Sociology

Some time ago I read a couple of sociology books including Giddens' Sociology: a Brief but Critical Introduction and a book in Finnish but I forgot the author (prob Sulkunen but could be Saaristo or Jokivuori, too).

The idea of social roles seems to have been popular for some time. A couple of interesting references: (1) the Stanford prison experiment (2) the flexibility of opinions according to a social group.

(1) has been well documented: people are randomly assigned roles of either a prisoner or a warden in a mock prison. However, though people know it is only an experiment, they start strongly enforcing their roles.

(2) is reportedly much more common than I realised. A person can appear to be sexually very conservative and monogamous in one social group and yet behave completely differently in another. This inconsistency does not lead to psychological difficulties as I would have expected.

The evidence of (1) and (2) seems to indicate strongly that people tend to be lead by their reference social group, both in opinions and in action. I quite cannot decide if this is positive or negative. However, it explains a lot of "getting indoctrinated" examples I have witnessed. On the less scary side: if we really change our opinions according to the group, could this make us take any ideology less seriously -- we'd just think it as a temporary obsession. On the other hand, if we really have a strong tendency for conformism rather than thinking what is just or rational, we can be an easy catch for the likes of Stalin and Hitler.