The Crisis in Sociology

[Politesse]

I know somebody who got a master's degree in sociology. They ended up working for a state prison system. That is what a sociology degree can get you. Trying to decide which lunkheads can be rehabilitated with expensive programs and who would end up being a waste of resources. A frustrating job

So they should get off their ass and look for fucking different job. If they're qualified to do rehabilitation placement, they're qualified to do a lot of other very different jobs as well. Though if your description of the placement process is an accurate translation of their feelings about it, they are probably pretty bad at their job and argumentative with their supervisors and peers, a condition which does not lend itself to promotion or transfer.

What were they expecting to do with their degree? Counsel celebrities? Of course earning an MSW is going to push you toward a career in social work. It's not a glamorous profession but its one that needs to be done, compensates reasonably, and which can be meaningful and satisfying, if you have a better attitude about it. Are you suggesting that we ought to turn all prison sentences into life sentences, or just that you think program placements should not be made by qualified social workers? Perhaps the warden should get to decide who trains and who works, eh? Based on his "gut feeling", perhaps? Welcome to the 17th century, you'll hate it once it's too late to fix.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Yeah, got out and went elsewhere. This person was apparently good at the job, but many hard core prisoners with long records will be back quickly. These guys do not think like the rest of us and experience shows there is not much that realistically ensures a solution.

 

[Bomb#20]

When I was applying to universities back in the mists of the 1980s, there was a small but vocal group of advisers that were pushing for people to take degrees in fields with a direct path to a well paid career.

More numerous, but beginning to be overwhelmed by the former group (who had serious influence in the Thatcher government) were advisers who wanted me to pursue a degree in a field that was seen as likely to generate interesting research opportunities (my father was by far the most influential person in this group, and ultimately I chose Molecular Biology for this reason, largely due to his advice).

Few and far between were people who advised studying something you found interesting and engaging. I probably should have listened to that group.

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 19, 1981 | GoComics.com

Mark: Let's see... Tabasco sauce, lemons, olives, nuts, swizzle sticks... Okay, let 'em in! Man: And then he became a sci-fi writer and moved to the Yucatan. Second man: Artie a writer? Is that right? Who would have thought it? Man: I know. Funny how the group turned out. Seems like you're the...

www.gocomics.com

 

[bilby]

It's one of the few things that Centrist Democrats and Centrist Republicans can still bear to agree on, so the philosophy is spreading widely.

And it's clear proof, if proof were needed, that the US desperately needs a left wing political party, and currently has only a right wing party, and an insanely far right wing party, as the participants in her two party system.

 

[lpetrich]

It's one of the few things that Centrist Democrats and Centrist Republicans can still bear to agree on, so the philosophy is spreading widely.

And it's clear proof, if proof were needed, that the US desperately needs a left wing political party, and currently has only a right wing party, and an insanely far right wing party, as the participants in her two party system.

AOC: 'In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party' - POLITICO

 

[bigfield]

Crisis in Sociology presents a compelling portrait of sociology's current troubles and proposes a controversial remedy. In the authors' view, sociology's crisis has deep roots, traceable to the over-ambitious sweep of the discipline's founders. Generations of sociologists have failed to focus effectively on the tasks necessary to build a social science. The authors see sociology's most disabling flaw in the failure to discover even a single general law or principle. This makes it impossible to systematically organize empirical observations, guide inquiry by suggesting falsifiable hypotheses, or form the core of a genuinely cumulative body of knowledge.

What would a general law or principle of sociology look like?

Are we talking about the sociological equivalent of something like conservation of energy?

 

[Politesse]

What would a general law or principle of sociology look like?

A good example might be William Stanley Jevons' formulation of rational choice theory, which if valid would have been a general theory of human motivation with explanatory power across a vast array of social exchanges. Mead and Cooley had similarchopes for synbolic interactionalism in the infancy of that theory set, as did BF Skinner with his behavioralist model of psychology.

 

[lpetrich]

Anything in sociology comparable to the Big Five personality theory of psychology? The Big Five seems like the biggest success of psychology in a long time.

The Big Five theory says that human personality has five major factors:

• Openness-Intellect -- Ideas, Esthetics
• Conscientiousness / Impulsiveness -- Diligence, Orderliness
• Extraversion / Introversion -- Enthusiasm, Assertiveness
• Agreeableness / Combativeness -- Compassion, Politeness
• Neuroticism / Emotional Stability -- Volatility, Withdrawal

There has been a lot of work on subdivisions of these five factors, and some proposed additional ones, but I've yet to see any consensus emerge around any of them.

