About 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of non-white Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race, according to an ongoing Reuters/Ipsos poll…

There are regions and groups where mixing with people of other races is more common, especially in the Hispanic community where only a tenth do not have friends of a different race. About half of Hispanics who have a spouse or partner are in a relationship with non-Hispanics, compared to one tenth of whites and blacks in relationships.

Looking at a broader circle of acquaintances to include coworkers as well as friends and relatives, 30 percent of Americans are not mixing with others of a different race, the poll showed…

Younger American adults appear to confirm this, according to the poll. About one third of Americans under the age of 30 who have a partner or spouse are in a relationship with someone of a different race, compared to one tenth of Americans over 30. And only one in 10 adults under 30 say no one among their families, friends or coworkers is of a different race, less than half the rate for Americans as a whole.

Given America’s racial history plus ongoing concerns like residential segregation and differences in educational achievement, is this much of a surprise? At the same time, it appears younger Americans are significantly different in this regard.

Another note: why not include some longitudinal data on this? This provides a snapshot and the percentages are high. But, is this more or less than 20 or 50 years ago? Even if policy is attempting to close the gap between groups, it may not be trickling down much to relationships where individuals have more control with whom they choose to interact with more.

The sociological term “civil inattention” sticks with people

Posted on July 8, 2013 by legallysociable

I’ve noticed that some of my Introduction to Sociology students really latch on to the idea of “civil inattention” and it appears others might have the same experience:

Some returned only my smile. Others returned my eye contact, too, albeit very briefly. Most appeared to be uncomfortable, even painfully awkward, at our exchange of social pleasantries that bordered on something deeper. I became even more intrigued.

“It’s called civil inattention,” explained my girlfriend, Karen, who learned about this sociological phenomenon back in college. “For some reason, it’s always stuck with me.”

It has always stuck with me, too, but I didn’t know it had a label — civil inattention. I immediately looked it up.

“Civil inattention is the process whereby strangers who are in close proximity demonstrate that they are aware of one another, without imposing on each other,” one definition stated. “It’s a recognition of the claims of others to a public space, and a sign also of their own personal boundaries.”

Simply put, the unspoken rule is that in a transient public encounter, strangers give visual notice to each other — a nod, smile, or quick eye contact — and then withdraw their attention. This sort of exchange takes place even more commonly in big cities where newcomers initially don’t understand it’s needed for a peaceful co-existence.

So why does this concept stick with people? I have a few thoughts:

1. Individuals feel guilty about this breakdown in communication. Perhaps they blame themselves for not being able to engage others, perhaps they blame the other person for rejecting them. Either way, the involved people feel like something went wrong.

2. People really seem to notice this in cities where they are in close proximity to other people but there is no interaction. In fact, people are trying to deliberately avoid interaction. Think the image of New Yorkers avoiding direct eye contact at all costs. Perhaps there is some implicit contrast with the stereotypical small-town life where everyone knows everyone. Of course, most Americans don’t live in such a setting.

3. There is a larger issue of how to act around strangers. Kids often hear strangers are dangerous. Does this change much when people get older? We hear all sorts of stories and data involving other groups and perhaps simply don’t know what to do when presented with people who fit those categories. In other words, civil inattention represents an inability to interact with people different than ourselves.

An English town that got rid of its traffic signs and lights sees improvement in street life

Posted on April 13, 2013 by legallysociable

This idea is not unknown but it is still highly unusual: an English town recently removed all of its traffic signs and lights.

The village of Poynton in the U.K. has undertaken one of the most ambitious experiments to date in this type of street design, whose most prominent advocate was the Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman. Variations on the shared-space model have been implemented in other European cities since the early 1990s, but never before at such a busy junction. Poynton’s city leaders sought the change because the historic hub of their quaint little town had become a grim and unwelcoming place…

The project didn’t come cheap, costing about $6 million. Engineers completely reconfigured the intersection at the center of town, replacing a traffic light with two “roundels” that cars must negotiate without the guidance of traffic signs. Pavements of varying colors and textures are the only signal as to which type of road user belongs where.

