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text. There are some very good
reasons for thismost of our
teachers have training in psy-
chology of one sort or another,
for one thing. For another, the
Air Force has job specialties in
psychology and related fields,
but not in sociology or anthro-
pology. Finally, if you consider
simply which of the three
coursespsychology, sociol-
ogy, or anthropologyis taken
by the largest number of under-
graduate students in America,
the winner is psychology.
Moreover, textbooks are ex-
pensive, and we only want to
make you buy one. So psychol-
Welcome to Behav-
ioral Sciences 110Introduc-
tion to the Behavioral Sciences
and Leadership. At many col-
leges, students will take all or
some of the following courses
psychology, sociology, an-
thropology, economics, and
political science. These sub-
jects, taken collectively, are
usually referred to as thesocialsciences. Psychology, sociol-ogy, and anthropology are
sometimes referred to as the
behavioral sciences, though it
can be argued that there is a lot
of behaving (and misbehaving)
going on in economics and
political science, too. Here at
the US Air Force Academy,
you will, as part of the Core
Curriculum, take this course
(Beh Sci 110), Economics, and
Political Science. Sociology is
an optional course taken by
some Behavioral Science ma-
jors (and some others) and An-
thropology is not offered. So
unfortunately, most of you will
not have an opportunity to take
a full course in sociology or
anthropology.
You have probably
noticed by now that the book
for this course is a psychology
HAVE YOU SEEN THE ELEPHANT?
In This Chapter:
Of Sciences Hard, Soft and
Easypg
Historical Development
Psychologypg
Sociologypg
Anthropology
pg
Subject Matter & Method
Psychologypg
Sociologypg
Anthropologypg
What Do Social Scientists
Actually Do?
Psychologistspg
Sociologistspg
Anthropologists
pg
Back To The Elephant-pg
George R. Mastroianni
Wilbur J. Scott
Angelle Khachadoorian
Since its emergence as
a major in the 1950s,
psychology has
increased to be one of
the most popular
majors in colleges
across the US.
Psychology is the
fourth most popular
major according to
the APA Monitor,
June 2008.
-
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2/24
ogy is the chassis for our
journey into the behavioral
sciences.
Our consideration of
sociology and anthropology
will be more than paint andbody work, however. Psy-
chology is a vehicle that can
take us lots of interesting and
even fun places. But sociol-
ogy and anthropology are
vehicles different enough
from psychology that they
will carry us to places from
which the view will also be
quite different. Well try to
show you that sometimes the
various views of phenomenaand events that well get from
these three disciplines are
like the old story about six
blind men who each examine
an elephant, but only feel
certain parts of the beast.
Only by combining the
different perspectives do
we get a full and complete
picture. The elephant story
is of ancient Eastern origin
(perhaps India) but the bestknown version in America
is a poem by John Godfrey
Saxe (1816-1887).
Social sciences.
Page 2
John Godfrey Saxe
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Natural sciences. Basic sciences. Physi-
cal sciences. Hard sciences. Soft sci-
ences. Mathematical sciences. Earth sci-ence, life science, food science, informa-
tion science,
sport science,
the sweet
science, the
dismal sci-
ence, weird
science, real
science -
science is
impressive in
our culture,
so a lot ofdifferent activities get labeled science
in hopes of getting in on the credibility
the title confers. So what is science
how is it different from other ways of
knowing, what exactly are social sci-
ences, and what makes them different
from other forms of science?
Science is the way many of us go
about trying to discover truths about the
world we inhabit.
Youve probably
leaned in highschool that sci-
ence happens
when scientists
make observa-
tions, form hy-
potheses, design
experiments to
test those hy-
potheses, carry out
the experiments,
and
validate or invali-
date theories on
the basis of their
findings. This is a
good basic statement of what goes on. We
can add that science is empiricalthat itconcerns events and phenomena that
are observable. Note that observable is
not the same as visiblethere are ob-
servable but not visible things (X-rays),
but observable things are things that
you dont have to take another persons
word for: we can all agree that it is or isnt
there, through aided or unaided observation.
Another aspect of science that is
important is that it is more than facts and
observations. Theories are ways to organize
facts into formal, logical structures that per-
mit us to make predictions about new facts,
and then test them. Theories have explana-
tory power that mere facts do not have.
Observing lots of things falling on earth is
collecting factsno matter how many
things you see fall on earth, though, you
wont be able to say anything about how
things will fall on the moonunless you
have a theory of grav-ity. Theories are al-
ways works in pro-
gress. We dont think
of theories as being
right or wrong so
much as we think of
them as fitting the
facts more or less well.
Newtons theory of
mechanics wasnt
wrong, it just didnt
fit the data as well asquantum mechanics
did after Einstein
came along.
One last thing about
science: while it
may be about the
world, it is done by
people. You have
heard people talk
about being objec-
tive as opposed to
subjective. The idea
is that we take the
facts for what they
are, not what we want them to be. This is
the only sure path to scientific truth. This
aspiration to be completely
objective, is like scientific
theory-making in the sense
that we can never really quite
achieve perfection. Thomas
Kuhn, a phi-
losopher of
science, ar-
gued many
years ago
that science
is also aso-cialprocess
a process
that is,
whether we
like it or not,
affected by
the people
who do it. Now, this does not mean
that its all relative and there is no
such thing asright or
wrong, bet-
ter or worse
when it
comes to
scienceit
just means
that it is
sometimes
hard to tease
out the sub-
tle influences our humanness has on
everything we do, even science.
Of Sciences Hard, Soft and Easy
Page 3
Science is the way many of us go
about trying to discover truths about
the world we live in.
Science is empiricalit concerns
events or phenomena that are ob-
servable.
Observable is not the same as
visible. Observable things are those
you dont have to take another per-
sons word for: we can all agree it
is or isnt there, through aided or
unaided observation.
Science aspires to be completely
objective.
Science is a social processa proc-
ess that is, whether we like it or not,
affected by the people who do it.
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leave at the door of the scientific labo-
ratory. There is a lot of worthwhile
thinking to be done that is not science.
So what exactly are social
sciences? Perhaps the best way to
think about the social sciences is to
think of them as the study of the world
with people in it. There are other sci-
ences which would work just as well
on the moon as here on earth.
Physics and chemistry come tomindthe same principles we
use to understand motion on
earth apply equally well on the
moon. Minerals on the moon
contain elements from the same
periodic table that works here on terrafirma. A physicist or chemist could
find much to amuse him/herself on the
moon, and some have done just that.
One more last thing about sci-
ence: it is only one
way to encounter the
world we live in.
Truth can be sought
in other ways, such as
through painting,
literature, dance,
theater, spirituality,
sport, and the list goes
on. Are scientifictruths better than other
kinds of truths? Well,
most of us in the Western
tradition have decided that
if you want to learn about
the world we live in, science is the best
way to go about it. Other kinds of truths
is this way better than that, is this
act right or wrong we generally
But what would a psychologist, or soci-
ologist, or anthropologist, or economist,
or political scientist do on the moon?
Pretty much nothing, short of studying
any transplanted Earthlings nearby. So
the social sciences study social beings,
which here on Earth, means mainly hu-
mans. Not exclusively humansbecause
there other creatures which are social,
FROM N-RAYS TO COLD FUSION
Page 4
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but not human. Ants and dogs are exam-
ples. Some psychologists even study other
creatures that arent particularly social,
but nevertheless offer opportunities to
learn more about humans. The common
thread is that social scientists are inter-ested in people as an ultimate object of
study.
Being interested in people has
advantages and disadvantages, from a
scientific point of view. One advantage is
their availabilitythe planet is crawling
with us. We have been paying lots of at-
tention to ourselves for a very long time,
and we keep fairly good records, so there
is a rich source of human activity to
study. Physical scientists sometimes find
themselves studying phenomena that are
very hard to observe and dont last long,
like the collisions of sub-atomic particles
or chemical reactions
under extreme tem-
perature conditions.
