Category Archives: Sociology

Unselfish people not liked by fellow group members

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When working in small groups, each person plays certain roles. If someone is unselfish, recent research suggests this does not lead to popularity among other group members:

Unselfish workers who are the first to offer to help with projects are among those that co-workers like the least, according to four separate social psychology studies.

In the most recent study, entitled “The Desire to Expel Unselfish Members from the Group,” psychologists found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they “raise the bar” for what’s expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad.

“It doesn’t matter that the overall welfare of the group or the task at hand is better served by someone’s unselfish behavior. What is objectively good, you see as subjectively bad,” said study co-author Craig Parks of Washington State University. The paper was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

This is an interesting finding. The article goes on to say that some of the other participants thought the unselfish person had ulterior motives. The unselfishness was unsettling for other participants who sounded like they expected each person to play for themselves rather than think about the greater good.
I wonder if these findings would be any different if the participants were not all undergraduate students. And what would it take for groups to accept the unselfish behavior – repeated offers to help from the unselfish member, time, failure on the part of other members?

Plainfield: From deadly tornado to suburban growth

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Plainfield, Illinois has experienced much suburban growth in the last twenty years: it had 4,500 people in 1990 and it was estimated in 2007 to have more than 37,000 (with projections of 120,000 people in 2030).

But at the beginning of this growth spurt, a deadly F5 tornado ripped through the community on August 28, 1990:

The tornado touched down outside Oswego about 3:15 p.m., and the 200 mph winds inside it etched a scar 16 miles long, stretching to the southwest side of Joliet.

By 3:45, the sky was clear and the horizon lined with battered, leafless trees and ruined homes. In all, 1,500 buildings were damaged or destroyed, 300 people were injured and 29 were dead, victims of the most powerful tornado ever to strike the Chicago area.

As the community prepares to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the tornado, this article provides some insights into the collective memory of the community. The memory of their darkest moment faded away as new people moved in, 1,000 new residents in the first year after the tornado. Today, Plainfield is something different than it was then.

Sociological studies of the effects of disasters or crises tend to focus on big cities. I recently heard a presentation about a new book comparing the 9/11 crisis in New York City and the Hurricane Katrina crisis in New Orleans. I wonder if the insights of that book would be able to speak to the experience of people in places like Plainfield.

A website to help understand scales

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The BBC has put together a cool website that maps certain physical features, manmade features, or events onto other maps to provide a sense of scale.

Once we get to large numbers, many of us are not very good with visualizing how large something is. Take, for example, the national debt – it is nearly beyond comprehension. Or the distance between Earth and the sun. Or the population of China. We tend to think in smaller units so larger numbers tend to cause problems. People who operate in such units try to break it down into more manageable sizes: this is the average debt per US citizen, that distance would equal X number of trips from the Earth to the moon, that population would be roughly 37 times the population of California.

Mortgage problems continue; 9.9% have missed at least one payment

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Some new data suggests the mortgage crisis is continuing and still affecting a large number of people:

One in 10 American households with a mortgage was at risk of foreclosure this summer as the government’s efforts to help have had little impact stemming the housing crisis.

About 9.9 percent of homeowners had missed at least one mortgage payment as of June 30, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Thursday.

That number, which is adjusted for seasonal factors, was down slightly from a record-high of more than 10 percent as of April 30.

In a worrisome sign, the number of homeowners starting to have problems with their mortgages rose after trending downward last year. The number of homes in the foreclosure process fell slightly, the first drop in four years.

More than 2.3 million homes have been repossessed by lenders since the recession began in December 2007, according to foreclosure listing service RealtyTrac Inc. Economists expect the number of foreclosures to grow well into next year.

Even if this data were to improve soon, there would still be a long way to go to get back to anything resembling the housing markets of the 1990s or 2000s.

Competition for Empire State Building on NYC skyline

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A developer has proposed a new skyscraper near the Empire State Building (ESB) in New York City and the ESB’s owner is arguing against it:

The tower would spoil the famous view of the 102-story skyscraper for millions of tourists, the Empire State Building’s owner, Anthony Malkin, testified Monday at a City Council hearing. It “defines New York,” he said.

“We view this as an assault on New York City and its iconography,” said Malkin, whose grandfather founded the Malkin Holdings company. It’s “the end of the image of New York City that billions of people hold dear.”

The City Council is to vote this week on whether to allow a developer to erect a 67-story tower that’s only 34 feet lower than the 79-year-old Empire State Building, the city’s tallest skyscraper.

