Class notes
SOC100H1: Class Notes
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This document covers the first 6 lectures of this course. Including economics, health, intro, education, and environment.
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SOC100 MidtermLegend
People
Definitions
On test
Intro
What is Sociology
- Sociology includes every subject from economic to criminology to natural sciences
- Auguste Comte: Referred to sociology as the queen/royalty of sciences since it had no
borders
- Everything is directly or indirectly related to sociology like whales who have never met
humans are affected by pollution
- Hard to define
- Sociology: approaching problems by searching for social and structural explanations
instead of biological or individual explanations
- Ex: Teen depression
→ Biological: genetics, hormonal and sexual maturation, experimentation with
drugs and alcohol all effect brain and body
→ Individual (psychology): Something happened in teens life (ex: parents
divorce) leading to depression
→ Sociological: Questions (study in groups): Another explanation can be
cognitive dissonance
- Why are teens more depressed than people of other ages?
- Why do women report more depression than men?
- Why men report more substance abuse the women
- Issues with more social media?
- Has teen depression increased or is there more acceptance
of mental illness, so people are revealing it more
- Cognitive Dissonance: Person is confronted with 2 conflicting beliefs/ideas/values, (core
beliefs shattered) which causes inner turmoil.
- Ex: Belief: lying is wrong
Ex: You lie to protect someone's feelings
- May have resulted from transition from childhood to adulthood, and learning
many of the values learnt are not upheld as adults
- Ex: Kid: love is real → Adult: learn about heartbreak
, SOC100 Midterm
Sociological Imagination:
- Ability to look at things sociologically
- Or ability to connect personal challenges to larger social issues
- 2 Principles:
1. See the general in the particular:
- Looking at seemingly individual issues like a social issue
- Ex: increasing mental stress in students
→ Psychological/individual: Look at each students brain and ask what
going on here and how to fix it
- Solution: more counselors and psychologists
→ Sociological: ask how society hurts you?
- Not interested in what increased anxiety has to do with individual
students, more interested in what's happening to students as a
social group to cause this (ex: higher tuition, social pressure to
maintain work-life balance, more competition, finding romance)
- Less anxious students aren’t more mentally strong (psychologist),
they may have less stressors like more financial freedom
- Anxiety isn't a personal problem, but a social issue for the group
- Solution: ex: lower tuition
2. See the strange in the familliar
- Challenge everything, consider things you find familiar as weird
- Ex: Social custom: Why do we shake hands?
- Historically: a symbolic gesture to say I have no weapons in my hand =
shows friendship
- Current: sign of respect and friendliness → offensive if not shaken
- Other cultures: East Asian cultures show respect and friendliness by
bowing
- Learn to challenge the rationale behind social conditions → why is this
normal?
- Learn that rationale can simply be ‘that is just how it has always
been done’ → People don’t change these customs because of
decline bias
Decline Bias: the belief that change leads to worsening conditions as compared to the past
, SOC100 Midterm
Bias
- Everyone is biased. And bias is unconscious and unavoidable
Objective:
- Making conclusions on empirically verifiable facts collected with scientific principles,
not personal opinion, feelings, preferences, or experiences. (opposite of bias)
Social location bias
- Social location: combination of factors including gender, race, class, age, ability, religion,
geographic location, etc.
- Social location is different for every individual
- People tend to build belief on their own first-hand knowledge, which is influenced by
their own social location
- Why don’t people understand other people's experiences?
- Believing your experience is the truth, and how everyone experiences the same
things. Truth is, people who experience a different social position report a massive
change in world view
- Personal experience: Anecdotal evidence is evidence from stories that tell people what
happened to them
- Using anecdotal evidence is engaging in social location bias, since you are
not explaining or understanding THE world, you are explaining and
understanding YOUR world. People think their experience is THE truth
- Ex: A white person saying racism doesn’t exist, because they don't experience it
daily
- Ex: Being asymptomatic for COVID and believing it's not a big deal, while others
lose loved ones and believe its serious
- Ex: Social location affects what you find interesting or important, what subject
you choose to study, your career choice, etc
Confirmation bias:
- Tendency to process information by looking for/interpreting information that is consistent
with one’s own belief
Fundamental Attribution Error
- Tendency to attribute observed failing of others to internal factors like their personality or
intelligence
→ Ex: someone with bad grades is dumb and lazy
, SOC100 Midterm
Self-Serving Bias
- Tendency to attribute one’s own failings onto external factors, instead of taking
responsibility
→ Ex: getting bad grades, and balming professors poor teaching ability
Optimism Bias
- Tendency to view thing positively while in a good mood
Pessimism Bias
- Tendency to view things negatively while in a bad mood
Cultural bias
- Viewing one’s own culture as normal, and therefore other cultures as abnormal
- Ex: Italy: unusual to move out before marriage
- Ex: North America: unusual to live with parents after early twenties
How to avoid bias?
- Make conclusions using scientific methods
- Being self-reflective of our biases
- Engaging in sympathy or imagining yourself in different social locations (in someone
else’s shoes)
Sociology of Education
Trends in Education
Historical trends
- Education was the luxury of the upper class, people who could afford to fund their
children’s educations themselves
- Public/free education rates started increasing dramatically after WW1
- In 1950: 46.4% completed grade 9, In 1970: 97.7% completed grade 9
- Graduation rates also started increasing from 72% in 1996 to 90% in 2016
- Why did public education become mandatory?
- Provided job training → helped businesses and economy grow
- Created a population more compatible with a democracy
- Ex: helped people to vote, became educated through news, interacted with
the health care system, etc.
- Reduced class differences and class inequality (education for all, not just those
who can afford it)
- The trend for post secondary education also increased dramatically
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