 

[lpetrich]

Big Five cross-species review
Openness was not very well-evaluated, and only chimpanzees have anything close to conscientiousness. It was mostly mammalian species that were researched, and most of them have forms of extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness. Of the non-mammalian ones researched, guppies and octopuses, they have forms of extraversion and neuroticism.

Additional dimensions were dominance and activity, though these may be related to extraversion.

Extraversion and neuroticism, in the forms of assertiveness and sensitivity to threat, seem shared across bilaterians. They are associated with neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin, dopamine being involved in feeling rewarded, and serotonin being involved in modulating such things as perception of threat.

Supertraits or metatraits of the Big Five:

• Plasticity (dopamine):
  • Extraversion
  • Openness
• Stability (serotonin):
  • Emotional stability
  • Agreeableness -- relational stability
  • Conscientiousness -- motivational stability

Dopamine-like and serotonin-like neurotransmitters are known for all over Bilateria and Cnidaria, but are absent from Ctenophora (comb jellies) - Convergent evolution of neural systems in ctenophores - PMC

 

[Politesse]

Anything in sociology comparable to the Big Five personality theory of psychology? The Big Five seems like the biggest success of psychology in a long time.

The Big Five theory says that human personality has five major factors:

• Openness-Intellect -- Ideas, Esthetics
• Conscientiousness / Impulsiveness -- Diligence, Orderliness
• Extraversion / Introversion -- Enthusiasm, Assertiveness
• Agreeableness / Combativeness -- Compassion, Politeness
• Neuroticism / Emotional Stability -- Volatility, Withdrawal

There has been a lot of work on subdivisions of these five factors, and some proposed additional ones, but I've yet to see any consensus emerge around any of them.

The Big Five is more pop psychology than serious theory... while the most reputable of the various schema of "personality types" and somewhat useful to a therapist, it has limited empirical basis, and isn't pushing ahead our general understanding of the working of human minds and societies. Rather, it strongly reflects certain dominant cultural values, and therfore can help a person assess their social situation within those constraints, or help a therapist suggest more healthy adaptations to the stress of social life. But the factors themselves are not objects of consensus, and even the broader concept of "personality" is regarded with considerable suspicion by most scientists.

 

[lpetrich]

The Big Five is more pop psychology than serious theory... while the most reputable of the various schema of "personality types" and somewhat useful to a therapist, it has limited empirical basis, and isn't pushing ahead our general understanding of the working of human minds and societies. ...

Why is that supposed to be the case? If the Big Five are as badly-supported as (say) the MBTI, then why isn't that evident in the professional literature?

 

[Politesse]

The Big Five is more pop psychology than serious theory... while the most reputable of the various schema of "personality types" and somewhat useful to a therapist, it has limited empirical basis, and isn't pushing ahead our general understanding of the working of human minds and societies. ...

Why is that supposed to be the case? If the Big Five are as badly-supported as (say) the MBTI, then why isn't that evident in the professional literature?

"As badly supported" seems like a bit of a loaded term. It's not that assessments like MTBI and the Big Five are bad, they just aren't theory in the scientific sense. Pragmatically, as clinical instruments or even sometimes as metrics in more empirical srudies, they are quite useful, as long as the population you're studying partakes in the same cultural heritage as those who devised these schemes. Which os true of the communities sociologists and psychologists are working with, more often than not.

My objection would be to making more of these types of sorting mechanisms than they are. You aren't learning about "human nature" by studying the Myers-Briggs typology. But you certainly have an opportunity to learn a lot about how people see themselves within the "Western World", and that insight can be genuinely helpful for helping people. Like the Tarot or astrology, an MBTI assessment is a springboard for talking about what's really on someone's mind, whether the categories are scientifically valid or not.

 

[lpetrich]

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com

• Extraversion - introversion -- E/I
• Sensing - intuiting -- S/N
• Thinking - feeling -- T/F
• Judging - perceiving - J/P

It is based on Carl Jung's theories of psychological types.

Jung knows these things because he is a careful observer of people. He did only one statistical study in his life, and that was in astrology (315). In fact, Jung disdained statistics. “You can prove anything with statistics,” he said (306). He preferred interpreting anecdotes.

However, he had one bit of good sense.

Jung also claimed that “there is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum. They are only terms to designate a certain penchant, a certain tendency...the tendency to be more influenced by environmental factors, or more influenced by the subjective factor, that’s all. There are people who are fairly well balanced and are just as much influenced from within as from without, or just as little” (304). Jung’s intuition turns out to be correct here and should be a red flag to those who have created a typology out of his preference categories. A typology should have a bimodal distribution, but the evidence shows that most people fall between the two extremes of introversion and extraversion. Thus, “although one person may score as an E, his or her test results may be very similar to those of another person’s, who scores as an I” (Pittenger 1993).