For the most part,
human behavior is all
around us all the
time. Some of us may
not behave well, but
we all behave a lot.
But the sheer
availability of human
behavior as data is
offset by some
real disadvan-
tages. For one
thing, doing
scientific ex-
periments in-volves achiev-
ing experimen-
tal control over
the phenomena
we are interested in studying. So, if we
want to understand the relations among
the pressure, volume, and temperature of
a confined gas (as a physical scientist
might) no one will object if we confine a
gas and heat it up. We can, with relative
ease, control all other variables and elimi-
nate any potential sources of experimental
error. We can measure the pressure as thetemperature rises. We can cool it off and
try again. And again. We can change
things a little and repeat under slightly
different conditions, if we choose to.
But what if someone made the
observation that there seems to be a lot
more violent crime when the weather is
hot, and hypothesized that increased am-
bient temperature makes people more
aggressive, and therefore more likely to
commit crimes? How can we learn more
about this interesting question? To beginwith, we really dont have control over
the weather. So theres a problem. But
even if we did, would it be rightorfairtopotential crime victims to go ahead and
raise the temperature if we could, just to
see the effects? How would you like it if
you got mugged one hot sunny day and
found out that pointy-headed evil scien-
tists had been cranking
up the temperature to
see what would hap-
pen, mugging-wise?
We have ethical obli-
gations to humans (andto animals, though any
people believe that the
nature of our obliga-
tions to animals is dif-
ferent) and so sometimes, even if it
is technically possible to achieve
experimental control, we cant do it
because we might hurt someone.
And, through application of some
of those non-scientific ways of
thinking we mentioned earlier(philosophy, ethics, morality) sci-
entists have decided that it is not
OK, under most circumstances, to
hurt someone (or risk hurting
someone) just to advance the state
of scientific knowledge.
Page 5
Scientists have decided that it is not OKto hurt someone (or risk hurting some-
one) just to advance the state of scientific
knowledge
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made up of people. Summer is a time for
travel, vacations, and going to the beach
(maybe not so much in Colo-
rado). Is there any guarantee
that the people in Colorado
Springs will be the same ones
from week to week? Noin
fact we can be pretty sure that
they wont be. You may say
that as long as the processes
that cause people to come and
go from Colorado Springs are
randomthey dont show any
systematic variation that might
affect our measurementsthen we can
still do our study, though maybe with a
little less confidence than before. But
arent some of the factors that might
cause people to come and go non-
random? For example, lots ofcollege students start returning
to college towns, and twelve
hundred brand-new USAFA
cadets (not the rowdiest group
around) get added to the popu-
lation of the Springs in July.
They are not in much of a po-
sition to commit crimes, as it
happens, so they may skew
our data if our study happens
to occur in the first two weeks
of August. So we could shift it
to the third and fourth weeksbut then, all those Colorado
College and
UCCS students
will be returning
and we all
know what they
are like! (More
on prejudice and
stereotyping
later).
And then, of course we have
to take in to account thatpeoples activities change when the tem-
perature changes. They may be outside
more, gathered in larger groups when the
temperature goes up, conditions that
might themselves lead to an increase in
crime through factors that are accidentally
associated, orcorrelated, with higher
temperature. Maybe they drink more alco-
hol when it is hotand we know that
alcohol consumption is related to violence.
In colder weather more of them may have
colds, and who feels like committing a
crime when you have the sniffles? They
may even have air conditioning and heating
systems that blunt the effects of our manipu-
lation.
So, we
might throw
our hands up
and abandon
the idea of
testing this
hypothesis
in a city. Remember, after all, that the
physical scientists didnt try to test their
hypothesis about the pressure, volume, and
temperature of gases on a busy city street
with whatever materials came tohandthey did it in a labora-
tory, with carefully purified
materials, where they could
control all the relevant vari-
ables. We can do that too!
In a laboratory, we can make
sure we have the same people
from condition to condition
well pay college students a
paltry sum and get them to live
in our lab. Well control their
activities and manipulate the
temperature in the laboratory,and measurewhat? It seems
unlikely that any of them will
be committing any crimes in a
psychology laboratory. Theres
certainly not much worth steal-
ing in most of them, and hope-
fully there will be no violence.
We can use questionnaires toassess how violent, angry, or
aggressive peoplefeel, though
and this will give us an idea as to how tem-
perature affects behavior.
So lets pretend we could ap-
proach this problem the same way a
chemist would
approach the prob-
lem. We can treat
individual people
in a city like the
molecules of gas in
a confined space.
We can raise and
lower the tempera-
ture at will and
then see if there are
changes in the
crime rate. If we take a city like Colo-
rado Springs, Colorado, population
about 500,000, and study two weeks in
August for our experiment, we should,
by raising the average temperature by
say, ten degrees Fahrenheit during thesecond week, be able to compare the
number of crimes committed during the
second week with those committed
during the first week, and test our
hypothesis, right?
Not so fast. In the pressure-
volume-temperature experiment, we
were able to ensure that when we raised
and lowered the temperature, every-
thing was the same exceptthe tempera-
turesame gas, same vessel, same
environmental conditions, same peoplereading the same meter, etc. So, if we
observe a
difference in
pressure, we
can be pretty
sure that it
was caused
by the differ-
ence in tem-
perature. But
can we make
the same
kinds of guar-antees about Colorado Springs on any
two weeks in August? If crime rates
change, can we be sure that the change
was due to the heat?
The gas in the vessel is made
up of molecules. They are the exact
same ones under the heated and un-
heated conditions. Colorado Springs is
Page 6
Random shows no systematic variation
that may affect measurement.
Correlation measures the extent to
which two factors vary together, and thus
of how well ether factor predicts the
other.
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But notice that we have now
been forced to move rather far from our
initial plan to study this phenomenon.
We have been forced to use a group of
college students instead of real people
because we can make sure they will bethe same ones in our study from condi-
tion to condition. We have been forced to
take them out of their natural habitat and
study them in a laboratory, where we can
control both the temperature and their
activities closely. And we have been
forced to measure something that is not
what we were originally interested in -
crimebut instead a substitute that we
hope is related
to the measure
we are inter-
ested in(questionnaire
results).
Now, as one
of my college
professors
was fond of
saying, you
might want to
ask yourselves
at this point
which of the
sciences arethe hard
ones, and
which are the
easy ones!
Of course Ive
chosen this example to make a point
(remember, science is done by people)
and there are other examples that could
be used to show how hard the
physical sciences are and how
easy the social sciences can be.
But I hope youll appreciate at
this point that the social sciences
are certainly no easier than the
physical sciences, and because of
the special ethical obligations we
have to our object of study, and
the difficulty this implies for
achieving good experimental con-
trol, the social sciences are beset
by methodological challenges that
make them very hard indeed.
Next time someone says, This
aint rocket science, you can answer, No
thisis really hard!
Moreover,
the social sciences
are not all thesame. Psycholo-
gists are interested
in a wide range of
behavior, including
the behavior of
individuals. So
doing experiments
in psychology may
sometimes be eas-
ier than doing
experiments in
sociology, where
there is less inter-est in people act-
ing alone and
more interest in
large aggrega-
tions of people. But psychologists are
also interested in group behavior, and so
labor under the same challenges as soci-
ologists. And sociologists are also inter-
ested in in-
teractions
between peo-
ple on a very
small scalemaking ex-
periments
possible.
Anthropolo-
gists, especially cultural anthropologists,
often interest themselves in events that
unfold over long periods of time, like the
development of societal institutions
under different cli-
matic and environ-
mental conditions, or
the development of
courtship and mar-
riage traditions in
societies with vary-
ing patterns of eco-
nomic activity. Such
interests require dif-
ferent methods than
are used in psychol-
ogy and sociology.
So lets learn a little
more about these three different, but re-
lated disciplines. Well begin by looking
at how and when these disciplines became
differentiated as distinct areas of study.
