Sociology Research Quotes

Gross well says that children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth.

In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.

العقل الباحث أم العقل المتأمل.....؟ البحث إقدام إيجابي وتساؤل وشك والتماس حقيقة متجددة... التأمل نظر مجرد سلبي إلى تجليات إعجازية والدوام الأبدي.... العقل الباحث مبدع ومتجدد... العقل المتأمل تستغرقه الأبدية... والأبدية هي الماضي القديم والحاضر والمستقبل في امتداد وتجانس

To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one's ability to learn something new that exceed the frameworks with which one enters.

The use of method as the criterion of science abolishes theoretical relevance. As a consequence, all propositions concerning facts will be promoted to the dignity of science, regardless of their relevance, as long as they result from a correct use of method. Since the ocean of facts is infinite, a prodigious expansion of science in the sociological sense becomes possible, giving employment to scientistic technicians and leading to the fantastic accumulation of irrelevant knowledge through huge “research projects” whose most interesting features is the quantifiable expense that has gone into their production.

Social scientific research is and always will be tentative and imperfect. It does not claim to transform economics, sociology, and history into exact sciences. But by patiently searching for facts and patterns and calmly analyzing the economic, social, and political mechanisms that might explain them, it can inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions. It can help to redefine the terms of debate, unmask certain preconceived or fraudulent notions, and subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny. In my view, this is the role that intellectuals, including social scientists, should play, as citizens like any other but with the good fortune to have more time than others to devote themselves to study (and even to be paid for it—a signal privilege).

Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to understand him. Yet we know that the interplay of theory and research makes both for understanding of the specific case and expansion of the general rule.

There are certain questions that scientists may not ask, or, more accurately, for some questions, there are certain answers that scientists must a priori preclude from consideration.

Since the ocean of facts is infinite, a prodigious expansion of science in the sociological sense becomes possible, giving employment to scientistic technicians and leading to the fantastic accumulation of irrelevant knowledge through huge “research projects” whose most interesting feature is the quantifiable expense that has gone into their production.

sociological research is part of a continuous ‘two-way’ process between sociologists and the subjects they study.

Your frequent claim that we must understand religious belief as a “social construct,” produced by “societal causes,” dependent upon “social and cultural institutions,” admitting of “sociological questions,” and the like, while it will warm the hearts of most anthropologists, is either trivially true or obscurantist. It is part and parcel of the double standard that so worries me—the demolition of which is the explicit aim of The Reason Project. Epidemiology is also a “social construct” with “societal causes,” etc.—but this doesn’t mean that the germ theory of disease isn’t true or that any rival “construct”—like one suggesting that child rape will cure AIDS—isn’t a dangerous, deplorable, and unnecessary eruption of primeval stupidity. We either have good reasons or bad reasons for what we believe; we can be open to evidence and argument, or we can be closed; we can tolerate (and even seek) criticism of our most cherished views, or we can hide behind authority, sanctity, and dogma. The main reason why children are still raised to think that the universe is 6,000 years old is not because religion as a “social institution” hasn’t been appropriately coddled and cajoled, but because polite people (and scientists terrified of losing their funding) haven’t laughed this belief off the face of the earth. We did not lose a decade of progress on stem-cell research in the United States because of religion as a “social construct”; we lost it because of the behavioural and emotional consequences of a specific belief. If there were a line in the book of Genesis that read – “The soul enters the womb on the hundredth day (you idiots)” – we wouldn’t have lost a step on stem-cell research, and there would not be a Christian or Jew anywhere who would worry about souls in Petri dishes suffering the torments of the damned. The beliefs currently rattling around in the heads of human beings are some of the most potent forces on earth; some of the craziest and most divisive of these are “religious,” and so-dubbed they are treated with absurd deference, even in the halls of science; this is a very bad combination—that is my point.

