in 1889, the new banner carried 'Order and Progress', words taken from his positivist creed.

Which word did sociologist Michael Young make famous in a 1958 satire, intending it as a warning?

Meritocracy. Young's satire pictured a Britain run by an elite picked for IQ and effort that ends in revolt, and in 2001 he complained that Tony Blair was using his warning word as praise.

Which university established the first independent department of sociology in 1892?

University of Chicago. Its sociologists took fast-growing Chicago itself as their subject, mapping it neighbourhood by neighbourhood, and the group became known as the Chicago School.

Durkheim contrasted the 'mechanical' solidarity of traditional societies with which kind in modern, specialised ones?

Organic. Durkheim meant that a modern society hangs together like a living body, its people as different and as dependent on one another as organs, where a traditional village coheres because everyone is alike.

Durkheim's 1897 study Suicide found that which religious group had far higher suicide rates than Catholics?

Protestants. Durkheim's reason was social, not doctrinal: their churches encouraged free inquiry, which left believers less tightly bound into a shared community, while Jews had lower rates still.

Which of Durkheim's types of suicide reflects a prolonged sense of not belonging to a community?

Egoistic. Durkheim blamed a lack of attachment: by his figures the unmarried and the childless took their own lives more often than husbands and parents, whom family life protected.

What term, usually glossed as "normlessness", did Durkheim popularize in Suicide?

Anomie. Durkheim found that suicides rose in sudden booms as well as in crashes: when fortunes change overnight, he argued, the usual limits on what people expect stop applying.

Max Weber argued that which faith's doctrine of predestination pushed believers to work hard, save and so seed capitalism?

Calvinism. Nobody could know whether they were among the saved, Weber argued, so anxious believers read disciplined work and thrift as signs of election, and reinvested their earnings instead of spending them.

Weber classified legitimate authority into three types: charismatic, traditional and what?

Rational-legal. Obedience is owed to the office, not the person, so a leader's authority ends the day they leave the post, which is why Weber tied this type to modern bureaucracy.

Weber's phrase "stahlhartes Gehäuse" was famously translated into English as what?

Iron cage. In Weber's image, concern for worldly goods was meant to sit on the believer's shoulders like a light cloak that could be thrown off at any moment, until fate turned the cloak into a cage.

Which 1848 pamphlet declares that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles'?

The Communist Manifesto. A London congress of the Communist League commissioned it from Marx and Engels in late 1847, and the manuscript reached the printer only weeks before revolution broke out in Paris.

In which Rhineland city was Karl Marx born in 1818?

Trier. Marx came from a long line of rabbis, but about a year before his birth his father, a lawyer, was baptised into Prussia's state church, probably to protect his career.

Who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" in 1864 after reading Darwin?

Herbert Spencer. The phrase comes from his Principles of Biology, not from Darwin, who borrowed it for later editions of On the Origin of Species after Alfred Russel Wallace urged him to.

Which sociologist was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate and wrote The Philadelphia Negro?

W. E. B. Du Bois. For The Philadelphia Negro he went door to door through the city's Seventh Ward interviewing residents himself, producing the first case study of a Black community in the United States.

The NAACP co-founder who wrote The Souls of Black Folk spent his final years in which African country?

Ghana. At 93 he moved to Accra, where the government was funding his long-planned encyclopedia of the African diaspora, and he died there the night before the 1963 March on Washington.

Erving Goffman's dramaturgical approach began with which book?

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman built it on more than a year of fieldwork in a crofting community on Unst, in the Shetland Islands, watching how the islanders behaved in front of one another.

What term did Goffman use for a person's efforts to shape how others see them?

Impression management. Goffman saw each person as an actor on a stage who plays a different part for each audience, which is why you behave one way with workmates and another with your grandparents.

Which English writer, often called the first female sociologist, published Society in America in 1837?

Harriet Martineau. After two years touring the United States she measured the young republic against its own creed that all are created equal, and found it failing both women and the enslaved.

Which book by C. Wright Mills did fellow scholars vote the 20th century's second most influential in their field?

The Sociological Imagination. Mills argued that private troubles only make sense when set against the wider society that shapes them; in the 1998 poll it trailed only Max Weber's Economy and Society.

Which Columbia sociologist coined the terms "role model" and "self-fulfilling prophecy"?

Robert K. Merton. Born Meyer Schkolnick, he invented the name as a teenage stage magician, taking 'Robert' from the French conjuror Robert-Houdin after a mentor called his first choice, Merlin, hackneyed.

Which term did Thorstein Veblen coin in The Theory of the Leisure Class?

