3. Cascades and ‘Tipping’ points
• Social Cascades = a domino effect or chain
reaction (aka contagion, bandwagon effect).
– Occurs when a small event triggers a large event or
when the actions of a few trigger the actions of
many.
– Basic idea: small large (or few many)
4. Cascades and ‘Tipping’ points
• Social Cascades = a domino effect or chain
reaction (aka contagion, bandwagon effect).
– What explains this? We are always paying
attention to and being influenced by the
behavior of other people.
5. Cascades and ‘Tipping’ points
• Tipping point = threshold: (aka ‘critical mass’)
• The ‘tipping point’ or ‘threshold’ is the point beyond which a
cascade occurs…
• A system has a tipping point at x if a small change in the value of
x has large effects on the end state.
• A threshold =“the number or proportion of others who
must make one decision before a given actor does so; this
is the point where net benefits begin to exceed net costs
for that particular actor” (Granovetter 1978)
6. Cascades and ‘Tipping’ points
• Example: Imagine there are 100 people in the
mall and you see a few of them running!
• How many of them have to be running out of
the mall before you run out of the mall also?
• Assume you have no understanding of why they are
running!
Crowded mall
7. Cascades and ‘Tipping’ points
• Consider two scenarios:
– Scenario 1: Homogeneity. Everyone has the same threshold, or
tipping point. Everyone will run out of the mall if they see 20 other
people run out of the mall. What happens? NOTHING! No one will
leave unless 20 other people leave!
– Scenario 2: Heterogeneity (Diversity). Everyone is numbered from 1
to 100; their number is also the number of people they need to see
running before they also run: their threshold. What happens? First
person leaves, then the second, then the third, etc. This generates a
chain reaction, aka a CASCADE!
Person 0
Begins to run
Person 1 runs
only if 1 other
person runs
Person 2 runs
only if 2 other
people run
3 4 5 6
8. Cascades and ‘Tipping’ points
• Mark Granovetter devised this threshold model
initially to describe RIOTS:
– one person will definitely riot; another will riot only if
one other person riots; a third will riot only if two
others riot; etc….
– We are much more likely to riot ourselves if we see
others rioting.
10. Cascades and ‘Tipping’ points
• Thresholds explain:
1. Why social changes can be
abrupt, discontinuous, and
sudden.
2. Why they are so unpredictable.
– One person in a chain can either
cause or prevent a collective
chain reaction, or social cascade.
• Other examples: clapping,
dancing at parties…
11. Pluralistic Ignorance
• Pluralistic Ignorance – situation in which majority of
people privately reject a norm but assume
incorrectly that most others accept it.
"Resistance would have been another form of suicide.”
14. Emergence and unintended
consequences
• Often, these collective outcomes are not intentional
outcomes: they are not planned or even desired.
• Note: unintended consequences can be both GOOD
or BAD (desirable or undesirable, depending on your
point of view)
Intended
actions
Unintended
Consequences
of Actions
15. Emergence and unintended
consequences
• “The Invisible Hand”: self-
interested behavior maximizes
the common good. (‘you best help
others by helping yourself’)
– Adam Smith (1776), the founder of
economics, argued that individuals'
efforts to maximize their own gains
in a free market can benefit society.
– The contrary is also often argued:
competition may generate a ‘race
to the bottom’ making everybody
worse off.
Adam Smith
16. Emergence and unintended
consequences
• Emergence refers to the creation of a whole from
the interaction or inter-relation of component
parts.
• Emergent properties are those new (and
surprising) properties of the whole that are not
possessed by its individual parts.
– Example: Hydrogen and Oxygen into H2O
17. Emergence and unintended
consequences
• Emergence:
– The whole is more than the sum of its parts…
– Analogy: a cake. Cake has a taste not found in
any of its individual ingredients. Nor is it simply
an average, half-way between flour and egg.
19. The Sociological Imagination
• Sociology attempts to explain facts about
groups of people, and then to relate these
social facts to our individual lives.
• The study of how our lives are influenced by
our larger historical and social circumstances
is called the sociological imagination.
20. The Sociological Imagination
“Neither the life of an individual
nor the history of a society can
be understood without
understanding both.”
C. Wright Mills
(1916-1962)
21. The Sociological Imagination
• To understand one side, you have to understand the
other.
• The ability to understand history and its relation to
biography is called the sociological imagination by C.
Wright Mills.
Man/Woman Society
Biography History
Self World
Personal “Troubles of
milieu”
Public “Issues of
social structure”
22. “Men make their own history,
but they do not make it as they
please; they do not make it
under self-selected
circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already,
given and transmitted from the
past. The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brains of the
living.”