Robin Simon, a sociology professor at Florida State University and researcher on parenting and happiness, told The Daily Beast in 20083 that parents “experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers.

scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries. Hence in order to comprehend how humankind has reached Alamogordo and the moon – rather than any number of alternative destinations – it is not enough to survey the achievements of physicists, biologists and sociologists. We have to take into account the ideological, political and economic forces that shaped physics, biology and sociology, pushing them in certain directions while neglecting others.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals.

Frankly, the overwhelming majority of academics have ignored the data explosion caused by the digital age. The world’s most famous sex researchers stick with the tried and true. They ask a few hundred subjects about their desires; they don’t ask sites like PornHub for their data. The world’s most famous linguists analyze individual texts; they largely ignore the patterns revealed in billions of books. The methodologies taught to graduate students in psychology, political science, and sociology have been, for the most part, untouched by the digital revolution. The broad, mostly unexplored terrain opened by the data explosion has been left to a small number of forward-thinking professors, rebellious grad students, and hobbyists. That will change.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.

The aborted research project wasn’t important in and of itself. What mattered was the instruction that Ye Wenjie had given him, so that’s where Luo Ji’s mind was stuck. Over and over again he recalled her words: Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. The mathematical structure of cosmic sociology is far clearer than that of human sociology. The factors of chaos and randomness in the complex makeups of every civilized society in the universe get filtered out by the immense distance, so those civilizations can act as reference points that are relatively easy to manipulate mathematically. First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and the technological explosion. I’m afraid there won’t be that opportunity.… Well, you might as well just forget I said anything. Either way, I’ve fulfilled my duty. He

I believe that it is the task of social science to produce nuanced and people-centered forms of knowledge, correcting asymmetries of information and helping to promote, to the best of our ability, informed consent, human protection, and safety in medical and research settings.

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by a gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. ... But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can go longer work that way.

Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This

EVEN PAUL GOODMAN, beloved by young leftists in the 1960s, was flabbergasted by his students in 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that…research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.

Nada Barry, widow of Bob Barry, had first arrived in Sag Harbor to carry out some sociological research. One of her observations, even back then, was that the typical American porch culture, whereby a family would sit on the large veranda at the front of the house in the evenings and chat with every passer-by, had disappeared completely in Sag Harbor by the

In preparing litigation on behalf of the children we were representing, it was clear that these shocking and senseless crimes couldn't be evaluated honestly without understanding the lives these children had been forced to endure. And in banning the death penalty for juveniles, the Supreme Court had paid great attention to the emerging body of medical research about adolescent development and brain science and its relevance to juvenile crime and culpability. Contemporary neurological, psychological, and sociological evidence has established that children are impaired by immature judgment, an underdeveloped capacity for self-regulation and responsibility, vulnerability to negative influences and outside pressures, and a lack of control over their own impulses and their environment.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum 'natural' size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about more than 150 human beings. [...] How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order.3

Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women. There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program.

I doubt many reading this would decide to re-plaster a ceiling that keeps leaking every time it rains, knowing the real leak is on the roof of the building. Yet our localized view of the human condition is still plastering away. To stop the leak, we need to seek out and resolve root causes that continue to lead to social oppression, ecological disregard, and other influences that reduce human well-being. It has only been in the modern age that sociological research has provided powerful evidence of what’s needed to resolve these problems. These new frameworks or models for understanding society must be applied if we expect to see true social progress.

The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary—culturally and biologically—for the optimal development of a human being.”12 In a summary of the relevant science, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox finds much the same: Let me now conclude our review of the social scientific literature on sex and parenting by spelling out what should be obvious to all. The best psychological, sociological, and biological research to date now suggests that—on average—men and women bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise, that children benefit from having parents with distinct parenting styles, and that family breakdown poses a serious threat to children and to the societies in which they live.13

for instance, the theories and practices of art and photography with anthropological theory and practice (e.g. Edwards 1997a; da Silva and Pink 2004; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2004; Schneider and Wright 2005). The interdisciplinary focus in visual methods has also been represented in Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt’s Handbook of Social Research (2000) and Chris Pole’s Seeing is Believing (2004) both of which combine case studies in visual research from across disciplines. The idea that visual research as a field of interdisciplinary practice is also central to Advances in Visual Methodology (Pink 2012a) and is demonstrated by the work of the volume’s contributors, as well as by the recent SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods (Margolis and Pauwels 2011). Likewise the interdisciplinary journal Visual Studies (formerly Visual Sociology) provides an excellent series of examples of visual research, practice, theory and methodology.