Conspicuous consumption. Veblen was describing the newly rich of his day, who bought luxuries less to use them than to put their wealth on public display.

Which French sociologist introduced the concepts of habitus and cultural capital?

Pierre Bourdieu. Raised in a working-class family in rural southern France, he argued in Distinction that taste in music, food and art comes less from the individual than from the class they grew up in.

Milgram's obedience experiments began in 1961, months into which Nazi official's trial?

Adolf Eichmann. Milgram wanted to test the defence of just following orders: the experts he polled expected almost nobody to go to the full 450 volts, and 65% of his volunteers did.

Which psychologist halted his 1971 Stanford prison experiment after six days?

Philip Zimbardo. He had cast himself as the prison's superintendent and let the abuse run until Christina Maslach, a young psychologist brought in to interview the volunteers, saw the prisoners and objected.

Which theory of policing, launched by a 1982 Atlantic article, holds that ignoring small signs of disorder invites serious crime?

Broken windows. James Q. Wilson and George Kelling backed the idea with an experiment in which a car left in Palo Alto sat untouched for over a week until the researcher smashed it himself, and others then joined in.

Who coined the term "symbolic interactionism", summarizing the ideas of his teacher George H. Mead?

Herbert Blumer. He coined the term in 1937, having earned his way through graduate school by playing professional football as a lineman for the NFL's Cardinals.

The "looking-glass self" was introduced in 1902 by which American sociologist?

Charles Horton Cooley. His mirror is other people: we imagine how we appear to them and react to that guess, which is why we choose our clothes and hair with an audience in mind.

The 1928 Thomas theorem says situations people define as real are real in their what?

Consequences. The textbook case is a bank run: if enough savers wrongly believe a sound bank is about to fail and rush to pull out their money, their belief makes the failure real.

Which Harvard sociologist is best known for structural functionalism and the AGIL paradigm?

Talcott Parsons. He arrived at Harvard as an economics instructor, began teaching sociology only in 1931, and first made his name by bringing the work of Max Weber to American readers.

Which 14th-century North African scholar's Muqaddimah makes him a forerunner of sociology?

Ibn Khaldun. After twenty years of court politics across North Africa and Spain he withdrew to a remote castle in Algeria to write it, and late in life he met the conqueror Timur at Damascus.

Which prison design by Jeremy Bentham did Michel Foucault turn into a metaphor for modern surveillance?

The Panopticon. Bentham's ring of cells around a central watch-post was never fully adopted, but Foucault seized on its trick: inmates who cannot tell when they are being watched behave as though they always are.

Which settlement house did Jane Addams co-found in 1889 to serve newly arrived immigrants?

Hull House. Addams and Ellen Gates Starr copied the idea from London's Toynbee Hall, moved in among poor immigrants back home in Illinois, and the house went on to help win the state its child labour laws.

Frigyes Karinthy's 1929 story 'Chain-Links' set out which idea?

Six degrees of separation. Karinthy's characters play at reaching anyone on Earth through a chain of five acquaintances, and in the 1960s Stanley Milgram tested it by having Midwesterners pass letters towards a stranger in Boston.

Howard Becker's Outsiders (1963) was central to which approach to deviance?

Labeling theory. Becker, who had worked as a dance-band pianist, studied fellow musicians and marijuana smokers and argued that deviance lies less in the act than in the label others attach to it.

George Ritzer's "McDonaldization" has four components: efficiency, calculability, predictability and what?

Control. Ritzer meant keeping people as predictable as the food: staff in uniform doing standardised tasks under watch, with human judgment replaced by machines wherever possible.

Sociologist Anthony Giddens is known for which political idea associated with Tony Blair?

The Third Way. Giddens used the phrase for a path between free-market neoliberalism and old-style social democracy, a label that Bill Clinton's Democrats and Gerhard Schröder's Germany shared with Blair's Britain.

The bystander effect was proposed after the 1964 murder of which New York woman?

Kitty Genovese. A New York Times story claimed that dozens of neighbours watched and did nothing; the paper has since called that report flawed and grossly exaggerated, but it prompted the experiments that established the effect.

Which effect, named after a Western Electric plant in Illinois, describes people behaving differently when observed?

The Hawthorne effect. The story goes that every change in the plant's lighting, even dimming it, raised output; economists who dug up the original 1920s data in 2009 found that famous pattern was not there.

Georg Simmel's 1903 essay examined the mental strain of which setting?

The big city. In 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', an early study of urban modernity, Simmel argued that city dwellers build psychological defences against a flood of stimuli that rural life never demands.

In Karl Marx's theory, which class owns the factories and other means of production?