Up until the
18th and 19thcenturies,
scholars typi-
cally worked in
ways that today
would be re-
markable.
Scholars of the
seventeenth
century might well be schooled in a vari-
ety of disciplines. While the term is not
entirely historically accurate, the ideal of
the Renaissance man did apply to the
way scholarship and science were doneuntil relatively recently. Industrialization
and mass education have led to speciali-
zation, so that now we learn a great deal
about our chosen area and less about
other areas than was the case in the past.
One vestige of the old system is that most
of your professors with doctoral degrees
are Doctors of Philosophy (Ph.D.s) in
psychology, or physics, or what have you,
not Doctors of Psychology or Doctors
of Physics. This respects the broader
educational goals that were common in
the past.
When and how did the disci-
plines of psychology, sociology, and an-
thropology appear? What is the subject
matter of these three disciplines? What
kinds of methods do they employ? How
are people trained in these disciplines,
and what do they do? These are the ques-
tions we will try to answer in the next
section.
Page 7
Psychologists are interested in a wide
range of behavior, including the behav-ior of individuals and groups.
Sociologists are interested in group
behavior, but are also interested in in-
teractions between people on a very
small scale.
Anthropologists especially cultural
anthropologists, often interest them-
selves in events that develop over long
periods of time, like the development
of societal institutions.
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The best way to summarize the
history of psychology is to say that peo-
ple have been doing psychology for along time, maybe as long as there have
been people, but weve only been doing
it a certain way since 1879. This chap-
ters first author, a psychologist, loves
psychology because it allows him to
make a living doing something he finds
intensely interesting and exciting: think-
ing about what it means to be human,
what makes him and the people around
him tick, why his boss and his dog and
whoever else do the things they do. It is
in that sense that
psychology is as old
as the speciesour
oldest written re-
cords contain sug-
gestions that people
were trying to ex-
plain the world, and
their place in it,
from the very begin-
ning. We are in-
tensely curious crea-
tures. People some-
times refer to sharks
as eating machines
creatures designed mainly to swimaround and eat things. Well, we humans
might be described as learning ma-
chines we are designed to learn and
adapt and learn more. Thats what we
do.
Before (and
after) psychology was a
word (it became a word
in Europe in the 16th cen-
turyits not clear ex-
actly who was the first to
use it) much of what wewould now think of as
psychology was done by
philosophers. The
Greeksthe pre-
Socratics, Plato/Socrates,
and Aristotle are best known in the
Western tradition, but of course there
were many others in Asia and in the
Moslem world thinking about the nature
of human nature. Check out the Timeline
on the wall on the 5th floor.
We mark 1879 (the year
Wilhelm Wundt founded his laboratory
in Leipzig, Germany) as the beginning
of scientific psychology. This is of
course an arbitrary choice, because the
appearance of psychology as a science
was the result of a set of processes that
were set in motion hundreds of years
earlier. The gradual separation of reli-
gious and secular power, the rise of hu-
manism in the Renaissance, the work of
the philoso-
pher ReneDescartes,
developing
conceptions of
humanness
during the
Enlighten-
ment, the de-
velopment of
new ideas
about the ori-
gin of the earth
and the crea-
tures on it in the 19th century, these
trends did not make the appearance of
psychology as we know it today inevita-
ble, but did make it possible.
At the dawn of the twentieth
century, when
modern scientific
psychology was
in its infancy, it
was novel, excit-
ing, daring, and
promising to
apply scientific
methods to thestudy of people,
as if people were
no different from
rocks and gi-
raffes and gases in
confined spaces. Prior to that time we
were SPECIALit was considered at
worst blasphemous and at best silly to
treat people the same as other objects on
the planet. And when the step was taken,
when psychologists
decided that science
was to be the orga-nizing principle of
the discipline, not
everyone was sure it
was the right way to
go, or that a disci-
pline organized this
way had much pros-
pect of success.
William James, an amazingly accom-
plished man sometimes referred to as the
Father of American Psychology, was
himself quite skep-
tical. James said
that we should go
ahead and try to do
the business of
psychology as sci-
entists, that we had
to act as if this en-
terprise would be
successful, but that
psychology was at
that time merely the hope of a science.
.
A hundred-and-some years on,
how are we doing? Did it work? What
verdict would James render if he couldbe here today? This course will not be
enough to equip you with the means to
answer that question. Many of us have
been at this for decades, and we dont
have the means. But one thing is certain:
psychology has come a long way. Psy-
chologists have made amazing strides in
understanding what makes us tick and
in helping those in need. Our scientific
approach has allowed us to jettison some
old ideas that everyone knew were
true that turned out to be wrong, such as
the once common idea that schizophre-nia was caused by bad parenting. We
now know it is a biological disorder, and
can treat it with drugs discovered by
scientists from many disciplines and
continually refined by psychologists who
work as neuroscientists. Psychology is
far from perfect, and none of us can pre-
dict its future. But this relatively undisci-
plined discipline is vibrant and stimulat-
ing more than a century after adopting
the mantle of science.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTPSYCHOLOGY
Page 8
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As we have seen, there is no
one person who invented science or,
more correctly, the scientific method.
However, during the sixteenth and sev-enteenth centuries, a number of thinkers
and tinkerers in the West developed the
ideas and methods that
laid the foundations
for modern science in
the disciplines of phys-
ics, biology, human
anatomy, and chemis-
try. An Englishman,
Sir Francis Bacon, is
the scholar usually
credited with identify-
ing the basic compo-nents of science
logic and observation
and ordering them in
a sequence that led practitioners to for-
mulate theories and then test them.
A number
of scholars toyed
with the idea of ap-
plying the method
that had wrought
new understandings
of the physicalworld to the social
one as well. If the
physical world fol-
lowed discoverable
natural laws, surely
the social one did too. In Europe a
Frenchman, August Comte, thought so.
We probably wouldnt even mention his
name these days had he not proposed a
name for the endeavor in the 1830s
Sociology. For, although Comte (who is
also remembered as an important phi-
losopher) thought doing science was a
great idea, he himself never did it, devot-
ing his time instead to increasingly weird
activities in his self-appointed role as
sociologys high priest he was pretty
well convinced that he was the person
with the first and last word on how
French societyshouldoperate. Others
writing at the time also were given to
pontificating. Karl Marx, father of the
conflict school of thought in sociology,
for example, was both a politi-
cal activist and a social theorist.
During the 1840s, the German
firebrand passed out copies ofhis Communist Manifesto to
factory workers, urging them
with the words, Workers of
the world unite, you have
nothing to lose but your
chains.
Many of the early practitioners
of sociology in America also were re-
formers, but they usually thought it was
a good idea to really study social condi-
tions. The English writer Harriet Mar-
tineau, writing at about the same timeas Comte, told of her travels across
America and compared the actual
workings of U.S. society with the ideals
on which it was founded. In her travels,
she made a point of talking to people in
all walks of lifecan you picture a hard-
of-hearing woman in corset and
hoopskirt
conversing
with factory
workers or
field hands
on a planta-tion, strain-
ing to catch
every word
with an ear
trumpet?
She explained
the whys-and-
wherefores in
How to ObserveMorals and Manners. In a similar spirit,
historian and self-proclaimed sociolo-
gist, Albion Small, founded the first-ever
Department of Sociology in 1892. He
liked to stand at his office window at the
University of Chicago and point out to
the teeming metropolis. Go, he would
tell his faculty and students, your labo-
ratory is out there. One more example
will suffice. In 1899, historian W.E.B.
DuBois published The Philadelphia Ne-
gro: A Social Study, documenting the
pairing, under slavery, between male
slave owner and female slave, and, later,
among intermarrying blacks
and whites despite miscegena-
tion laws. Both arrangements
revealed the gap between socialrealities and racially-inspired
statutes which assumed clear-
cut racial categories. In 1903,
Dubois penned an immensely
popular work, The Souls of
Black Folk, an essay on the
strange double consciousness
that stems from living in an America in
which slavery and then segregation were
legal entities.