In other words, the sixteen-type interpretation of the MBTI is totally unjustified, as opposed to treating it as a set of four continuous values.

Skepdic's authors noted

The reason scientists do controlled studies rather than rely solely on their clinical observations and memories as Jung did is because it is easy to deceive ourselves and fit the data to our hypotheses and theories.

 

[lpetrich]

The Big Five is more pop psychology than serious theory... while the most reputable of the various schema of "personality types" and somewhat useful to a therapist, it has limited empirical basis, and isn't pushing ahead our general understanding of the working of human minds and societies. ...

Why is that supposed to be the case? If the Big Five are as badly-supported as (say) the MBTI, then why isn't that evident in the professional literature?

"As badly supported" seems like a bit of a loaded term. It's not that assessments like MTBI and the Big Five are bad, they just aren't theory in the scientific sense. Pragmatically, as clinical instruments or even sometimes as metrics in more empirical srudies, they are quite useful, as long as the population you're studying partakes in the same cultural heritage as those who devised these schemes. Which os true of the communities sociologists and psychologists are working with, more often than not.

The Big Five != the MBTI
The Big Five != the MBTI
The Big Five != the MBTI
...

My objection would be to making more of these types of sorting mechanisms than they are. You aren't learning about "human nature" by studying the Myers-Briggs typology. But you certainly have an opportunity to learn a lot about how people see themselves within the "Western World", and that insight can be genuinely helpful for helping people. Like the Tarot or astrology, an MBTI assessment is a springboard for talking about what's really on someone's mind, whether the categories are scientifically valid or not.

They are good at giving people ideas, but that's about it. They work by the Forer effect - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com
Bertram Forer himself used this assessment in his experiments:

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

Surprisingly many people are willing to believe that this is a good assessment of them.

Note that this is a very general and very flattering sort of assessment.

 

[thebeave]

The Big Five is more pop psychology than serious theory... while the most reputable of the various schema of "personality types" and somewhat useful to a therapist, it has limited empirical basis, and isn't pushing ahead our general understanding of the working of human minds and societies. ...

Why is that supposed to be the case? If the Big Five are as badly-supported as (say) the MBTI, then why isn't that evident in the professional literature?

"As badly supported" seems like a bit of a loaded term. It's not that assessments like MTBI and the Big Five are bad, they just aren't theory in the scientific sense. Pragmatically, as clinical instruments or even sometimes as metrics in more empirical srudies, they are quite useful, as long as the population you're studying partakes in the same cultural heritage as those who devised these schemes. Which os true of the communities sociologists and psychologists are working with, more often than not.

The Big Five != the MBTI
The Big Five != the MBTI
The Big Five != the MBTI
...

My objection would be to making more of these types of sorting mechanisms than they are. You aren't learning about "human nature" by studying the Myers-Briggs typology. But you certainly have an opportunity to learn a lot about how people see themselves within the "Western World", and that insight can be genuinely helpful for helping people. Like the Tarot or astrology, an MBTI assessment is a springboard for talking about what's really on someone's mind, whether the categories are scientifically valid or not.

They are good at giving people ideas, but that's about it. They work by the Forer effect - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com
Bertram Forer himself used this assessment in his experiments:

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

Surprisingly many people are willing to believe that this is a good assessment of them.

Note that this is a very general and very flattering sort of assessment.

Reminds me of when James Randi pulled a little trick on students in a classroom to teach them about how bogus astrology was. He handed out a "personalized" horoscope to each student based on the their time and date of birth (provided to him at an earlier time). After giving them a chance to read it, he asked the students to raise their hand if it accurately described them. Most, if not all, students enthusiastically raised their hands, and were many were pretty impressed and amazed by the personality assessment. Then he told them that everyone received the exact same assessment (similar to the paragraph above). As I recall most of the students were convinced by that little demonstration that astrology was just a bunch of ca-ca, but I think some were still believers. You can't get through to everyone I guess.

 

[Politesse]

Assessments of personality work the same way as a cold read, though. You're essentially asking someone a bunch of questions about what sort of person they are, then giving them an "assessment" that they are the kind of person they think they are.

 

[lpetrich]

Google Scholar -- I find a *lot* of research papers on the Big Five.

The OP links to the book's Amazon page:

Generations of sociologists have failed to focus effectively on the tasks necessary to build a social science. The authors see sociology's most disabling flaw in the failure to discover even a single general law or principle. This makes it impossible to systematically organize empirical observations, guide inquiry by suggesting falsifiable hypotheses, or form the core of a genuinely cumulative body of knowledge.

Absent such a theoretical tool, sociology can aspire to little more than an amorphous mass of hunches and disconnected facts. The condition engenders confusion and unproductive debate.