The bourgeoisie. The word once meant simply town-dwellers; Marx and Engels argued that by gathering workers into its factories this class was producing, above all, 'its own grave-diggers'.

The founder of positivism ended his career as High Priest of which secular faith of his own design?

The Religion of Humanity. It had prayers, hymns, sacraments, a priesthood and a calendar honouring history's great figures, which is why Thomas Huxley dismissed it as "Catholicism minus Christianity".

William Graham Sumner's 1906 book Folkways brought which term for judging other peoples by one's own group's standards into sociology?

Ethnocentrism. Sumner defined it as seeing one's own group as 'the center of everything', and argued that pride in 'us' and contempt for outsiders grow from that single habit.

Which term did sociologist Ruth Glass coin for the change she saw in London's working-class districts?

Gentrification. Glass built the word on 'gentry', describing how the shabby mews and cottages of working-class districts such as Islington were being taken over and turned into elegant, expensive homes.

Which term did sociologist Arlie Hochschild coin in The Managed Heart, her study of flight attendants?

Emotional labor. Hochschild set flight attendants, paid to be 'nicer than natural', beside bill collectors, paid to be 'nastier than natural', and argued that both jobs sell a feeling the worker may not have.

Ferdinand Tönnies built his sociology on which pair of concepts, meaning 'community' and 'society'?

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Tönnies published the book in 1887 and led Germany's sociological society for more than two decades, until his public denunciation of Nazism got him thrown out of his university post in 1933.

The United Kingdom's first sociology department was set up in 1904 at which institution?

London School of Economics. One of its first two professors of the subject, L. T. Hobhouse, arrived in 1907 after a decade away from universities, much of it spent writing for the Manchester Guardian.

Which approach to the unwritten rules of everyday life grew out of the work of Harold Garfinkel?

Ethnomethodology. Garfinkel had students disrupt everyday routines, such as behaving like polite strangers at their own family's dinner table, and the indignation that followed exposed the rules nobody states.

James Coleman's 1966 report found that what shaped pupils' results more than school funding?

Family background. Washington expected the huge survey to expose starved schools for poor and minority children; instead home life and a classroom's social mix outweighed budgets, a finding later used to argue for busing.

Mark Granovetter is best known for his theory of the strength of what?

Weak ties. Granovetter argued in 1973 that acquaintances, not close friends, are the ones who bring us news of new jobs, and half a century later an experiment on 20 million LinkedIn users bore him out.

Which word for a fixed belief about a group began as a printer's term for a duplicate plate?

Stereotype took on its modern sense in 1922, when American journalist Walter Lippmann borrowed the printers' word in his book Public Opinion. The plate was a copy used for printing in place of the original type.

Which word did Michael Young popularize in his 1958 satire about a Britain ruled by the clever?

Meritocracy was meant as a warning: Michael Young imagined a future Britain where IQ plus effort decided rank and left a disenfranchised underclass. The word shed its sting anyway.

Which word for a person unfairly blamed comes from an animal sent into the wilderness in Leviticus?

Scapegoat entered English in 1530, when William Tyndale's Bible translation called the animal the '(e)scape goat'. In the ritual it was released bearing all the sins of the people.

Which term did Irving Janis apply to the flawed decisions behind the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion?

Groupthink echoes the 'doublethink' of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Janis argued that a close group's desire for harmony silences doubt and produces irrational decisions.

Which word was coined in 1964 for middle-class arrivals pushing workers out of London's Islington?

Gentrification was coined by a German-born British sociologist who built it on 'gentry', the old name for England's landed upper class. The new 'gentry' are simply a neighborhood's more affluent arrivals.

Which phrase for the barrier keeping women from top jobs did Marilyn Loden coin in a 1978 speech?

Glass ceiling went mainstream in 1986, when a widely cited Wall Street Journal article put it in a headline about why women could not seem to break through to the top jobs.

Which phrase did Marshall McLuhan coin in the 1960s for a world shrunk by electronic media?

Global village first appeared in Marshall McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, decades before the internet. He had radio and television in mind, which turned events into shows watched by a worldwide audience.

Which 1908 play by Israel Zangwill gave America a lasting metaphor for blending immigrant cultures?

The Melting Pot opened in Washington with President Theodore Roosevelt in the audience. He is said to have shouted, 'That's a great play, Mr. Zangwill.'

In an 1844 essay on Hegel, Karl Marx famously called religion which drug 'of the people'?

Opium was Marx's image for comfort as much as delusion. The same passage calls religion 'the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world'.

Jane Elliott's famous 1968 classroom exercise on prejudice divided her Iowa pupils by which trait?