This scholarly shortfall did not happen by chance. Part of it has to do with particular discomforts characteristics of left-leaning academic social scientists. Conducting high-quality ethnographic or long-term participant observation research can require a great deal of empathy for one’s subjects. Such research involves more or less taking on the perspective of the people and culture being studied. It means listening to their stories with honesty and, if only for a moment, giving their experiences and their explanations the benefit of the doubt. But most social scientists know the facts about inequality, wealth, and privilege, and thus find the empathy required for ethnographic research in short supply when it comes to the ultra-wealthy. Empathy is more naturally given to the people and communities obviously suffering harm, rather than, say, a Wall Street financier who struggles with the life complexities and social-psychological dilemmas that accompany immense wealth and power.

Bohr is really doing what the Stoic allegorists did to close the gap between their world and Homer's, or what St. Augustine did when he explained, against the evidence, the concord of the canonical scriptures. The dissonances as well as the harmonies have to be made concordant by means of some ultimate complementarity. Later biblical scholarship has sought different explanations, and more sophisticated concords; but the motive is the same, however the methods may differ. An epoch, as Einstein remarked, is the instruments of its research. Stoic physics, biblical typology, Copenhagen quantum theory, are all different, but all use concord-fictions and assert complementarities. Such fictions meet a need. They seem to do what Bacon said poetry could: 'give some show of satisfaction to the mind, wherein the nature of things doth seem to deny it.' Literary fictions ( Bacon's 'poetry') do likewise. One consequence is that they change, for the same reason that patristic allegory is not the same thing, though it may be essentially the same kind of thing, as the physicists' Principle of Complementarity. The show of satisfaction will only serve when there seems to be a degree of real compliance with reality as we, from time to time, imagine it. Thus we might imagine a constant value for the irreconcileable observations of the reason and the imagination, the one immersed in chronos, the other in kairos; but the proportions vary indeterminably. Or, when we find 'what will suffice,' the element of what I have called the paradigmatic will vary. We measure and order time with our fictions; but time seems, in reality, to be ever more diverse and less and less subject to any uniform system of measurement. Thus we think of the past in very different timescales, according to what we are doing; the time of the art-historian is different from that of the geologist, that of the football coach from the anthropologist's. There is a time of clocks, a time of radioactive carbon, a time even of linguistic change, as in lexicostatics. None of these is the same as the 'structural' or 'family' time of sociology. George Kubler in his book The Shape of Time distinguished between 'absolute' and 'systematic' age, a hierarchy of durations from that of the coral reef to that of the solar year. Our ways of filling the interval between the tick and tock must grow more difficult and more selfcritical, as well as more various; the need we continue to feel is a need of concord, and we supply it by increasingly varied concord-fictions. They change as the reality from which we, in the middest, seek a show of satisfaction, changes; because 'times change.' The fictions by which we seek to find 'what will suffice' change also. They change because we no longer live in a world with an historical tick which will certainly be consummated by a definitive tock. And among all the other changing fictions, literary fictions take their place. They find out about the changing world on our behalf; they arrange our complementarities. They do this, for some of us, perhaps better than history, perhaps better than theology, largely because they are consciously false; but the way to understand their development is to see how they are related to those other fictional systems. It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive powers. This may, in the absence of a supreme fiction-or the possibility of it, be a hard fate; which is why the poet of that fiction is compelled to say From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own, and much more, nor ourselves And hard it is, in spite of blazoned days.