That seems to be a general problem with the social sciences: they seem short on broadly-applicable theories. I mentioned the Big Five personality theory as an example of what the social sciences ought to have.

Bibliometric Evidence for a Hierarchy of the Sciences | PLOS ONE
Finds evidence of this hierarchy:

• Mathematics
• Physical science - physics, chemistry, space science (could have also done earth science, astronomy)
• Hard biological science - molecular biology, biochemistry
• Soft biological science - plant & animal biology, ecology/environment
• Social science - psychology/psychiatry, economics & business, general social science (sociology? anthropology? political science?)
• Humanities

Moving from mathematics to the humanities, or at least from the physical to the social sciences, papers progressively tend to list fewer co-authors, have longer texts, use less substantive titles, make greater use of first person pronouns, and cite more references, more books, older literature, and a higher diversity of sources. Perhaps most important of all, papers show, collectively, a proportional loss of cognitive structure and coherence in their literature background: in the physical sciences, they share several references with fewer other papers, as we expect if studies cluster around clearly defined problems and methods; moving to the biological and to the social sciences, papers are increasingly likely to share common references randomly, which reflects the greater freedom and flexibility with which scientists establish a cognitive basis to their research

 

[Politesse]

That seems to be a general problem with the social sciences: they seem short on broadly-applicable theories.

It's not a virtue to pretend that you have grand solutions or all-encompassing paradigms if you haven't. Sociology is yet a very young discipline in the grand scheme of things, and they produce plenty of new knowledge and data each year. I disagree that the turn against grand theory is a bad thing. Rather, it is a reflection of lessons hard learned during the very first few decades of the discipline. Of the social sciences in general. People were really and substantively hurt by some of the mistakes of Freudianism, Malthusianism, Marxism, and many other early sociological paradigms. Are still being hurt in some cases. We've learned to be much more careful about what we put into print when publishing on societal matters.

 

[lpetrich]

“Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences | PLOS ONE

From hard to soft,

• Mathematics
• Physical sciences
• Biological sciences
• Social sciences
• Humanities

The three in-between ones are empirical sciences, as opposed to mathematics, a  Formal science - a science of formal systems, like computer science.

From the abstract:

This order is intuitive and reflected in many features of academic life, but whether it reflects the “hardness” of scientific research—i.e., the extent to which research questions and results are determined by data and theories as opposed to non-cognitive factors—is controversial.

Then counting reports of positive (full or partial) and negative results.

If the hierarchy hypothesis is correct, then researchers in “softer” sciences should have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases, and therefore report more positive outcomes. Results confirmed the predictions at all levels considered: discipline, domain and methodology broadly defined. Controlling for observed differences between pure and applied disciplines, and between papers testing one or several hypotheses, the odds of reporting a positive result were around 5 times higher among papers in the disciplines of Psychology and Psychiatry and Economics and Business compared to Space Science, 2.3 times higher in the domain of social sciences compared to the physical sciences, and 3.4 times higher in studies applying behavioural and social methodologies on people compared to physical and chemical studies on non-biological material. In all comparisons, biological studies had intermediate values.

Harder: more negative results, softer: more positive results.

These results suggest that the nature of hypotheses tested and the logical and methodological rigour employed to test them vary systematically across disciplines and fields, depending on the complexity of the subject matter and possibly other factors (e.g., a field's level of historical and/or intellectual development). On the other hand, these results support the scientific status of the social sciences against claims that they are completely subjective, by showing that, when they adopt a scientific approach to discovery, they differ from the natural sciences only by a matter of degree.

With better-developed theories, negative results can become more meaningful. In fact, one can sometimes put a positive spin on negative results, by framing them as upper limits or else as success in falsifying some hypotheses.

 

[lpetrich]

The characteristics of subject matter in different academic areas. with this scan in PDF form - published 1973

Performed multidimensional scaling on scholars' judgments about the similarities of the subject-matter of different academic areas. 168 university scholars made judgments about 36 areas, and 54 small-college scholars judged similarities among 30 areas. G. A. Miller's method of sorting was used in collecting data. 3 dimensions were common to the solutions of both samples: existence of a paradigm, concern with application, and concern with life systems. It appears that these dimensions are general to the subject-matter of most academic institutions.

 Multidimensional scaling is finding the positions of some points when one knows the distances between them.

One can then do principal components analysis on them to find their axes of variation. There were three:

• Hard - soft
• Pure - applied
• Nonbiological - biological

These papers used various features of different fields and the attitudes of people involved in them, like their source of funding, how the people spent their time, and these people's political positions (liberal to conservative)

• Validation of the Biglan model | SpringerLink
• The Biglan Classification Revisited on JSTOR