Karl Marx
(1818-1883)
23. What is Social REALITY?
• Thomas theorem: "If people define
situations as real, they are real in their
consequences“
• To understand human inter-actions and
relations, sociologists have to
understand both reality, and perceived
reality.
W. I. Thomas
1863 - 1947
24. • Social relations are often real
because we act AS IF they are real.
The social world concerns not only
the material world, but the
meanings we ascribe to the
material objects, meanings which
are themselves non-physical and
non-material.
Examples:
1. Nations
2. Money
25. Self-fulfilling and Self-negating
prophecies
• Robert K. Merton also coined the terms
– ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and
– ‘role model’
• A self-fulfilling prophecy is something that
becomes true because it is believed to be
true.
– Example: bank run, placebos, psychic
predictions, etc…
• A self-negating prophecy is a belief that
causes its own falsehood. Explanation: it is
something that, once believed to be true or
expected to happen, cannot happen (or
becomes less likely to happen).
Robert K. Merton
(1910 – 2003)
26. The Power of Expectations
• Pygmalion Effect (aka
Rosenthal effect): the
greater the expectation
placed upon people, the
better they perform.
– According to legend, Pygmalion
was the king of Cyprus who fell
in love with a beautiful woman
(Galatea) he sculpted out of
ivory.
27. The Power of Expectations
• In the 1960s Robert Rosenthal
and Lenore Jacobson
hypothesized that teacher
expectations influenced
children’s performance.
• Study: they randomly assigned 1
out of 5 children to the
‘spurter/bloomer’ group, but
told teachers these students
were selected to the group
based on test performances that
indicated future success.
• Findings: the kids who were
expected to ‘spurt’ made larger
improvements than nonspurters.
29. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
• One of the most famous
experiments of the 20th century.
• What explains the Holocaust? Are
Germans just inherently more
obedient than other people?
• The Milgram experiment measured
the willingness to obey an
authority figure who instructed
them to perform acts that
conflicted with their personal
conscience.
30. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
Experiment:
• Three roles:
– an experimenter (man in white lab coat);
– a volunteer (the ‘teacher’);
– and the shockee (the ‘learner’). All are
actors except the volunteer.
• Responding to a newspaper ad, a volunteer
was told he would be participating in an
experiment testing the effects of negative
reinforcement (punishment) on learning.
The volunteer was told that a ‘teacher’
(giving electric shocks) and ‘learner’
(receiving electric shocks) were to be picked
at random.
31. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
Experiment:
• In reality, the experiment was to see how
much electroshock the teacher would give as
punishment, when told it was part of an
experiment. Everyone but the ‘teacher’ was
acting and knew the true purpose of the
experiment. No electric shocks were actually
administered, but the volunteer believed he
was administering them.
• The ‘learner’ would go into another room and
a tape recording was played of scripted
answers. For each wrong answer, the teacher
was supposed to give a shock to the learner,
with the voltage increasing in 15-volt
increments for each wrong answer.
32. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
Findings:
• BASELINE STUDY (most famous):
65% of volunteers ‘go all the way’
and are willing to shock the subject
to death!
• Milgram also studied 20-40
variants of this experiment with
different results:
33. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
Findings:
• Experiment #3: The Shockee is placed
in the same room so that the volunteer
can see him; obedience drops to 40%.
• Experiment #4: The volunteer must
physically restrain the shockee;
obedience drops to 30%.
• Experiment #14 : If experimenter is
not a scientist in a white lab coat, then
obedience drops to 20%.
• Experiment #17: Volunteer and two
other participants (both actors); if
other actors refuse to continue the
experiment, obedience drops to 10%
34. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
Findings:
• Experiment #15: *If there are two
other experimenters in white lab
coats (both actors) who disagree
about what to do, then obedience
drops to ZERO!
• As soon as participants are told
that they “have no choice”,
obedience drops to ZERO!
• These results were confirmed in
2006.
35. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
QUESTION: What does all this mean?
Why did so many people go along
with the experiment, if they only did
so long as they were NOT ordered
to do so?
36. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
• This study does NOT show that
people ‘obey orders’!
• They are participating because they
believe they are promoting the
‘greater good’, a noble cause:
science.
• They are shocking innocent
strangers not because they believe
they have to, but because they
believe they ought to.
37. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison
Experiments
Experiment:
• 70 volunteers selected;
• by flip of coin, half are chosen
as guards, other half as
prisoners
• Participants make up their own
rules; not pre-determined
• Each participant was paid $15 a
day
38. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison
Experiments
• Findings:
• Experiment ended after 6 days!
• Could no longer distinguish reality (the
experiment) from the roles they
adopted as prisoners and guards
• “There were dramatic changes in
virtually every aspect of their behavior,
thinking and feeling…. We were
horrified because we saw some boys
(guards) treat others as if they were
despicable animals, taking pleasure in
cruelty, while other boys (prisoners)
became servile, dehumanized robots….”