Eye color was Jane Elliott's stand-in for race. She first ran the exercise the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the children told they were 'superior' turned arrogant and bossy.

Which word for a strong social prohibition did Captain James Cook record in Tonga in 1777?

Taboo comes from the Tongan 'tapu'. Cook wrote that the islanders used it for 'any thing that is forbidden to be eaten, or made use of'.

Kalervo Oberg's four-phase model, opening with a 'honeymoon', describes which experience of life abroad?

Culture shock got its classic phases, from honeymoon through negotiation and adjustment to adaptation, in a talk Oberg gave to the Women's Club of Rio de Janeiro in 1954.

Which word did Theodore Roszak put on the map with a 1969 book about student radicals and hippie dropouts?

Counterculture, in Roszak's telling, united 1960s radicals and hippies in rejecting 'the technocracy', the rule of corporate and technological experts over industrial society.

Which term for judging other cultures by one's own standards was popularized by the 1906 book Folkways?

Ethnocentrism, in the book's words, is the view 'in which one's own group is the center of everything'. The word is thought to have been coined earlier by the Polish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz.

Which term did William F. Ogburn coin in 1922 for customs and laws trailing behind new technology?

Cultural lag had its classic example in the early automobile: wider roads and traffic rules came only some time after cars went mainstream, leaving pedestrians in danger.

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, never formally proposed by either namesake, says what shapes human thought?

Language shaping thought is also known as linguistic relativity. The joint label was introduced by Harry Hoijer, another of Edward Sapir's students.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead made her name with a 1928 study of adolescent girls growing up where?

Samoa, Mead concluded, let girls pass from childhood to adulthood smoothly, without the distress seen in the United States. In the 1980s Derek Freeman argued that she had been hoaxed.

Which term from Erving Goffman's 1961 book Asylums covers jails, monasteries and army barracks alike?

Total institution is the name for a place where people live cut off from the wider community under one regimented routine. Goffman's list also took in boarding schools and ships.

Which term did George Herbert Mead give the community viewpoint children learn through team games?

The generalized other was Mead's lesson from the ball team: to play, a child must hold in mind the attitudes of everyone involved in the game, and a mature sense of self grows from that.

Which phrase did Philip W. Jackson coin in 1968 for the lessons schools teach without openly intending to?

Hidden curriculum covers the norms, values and beliefs that pupils absorb from the classroom and its social world. Jackson introduced the phrase in his book Life in Classrooms.

Which pseudonym was given to the girl found near Los Angeles in 1970 after a childhood locked in one room?

Genie had been exposed to almost no speech, so linguists studied her to test whether there is a critical period for learning to talk. She never fully acquired a mother tongue.

Which Victorian polymath, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, popularized the phrase 'nature versus nurture'?

Francis Galton used the phrase to frame the debate over heredity and environment, and counted the relatives of eminent men to test whether ability was inherited. He coined the word 'eugenics' in 1883.

Which label did anthropologist Ralph Linton give a social position assigned at birth rather than earned?

Ascribed status rests on things like age, sex, race or family origins. Linton admitted that telling it apart from the earned kind is not always easy.

Which term from the 1909 book Social Organization names close circles like family and childhood friends?

Primary group members share close, personal, enduring ties. A secondary group, by contrast, is more impersonal and built around a shared task, like coworkers or schoolmates.

Which psychologist had students judge line lengths in the 1950s after actors gave the wrong answer aloud?

Solomon Asch found that roughly a third of responses went along with the actors' plainly wrong answer. With no group pressure, people erred less than 1% of the time.

Which 1954 experiment split 22 boys at an Oklahoma summer camp into rival groups to study hostility?

Robbers Cave researchers posed as camp staff while the boys' rivalry flared. They concluded that good relations return only when both sides share goals neither can reach alone.

Which term did Arlie Hochschild first define in a 1983 book about flight attendants paid to stay cheerful?

Emotional labor means displaying certain feelings because the job requires it. Hochschild set calm, cheerful cabin crew against bill collectors, who were expected to stay suspicious of debtors.

Which Greek word for a mark burned into a criminal's skin did Erving Goffman take as a 1963 book title?

Stigma, in Goffman's sense, is any deeply discredited attribute that leads others to reject a person. His book looks at how people conceal such traits to protect themselves.

Which term did Edwin Sutherland introduce in 1939 for lawbreaking by respectable people at work?

White-collar crime, as Sutherland defined it, is crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of an occupation. Fraud, bribery and embezzlement are typical.

Which term did Stanley Cohen develop in a 1972 book on Britain's reaction to rival mods and rockers?

Moral panic, in Cohen's words, sets in when a group 'emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests'. His book was titled Folk Devils and Moral Panics.

