Sociology 3701: Outline--Week Ten

I. "Being There," part II and groups

II. . "On Being Sane in Insane Places"

You only have part of the original study; I actually want to emphasize a part that is missing from your reader, showing the way mental patients are treated by nurses and doctors in this field experiment, versus the way people might be treated on a college campus, and the related implications for self.

III. "The Social Construction of Unreality: A Case Study of the Attribution of Competence to a Severely Retarded Child"

1. Overview. "The contructionist standpoint (symbolic interactionism) corrects this imbalance by inviting close examination of the artful, minute, and continuous work through which what might be characterized as 'myth,' 'distortion,' or 'delusion' from outside the family is rendered a reality for those inside."

Father: "She's really a fast child, if anything. Once she even read a note aloud that I had passed over to my wife not intending that Mary see it."

Mother: "She put's on an act of being retarded in public while acting normally at home."

2. Implications here of the Thomas Theorem: "What men define as real is real in its consequences." Notice, they don't make Mary "normal," but they manage to maintain many of the feelings families have about their "normal" children. (Remember Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average.)

3. How does the family do it?

4. Notice the similarity to some of the ways in which parents interact with their preverbal children, attributing meaning and intention to "words" where none is intended. (Baby Talk)... perhaps the best way to understand the delusion system in this family is to see it as an unusual extension of a pattern that is quite usual in a child's first year.

IV. "When Belief Creates Reality: the Self-Fulfilling Impact of First Impressions On Social Interaction"

A. Research method: experiment (Snyder a psychologist, like Aronson)

1. 51 male and 51 female undergraduate U of Minn students recruited to participate in what was billed as a study "of the processes by which people get to know one another"

2. Male-female dyads talked by phone and were recorded in a ten-minute, unstructured conversation

3. Before the conversation began, each male received a Polaroid photo purportedly of the woman he was talking with. Photos showed someone who was either "physically attractive" or "not physically attractive." (Notice the assumption here, that there is a cultural standard such that attractiveness ratings are possible)

4. Also before the conversation began, first impressions were collected from the males, and it became clear that men who expected physically attractive partners were more apt to expect that their partners would be: cordial, poised, humorous, socially adept

B. Analysis

a. A panel of 9 observer-judges listened to only the male portion of the conversations.
They knew nothing of the research design or hypotheses: They rated the voice/conversation of the men who thought they were talking with physically attractive women to be more: cordial, sexually warm, sexually permissive, bold, outgoing, humorous, and socially adept

b. A panel of 12 observer-judges listened to the tape recordings of the female voices only. They knew nothing of the research design or the research hypothesis. The women whose conversational partners believed they were physically attractive were rated as talking in a more friendly, likeable, and sociable manner.

C. Implications

Snyder views this experiment as supporting Robert Merton's theory about self-fulfilling prophecy:

Merton: "The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false assumption come true. The validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. "

Snyder's conclusion: "Might not other important and widespread social stereotypes -- particularly those concerning sex, race, social class and ethnicity--also channel social interaction in ways that create their own social reality."