Sociology Trivia
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99 free Sociology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
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Q 01Which French philosopher gave sociology its name and founded the doctrine of positivism?
Auguste Comte
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.
Q 02Which word did sociologist Michael Young make famous in a 1958 satire, intending it as a warning?
Meritocracy
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.
Q 03Which university established the first independent department of sociology in 1892?
University of Chicago
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.
Q 04Durkheim contrasted the 'mechanical' solidarity of traditional societies with which kind in modern, specialised ones?
Organic
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.
Q 05Durkheim's 1897 study Suicide found that which religious group had far higher suicide rates than Catholics?
Protestants
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.
Q 06Which of Durkheim's types of suicide reflects a prolonged sense of not belonging to a community?
Egoistic
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.
Q 07What term, usually glossed as "normlessness", did Durkheim popularize in Suicide?
Anomie
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.
Q 08Max Weber argued that which faith's doctrine of predestination pushed believers to work hard, save and so seed capitalism?
Calvinism
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.
Q 09Weber classified legitimate authority into three types: charismatic, traditional and what?
Rational-legal
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.
Q 10Weber's phrase "stahlhartes Gehäuse" was famously translated into English as what?
Iron cage
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.
Q 11Which 1848 pamphlet declares that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles'?
The Communist Manifesto
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.
Q 12In which Rhineland city was Karl Marx born in 1818?
Trier
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.
Q 13Who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" in 1864 after reading Darwin?
Herbert Spencer
Q 21Which term did Thorstein Veblen coin in The Theory of the Leisure Class?
Conspicuous consumption
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.
Q 22Which French sociologist introduced the concepts of habitus and cultural capital?
Pierre Bourdieu
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.
Q 23Milgram's obedience experiments began in 1961, months into which Nazi official's trial?
Adolf Eichmann
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.
Q 14Which sociologist was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate and wrote The Philadelphia Negro?
W. E. B. Du Bois
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.
Q 15The NAACP co-founder who wrote The Souls of Black Folk spent his final years in which African country?
Ghana
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.
Q 16Erving Goffman's dramaturgical approach began with which book?
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
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.
Q 17What term did Goffman use for a person's efforts to shape how others see them?
Impression management
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.
Q 18Which English writer, often called the first female sociologist, published Society in America in 1837?
Harriet Martineau
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.
Q 19Which book by C. Wright Mills did fellow scholars vote the 20th century's second most influential in their field?
The Sociological Imagination
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.
Q 20Which Columbia sociologist coined the terms "role model" and "self-fulfilling prophecy"?
Robert K. Merton
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.
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.
Q 24Which psychologist halted his 1971 Stanford prison experiment after six days?
Philip Zimbardo
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.
Q 25Which theory of policing, launched by a 1982 Atlantic article, holds that ignoring small signs of disorder invites serious crime?
Broken windows
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.
Q 26Who coined the term "symbolic interactionism", summarizing the ideas of his teacher George H. Mead?
Herbert Blumer
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.
Q 27The "looking-glass self" was introduced in 1902 by which American sociologist?
Charles Horton Cooley
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.
Q 28The 1928 Thomas theorem says situations people define as real are real in their what?
Consequences
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.
Q 29Which Harvard sociologist is best known for structural functionalism and the AGIL paradigm?
Talcott Parsons
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.
Q 30Which 14th-century North African scholar's Muqaddimah makes him a forerunner of sociology?
Ibn Khaldun
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.