It was a controversial move for the community of some 14,000 people, which lies about 11 miles from Manchester in the northwestern part of England. Now, a year after construction wrapped up, a video called “Poynton Regenerated” makes the case that the shared space scheme maintains a smooth flow of traffic while simultaneously making the village center a more attractive and safer place for pedestrians, leading to increased economic activity downtown…

In the “Regenerating Poynton” video, several people who admit to having been skeptical of the plan say that after it was put in place, they came to see it as a dramatic improvement. A local city councilor says that the main street no longer seems like a dying place, as it had for years before the change. Some 88 percent of businesses in the area are reporting an increase in foot traffic, and real estate agents say they’re seeing new interest in buying property in the area.

The social interactions that result from shared space — eye contact, waves of thanks, and the like — are one of the main selling points for advocates.

What is most interesting about this presentation is that it is less about safety, and traffic crashes do tend to go down when measures like this are taken, and more about how it can improve street life. When motorized vehicles are no longer privileged on the streets in the ways that they are in most communities, street life can be more open and lively. So, perhaps we will see more people in the coming years selling this plan more as a viable redevelopment option rather than a safety concern.

Measuring audience reaction: from the applause of crowds to Facebook likes

Posted on March 16, 2013 by legallysociable

Megan Garber provides an overview of applause, “the big data of the ancient world.”

Scholars aren’t quite sure about the origins of applause. What they do know is that clapping is very old, and very common, and very tenacious — “a remarkably stable facet of human culture.” Babies do it, seemingly instinctually. The Bible makes many mentions of applause – as acclamation, and as celebration. (“And they proclaimed him king and anointed him, and they clapped their hands and said, ‘Long live the king!'”)

But clapping was formalized — in Western culture, at least — in the theater. “Plaudits” (the word comes from the Latin “to strike,” and also “to explode”) were the common way of ending a play. At the close of the performance, the chief actor would yell, “Valete et plaudite!” (“Goodbye and applause!”) — thus signaling to the audience, in the subtle manner preferred by centuries of thespians, that it was time to give praise. And thus turning himself into, ostensibly, one of the world’s first human applause signs…

As theater and politics merged — particularly as the Roman Republic gave way to the Roman Empire — applause became a way for leaders to interact directly (and also, of course, completely indirectly) with their citizens. One of the chief methods politicians used to evaluate their standing with the people was by gauging the greetings they got when they entered the arena. (Cicero’s letters seem to take for granted the fact that “the feelings of the Roman people are best shown in the theater.”) Leaders became astute human applause-o-meters, reading the volume — and the speed, and the rhythm, and the length — of the crowd’s claps for clues about their political fortunes.

“You can almost think of this as an ancient poll,” says Greg Aldrete, a professor of history and humanistic studies at the University of Wisconsin, and the author of Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome. “This is how you gauge the people. This is how you poll their feelings.” Before telephones allowed for Gallup-style surveys, before SMS allowed for real-time voting, before the Web allowed for “buy” buttons and cookies, Roman leaders were gathering data about people by listening to their applause. And they were, being humans and politicians at the same time, comparing their results to other people’s polls — to the applause inspired by their fellow performers. After an actor received more favorable plaudits than he did, the emperor Caligula (while clutching, it’s nice to imagine, his sword) remarked, “I wish that the Roman people had one neck.”…

So the subtleties of the Roman arena — the claps and the snaps and the shades of meaning — gave way, in later centuries, to applause that was standardized and institutionalized and, as a result, a little bit promiscuous. Laugh tracks guffawed with mechanized abandon. Applause became an expectation rather than a reward. And artists saw it for what it was becoming: ritual, rote. As Barbra Streisand, no stranger to public adoration, once complained: “What does it mean when people applaud? Should I give ’em money? Say thank you? Lift my dress?” The lack of applause, on the other hand — the unexpected thing, the relatively communicative thing — “that I can respond to.”…

Mostly, though, we’ve used the affordances of the digital world to remake public praise. We link and like and share, our thumbs-ups and props washing like waves through our networks. Within the great arena of the Internet, we become part of the performance simply by participating in it, demonstrating our appreciation — and our approval — by amplifying, and extending, the show. And we are aware of ourselves, of the new role a new world gives us. We’re audience and actors at once. Our applause is, in a very real sense, part of the spectacle. We are all, in our way, claqueurs.