Which prison design by Jeremy Bentham lets one guard watch inmates who never know when they are observed?

Panopticon plans were first sketched in letters Bentham wrote while visiting his brother Samuel in the Russian Empire. He borrowed Samuel's ideas on constantly observing workers and applied them to prisons.

Which Marxist term for the working class comes from a Latin word meaning 'producing offspring'?

Proletariat goes back to Rome's poorest citizens. They fell below the lowest category for military service, so their children were listed in place of property.

Which measure of inequality, devised by an Italian statistician in 1912, scores perfect equality as 0?

Gini coefficient scores climb to 1 when a single individual has all the income and everyone else has none. Corrado Gini built the measure on the work of economist Max Lorenz.

Which 1956 book by C. Wright Mills said military, corporate and political leaders jointly run America?

The Power Elite cast the ordinary citizen as a relatively powerless subject of manipulation by those three interwoven groups, which Mills described as a triumvirate.

Which term from The Souls of Black Folk describes always seeing oneself through the eyes of others?

Double consciousness was the 1903 book's name for the 'two-ness' of being both an American and a Negro: 'two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings'.

Which term did Kimberlé Crenshaw coin in 1989 for the way race and sex discrimination overlap?

Intersectionality began as a legal argument. Crenshaw said courts tended to ignore Black women's experiences by treating them as only women or only Black.

Which kind of household, two parents and their children, takes its name from the Latin for 'nut'?

Nuclear family draws on 'nucleus', the core of something, from the Latin 'nux'. The term is younger than it sounds: Merriam-Webster dates it only to 1924.

Which form of marriage, practiced among Tibetans in Nepal, lets one woman wed two or more brothers?

Polyandry among brothers keeps family land intact and undivided, because all of them marry the same wife. The word joins the Greek for 'many' and 'man'.

Teachers at a California school were told certain pupils would bloom in the classic study of which phenomenon?

Pygmalion effect is named after the mythical Greek sculptor whose beloved statue came to life. The 'bloomers' were picked at random, yet their teachers' high hopes seemed to lift their results.

Which term did sociologist Ray Oldenburg use in 1989 for hangouts like cafes, bars and libraries?

Third place comes after home, the 'first', and the workplace, the 'second'. Oldenburg argued that such spots matter for democracy and civic engagement.

Which survey format, named after its American inventor, runs from 'strongly disagree' to 'strongly agree'?

Likert scale items are the most widely used way of scaling responses in survey research. Rensis Likert said his surname 'LICK-ert', though 'LIKE-ert' is the more common mispronunciation.

Which research method for reaching elusive groups such as drug users has subjects recruit acquaintances?

Snowball sampling is so called because the group of participants is said to grow like a rolling snowball. People with many friends are more likely to be drawn in, one of several biases it carries.

Which sociological perspective, drawing on Karl Marx, sees society's groups as rivals rather than partners?

Conflict theory holds that classes interact through conflict rather than agreement, and it puts unequal power at the center. Such ideas were popular in sociology's early years.

Which social bond, named in an 1893 study of the division of labor, rests on people's interdependence?

Organic solidarity arises from specialized work in modern industrial societies, where people rely on one another's different jobs. Small traditional societies cohere through sameness instead.

Which term did Karl Marx use in his 1844 manuscripts for workers' estrangement from what they produce?

Alienation, for Marx, begins when the worker's product is taken by the capitalist and confronts its maker as a hostile power. He set out four aspects of it in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.

Which figure, proposed by a British anthropologist, caps a person's stable relationships at about 150?

Dunbar's number came from primates. Robin Dunbar found that species with bigger brains live in bigger groups, then extrapolated from the size of the human brain.

Which 1950 book by David Riesman sorted people into tradition-, inner- and other-directed types?

The Lonely Crowd argued that by the 1940s the other-directed type, flexible and eager for approval, was coming to dominate. Such a person 'wants to be loved rather than esteemed'.

Which 1951 concept treats illness as 'sanctioned deviance' that excuses a person from normal duties?

Sick role comes with obligations as well as rights: the patient is exempt from normal social roles but should try to get well and seek competent help. The idea fell out of favour in the 1990s.

Which phrase did Thorstein Veblen coin in 1899 for buying luxuries chiefly to display wealth?

Conspicuous consumption was Veblen's verdict on the nouveau riche of the Second Industrial Revolution, set out in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Which English cleric argued in a 1798 essay that population growth would always outrun the food supply?

Thomas Malthus held that food output grows arithmetically while population grows exponentially. Pioneers of evolutionary biology read him, notably Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.