50 free Sociology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
42 free Sociology trivia questions with answers. Sociology is the study of how societies work, and its history is full of good trivia: the philosopher who coined the word, the professor who counted suicides to prove a point, the experiment that shocked Yale, and the settlement house that won a Nobel Prize. This quiz covers the founders (Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Martineau, Du Bois), the mid-century Americans (Parsons, Merton, Mills, Goffman), the big concepts (anomie, habitus, the iron cage, the looking-glass self, labeling theory) and the classic studies from Milgram to the Stanford prison experiment. It works as a revision quiz for an introductory sociology course, a pub-quiz round for the socially curious, or a challenge for graduates who want to see what they still remember. About a third of the questions are easy, a third are medium and the rest are for people who know who Meyer Schkolnick was. Every answer is checked against a reference page for the thinker, book or concept.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which French philosopher coined the term "sociology" and founded the doctrine of positivism?
Auguste Comte
He had first called it "social physics" until the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet appropriated that phrase.
Q 02Which French essayist first wrote down the word "sociology" in 1780, in an unpublished manuscript?
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès
Sieyès is better known for the revolutionary pamphlet "What Is the Third Estate?"
Q 03Which institution established the world's first formal Department of Sociology in 1892?
University of Chicago
Albion Small founded it, wrote the first sociology textbook and started the American Journal of Sociology in 1895.
Q 04Who became France's first professor of sociology in 1895 and wrote The Rules of Sociological Method?
Émile Durkheim
He set up the first European sociology department the same year, at Bordeaux.
Q 05Durkheim's 1897 study Suicide compared suicide rates between which two groups?
Catholics and Protestants
It pioneered the use of statistics in social research and helped separate sociology from psychology.
Q 06Which of Durkheim's four types of suicide reflects a prolonged sense of not belonging to a community?
Egoistic
Altruistic suicide sits at the opposite end of the integration scale, where the group's goals overwhelm the individual.
Q 07What term, usually glossed as "normlessness", did Durkheim popularize in Suicide?
Anomie
He first used it in The Division of Labour in Society and described it as "the malady of the infinite".
Q 08Which German sociologist wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism?
Max Weber
He also defined the state by its monopoly on the legitimate use of force and left Economy and Society unfinished at his death in 1920.
Q 09Weber classified legitimate authority into three types: charismatic, traditional and what?
Rational-legal
Rational-legal authority rests on rules and offices rather than persons or custom, and underpins modern bureaucracy.
Q 10Weber's phrase "stahlhartes Gehäuse" was famously translated into English as what?
Iron cage
An American translator chose the phrase in 1930; Weber also called bureaucratization "the polar night of icy darkness".
Q 11Which 1848 book opens by claiming that all history is the history of class struggles?
The Communist Manifesto
Marx and Engels wrote it on commission for the Communist League as revolutions swept Europe.
Q 12In which city was Karl Marx born in 1818?
Trier
He earned his doctorate at Jena in 1841 and is buried in London's Highgate Cemetery.
Q 13Who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" in 1864 after reading Darwin?
Herbert Spencer
It appeared in his Principles of Biology; Darwin later adopted the phrase himself.
Q 21The sociologist born Meyer Schkolnick took the name Robert in honor of whom?
A French magician
Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin is regarded as the father of modern conjuring, and Merton performed magic as a teenager.
Q 22Which French sociologist introduced the concepts of habitus and cultural capital?
Pierre Bourdieu
His best-known book, Distinction (1979), argues that judgments of taste are acts of social positioning.
Q 23What percentage of Milgram's participants went all the way to the 450-volt shock?
65%
The experiments began at Yale in August 1961, three months after Adolf Eichmann's trial opened.
Q 14Which sociologist was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate and wrote The Philadelphia Negro?
W. E. B. Du Bois
His 1899 street-by-street mapping of Black Philadelphia prefigured the Chicago School's methods.
Q 15Du Bois spent his final years in, and died in, which country?
Ghana
He died in Accra on August 27, 1963, the day before the March on Washington.
Q 16Erving Goffman's dramaturgical approach began with which 1956 book?
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
He gathered the data for his dissertation on Unst, in the Shetland Islands.
Q 17What term did Goffman use for a person's efforts to present an acceptable image to those around them?
Impression management
He argued it only works when the audience is in sync with the person's self-perception.
Q 18Which English writer, often called the first female sociologist, published Society in America in 1837?
Harriet Martineau
She was deaf from childhood and famously carried an ear trumpet.
Q 19Which 1959 book by C. Wright Mills was named the 20th century's second most important sociology book?
The Sociological Imagination
The International Sociological Association made the ranking in 1998.
Q 20Which Columbia sociologist coined the terms "role model" and "self-fulfilling prophecy"?
Robert K. Merton
"Role model" first appeared in his study of medical students; his son won the 1997 Nobel Prize in economics.
Q 24The Stanford prison experiment of 1971 was cut short after how many days?
Six
Philip Zimbardo had randomly assigned 24 screened volunteers to be prisoners or guards.
Q 25The "broken windows" theory of policing was introduced in a 1982 article by which two social scientists?
James Q. Wilson and George Kelling
New York police commissioner William Bratton popularized it in the 1990s.
Q 26Who coined the term "symbolic interactionism", summarizing the ideas of his teacher George H. Mead?
Herbert Blumer
His summary: people act toward things based on the meanings those things hold, and meanings come from social interaction.
Q 27The "looking-glass self" was introduced in 1902 by which American sociologist?
Charles Horton Cooley
We form a self-image by imagining how we appear to others and internalizing their judgments.
Q 28The 1928 Thomas theorem says situations people define as real are real in their what?
Consequences
W. I. Thomas co-wrote it with Dorothy Swaine Thomas, whose credit was long overlooked.
Q 29Which Harvard sociologist is best known for structural functionalism and the AGIL paradigm?
Talcott Parsons
He earned his PhD in economics and helped found Harvard's Department of Social Relations.
Q 30Which 14th-century North African scholar's Muqaddimah makes him a forerunner of sociology?
Ibn Khaldun
He claimed to have written the book in just six months.