Fascinating, from the human tendency across cultures to clap, planting people in the audience to clap and cheer, to the rules that developed around clapping.

A couple of thoughts:

1. Are there notable moments in history when politicians and others thought the crowd was going one way because of applause but quickly found out that wasn’t the case? Simply going by the loudest noise seems rather limited, particularly with large crowds and outdoors.

2. The translation of clapping into Facebook likes loses the embodied nature of clapping and crowds. Yes, likes allow you to mentally see that you are joining with others. But, there is something about the social energy of a crowd that is completely lost. Durkheim would describe this as collective effervesence and Randall Collins describes the physical nature of “emotional energy” that can be generated when humans are in close physical proximity to each other. Clapping is primarily a group behavior and is difficult to transfer to a more individualistic setting.

3. I have noticed in my lifetime the seemingly increasing prevalence of standing ovations. Pretty much every theater show I have been to in recent years is followed by a standing ovation. My understanding is that at one point such ovations were reserved for truly spectacular performances but now it is simply normal. Thus, the standing ovation now has a very different meaning.

How the Facebook equation 6÷2(1+2)= reveals the social construction of the order of operations

Posted on March 13, 2013 by legallysociable

An equation on Facebook that has generated a lot of debate actually illustrates where the mathematical order of operations comes from:

Some of you are already insisting in your head that 6 ÷ 2(1+2) has only one right answer, but hear me out. The problem isn’t the mathematical operations. It’s knowing what operations the author of the problem wants you to do, and in what order. Simple, right? We use an “order of operations” rule we memorized in childhood: “Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally,” or PEMDAS, which stands for Parentheses Exponents Multiplication Division Addition Subtraction.* This handy acronym should settle any debate—except it doesn’t, because it’s not a rule at all. It’s a convention, a customary way of doing things we’ve developed only recently, and like other customs, it has evolved over time. (And even math teachers argue over order of operations.)

“In earlier times, the conventions didn’t seem as rigid and people were supposed to just figure it out if they were mathematically competent,” says Judy Grabiner, a historian of mathematics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. Mathematicians generally began their written work with a list of the conventions they were using, but the rise of mass math education and the textbook industry, as well as the subsequent development of computer programming languages, required something more codified. That codification occurred somewhere around the turn of the last century. The first reference to PEMDAS is hard to pin down. Even a short list of what different early algebra texts taught reveals how inconsistently the order of operations was applied…

The bottom line is that “order of operations” conventions are not universal truths in the same way that the sum of 2 and 2 is always 4. Conventions evolve throughout history in response to cultural and technological shifts. Meanwhile, those ranting online about gaps in U.S. math education and about the “right” answer to these intentionally ambiguous math problems might be, ironically, missing a bigger point.

“To my mind,” says Grabiner, “the major deficit in U.S. math education is that people think math is about calculation and formulas and getting the one right answer, rather than being about exciting ideas that cut across all sorts of intellectual categories, clear and logical thinking, the power of abstraction and a language that lets you solve problems you’ve never seen before.” Even if that language, like any other, can be a bit ambiguous sometimes.

Another way to restate this conclusion from Grabiner is that math is more about problem-solving than calculations.

This reminds me of well-known areas of sociology that deal with the norms of everyday interactions. In order to interpret the actions of others, we need to know about agreed-upon assumptions. When those assumptions are blurry or are not followed, people get nervous. Hence, as this article suggests, many people get anxious when the rules/norms of math are seemingly violated. If these sorts of basic equations can’t be easily figured out, what hope is there to understand the rest of math? But, norms are not always cut and dry and that can be okay…as long as the people participating are aware of this.