Sociology as a full-blown sci-
ence, however, got its definitive start
with a single, monumental work, Sui-
cide, written in 1897 by a French profes-
sor, Emile Durkheim.For sociologists, the book is still worth-
while, if not downright
required, readingto
this day, no card-
carrying sociologist
would dare admit that
he or she had only casu-
ally sifted through its
pages. Since the French
were avid collectors of
birth and death records, Durkheim,
working from his office at the Sorbonne
University in Paris, had access to a gold-mine of data. In addition, he had a the-
ory about suicide that focused on social
relationships among people, or the
dearth of them, rather than upon the psy-
chological states of individuals. Social
phenomena, he argued, beg for explana-
tions grounded in social, not exclusively
psychological, structures.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTSOCIOLOGY
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in the 1870s. Billed as ethnological ex-
positions, Negro villages, or sometimes
just the subhuman section of a zoo, ex-
hibits in Paris, London, Antwerp, Ham-
burg, and New
York City each
drew hundreds of
thousands of visi-
tors. ParisJardin
Zoologique dAc-
climatation, and
the 1878 and 1989
World Fairs in
Paris, staged expo-
sitions of people
from French colo-
nies in caged, natu-
ral settings. In the
U.S., the Cincin-
nati Zoo featured a 100-person Sioux village
for 3 months in 1896.
Another popular at-
traction in the U.S.
was a Pygmy from the
Congo, then a colony
of Belgium, by the
name of Ota Benga.
He was featured at the
1904 St. Louis World Fair and, in 1906,
over protests by a local African-
American minister, displayed in New
York Citys Bronx Zoo in a cage with anorangutan.
We have taken some space to
set up this scenario because early anthro-
pology grew from this fascination with
exotic peoples. Initially, two contrasting
positions
emerged. One
argued that all
peoples and their
societies could
move from the
simple to the com-plexsome were
just doing so more
speedily than oth-
ers. The second
position was more
sinisterit posited that primitive socie-
ties were primitive because of the primi-
tive nature of the people in them. The
idea was that people were limited by
their nature to whatever state of civili-
zation or barbarism in which
they were found. Among the first
to develop the latter position was
the Frenchman, Arthur
de Gobineau. Writingin the 1850s, he put
forth his ideas inAn
Essay on the Inequality
of the Human Races.
Simply put, Gobineau
argued that the racial
characteristics of a peo-
ple define the type of
society and culture they pro-
duce. As such, white,
yellow, and black races
represent a hierarchy of so-
cial possibilities, with the
white race being the most superior.Further, he warned that race-mixing
would lead to disastrous results. Books
like Goibineaus were very popular.
For instance, although many U.S.
whites in the South felt that the justifi-
cation for slavery could be found in the
Bible, they took additional comfort in
the scientific racism of Gobineau and
others.
The Englishman E.B. Tylor
disagreed. Considered the founder of
social anthropology, Tylor never ob-
tained a university degree. However,
his travels to Central America and en-
counters with the Anahuac Indians of
Mexico led to a life-long vocation as a
self-taught ethnologist, i.e., one who
studies a particular society and com-
pares its features with those of othersocieties. In a series of books, culmi-
nating in 1871 with one entitledPrimi-
tive Culture, Tylor argued that humans
in all cultures have the same basic ca-
pabilities. Peoples in very different
societies hence often find similar solu-
tions to problems independently. For
example, peoples in the Fertile Crescent
present-day Iraq and Syriawere the
first to develop a written alphabet, but
the Maya of present-day
Mexico, Guatemala and
Belize were one of only
a handful of societies to
do so separately on their
own (there are thou-
sands of languages, but
only a few alphabets
people in most societies
simply have borrowed
someone elses alphabet
for their language).
Primitive societies, he
believed, represent what advanced socie-
ties once were like, and progress from
primitive to advanced is possible. In his
view, the key difference among the types
of societies lay in the level of formal
education.
On the
American front,
similar arguments
were made by
Lewis Henry
Morgan, who was
university
trained, though in
law. Morgan had
befriended Indi-
ans from the Iro-
quois and Seneca tribes and assistedthem in the legal defense of their land
claims. In his interactions with these
tribes, he began to see intriguing cultural
similarities and differences which helped
shape his unity of origin of man hy-
pothesis. Kinship terminology espe-
cially caught his attention. While the
concept of family is universal, different
cultures might label and define relation-
ships among family members differ-
ently. For the Iroquois, for example, a
mothers sister is like another mother
and should be called such, while a fa-thers sister is similar to an aunt. Yet, he
also noticed that seemingly divergent
cultures can share a similar concept of
family structure.
Morgan extended this hypothe-
sis in his 1877 book,Ancient Society:Researches in the Lines of Human Pro-
gress, where he laid out a unilinear the-
ory of evolution, i.e., one that posits set
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stages of development through which
all societies will passin his terms,
from savagery to barbarism to civiliza-
tion. Technology, in his view, was the
driving force behind
social changethe in-vention of the bow and
arrow for hunting, met-
alworks for hoeing and
plowing, and the alpha-
bet and writing for civi-
lized ways. Indian so-
cieties, in fact, already
ran the gamut of these
stages (remember the
Maya and their alphabet?). The meth-
odology underlying Morgans claims is
intensive field workhe advocated
studying native peoples in their home
settings, just as a biologist might studyanimals in their natural habitat
(Morgan, it turns out, also published a
study of the American beaver using that
strategy). While Morgans efforts were
an attempt to point to the shared hu-
manity of all cultures, his theory was
recognized as weak for its emphasis on
material culture. The Aztecs, with their
complex culture and elaborate market
and monetary systems would, according
to Morgans model, never rise to civili-
zation because they had minimal access
to metal for tools.
Just as Durkheim helped estab-lish sociology as a science, so Franz
Boas did
almost
singlehand-
edly for An-
thropology.
German-born
and educated
(his PhD
actually was
in physics),
Boas traveled
to Baffin
Island in far northwest Canada in the
early 1880s as a geographer for the Brit-
ish government. There he discovered his
anthropologist self doing fieldwork with
Eskimos and then the Kwakiutl Indians
in the Vancouver area. He moved to
New York City in the late 1890s as Cu-
rator of the American Museum of Natu-
ral History, which featured exhibits of
Native American tribes, and as Professor
of Anthropology at Columbia University.
In 1911 he published a summary of his
thinking and a blueprint for Anthropology
in The Mind of Primitive Man. Taking on
the de Gobineaus of the world, Boas
argued that the concept of race was use-less in explaining the diversity of human
societies. The human mind, he con-
tended, does not explain variations in
society and culture. It is the other way
aroundhuman
capabilities and be-
havior are conse-
quences of having
learned the particu-
lar cultures into
which groups of
people were born.
Finally, he provided
Anthropology with a
methodological dic-
tum: ethnologists
must study societies
from the point of view
of those being studied, be proficient in the
native language, and employ those being
studied when possible as informants or
even co-investigators.
1890s, we can be confident
that the idea of including
the word behavior in the
opening sentence did not
occur to him. To
psychologists then,
and to most people
now, psychology
ought to be the
study of what goes
on in my
head. But
in the earlyyears of
psychology,
it quickly
became ap-
parent that
there is really only
one person who
KNOWS for sure
what is going on
Many introductory
psychology books a few
years ago would have begun
with a sentence something
like, Psychology is the sci-
ence of behavior. Youll
notice that yours begins
with, Psychology is the
scientific study of behavior
and mental processes. The
obvious difference is the
addition of the term, mental
processes. The story ofhow this change occurred is too long to
recount here in detail, but a thumbnail
sketch will help you to frame some of
the issues and controversies you will
encounter as you go through the course.
When William James was writing the
first psychology textbook in English
(thePrinciples of Psychology) in the
your headand that would be you.
