Introduction!

Hey everyone and welcome to my blog, Sociological Lenses! My name is Joshua Bartling, and I wrote this blog as my final assignment for my Senior Capstone Class in Sociology at Montana State University. The goal of this blog is to use real life examples to explain widely used sociological concepts and to help people begin to think using what C. Wright Mills would call their sociological imagination. My hope is that my blog posts could be used to help sociology students, or other people desiring to know more about social science, come to better understand big sociological concepts and truly understand what sociology is. I hope you enjoy!

Why Are So Many Financial Scams Targeted Towards the Elderly?

Have you ever thought of why there are so many financial scams that are targeted towards the elderly? Why are large numbers of people specifically trying to swindle seniors out of the money they worked their entire life to earn through internet, mail, and phone scams? The FBI reports that seniors are one of the most targeted populations for financial fraud schemes. When thinking about this from a sociological perspective however, targeting the elderly for money making schemes makes sense.

  In 1979, Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson developed what they called routine activities theory. Their theory basically states that in order for a crime to occur there has to be three things: a motivated offender, a lack of capable guardians, and the presence of a suitable target. There are people that want to make easy money that are willing to resort to criminal conduct to acquire it. Those are the people that constitute the motivated offenders. Elderly people are often less aware of how to recognize money making schemes on the internet, phone, or by mail as well and therefore they are not as able to guard against them. And finally, elderly people in general often times have somewhat substantial wealth built up from a lifetime of accumulating money therefore are suitable targets for financial scams. 

This idea can be applied to almost every type of crime. If there are not any motivated offenders, a crime will obviously not occur. Likewise, if there are people around that can stop a crime from happening, or there is no target for a crime, the motivated offender cannot do anything illegal. Thinking like a sociologist and how individuals relate to, and with each other can help you to understand how crime works, and how you can avoid becoming a victim of it.

Why Do People Act So Differently in Different Situations?

The way I act in sitting through one of my college lectures is radically different from how I act when I go out dancing on Friday nights. My interaction with my friends is different than my interaction with my employer. Have you ever thought of why people behave so differently in different situations and with different people? For example, why it is easier to flip someone off when your mom isn’t with you? Sociologist Erving Goffman who call this the difference in front-stage and back-stage performances. 

 In one of his books, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman argues that we all live our lives as if we were actors in a play. Sometimes we need to be on the stage making ourselves look good and doing what we feel is expected of us. At other times, like when we are with our close friends, we can present a different “self,” our back-stage self. We have all been socialized to know what we are expected to do in different situations in the culture we live in, and our attempt to carry out those expectations is our front-stage performance.

So, before you adjust your behavior to fit a social setting, try to think more like a sociologist. Recognize that you have been trained to know what to do in different situations through years of social interaction and that, to some extent, your actions are dictated by those social forces. Congrats on conforming to what is expected of you!  

Why Are Some People So Rich?

According to Forbes.com, there were 595 people in the world in 2015 with more than three billion dollars. That’s a lot of extremely wealthy people. This begs us to ask the question, why are some people so stinking rich? Why is it that some people can work their butts off their entire life just to get by, and others can make millions of dollars every month by doing virtually nothing? The answer to this in part lays in the way our society and economy runs. 

  In his work “The German Ideology,” Karl Marx argues that ever since personal ownership of things like land and tools for farming began, there has been wealth and power inequality. Those who own and control the things needed to produce goods are those who earn most of the money as a result. The "haves" have power over the "have-nots". If someone owns a company, they have the ability to determine who gets paid what, and people that are desperate for a job are willing to work for significantly less money than what the owners are getting in profits. Marx called the super rich the bourgeoisie, and the rest of the population of workers, the proletariat. Marx argued that as long as personal ownership of goods continues to exist, there will always be incredible inequality and conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. That is why some people who own companies and who patent great ideas can earn millions of dollars a year while a blue collar worker who works sixty hours a week can struggle just to support their families. The class struggle is real.

Why Do People Smoke Marijuana?

Have you ever wondered why people smoke weed? Who was the first guy to find some plant leaves and think to himself, “Hey, I wonder what would happen if I lit this on fire and put it in my mouth?” We may never know the root from where this leafy phenomenon stems, but we do know that the first guy to inhale some of that leaf smoke apparently liked what he felt. He also must have showed his buddies what he had learned. This shows that, while people may smoke alone at times, the way people learn how to smoke is through social interaction. 

  One sociologist in the 1950s had the same question that I had. What motivates people to burn plants and inhale the smoke to have fun? Howard Becker studied this and wrote a now famous article entitled, “Becoming a Marihuana User” No I didn’t spell marijuana wrong, Becker did. He found that in order for someone to become a habitual marijuana user, someone has to learn how to properly smoke it from others, feel the effects of the drug, and interpret those effects as pleasurable. Most of these things arise from social interaction. Sociologists call this Social Learning Theory.  People will not learn the proper technique for smoking without others teaching them, with weaker strains of marijuana they may need help recognizing the effects, and often times what makes people like the effects of weed is being around other people while they are high. So, if you boil it all down, the reason people smoke is because their friends are doing it and their friends have learned to like it.

Why Do People Care So Much About Sports?

Have you ever wondered why people care so much about football? According to CNN Money, the NFL brings in about 12 billion dollars annually. Why do people spend so much money on NFL apparel, tickets, and television just to watch  twenty two men try to move a ball from one side of a field to the other? The answer to this is in part explainable by sociology. 

Early twentieth century sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that as societies become more and more complex, people no longer have as much in common with each other. Back in the day when you were a farmer along with most of the other families around you, it was easy to get along with others in your community. People want to feel that sense of belonging and unity with others, but when people’s occupations are so diverse like in most of today’s cities, it is hard to find this same sense of community (what Durkheim would call social solidarity). And this is where sports teams come in. 

Sports teams offer people in today’s society something to unite behind and something that they can have in common with the people around them regardless of what they do for a living or what they believe about politics. In this way, people satisfy part of their need to be in community with others and feel a part of the larger collective. That is in part why sports have become so big over the past hundred years or so as the United States has become more and more diverse and industrialized.

Why Do People Believe What They Believe?

Why do so may people around the world have such different beliefs about things like religion, morality, parenting, marriage, and taste in music? Perhaps more applicably, why do people have such strong differing beliefs that they are willing to mock, ridicule, or even kill and go to war with those holding to differing beliefs? This has been a serious issue throughout history. However, people seem to continually focus solely on these differences themselves, rather than trying to find the root cause of why people think and behave differently. Sociology provides a platform on which to understand these differences. 

One of the most fundamental concepts in sociology is the idea of socialization. Socialization essentially describes the process by which people come to believe what they believe and learn to interact with and think about the world around them. Early twentieth century sociologist, George Herbert Mead, argued that a person’s “self” only develops through interaction with other people. This usually begins within the family. Different families obviously believe different things and then impart many of their beliefs to their kids. This includes everything from religious beliefs to knowing how to behave at a funeral. These ideas become so ingrained in the person’s understanding of the world around them that any idea that deviates significantly from their own may be perceived by the individual as threatening their way of life. If these feelings are strong enough it can drive different people to mocking, violence, and even national wars based on these competing ideologies. 

So, before you judge people’s convictions too harshly, take a step back and examine the bigger sociological forces that may cause someone to think and behave differently from yourself. Understand the context in which that person was brought up, what influences shaped their lives and their ideas and even if you disagree with them over an issue, still extend grace to that person and reason with them with an understanding of their background in mind.