This is precisely the test of true humility, that one no longer presumes to judge whether or not one is too miserable to be included in the call to sanctity but simply answers the merciful love of God by sinking down into adoration.” And this sinking down, this humility, leads to confidence. Hildebrand continues, “The question whether I feel worthy to be called is beside the point; that God has called is the one thing that matters.”15 Understanding that our emotions are not the measure of God’s call may go a long way to closing the confidence gap between men and women. In the May 2014 cover story of the Atlantic, journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman write about the sociological phenomenon in which men tend to overestimate their abilities while women tend to underestimate theirs, even when controlled evaluations show no difference in competence. Sociologists suggest many causes for the confidence gap—including even chemical differences—but the result of such a gap is that women’s self-doubt keeps them from acting, while men’s overconfidence leads them to act when they shouldn’t. Of course, this does not mean that all men have an inflated sense of their abilities or that some women couldn’t use a dose of humility. But the research does reveal how our emotions don’t always correspond with reality. And because they don’t, we can’t be led by them—especially when it comes to the Holy Spirit’s call on our life.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum 'natural' size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings...How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

In 1942, Merton set out four scientific values, now known as the ‘Mertonian Norms’. None of them have snappy names, but all of them are good aspirations for scientists. First, universalism: scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it – so long as their methods for finding that knowledge are sound. The race, sex, age, gender, sexuality, income, social background, nationality, popularity, or any other status of a scientist should have no bearing on how their factual claims are assessed. You also can’t judge someone’s research based on what a pleasant or unpleasant person they are – which should come as a relief for some of my more disagreeable colleagues. Second, and relatedly, disinterestedness: scientists aren’t in it for the money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance their own ego or reputation (or the reputation of their university, country, or anything else). They’re in it to advance our understanding of the universe by discovering things and making things – full stop.20 As Charles Darwin once wrote, a scientist ‘ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.’ The next two norms remind us of the social nature of science. The third is communality: scientists should share knowledge with each other. This principle underlies the whole idea of publishing your results in a journal for others to see – we’re all in this together; we have to know the details of other scientists’ work so that we can assess and build on it. Lastly, there’s organised scepticism: nothing is sacred, and a scientific claim should never be accepted at face value. We should suspend judgement on any given finding until we’ve properly checked all the data and methodology. The most obvious embodiment of the norm of organised scepticism is peer review itself. 20. Robert K. Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (1942), The Sociology of Science: Empirical and Theoretical Investigations (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973): pp. 267–278.

All addictions — whether to drugs or to nondrug behaviours — share the same brain circuits and brain chemicals. On the biochemical level the purpose of all addictions is to create an altered physiological state in the brain. This can be achieved in many ways, drug taking being the most direct. So an addiction is never purely “psychological” all addictions have a biological dimension. And here a word about dimensions. As we delve into the scientific research, we need to avoid the trap of believing that addiction can be reduced to the actions of brain chemicals or nerve circuits or any other kind of neurobiological, psychological or sociological data. A multilevel exploration is necessary because it’s impossible to understand addiction fully from any one perspective, no matter how accurate. Addiction is a complex condition, a complex interaction between human beings and their environment. We need to view it simultaneously from many different angles — or, at least, while examining it from one angle, we need to keep the others in mind. Addiction has biological, chemical, neurological, psychological, medical, emotional, social, political, economic and spiritual underpinnings — and perhaps others I haven’t thought about. To get anywhere near a complete picture we must keep shaking the kaleidoscope to see what other patterns emerge. Because the addiction process is too multifaceted to be understood within any limited framework, my definition of addiction made no mention of “disease.” Viewing addiction as an illness, either acquired or inherited, narrows it down to a medical issue. It does have some of the features of illness, and these are most pronounced in hardcore drug addicts like the ones I work with in the Downtown Eastside. But not for a moment do I wish to promote the belief that the disease model by itself explains addiction or even that it’s the key to understanding what addiction is all about. Addiction is “all about” many things. Note, too, that neither the textbook definitions of drug addiction nor the broader view we’re taking here includes the concepts of physical dependence or tolerance as criteria for addiction. Tolerance is an instance of “give an inch, take a mile.” That is, the addict needs to use more and more of the same substance or engage in more and more of the same behaviour, to get the same rewarding effects. Although tolerance is a common effect of many addictions, a person does not need to have developed a tolerance to be addicted.