Wundt (remember, the fellow who
founded the first psychology laboratory)
developed a method he called introspec-
tion. This
involved
exposing
himself and
others to
carefully
produced,
repeatable
sensoryexperiences
(flashes of
light, tick-
ing sounds,
and the
like) and carefully thinking about his
inner experience of these events.
Wundts observations then formed the
basis for his theories of the elements of
SUBJECT MATTER & METHODPSYCHOLOGY
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mental life and their combinations and
propertiesa kind of mental chemis-
try. The problem was, only Wundt
could see the chemicalsand if you
didnt happen to see them the same way
he did (since the authority of professorsthen was FAR greater than it is now) that
meant you were, well, wrong. This is not
a club a lot of people are going to want
to join, and psychologists soon began to
try other methods and approaches. The
one that had the most impact on the
STUDY of psychology was the approach
known as behav-
iorism. I say the
study of psychol-
ogy because the
PRACTICE of
psychology, thatpart of psychol-
ogy done by cli-
nicians and
therapists, was
most heavily influ-
enced by psycho-
analysis (Freudian
psychology) in the
early days.
As long as
we have run across
Freud, it is worth
pausing briefly to discuss his contribu-
tions to psychology. One of us
(Mastroianni) is a psychologist, and al-
ways asks his students in this class to
name one famous psychologist on
Lesson 1. The overwhelming
response is Sigmund Freud. Like it or
not, Freud is the face of psychology to
popular culture. Everyone has heard of
him, and many books, plays and films
use elements of Freudian psychology.
Many students are surprised, then, when
his psychology receives only a brief
mention in most introductory courses.Freud contributed mainly to clinical psy-
chology, and for a host of reasons,
Freuds approach is much less influential
among modern clinicians today than it
was a hundred years ago. But Freud is an
important historical figure: he, along
with Darwin, radically altered our con-
ception of ourselves, and in so doing
earned the admiration of some and the
disdain of others.
On the scien-
tific side of things, psy-
chology became domi-
nated by Behaviorism.As articulated by John
Watson, behaviorism
took as its guiding prin-
ciple the idea that the
ONLY legitimate object
of study in psychology
was behavior. Science
deals with ob-
servable events; mental events are
not observable; therefore, mental
events cannot be part of a scien-
tific psychology. That simple idea
dominated American psychologyuntil a few decades ago. The proc-
ess that would result in the term
mental processes reappear-
ing in textbooks didnt really
begin until the 1950s, and
gathered steam in the 1970s
and later. This happened for a
few reasons: a growing realiza-
tion that a psychology stripped
of all discussion of mental
events is not all that interest-
ing, really, and has a kissing-
your-sister (or brother) kind of
effect on most people passionate about
understanding human nature. And, the
invention of high-speed digital com-
puters appeared to offer a way out of the
behaviorist
box: a way to
keep the inter-
esting stuff in
psychology,
but do it in a
scientifically
respectable
way. After all,
computershave memo-
ries, and do
something that looks like a
lot like thinking, and there is
nothing unobservable about
them, so why cant we apply
the same methods to people?
Thus was born the cognitive
approach to the study of
psychology. And the methods we use in
psychology today are the methods of sci-
ence, applied broadly to both inner mental
events and publically observable behav-
ior.
Scientific methods include ex-
perimental, correlational, and observa-
tional approaches. Weve already encoun-
tered the fundamentals of the experimen-
tal approach. This approach involves the
purposeful and systematic manipulation
of an independent variable (such as am-
bient temperature) and the measurement
of a dependent variable (such as the rate
of violent crime). The groups defined by
the manipulation of the independent vari-
able are often refrred to as the control
group and the experimental group. Theexperimental group is normally exposed
to some treatment, such as raising the
ambient temperature by ten degrees Fahr-
enheit, while the control group is exposed
to normal temperatures. Subjects are ran-
domly sampled from the population
and assigned to the groups in the study,
to avoid biases arising from non-
representative samples.
Because people are exquisitely
sensitive to very subtle signals from one
another, and can be deeply affected by
their beliefs and expectations, we usually
conceal the nature of the experimental
treatment (am I in the control group or the
experimental group?) from the subject (a
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14/24
Measures of Central Tendency1.0 Describe the three measures of centraltendency, and tell which is most affected by
extreme scores.The next step is to summarize the data using somemeasure of central tendency, a single score thatrepresents a whole set of scores. The simplest
measure is the mode, the most frequently occurringscore or scores. The most commonly reported is the
mean, or arithmetic averagethe total sum of all
the scores divided by the number of scores. On adivided highway, the median is the middle. So, too,
with data: The medianis the midpointthe 50thpercentile. If you arrange all the scores in order
from the highest to the lowest, half will be abovethe median and half will be below it.
Fig. 1.10 A skewed distribution This graphic representation of the distribution of incomes illus-
trates the three measures of central tendencymode, median, and mean. Note how just a few high in-
comes make the meanthe fulcrum point that balances the incomes above and belowdeceptivelyhigh.
In the United States, advocates and critics described the 2003 tax cut with different statistics, bothtrue. The White House explained that 92 million Americans will receive an average tax cut of $1083.Critics agreed, but also noted that 50 million taxpayers got no cut, and half of the 92 million who did
benefit received less than $100 (Krugman, 2003). Mean and median tell different true stories.
Measures of central tendency neatly summarizedata. But consider what happens to the mean
when a distribution is lopsided or skewed. With
income data, for example, the mode, median, andmean often tell very different stories (Figure
1.10). This happens because the mean is biased
by a few extreme scores. When Microsoft founder
Bill Gates sits down in an intimate cafe, its aver-age (mean) patron instantly becomes a billionaire.Understanding this, you can see how a British
newspaper could accurately run the headlineIncome for 62% Is Below Average (Waterhouse,1993). Because the bottom halfof British income
earners receive only a quarterof the national in-
come cake, most British people, like most peopleeverywhere, make less than the mean.
Measures of Variation1.0 | Describe two measures of variation.Knowing the value of an appropriate measure of central ten-dency can tell us a great deal. But it also helps to knowsomething about the amount ofvariation in the datahowsimilar or diverse the scores are. Averages derived fromscores with low variability are more reliable than averagesbased on scores with high variability. Consider a basketball
player who scored between 13 and 17 points in each of herfirst 10 games in a season. Knowing this, we would be moreconfident that she would score near 15 points in her nextgame than if her scores had varied from 5 to 25 points.The average person has one ovary and one testicle.
The rangeof scoresthe gap between the lowest and high-est scoresprovides only a crude estimate of variation be-
cause a couple of extreme scores in an otherwise uniformgroup, such as the $475,000 and $710,000 incomes in Fig-ure 1.10, will create a deceptively large range.
The more useful standard for measuring howmuch scores deviate from one another is the
standard deviation. It better gauges
whether scores are packed together or dis-persed, because it uses information from eachscore (Table 1.4). (The computation assem-
bles information about how much individualscores differ from the mean.) If your collegeor university attracts students of a certain
ability level, their intelligence scores will have
a smaller standard deviation than the onefound in the more diverse community popula-tion outside your school.
http://top.define%28%27mode%27%29/http://top.define%28%27mode%27%29/http://top.define%28%27mean%27%29/http://top.define%28%27mean%27%29/http://top.define%28%27median%27%29/http://top.define%28%27median%27%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.define%28%27range%27%29/http://top.define%28%27range%27%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.define%28%27standarddeviation%27%29/http://top.define%28%27standarddeviation%27%29/http://top.opensupp%28%22table%22%2C1%2C4%29/http://top.opensupp%28%22table%22%2C1%2C4%29/http://top.opensupp%28%22table%22%2C1%2C4%29/http://top.define%28%27standarddeviation%27%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.define%28%27range%27%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.opensupp%28%27figure%27%2C1%2C10%29/http://top.define%28%27median%27%29/http://top.define%28%27mean%27%29/http://top.define%28%27mode%27%29/8/8/2019 MasterV Have You Seen the Elephant
15/24
so-called single-blind experiment). We
sometimes even conceal this information
from the experimenter, as wellthis is
often done in drug studies, where sub-
jects are given an experimental drug and
a placebocrating a double-blind ex-
periment. This is not done because we
are afraid experimenters will cheat and
tell the subjects to produce the outcome
the experimenter desires; rather, it is
dine because we recognize that humans
are built to transmit and receive signals
and information from each other, often
without any awareness that we are doing
so.