Sociologist on how urban sprawl contributes to stress, limits community

Posted on January 31, 2013 by legallysociable

A sociologist argues urban sprawl boosts stress levels and inhibits social interactions:

Urban sprawl in Alberta’s two largest cities could be contributing to high stress levels and lack of community ties reported in the province, a sociologist suggests.

Statistics Canada’s age-standardized figures show nearly a quarter of Alberta’s population aged 15 and older perceive most days as “quite a bit or extremely stressful.”

Out of the 10 Canadian provinces, Alberta was second-highest for perceived life stress — second only to Quebec — in 2011.

It also had the second-lowest percentage of the population aged 12 and over who reported their sense of belonging to the local community as being “very strong or somewhat strong” — higher only than Quebec.

Tim Haney, an urban sociology expert and assistant professor at Mount Royal University, said the way Calgary, and more recently Edmonton, are growing outward affects residents’ quality of life.

Difficulty or inconvenience commuting from place to place can impact a person’s relationships and ability develop some sense of community, he said.

This sounds like possible correlations – we would have to see more specific data before making any conclusions. But, these arguments are related to earlier theories and findings. Some of the early sociologists, people like Georg Simmel, worried about how individuals would survive in cities. Simmel didn’t think much about suburbs but perhaps his ideas about “nervous stimulation” in cities could be adapted to suburban settings where there is less regular interaction with strangers but still a lot of movement (particularly driving) amidst populated areas. Also, Robert Putnam argued in Bowling Alone that sprawl contributed to a decline in community life and civic engagement.

If all of this is true and life in sprawl does include a stress penalty, this is an interesting trade-off for Americans: buy a bigger and cheaper house within the sprawl and participate in the suburban good life but have more stress than living elsewhere.

Testing rules of reciprocity two ways: sociologist sends out Christmas cards to strangers, making requests of strangers in Facebook

Posted on November 27, 2012 by legallysociable

In 1974, a sociologist tested the social norms of reciprocity by sending out Christmas cards to 600 strangers. He received a sizable response:

And so he went out and collected directories for some nearby towns and picked out around 600 names. “I started out at a random number and then skipped so many and got to the next one,” he says.

To these 600 strangers, Kunz sent his Christmas greetings: handwritten notes or a card with a photo of him and his family. And then Kunz waited to see what would happen.

“It was just, you know, a shot in the dark,” he says. “I didn’t know what would happen.”

But about five days later, responses started filtering back — slowly at first and then more, until eventually they were coming 12, 15 at a time. Eventually Kunz got more than 200 replies. “I was really surprised by how many responses there were,” he says. “And I was surprised by the number of letters that were written, some of them three, four pages long.”…

“We got cards for maybe 15 years,” he says.

While the article goes on to discuss why strangers might reciprocate in this way, I wonder how much this applies to the social realm of Facebook. If someone did something similar on Facebook today, such as making friend requests of many people they don’t know or sending messages to strangers, would people respond in the same way? From personal experience, research on the topic, and an experiment one of my students did this semester by sending messages to random Facebook users and receiving no response, reciprocation does not occur to the same degree in Facebook. Here are a few reasons why this might be the case:

1. A growing distrust of strangers. On Facebook, this sort of behavior tends to be described as “creepy.” Even as media sources suggest users, particularly kids and teenagers, can meet all sorts of random people online, most users tend to stick with people they already know or who are in geographic proximity (like classmates at the same school).

2. People are less in the habit of having to reciprocate because more encounters on Facebook are controlled, meaning they happen when a user wants them to happen. In other words, chance encounters between people who don’t know each other are more limited. Overall, Facebook and text messaging and other means make it more possible to have social interactions on someone’s own terms.

