What is Sociology?

1. What is Sociology? Sociology tries to explain how membership in social groups, large and small, affects human behaviour and how people in some groups behave differently than people in other groups.

2. What is psychology? • The study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behaviour • Explore concepts such as: • Attention, Motivation, Brain functioning, Personality, Behaviour • Important names in psychology: • Wilhelm Wundt, John Dewey, Ivan Pavlov, Sigmund Freud,

3. Sigmund Freud his theories helped shape our views of childhood, personality, memory, sexuality and therapy.His ideas had such a strong impact on psychology that an entire school of thought emerged from his work. While it was eventually replaced by the rise of behaviorism, psychoanalysis had a lasting impact on both psychology and psychotherapy.

4. Erick Erikson • Erikson, like Freud, was largely concerned with how personality and behaviourare+influenced after birth - not before birth - and especially during childhood. In the 'nature v nurture' (genes v experience) debate, Erikson was firmly focused on nurture and experience.

5. Ivan Pavlov • Summary: Classical conditioning is a reflexive or automatic type of learning in which a stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that was originally evoked by another stimulus. • Example…Dogs shown food—salivate Dogs hear bell then get food Dogs hear bell--salivate

6. B. F. Skinner • Operant Conditioning • Skinner is regarded as the father of Operant Conditioning.  • Skinner introduced a new term into Sociology--Reinforcement.  • Behavior which is reinforced tends to be repeated (i.e. strengthened); behavior which is not reinforced tends to die out-or be extinguished (i.e. weakened).

7. Who would be most interesting…let’s hear what some of you had to say!! Freud, Erikson, Pavlov or Skinner

8. An Anthroplogist spends time: • Anthropologists study and train to develop the knowledge, skills and tools to work with people, study the past, and shape the future. • Anthropologists want to know why things happen. For example, we know how AIDS is spreading but do we know why? Anthropologists tackle big human problems, such as overpopulation, warfare, and poverty.

9. Margaret Mead • a woman anthropologist who was a strong proponent of women's rights, who shone a light of understanding on human nature and sexuality, and a clear and forceful entity who provided much knowledge to the field of anthropology and psychology. • She studied three primitive societies and discovered that all humans form social roles.

10. Noam Chomsky • Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics“and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology. • Chomsky simply observed that while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human child will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability.

11. Jane Goodall • Considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 45-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. • Her findings suggest similarities between humans and chimpanzees exist in more than genes alone, but can be seen in emotion, intelligence, and family and social relationships.

12. Benjamin Bloom • He focused much of his research on the study of educational objectives and, ultimately, proposed that any given task favors one of three psychological domains: cognitive, affective, or psychomotor. The cognitive domain deals with a person's ability to process and utilize (as a measure) information in a meaningful way. The affective domain relates to the attitudes and feelings that result from the learning process. Lastly, the psychomotor domain involves manipulative or physical skills.

13. Howard Gardner • His theory predicts that a child who learns to multiply easily is not necessarily generally more intelligent than a child who has more difficulty on this task. The child who takes more time to master simple multiplication 1) may best learn to multiply through a different approach, 2) may excel in a field outside of mathematics, or 3) may even be looking at and understanding the multiplication process at a fundamentally deeper level, or perhaps as an entirely different process.

14. Paulo Friere • There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

15. Social Work • Social work is a professional and academic discipline that seeks to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of an individual, group, or community by intervening through research, policy, community organizing, direct practice, and teaching on behalf of those afflicted with poverty or any real or perceived social injustices and violations of their human rights.

16. Economics • Is economics a science because it is like Darwinian biology? Darwinian biology (survival of the fittest) is very different from the physical sciences. Like economics it is a very useful way to organize your thinking about complex phenomena. But it is not a predictive or very precise science or whatever you want to call it….

17. Karl Marx • , Marxism posited that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions leading to its own destruction.(Conflict theory) • Conflict theorists today believe that the policies of the power elite will result in "increased escalation of conflict, production of weapons of mass destruction, and possibly the annihilation of the human race."

18. John Maynard Keynes • Keynes is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern macroeconomics, and the most influential economist of the 20th century.

19. Adam Smith • Wrote The Wealth of Nations, and it is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Smith is cited as the father of modern economics and capitalism and is still among the most influential thinkers in the field of economics today.

20. How can linguistics be tied to Sociology? • Language is a vocalized or written expression with semantic content and a medium to interact communication and information between individuals and groups in a community or society. • Linguistics is the scientific study of a language.

21. How important is language to social interaction? • Sociologists regard communication as achieving a solution to “the problem of meaning,” which was long ago identified as being at the core of social action. • Making meaning of actions is allowing interactive interpretations for society’s members…not every society “communicates” the same way!

22. What do you think????.... • Do we really need language? • Can a person give a straight forward definition of Sociology like you can Biology or Chemistry?? • What area of social sciences is most interesting?