In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order. 3A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department. But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust. How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

Partly, it is because we tend to think of black and white poverty differently. Sandra Barnes (2005, 17), citing census data from 2000, notes that “75 percent of all impoverished are white,” but also that (taken from Flanagan 1999): “poverty among whites appears to be less expected, less recognized, less stigmatized, and less often the focus of research and commentary.” Andrew Hacker (1995, 100) adds that:

It is noteworthy that socioceconomics—that is, poor neighborhoods and poor schools—are prominent in both settings. Long ago, the Coleman report (1966) concluded that family socioeconomic level plays a greater role in children's academic achievement than features of the schools children attend, but also that the socioeconomic makeup of a school's enrollment is the most consequential school quality factor. Research since reinforces the second point, with stronger school-SES effects than in Coleman's early research (Borman and Dowling 2010; Rumberger and Palardy 2005). As regards neighborhood, Tama

Social scientific research is and always will be tentative and imperfect. It does not claim to transform economics, sociology, and history into exact sciences. But by patiently searching for facts and patterns and calmly analyzing the economic, social, and political mechanisms that might explain them, it can inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions. It can help to redefine the terms of debate, unmask certain preconceived or fraudulent notions, and subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny. In my view, this is the role that intellectuals, including social scientists,

McDonald’s—and the rest of the world—are creating structured, controlled environments so that people feel safe. That’s why there are so many sequels for the big blockbuster hits.

Whether it’s anthropology or sociology or geography, social scientists are often asked – no, required – early in their careers, to choose between humanistic and scientific approaches to the subject matter of their discipline and between collecting and analyzing qualitative or quantitative data. Even worse, they are taught to equate science with quantitative data and quantitative analysis and humanism with qualitative data and qualitative analysis. This denies the grand tradition of qualitative approaches in all of science, from astronomy to zoology. When Galileo first trained his then-brand-new telescope on the moon, he noticed what he called lighter and darker areas. The large dark spots had, Galileo said, been seen from time immemorial and so he said, “These I shall call the ‘large’ or ‘ancient’ spots.” He also wrote that the moon was “not smooth, uniform, and precisely spherical” as commonly believed, but “uneven, rough, and full of cavities and prominences,” much like the Earth. No more qualitative description was ever penned

Sociology professor Osagie K. Obasogie recently produced some ingenious research—he interviewed people blind from birth and found the same attitudes about race as in the sighted world.

For example, in a major review of stress research in medical sociology in the mid-1990s, Peggy Thoits (1995: 56) observed that: “Despite attributions of the origins of stress to large-scale social structures or processes, few investigators have attempted to examine the links between macro-level factors and micro-level experiences, preferring to assess, for example, status variations in role strains, powerlessness, or lack of control at the individual level only.

In the ensuing chapters, we will look in some detail at particular manifestations of the modern scientific ideology and the false paths down which it has led us. We will consider how biological determinism has been used to explain and justify inequalities within and between societies and to claim that those inequalities can never be changed. We will see how a theory of human nature has been developed using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to claim that social organization is also unchangeable because it is natural. We will see how problems of health and disease have been located within the individual so that the individual becomes a problem for society to cope with rather than society becoming a problem for the individual. And we will see how simple economic relationships masquerading as facts of nature can drive the entire direction of biological research and technology.

The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality[,] consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than an abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research. “Psychoanalysis and sociology.” Pp. 37-39 in Critical theory and society: A reader, edited by S. Bronner and D. Kellner. New York: Routledge.

يشعر المرء أحيانا أن صيغة التحليل النفساني وصيغة التحليل الاجتماعي تخدمان هدفا واحدا وهو الكشف عما يحرك الناس بدون علم منهم. ان اللا وعي يحرك الناس من الداخل والنظام الاجتماعي يحركهم من الخارج.

