1. SOCIAL STRUCTURES
(Ch. 5-6)
Dr. Bradford

2. Social Structure
SOCIAL STRUCTURE
STATUSES ROLES
Ascribed Performance
Achieved Expectation
• Social structure refers to the way society is organized.
• Status = is a position in a social structure.
• Role = how we (generally) expect members of a status to
behave.
– Statuses and Roles exist independently of their ‘incumbents’ or
‘occupants’

3. Statuses
• You can think of (sets of) statuses as different
ways of categorizing people in different
situations.
– Examples: Family statuses, occupational statuses
, social class statuses, demographic statuses, etc.
1. Achieved statuses – positions that are achieved
by the individuals for themselves (but not
always on purpose); these statuses can change.
2. Ascribed statuses – statuses given to individuals
generally at birth, and from which they cannot
escape; these statuses are fixed.

4. Statuses
• Master Status- the most important status
someone occupies (as perceived by others)
• Status Symbol- material sign that indicates
someone’s status.

5. Roles
• Roles- how we expect occupants of a social
status to behave and their attempt to meet
those expectations in role performances.
– Role = the common denominator among all
occupants of a status; (i.e. what they all have in
common)
• Role Conflict- a situation in which
incompatible role demands are placed on a
person by two or more statuses at the same
time.

6. Primary and Secondary Groups
• Primary group: the people we spend the most time with; a
common whole, a “WE.” (George Horton Cooley)
• Secondary group: a larger, more specialized group in which
members engage in impersonal, goal-oriented relationships.
PRIMARY GROUP SECONDARY GROUP
Relationships are ends in themselves Relationships are viewed as means to
an end (e.g. money)
Tend to be small in size; intimate Tend to be larger in size
association
Personal or individual qualities are Your status, rather than personal
most important attributes are most important
The family is typically the first and the The most important secondary group
most enduring source of influence on is the formal organization (e.g.
the individual bureaucracy)

7. Durkheim and Division of Labor
Traditional Society Modern Society
Mechanical solidarity = a form of Organic solidarity =
social interdependence based on form of social interdependence based
commonly shared beliefs and strong on differentiated/specialized division
group identity. Based on very simple of labor.
division of labor.
Similar to simple organism or machine: Similar to a complex organisms; its organs
individuals are mostly functionally are not interchangeable.
equivalent and substitutable.
‘Society is in the individual’ ‘The Individual is in Society’

8. Ferdinand Tönnies
Two types of social relationships:
1. Relationships that people enter as ends
in themselves, or Gemeinschaft =
intimate or communal association.
2. Relationships that people enter into as
means to an end, or Gesellschaft = goal-
driven, impersonal relationships Ferdinand Tönnies
(1855 – 1936)
• Relationships in modern society are
more frequently gesellshaft
relationships. Why?

9. Facial Expressions
• Facial Expressions are the most important
means of nonverbal communication.
• Emotions are communicated via facial
expressions.

10. The Primary Emotions
Can you name these emotions?

11. The Primary Emotions
Can you name these emotions?

12. Cultural Differences in
Nonverbal Communication
1. Eye Contact and Gaze:
– In Nigeria, Puerto
Rico, and
Thailand, children are
taught to avoid eye
contact with superiors
– In the Middle East, Arabs
often use a lot of eye
contact

13. Cultural Differences in
Nonverbal Communication
2. Personal Space and
touching:
• High-contact cultures:
stand close to one another
and touch frequently;
Middle East, South
America, Southern Europe
• Low-contact cultures
include: North
America, Asian, Pakistani
and some Native American
peoples

14. Cultural Differences in
Nonverbal Communication
3. Hand Gestures:
– “OK” Sign: In Japan = ‘money’; in Mexico
=‘sex’; in Brazil = the middle finger
– Thumbs-up: Japan = ‘boyfriend’; Iran =
obscene
– Hand-purse gesture: no meaning in the
US; but in Italy means ‘What are you trying
to say?’; in Tunisia it means ‘slow down’; in
Malta means ‘you may seem good, but you
are really bad.’
– Nodding head: in some parts of Africa and
India, up and down mean ‘NO’ and side to
side means ‘YES’; in Korea, side to side
means ‘I don’t know’

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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:

19. 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%

20. 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.

21. 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?

22. 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.

23. 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

24. 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)

25. 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)

26. 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 Solomon Asch
reasonably intelligent and (1907 – 1996)
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)

27. The power of the situation
• A definition of the situation
consists of our expectations of
the relevant roles that ‘make
sense’ in a given context , and
the corresponding behaviors
associated with these roles
Behavior Situation
• Role = “social scripts that are
attached to the statuses
people occupy” (140).
• Different situations can elicit
different behaviors!

28. The power of the situation
• We normally think an individual’s behavior is a
consequence or effect of his/her personality, the
type of person s/he is, or some other internal
characteristic.
CAUSE = EFFECT =
Inside Outside
Personality Behavior
Common-sense view of human behavior

29. The power of the situation
• This view is incomplete! Behaviors are often
influenced more by social context, i.e. the
expectations we have of relevant or appropriate
behaviors defining a perceived situation.
CAUSE =
Relevant Labeling of
Perceived
Behavior Personality
situation
Sociological view of human behavior

30. The power of the situation
• Quote: “Individual behavior is largely under the control of
social forces … rather than personality traits, character, will
power or other empirically unvalidated constructs. Thus
we create the illusion of freedom, by attributing more
internal control to ourselves, to the individual, than
actually exists. We thus underestimate the power and
pervasiveness of situational controls over behavior….”
(Zimbardo, pg. 142)
CAUSE =
Relevant Labeling of
Perceived
Behavior Personality
situation
Sociological view of human behavior

31. The power of the situation
• These are not only individual
expectations that matter!
Sometimes, the expectations
of others impose themselves
on us! Remember, the
Thomas theorem.
• In the Prison experiments, the
prisoners and guards were
both trapped in an imagined
situation, but once
established, the guards ran the
show…