(141)
39. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison
Experiments
• Findings:
• About 1/3 of guards became
‘corrupted by the power of their
roles’ (142)
• “[T]he mere act of assigning
labels to people and putting them
into a situation where those
labels acquire validity and
meaning is sufficient to elicit
pathological behavior”
(Zimbardo, pg. 143)
40. ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’
• Can we always distinguish
‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’
people? The ‘sane’ from the
‘insane’?
• How objective are these labels?
1. Are ‘insane’ behaviors caused
by innate characteristics of
these individuals or are they
elicited from external
environments?
2. Do observers see the ‘same’
behavior differently in different
circumstances? Scene from One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(1975)
41. ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’
• Rosenhan undertakes groundbreaking study:
will sane people (‘pseudo-patients’) be
recognized as sane by hospital staff in a
psychiatric ward?
• Experiment
– 8 sane people admitted into 12 hospitals; 3
women, 5 men
– Initially complained of ‘hearing voices’ of an
‘existential nature’:
– Symptoms chosen because there were zero
reports of ‘existential psychoses in the literature’
– After being admitted, pseudo-patients behaved
normally
– Length of stay ranges from 7 to 52 days, average
of 19 days
D. L. Rosenhan
42. ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’
• Findings: The normal are not
detectably sane!
– Pseudo-patients were never detected
• Other patients (but not doctors and staff)
sometimes detected that they were not
insane.
– Each was discharged with a diagnosis
of schizophrenia “in remission”
– Normal behaviors were often
interpreted as abnormal because of the
diagnosis!
D. L. Rosenhan
43. Labels and Perception
Label
(diagnosis)
Perception
of
behavior
• “Once a person is
designated abnormal, all
of his other behaviors and
characteristics are
colored by that label”
(280).
1. Observers perceive
normal behavior as crazy;
our expectations thus
reinforce our initial
impressions
2. Patients can even begin
to see themselves as
‘crazy’, and thus act crazy
(self-fulfilling prophecy)
44. Asch’s Conformity Experiments
• Question: Which of the lines
on the second card (A, B, or C)
is the same length as the line
on the first card?
• “That we have found the
tendency to conformity in our
society so strong that
reasonably intelligent and
well-meaning young people
are willing to call White Black
is a matter of concern. It
raises questions about out
ways of education and about
the values that guide out
conduct” (95)
Solomon Asch
(1907 – 1996)
Hinweis der Redaktion
Granovetter is perhaps most famous for his concept of the ‘small worlds’ such as in the popular game, 6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.
Granovetter is perhaps most famous for his concept of the ‘small worlds’ such as in the popular game, 6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.
Granovetter is perhaps most famous for his concept of the ‘small worlds’ such as in the popular game, 6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.
Granovetter is perhaps most famous for his concept of the ‘small worlds’ such as in the popular game, 6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. We will cover this later in the semester!
In his book Defying Hitler, the German writer Sebastian Haffner recalls how he, an enemy of the Nazis, had been coerced into taking part in their activities. In the mid-1930s, when the Nazi army of intimidation, the brownshirts, marched through the streets, they beat anyone who failed to salute. Defiant in his own small way, Haffner often ducked into doorways. But when he and other students of law were ordered into an indoctrination camp, he found himself wearing a brown shirt and joining the very same marches.
"Resistance would have been another form of suicide," Haffner wrote, and the oppressed, unwittingly, became oppressor: When we came through villages, the people on either side of the road raised their arms to greet the flag, or disappeared quickly in some house entrance. They did this because they had learned that if they did not, we, that is I, would beat them up. It made not the slightest difference that I—and, no doubt others among us—ourselves fled into entryways to avoid these flags, when we were not marching behind them. Now we were the ones embodying an implicit threat of violence against all bystanders. They greeted the flag or disappeared.
Source: Buchanan, Mark (2008-12-05). The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You (p. 2). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Sometimes some people can benefit from the ‘system’- the way things are- but very rarely do these beneficiaries control the system entirely!
Adam Smith published his famous Wealth of Nations in 1776.
Methodological Individualism: the idea that society can be explained entirely by the individuals that make up society.
Methodological Individualism: the idea that society can be explained entirely by the individuals that make up society.
There are two levels here to evaluate: what is going on, and what people think is going on; the facts, and perceived facts; the world of physical, material objects and the world of meanings ascribed to these objects. The relation between these two levels is often complicated. For example, a sufficient sociological explanation would not only explain to people that what they believe to be true is in fact only partially true or false, but also, to explain what about the real world leads to their being deluded about it in the first place!