To embrace the belief that man is the accidental product of a random and otherwise genetically and biologically impossible Darwinian gradual evolution allegedly monitored by a quasi-fictitious natural selection, a process that supposedly started with an amoeba nobody knows how it arrived on Earth that somehow became a fish with stumps for legs that turned crocodile, a creature that following successive transmutations “evolved” into an ape that ended up as Leonardo Da Vinci is an attitude that comes in conflict with the scientific method of research and it certainly violates its standard principles.

I am a Durkheimian, I think Emil Durkheim got it right. I think you need to see communities as absolutely needing a sense of cohesion, trust, shared values and a sense of who we are. This is why mass immigration can be a bad thing. I'm Jewish and my grandparents came to America in 1905 fleeing pogroms, and I look at the videos and see the kids coming out of Syria and it is the same thing, so I'm sympathetic to the moral case. But you can only have mass immigration if you have mass assimilation, which my grandparents and my parents went through. If you have a society that has the moral resources to say 'This is America, welcome, adapt, learn English', then you can have mass immigration. Immigration clearly boosted America's creativity and economy, so there is plenty of good things with immigration. I'm not saying immigration is bad. But from a Durkheimian perspective, to have massive Muslim immigration into secular European societies where not only do you not have assimilation, you have a political left arguing that assimilation is genocide, which is ridiculous. With an anti-assimilation ethos, Europe is setting itself up for massive failure. Their generous redistributive welfare states can only work if people have a strong sense of social solidarity. Diversity can be divisive, as research has shown. So Europe is in huge trouble and the sociology is worrisome for what Europe is going to be like in one or two generations.

Goffman said that every day presents a stage on which people present themselves in various roles. He said that every social interaction has main players and audience members. He further stated that for every stage there is also a back stage; on this back stage, people can relax and actually get rid of the roles they’ve been playing on their life stage. He called this his dramaturgical framework.

In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and storms across

And here a word about dimensions. As we delve into the scientific research, we need to avoid the trap of believing that addiction can be reduced to the actions of brain chemicals or nerve circuits or any other kind of neurobiological, psychological, or sociological data. A multilevel exploration is necessary because it’s impossible to understand addiction fully from any one perspective, no matter how accurate. Addiction is a complex condition, a complex interaction between human beings and their environment. We need to view it simultaneously from many different angles—or, at least, while examining it from one angle, we need to keep the others in mind. Addiction has biological, chemical, neurological, psychological, medical, emotional, social, political, economic, and spiritual underpinnings—and perhaps others I haven’t thought about. To get anywhere near a complete picture we must keep shaking the kaleidoscope to see what other patterns emerge.

However, a great amount of sociological research indicates the importance of diversity in organizations and decision making. ..."Leadership teams that make decisions in a homogeneous vacuum are more likely to make less informed decisions while perceiving that their decision is superior to those of other groups, practicing what has come to be known as "group think". Conversely, more diverse teams are better able to produce effective and creative solutions to challenges because they benefit from a broader array of knowledge, ideas, resources and experience.

The fact, just noted, that sociology has often won its academic right to existence in opposition to other departments may have increased the necessity for textbooks. Now, textbooks organize facts in order to make them available to youngsters, not around the growing points of research and discovery. Accordingly textbooks readily become a rather mechanical gathering of facts to illustrate more or less settled conceptions. The research possibilities of new ideas, the interplay of ideas and facts, are not usually considered very important in putting accumulated detail into some sort of textbook order.