Correlational methods identify
statistical associations between variables
(most usually, two variables, though
there are techniques for measuring asso-ciations among many variables simulta-
neously). Correlations can be positive
(ranging from 0 to +1), where in-
creases in one variable are associated
with increases in the other; negative,
(ranging from 0 to -1) where increases
in one variable are associated with
decreases in the other; or can be un-
correlated (near 0) where there is no
systematic relationship between the
two variables. Height and weight, then,
are (positively correlated, negatively
correlated, uncorrelated)? Does this
mean that if adults eat more they will
get taller? No. And this illustrates the
crucial difference between experimen-
tation and correlation: experiments can
help us identify causal relationships,
whereas correlational methods only
identify associations. Surveys are fre-
quently used in correlational research.
Do you see why? Youve probably
taken a lot of surveys, and have noticed
that some are better than others. What
makes a good survey?
Observational approaches in-
volve, well, observing. These methods
can produce valuable insights into the
behavior of those being observed, andoften lead to the development of hy-
potheses that may be tested in experi-
ments or ex-
plored in cor-
relational
studies. Ob-
servation is
more than just
watching,
however:
behaviors of interest must be carefully
defined, using operational definitions;
systematically recorded, and the results
compared against those of other observ-
ers to ensure that no individual biases
in observing or recording have affected
the results.
While most psychological
methods involve studying groups of
people, the case study is also used
sometimes. This method involves the
intensive study of a single individual,
often relying primarily on observation
but sometimes including experimental
interventions
as well. Such
studies are
most appropri-
ate when thephenomena of
interest are
especially rare
or idiosyn-
cratic. Can you
think of an
example where
such a method
might be appropriate? (HINT: Wap-
ners on at 5).
SUBJECT MATTER & METHOD
SOCIOLOGYranging from the statistical analysis of
survey data to in-depth descriptions of
social settings. How did all this come
about?
The short story is that sociology
in America began to chart a course of its
own apart from that in Europe during the
1930s. At this time, the developing
model in psychology (Behaviorism) was,
Stimulus [black box] Behavior,
where psychologists settled
on directly observable stimuliand behaviors while bypass-
ing whirrings within the
black box, the not-directly-
observable workings of the
mind. The black box, how-
ever, was precisely the focus
of University of Chicago jack
-of-all tradessociologist,
philosopher, and psycholo-
gistGeorge Herbert Mead. What
Mead wanted to know was, what is
going on WITHIN the black box?
This question led him to study how
small humansinfants and children
acquired language, a sense of self,
and, ultimately, the wherewithal to
become functioning members of a
society. Because of its emphasis on
the role of language, Meads ap-
proach is called symbolic inter-
actionism, and remains withconflict theory (from Marx) and
functionalism (from Durkheim)
one of the three major theoretical
paradigms in sociology. Inci-
dentally, Mead himself, suffer-
ing from a bit of writers block,
never put his thoughts down in a
comprehensive, written
form. So, after his death, his
We just learned above that psy-
chology is the science of behavior and
mental processes. So what is sociology
about? For starters, most sociologists
would clarify that
their field is the
study ofhumanbehavioras it oc-
curs in groups.
Although some in
sociobiology, a
disputed subfield ofsociology, study
nonhumans who
live in complex societies, like ants, for
example, the human groupings could be
anything from couples to gangs to formal
organizations to whole societies or even
the whole system of currently existing
societies. Further, practitioners of the
field use a variety of research methods,
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students compiled and edited
his theory into a single volume,
Mind, Self, and Society. The
methodology associated with
this approach typically details
what individual social actorsare thinking, feeling, and ex-
periencing as they go about the
business of daily life.
At about the same
time, a young Harvard doctoral
student in sociology, Robert
Merton, published a paper
which would later culminate in
his 1948 book, Social Theory
and Social Structure. Probably
the single most frequently read
and trans-lated-into-
other-
languages book in
Sociology,
Social Theory andSocial Structure rede-
fined functionalism
in American social
science. Durkheims
functionalism had
proceeded by asking
of any social arrange-
ment, what purpose does it serve? This
query unfortunately created a kind of cir-
cularity of reasoning, for it implied that if
particular social arrangement did not
serve some important
purpose, it would not
exist. For example,
war is a persistent fea-
ture of human socie-
ties, so it must fulfill
some important system
needs for a society or
it would not be so
prevalent. Merton
suggested instead thefollowing question,
what consequences
does the arrangement
have? This question
directs the analyst to
look for positive and negative conse-
quences, plus ones that are intended
(manifest functions) and ones that were
unanticipated (latent functions).
Now try Mertons suggestion on
the question, why is war a persis-
tent feature of human societies?
What positive and negative conse-
quences did you come up with?What manifest and latent func-
tions? By the way, we can make a
bridge to conflict theory by adding
the question, positive and negative in
its consequences, for whom?
Associated with this refocusing
of functionalism is the emphasis
on social arrangements, i.e.,
social structures. It is possible
to devise strategies for studying,
in a scientific sense, whole so-
cieties or systems of societies.
Merton, however, argued that it
is best at this
time to place our eggs
in smaller baskets, or,
what he called
theories of the mid-
dle range. Every
society, for instance,
has a kinship and
family system and
struggles with issues
of deviance and so-
cial control, but there
is tremendous varia-tion in how societies
do these. By focus-
ing on these aspects
of a soci-
ety, Mer-
ton con-
tended, sociologists can de-
velop testable theories which
then can be validated with
data.
We will mention one more
sociologist from this era.Some contemporary sociol-
ogy is strongly quantitative in
its orientation and methods, a
characteristic we can trace to
the influence of Paul Lazars-
feld. An Austrian-born and educated
sociologist (his PhD actually was in
mathematics), Lazarsfeld escaped the
rise of Nazism to eventually assume pro-
fessorships at Princeton and later Colum-
bia Universities. An entrepreneurial
sort, he pioneered what at the time was
derisively called administrative re-
search, that is, studies paid for by com-mercial interests. At least he was big-
time about ithis first efforts in the U.S.
were funded by the Rockefeller Founda-
tion. His interest in the effects of mass
media on decision-making led him to
design a study of the 1936 presidential
electionand the field of public opinion
polling was off and running. Data de-
rived from surveys of this sort lent them-
selves to sophisticated statistical analy-
ses, thereby sparking the rise of not only
survey research but of reason analysis,
quantitative sociology, and mathematical
modeling.
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Anthropologists approach the
study of humanity through the lens of
culture. For this, we can thankFranz Boas. Central to his
perspective was the idea that
there was a virtual smorgas-
bord (all-you-can-eat buffet?)
of distinct cultures out there,
rather than societies that could
be rated in terms of they
where fell on some continuum
of how civilized they were.
Also, he insisted on studying
each culture on its own terms,
and waves of Boas students took to
the field with this mandate. Their
work has enshrined culture as the key to
understanding most anything that hu-
mans do.
At its simplest, culture is every-
thing humans do that is not directly re-
lated to survival. All humans need food,
shelter and companionship. Culture is
HOW people fulfill those basic needs.
Consider that all humans need food. Yet
every culture
defines what is
delicious, in-
edible, appro-priate or even
morally wrong
to eat. Ameri-
cans eat tre-
mendous
amounts of
processed foods that contain ingredients
that we have a hard time even pronounc-
ing, and French people, with their em-
phasis on local, fresh and home-made
foods would be horrified to consume
some of them. Yet, the French eat horse-
meat, considered so taboo tobe inedible for many Ameri-
cans. What, then, makes an
energy drink with its color
not found in nature more or
less palatable than a grass fed
mammal? Culture.