To some degree, reciprocity is part of how trust is built between social actors. It is part of basic exchanges: if you ask someone “how are you doing?” you expect a polite response. If you provide a favor for someone at work, we tend to expect a favor in return down the road. However, these sorts of exchanges may look very different on Facebook (for example, common encouraging responses to new profile pictures or posts about tough circumstances) and could signal larger shifts in how people interact.

A lot of web traffic comes through the “dark social,” not through social network sites

Posted on October 12, 2012 by legallysociable

Alexis Madrigal argues that while social network sites like Facebook get a lot of attention, a lot of web traffic is influenced by social processes that are much more difficult to see and measure:

Here’s a pocket history of the web, according to many people. In the early days, the web was just pages of information linked to each other. Then along came web crawlers that helped you find what you wanted among all that information. Some time around 2003 or maybe 2004, the social web really kicked into gear, and thereafter the web’s users began to connect with each other more and more often. Hence Web 2.0, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’m not strawmanning here. This is the dominant history of the web as seen, for example, in this Wikipedia entry on the ‘Social Web.’…

There are circumstances, however, when there is no referrer data. You show up at our doorstep and we have no idea how you got here. The main situations in which this happens are email programs, instant messages, some mobile applications*, and whenever someone is moving from a secure site (“https://mail.google.com/blahblahblah“) to a non-secure site (http://www.theatlantic.com).

This means that this vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. It shows up variously in programs as “direct” or “typed/bookmarked” traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that’s not actually what’s happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you…

Just look at that graph. On the one hand, you have all the social networks that you know. They’re about 43.5 percent of our social traffic. On the other, you have this previously unmeasured darknet that’s delivering 56.5 percent of people to individual stories. This is not a niche phenomenon! It’s more than 2.5x Facebook’s impact on the site…

If what I’m saying is true, then the tradeoffs we make on social networks is not the one that we’re told we’re making. We’re not giving our personal data in exchange for the ability to share links with friends. Massive numbers of people — a larger set than exists on any social network — already do that outside the social networks. Rather, we’re exchanging our personal data in exchange for the ability to publish and archive a record of our sharing. That may be a transaction you want to make, but it might not be the one you’ve been told you made.

Two thoughts about this:

1. Here is how I might interpret this argument from a sociological point of view: Internet traffic is heavily dependent on social connections. Whether this is done on sites like Facebook, which are more publicly social, or through email, which is restricted from public view but is still quite social, the interactions people have influence where they go on the web. In this sense, the Internet is an important social domain that may have some of its own norms and rules as well as its own advantages and disadvantages but it is built around human connections.

2. This sounds like a fantastic business and/or research opportunity; what is going on in this “dark social” realm? Could there be ways at getting at these activities that would help us better understand and analyze the importance of social connections and interactions and could this information be monetized as well?

David Brooks makes a pitch for sociology?

Posted on January 18, 2011 by legallysociable

David Brooks jumped into the recent debate over Amy Chua’s “tiger mother” theory with a piece suggesting that Chua is ignoring what is really cognitively difficult. In describing this, Brooks makes a pretty good pitch for sociology as a discipline:

I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.

Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.

Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals (swimmers are often motivated to have their best times as part of relay teams, not in individual events). Moreover, the performance of a group does not correlate well with the average I.Q. of the group or even with the I.Q.’s of the smartest members…

Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.

This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from by making them rush home to hit the homework table.

Sounds like a good reason to take a sociology course. Interacting with other human beings can indeed be difficult and sociology both teaches particular ways of thinking about interaction that would be helpful.

These sorts of skills, such as working within a group, often get labeled something like “soft skills.” Brooks seems to be suggesting that perhaps these really are the “hard skills” that people need to be productive employees, neighbors, and citizens. Employers seem to want these skills and yet we have relatively few college courses that explicitly teach them.

I wonder if there is available data or studies that show that sociology students are better prepared to work in group settings than those of other majors.

And would people in other disciplines read this pitch of Brooks?

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