The proposed tower’s developer, David Greenbaum, says 15 Penn Plaza would provide critically needed and state-of-the-art office space to midtown Manhattan, creating at least 7,000 new jobs.

“The fact is, New York City’s skyline has never stopped changing, and I certainly hope it never will,” testified Greenbaum, president of Vornado Realty Trust’s New York chapter.

This is an interesting example of many development battles: someone wants to make money with a new building and someone else wants to preserve what the neighborhood (and perhaps wants to protect their own investment).

I have a hard time buying the argument that the building shouldn’t be built because it is “an assault on New York City.” As the developer notes, skylines change pretty frequently. There could be other arguments to make against the building but preserving the skyline doesn’t sound reasonable. In fact, the changing of the skyline is often part of what makes cities interesting; they are consistently changing.

The difficulties of polling for primary elections

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Some polls about recent primary races in several states have been off. In a report from ABC, some of the difficulties in predicting primary elections are discussed:

Experts say this year’s primaries are highlighting some of the pitfalls of political polling.

“As a general rule, primaries are much harder to predict than general elections,” said Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling and Research. “The hard part is figuring out who’s going to show up.”

Pollsters say developing a fundamental sense of who is going to vote is harder to do in primary elections when turnout is historically lower and more variable. There’s also the early and absentee voting factor.

This sounds like a sampling issue. Political polls tend to search for people who are likely to vote. But if a large percent of the sample that pollsters reach aren’t going to vote, the results are not very trustworthy.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and playing Portal

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Erving Goffman’s 1959 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a sociological classic. “Portal” is a video game that has received good reviews (90 out of 100 at MetaCritic.com). How could they fit together?

According to a story at Mashable.com, they are both part of some sections of a required Freshman course at Wabash College in Indiana:

The game will be part of a mandatory Freshman seminar called “Enduring Questions” that will explore “fundamental questions of humanity” through “classical and contemporary works.” A theater professor named Michael Abbott is among the faculty members designing the course.

Inspired by a game theory article drawing comparisons between Portal and Erving Goffman’s 1959 sociology text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Abbott nominated Portal as one of the works that students would be required to experience and discuss to pass the class.

He demonstrated the game for his non-gaming colleagues and was pleased to find that they appreciated and approved the plan to assign Goffman’s text and follow it up with “a collective playthrough of Portal.”

I haven’t played Portal but this sounds like an intriguing combination. I wonder how many college classes today include video games…

How diseases become a social problem

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NPR explores how certain diseases, such as cancer, particularly breast cancer, turn from a medical condition that no one talked about to a prominent social cause. Some of the factors, according to the article, that helped cancer become a visible concern:

[T]he women’s health movement, the rise of information technology and a shift in the medical culture itself away from a purely hierarchical system in which doctors were always assumed to know best…

A lot of illness-awareness promotion, though, stems from the way AIDS patients responded to the rise of that disease…The tropes developed with AIDS — clothing accessories such as ribbons, displays of commemorative quilts, marches on Washington — have all since been adopted by groups concerned with other conditions.

How certain issues (and not others) become social problems is often a fascinating tale. What one time period and culture sees as problematic is not an issue for the same culture in a later period – Prohibition would be a great example. There is often a complicated process that takes place by which the problem is brought to the attention of the public and then people become convinced it is a cause that requires their action.

Predicting future crimes

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Professor Richard Berk from the University of Pennsylvania has developed software that predicts which criminals on probation or parole will commit future crimes. His software is already being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia and soon will be used in Washington, D.C.

Here is a quick description of how the algorithm was developed:

Beginning several years ago, the researchers assembled a dataset of more than 60,000 various crimes, including homicides. Using an algorithm they developed, they found a subset of people much more likely to commit homicide when paroled or probated. Instead of finding one murderer in 100, the UPenn researchers could identify eight future murderers out of 100.

Berk’s software examines roughly two dozen variables, from criminal record to geographic location. The type of crime, and more importantly, the age at which that crime was committed, were two of the most predictive variables.

Of course, there could be some problems with this:

But Berk’s scientific answer leaves policymakers with difficult questions, said Bushway. By labeling one group of people as high risk, and monitoring them with increased vigilance, there should be fewer murders, which the potential victims should be happy about.

It also means that those high-risk individuals will be monitored more aggressively. For inmate rights advocates, that is tantamount to harassment, “punishing people who, most likely, will not commit a crime in the future,” said Bushway.

“It comes down to a question of whether you would rather make these errors or those errors,” said Bushway.

I would be curious to see reports on the effectiveness of this software over time. And determining whether this software is effective in areas like reducing crime would present some interesting measurement issues.