Culture shapes the
human worldview. It defines
the values, beliefs and com-
mon sense of a communitys members.
In fact, when humans see a situation or
action as so utterly logicalthat it need not be explained
because in fact it might be
very difficult to explain the
behavior logicallythey
simply refer to common
sense. Someone might as-
sert that it is simply com-
mon sense that one should
not wear white after Labor
Day. Is this logical? Does
this have any basis in the
natural world, such as prevent-
ing people from getting lost in
snow? Clearly, human survival is not
tied to packing ones white clothes away
in early September,
yet the common
sense of this action
is still taken for
granted in parts of
the United States.
Perhaps this is be-
cause white clothing
is symbolicit
represents summer,
and by Labor Day,
summer is seen asfinished. In turn,
white clothing becomes a misplaced or
misused symbol.
Symbols are the core of culture.
The meaning of these symbols is shared
among community members. A symbol
is anything which is assigned a meaning
that does not logically follow. There is
nothing inherently logical to the choice
of green as representing go and red as
representing stop. Instead, at some
time these colors gained these meanings
and the meanings wereaccepted (unconsciously),
shared and passed on to
subsequent generations.
A symbol, though, need
not be visual. Spoken
language is symbolic, as
there is usually no logical
connection between the
sounds of the words hu-
mans use for a concept or object, and
the object or concept itself. Culture,
and the symbols it is composed of,would have no meaning if it was not
shared. There cannot be a culture of
one.
Interestingly, a number of
Boas most visible and important stu-
dents were women. For example, one
of Boas most well-known students was
Ruth Benedict, who obtained her PhD
under his tutelage at Columbia Univer-
sity and joined its
faculty in 1923.
Her 1934 book,
Patterns of Cul-
ture, described her
fieldwork among
Pueblo Indians in
the American
southwest and
several available
ethnographies by
other anthropolo-
gists. It also contained her famous dic-
tum that the culture of a people could
be thought of as their distinctive per-
sonality traits writ large (for example,
restraint in both personal and public
matters among the Pueblo). During theSecond World War, Benedict prepared
her second monumental work, The
Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Since
it was not feasible for Benedict to do
fieldwork in Japan, her study of Japa-
nese culture was based upon an analysis
of Japanese literature and other arti-
facts, an illustration of doing
anthropology at a distance.
As well-known as Ruth Bene-
dict was, she was not the most famous
graduate student to come out of the
Anthropology program at Columbia,especially if the designation famous
is taken to include notoriety in the pub-
lic domain. That distinction goes to
Margaret Mead, a student of both Bene-
dict and Boas. Her greatest work, Com-
ing of Age in Samoa, the best-selling
Anthropology book of all time. How-
ever, her work, while influential, was
not without controversy (see box).
SUBJECT MATTER & METHODANTHROPOLOGY
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WHAT DO SOCIAL SCI-
ENTISTS ACTUALLY DO?
PSYCHOLOGISTS
There are two main kinds of
psychologistspractitioners
(clinicians and therapists) and
scientists. They are trained
Page 18
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
What was Coming of Age in Samoa about? Mead studied adolescents in Samoa guided by the
question, Is the angstof adolescence, known to us in America as a period of difficult adjustments, a phe-nomenon of adolescence itself or a product of how we do adolescence in industrial societies? To answer
the question, Mead lived in a small village in Samoa and, over a period of time, observed and interviewed
sixty-some girls and young women between the ages of 9 and 20. Her conclusion: adolescence was a verydifferent phenomenon in Samoa than in the U.S. She characterized adolescence there as a sunny, ratherthan turbulent, phase of life among young, female Samoans, marked especially by a casual attitude towardsex. Sexual relations, Mead contended, were enjoyed with many partners without jealousy. Conse-
quently, young Samoan women often deferred marriage for several years before settling down, marrying,and having children. The implication was that adolescence, and its related norms, are culturally deter-mined rather than naturally occurring. Some would consider Meads claims pretty hot stuff, even today.Can you imagine the stir they caused back in the 1920s? Even today the book is very controversial, and isregarded by some as dangerously undermining the basis of morality.
But Meads work also generated controversy within anthropology. A recent critique by Austra-lian anthropologist, Derek Freeman, is illustrative. Freeman, who did fieldwork in another part of Samoa
in his case, among Samoan men, who accepted him as a chiefargued that Meads findings did not jibe
with his observations. He noted that Samoan men he interviewed valued virginity in women they mightmarry and that sexual jealousies were rather common. He suggested that Mead had interviewed too small
and restricted a sample and, further, the girls had told Mead essentially what she wanted to hearthat sexwas carefree and that women occupied a more dominant place in Samoan society than they actually did.
Which viewpoint is more correct? In anthropology, as in other disciplines, it takes time and pa-
tience to resolve these differences. People must put aside deeply held, very emotional culturally-
determined attitudes of their own about sex to see another cultures practices objectively. From N -rays to
sex among the Samoans, scientists struggle to see through the filter of their own humanity and view the
world as it is.
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There are two main kinds of
psychologistspractitioners (clinicians
and therapists) and scientists. They aretrained differently, and typically work in
different settings: practitioners in clinics
and private practice, scientists in univer-
sities and laboratories. Thats NOT to
say that no
practitioners are
accomplished
scientists, or
that all scien-
tists are insensi-
tive eggheads.
The boundaries
overlap, and weall share a lot of
common
ground. We
should also
mention that there are many people who
are often lumped together as
shrinks (clinicians or therapists) in the
public eye who are not psychologists at
all. These include psychiatrists, who are
medical doctors who complete a psychi-
atric residency. Psychiatrists and clinical
psychologists may overlap to some de-
gree in their training and orientation, but
there are some important differences.
For one thing, the capacity for psycholo-
gists to prescribe medications is much
more limited than that of
psychiatrists.
Clinical psychologists
and counselors provide
a wide range of mental
health and counseling
services. These services
include group and individual therapy,
preventive care, inpatient and outpa-
tient care, and grief counseling, to
name only a few. Some work
in hospitals or clinics, others
work in group or individual
private practices. Still others
are teachers or professors inclinical training programs. It
is also the case that many peo-
ple without formal psycho-
logical training are sometimes
confused with psychologists.
Regulations for licensure as providers of
mental health or counseling services
differ from state to state, and in some
places the requirements to set up shop as
a therapist are quite minimal. The
American Psychological Association
does accredit training programs, so there
is a way for the public to know at least
which practitioners have been trained
according to the standards of that organi-
zation. None of this is to say that only
certain people with certain training can
be effective or helpful: it is only to say
that the field of psychology itself isdiverse, and that the definition of psy-
chology in the mind of the lay public is
probably broader than in the minds of
most psychologists.
Experimental or research psy-
chologists typically work in universities
your teacher may well be one, though
many clinical or
counseling psy-
chologists also
work and teach
in universities.Researchers do
not receive su-
pervised clinical
training during
their graduate
schoolinginstead, they practice doing
research, and are often required to
study and practice teaching in prepara-
tion for becoming a professor. As your
book points out and as you will see as
you go through this course, there are
many different sub-fields of academic
psychology, ranging from some that
look a lot like biology to some that look
a lot more like sociology.
WHAT DO SCIENTISTS ACTUALLY DO? - PSYCHOLOGISTS
WHAT DO SCIENTISTS ACTUALLY DO? - SOCIOLOGISTS
Page 19
One way to answer
the question about what so-
ciologists actually do is to
pose a related question par-
ents often ask when they
find out their kids chosen
major in college: what can
you possibly do with a de-
gree in sociology (or anthro-
pology)? Several years ago,
there was a kind of anecdote
associated with the question,what can you do with a law
degree? The answer was that the
smartest law school graduates became
professors of law, the
next layer became judges,
and the lowest tier be-
came lawyers who make
all the money.
