The sociological imagination

1. A NEW WAY TO THINK
SOCIAL FACTS
Social Problems

2. Trapped by Self Deception and Assumptions
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception?language=en&utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_med
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4. It’s easy for our brain to get stuck in mental loops, and the
best way to break these mental loops is to change the
reference point. We are not changing our intuitive
understanding of the problem or the core we have
identified, just how it is expressed.
We could, for example, ask: What is the best way to solve
this? But we could also ask: What is the worst way to solve
this? Each contains knowledge, and we should dissect
both.Just as a problem has forms, it also has many shapes.
Different shapes hold different truths.

5. Frequently, when we have spent a lot of time thinking
about a problem, we create a tunnel vision that rigidly
directs us along a singular path. Logical thinking
starts at one point, makes reasoned connections, and
if done well, it always leads to the same place every
time.
Creative thinking is a little different. It, too, makes
connections, but these connections are less logical
and more serendipitous, allowing for what we think of
as new thinking patterns.

6. If you don’t find the core of a problem, you
start off with all of the wrong details, which
is then going to encourage you to add
many more of the wrong kinds of details
until you’re stuck.

7. Developing Self and Social Consciousness
• Distinguishing personal problems from public issues
resulting from social structure
• Troubles versus issues: personal/ societal
• One man's death is a tragedy: 145 people killed by a terrorist
blast is a statistic.

8. Thinking like a sociologist means
looking at the world
around you in a new way.
Challenge conventional wisdom
and question what most people take for granted.

9. Coined by C. Wright Mills, this tool helps us to:
• connect our personal experiences to society at large and greater
historical forces.
• “make the familiar strange,” or to question habits or customs that seem
“natural” to us.
The Sociological Imagination

10. Imagine – John Lennon
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRhq-yO1KN8

11. 11
http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html

12. Outrospection - Empathy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG46IwVfSu8&feature=youtu.be

13. ○ The way individuals define themselves in relationship to groups they are a
part of (or in relationship to groups they choose not to be a part of).
○ What groups are you in? Or not in?
○ Write down a list of groups that you define you.
What Is Social Identity?
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14. ○ Social institutions are networks of structures in society that
work to socialize the groups of people within them.
○ Examples include:
○ the legal system
○ the labor market
○ the educational system
○ the military
○ the family
What Is a Social Institution?
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15. ○ Microsociology understands local interactional
contexts, focusing on face-to-face encounters and
gathering data through participant observations
and in-depth interviews.
○ Macrosociology looks at social dynamics across
whole societies or large parts of them and often
relies on statistical analysis to do so.
Divisions within Sociology
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16. Think about you own backgrounds, including
their race, gender, religion, and economic class.
How larger social forces—the economy, civil rights, religious movements, and
so on—have shaped what it means to be a person “like you”
someone with the same list of traits—in society today.

17. Functionalism, conflict theory, feminist theory, symbolic interactionism,
postmodernism, and midrange theory are all
modern sociological theories.
Theories of Sociology
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Macro Theories

18. Symbolic Interactionism
Micro Theories
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caIlwCi6JCc

19. Sociology focuses on making comparisons across cases to find
patterns and create hypotheses about how societies work now or
how they worked in the past.
Sociology looks at how individuals interact with one another as well
as at how groups, small and large, interact with one another.
Sociology and Its Cousins