By way of re-
sponding seriously to our
original question, the
answer depends some-
what on the level of the
degree. One cannot be-come a sociologist with a
baccalaureate degree. However, B.A. or
B.S. degrees in these fields, because of
the exposure they provide to the sci-
ence of human behavior, qualify one
for a wide variety of white-collar posi-
tions in which some people skills and
a nose for social issues are important.
This could potentially include any-
thing from an obvious application like
police work to any pursuit that is car-
ried out in which people are a factor.
For exam-
ple, the
daughter ofone of the
authors of
this chapter
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For example, the daughter of one of the
authors of this chapter (Scott) earned a
B.A. degree in Sociology and was hired
by an engineering firm that does all their
work in teams. Scotts daughter was
hired because the firm likes to have at
least one member of each team that is
nottrained as an engineer, presumably tobring to the team a consideration for the
human dimension of their products. Per-
haps one reason the social sciences are
such popular majors in the USA is be-
cause they are a gateway to disparate
professional positions. In fact, social
sciences are the second most popular
major in our country. Do you think you
can figure out what the most popular
academic major is? Why?
At the Masters and especiallythe Ph.D. levels, sociologists, like psy-
chologists, divide into two categories
those who earn a living teaching the dis-
cipline to others at colleges and universi-
ties and those who work in applied
settings. Recent trend data show that
just over half of those receiving their
Ph.D.s in these
fields go into a
teaching position
upon graduation.In the case of So-
ciology, about
40% land a re-
search position
with a govern-
mental entity or
private firm.
Their task gener-
ally is to collect
and analyze
social data of
some sort. Pri-
vate firms may need social data for anumber of reasons, for instance, to pin
down the demographics of their cus-
tomer base. As for governmental
agencies, many of them have research
sections to assess the impact and effec-
tiveness of their programs. The remain-
ing percentage generally finds a position
in a governmental or nonprofit
organization, often with a con-
nection to the subject matter of
their specialty.One of the biggest changes in
sociology over the past 50
years is in who is getting their
doctorate in Sociology. Gener-
ally, about 500 to 600 people a
year earn a doctorate in sociol-
ogy here in the U.S. Fifty years
ago, the ratio of men-to-women
doing so was about 5-to-1.
That gap has been steadily
closing and in the early
1990s for the first time,
more women received Ph.D.s in Sociol-ogy than did men. These days the ratio
of women-to-men obtaining Ph.D.s in
sociology is about 1.5-to-1. Nearly the
same pattern has occurred in psychol-
ogy. Any ideas about why this might so?
WHAT DO SCIENTISTS ACTUALLY DO? - ANTHROPOLOGISTS
changing, and why those symbols be-
came important. They describe simi-
larities and differences between cul-
tures and explain what those similari-ties or differences
mean. For example,
virtually all cultures
have a concept of mar-
riage, but who gets mar-
ried to whom, how a
marriage is ended, and
the relationship between
the married people
all differ according
to culture.
Archeologists reconstruct andinterpret the cultures of non-
living peoples by examining the
material remains of their culture.
Many cultures did not keep writ-
ten histories, and those that did
rarely wrote of the daily lives of
average people. A typical farmer
does not usually have a pyramid
built in his honor. Archeological
work is oftentimes like that of a detec-
tive. Archeologists piece together clues
(sometimes very few clues are available)
and use existing cultures as examples fortheir interpretation
of their results.
Archeologists are
not just interested
in the objects they
find, but the con-
text in which they
are found. A pre-
historic building is
interesting, but a
wishbone shaped prehistoric building
that is surrounded by smaller, round pre-
historic buildings is informative.
Biological anthropologists, also
known as physical anthropologists, study
humans as biological organisms, exam-
ining how human biology might shape
culture. Biological anthropologists
study human variation across popula-
tions and regions. They study the skele-
tal remains of humans to analyze health
Like psychologists and sociolo-
gists, anthropologists with advanced
degrees tend to work either in university
settings (about 80%) or in governmentand industry. Anthropology has four
subfields which study culture in several
forms. These are cultural anthropology,
archeology, biological anthropology and
linguistic anthropology. These divisions
can be traced back to Franz Boas book,
The Mind of Primitive Man nearly a cen-tury ago.
Cultural
anthropologists,
also known as
ethnologists, studythe culture of liv-
ing people. Cul-
tural anthropolo-
gists study what
symbols have
meaning for a
living culture,
how that culture
has changed or is
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and mortality. Our overall health, his-
tory of disease,
diet and even our
region leave evi-
dence on our
bones. They cantell if an injury
occurred prior to
death, or after.
They can identify
the gender, age and
population of an
individual. In fact,
many biological
anthropologists assist with forensic
research, describing a deceased individ-
ual as they were in life, and how they
died. The U.S. military employs a num-
ber of physical anthropologists who areclosely involved in uniform and per-
sonal equipment design and sizing.
Sociolinguistics, or linguistic
anthropology, analyzes the ties between
language and culture. A sociolinguist
might describe the rules and structure
of a language, or trace the changes in a
language over time. Changes in lan-
guage indicate changes in culture. The
shift from the common use of Miss and
Mrs. to Ms. for women indicated a
lessening of interest in womens mari-
tal status. Sociolinguists also use lan-
guage to trace migration patterns. For
example, Navajo and Apache peopleof Arizona and New Mexico speak
Athabaskan languages indicating that
these tribes originated in Alaska. Indi-
vidual words support this point, as the
Navajo language has a word for
whale not a common sight in Ari-
zona. Language can
also indicate power
relations and rules for
interaction within a
culture. You call your
superiors sir or maam,
but they do not usethese terms for you in
return.
All of the
fields of anthropology
can, and are, used for non-academic pur-
poses as well. Biological anthropolo-
gists, for example, have used their skills
at identification and excavation in identi-
fying victims from mass graves in Iraq
that were executed by Saddam Husseins
government. Sociolinguists can work in
marketing and public relations, especially
with international clientele. Simple mar-
keting suggestions might have included
telling Chevy that the Nova (the no-go inSpanish)
will not
sell well
in Latin
Ameri-
can coun-
tries, or
that be-
fore sell-
ing Eng-
lish-speakers the Iranian detergent that
makes your laundry white as snow, its
name should be changed from Barf. Ar-cheologists use their skills at modern day
dumps to analyze American recycling
patterns, and used their excavation skills
in the efforts to recover human remains
from the Twin Towers site after Septem-
ber 11th. Cultural anthropologists can
explain the symbols and values of one
culture in its interactions with another,
thereby minimizing misunderstanding and
tension.
Understanding and
explaining the abuses
that took place at
Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq in late 2003 and
(2) The question of
whether expo-
sure to violent
video games
increases aggres-
sion in children who play them.
Without getting into alengthy discussion of the nature of
the differences among monodiscipli-
nary approaches such as multidisci-
plinarity, pluridisciplinarity, and
crossdisciplinarity , as opposed to
interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary
approaches, we want you to notice that
fully understanding the case studies we
are going to discuss involves more than
We mentioned
earlier that the reason we
have included this mate-
rial on anthropology and
sociology in addition to
psychology is that we
wanted to take a transdis-
ciplinary approach to un-
derstanding humans. To
help illustrate what we
mean, well bring in sociology and an-
thropology throughout the course. Wewill also discuss these disciplines at
length again when we address two spe-
cific issues that are especially good ex-
amples of how we can learn more about
an issue when we apply the differing
methods and interpretations of the vari-
ous disciplines we have discussed to
those issues, rather than just one of them.
The issues we will focus on will be (1)
just these three disciplines of social sci-
ence. Not only do other fields of science
come into play (for example, political
science, economics), but other areas of
human activity outside science also
come into play, such as law, religion,
and educa-
tion. The
value of
transdisci-
plinary
approachesis that they
allow us to
integrate
knowledge
across dis-
ciplines, but also across less
disciplined but no less important ways
of understanding ourselves.
BACK TO THE ELEPHANT
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So lets return for a
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