…American men actually engage most in hunting and fishing. The desire of men in wealthy societies to re-create the food-gathering conditions of very primitive people appears to be an appropriate comment on the power of the hunting drives discussed earlier. Not only is hunting expensive in many places – think of the European on safari in Africa – but it is also time-consuming, potentially dangerous, and frequently involves considerable personal discomfort. Men do it because it is ‘fun’. So they say, and so one must conclude from their persistent rendition of the old pattern. What is relevant from our point of view is that hunting, and frequently fishing, are group activities. A man will choose his co-hunters very carefully. Not only does the relative intimacy of the hunt demand some congeniality, but there is also danger in hunting with inept or irresponsible persons. It is a serious matter, and even class barriers which normally operate quite rigidly may be happily breached for the period of the hunt. Some research on hunters in British Columbia suggests the near-piety which accompanies the hunt; hunting is a singular and important activity. One particular group of males takes along bottles of costly Crown Royal whisky for the hunt; they drink only superior whisky on this poignant re-creation of an ancient manly skill. But when their wives join them for New Year's celebrations, they drink an ordinary whisky: the purely formal and social occasion does not, it seems, merit the symbolic tribute of outstanding whisky. Gambling is another behaviour which, like hunting and sport, provides an opportunity in countless cultures for the weaving of and participation in the web of male affiliation. Not the gambling of the London casino, where glamorous women serve drinks, or the complex hope, greed, fate-tempting ritual, and action of the shiny American palaces in Nevada, and not the hidden gambling run by racketeers. Rather, the card games in homes or small clubs, where men gather to play for manageable stakes on a friendly basis; perhaps – like Jiggs and his Maggie – to avoid their women, perhaps to seek some money, perhaps to buy the pleasant passage of time. But also to be with their friends and talk, and define, by the game, the confines of their intimate male society. Obviously females play too, both on their own and in mixed company. But there are differences which warrant investigation, in the same way that the drinking of men in groups appears to differ from heterosexual or all-female drinking; the separation of all-male bars and mixed ones is still maintained in many places despite the powerful cultural pressures against such flagrant sexual apartheid. Even in the Bowery, where disaffiliated outcast males live in ways only now becoming understood, it has been noted that, ‘There are strong indications that the heavy drinkers are more integrated and more sociable than the light. The analytical problem lies in determining whether socialization causes drinking or drinking results in sociability when there is no disapproval.’ In the gentleman's club in London, the informally segregated working man's pub in Yorkshire, the all-male taverns of Montreal, the palm-wine huts of west Africa, perhaps can be observed the enactment of a way of establishing maleness and maintaining bonds which is given an excuse and possibly facilitated by alcohol. Certainly, for what they are worth in revealing the nature of popular conception of the social role of drinking, advertisements stress the manly appeal of alcohol – particularly whisky – though it is also clear that there are ongoing changes in the socio-sexual implications of drinking. But perhaps it is hasty to regard the process of change as a process of female emancipation which will culminate in similarity of behaviour, status, and ideals of males and females. The changes are still too recent to warrant this. Also, they have been achieved under sufficiently self-conscious pressure...

Research tends to indicate that American Indians on average fare relatively poorly across a number of outcomes, such as educational achievement and income. American Indians have been, and continue to be, marginalized in a number of ways, such as spatially and economically, that contribute to their disadvantaged position. A challenge when examining American Indian outcomes is that, because of the group’s relatively small population, less data are available about them in nationally representative surveys than for most other groups. Moreover, it is difficult to gauge the change in outcomes over time among American Indians because of changing patterns of self-identification among people with some American Indian ancestry.

The Big Fat Indian Wedding is a celebration to beat all celebrations in the life of Indians. Amita Nigam Sahaya's book is a sensitive, deeply researched and poignant meditation on the celebration, the planning, the complexities, the sociology, the clash between tradition and modernity, and the enduring appeal of this pivotal event.

The first census in 1790 essentially just collected information on whites and blacks. In the nineteenth century, inspired by the eugenics movement that was popular at the time, there was some experimentation with differentiating among blacks with categories such as “black” and “mulatto” (the latter referring to a black and white mix), and in 1890 even “quadroon” and “octoroon” (categories for one-fourth black and one-eighth black, respectively). The category for American Indian first appeared in the 1860 census, which was also the first year in which there was a category for Chinese. Mexican was an option in 1930, though it disappeared until the Hispanic origin question was introduced in 1970.24 People were first able to choose more than one race beginning in the 2000 census. Even today research continues on whether we should further revise the race and ethnicity question, such as combining them into one that collects information on people’s “origins.”25

In my opinion, the author-level metric can distort a real author's citation impact. For example, an author who has an h-index = 2 obtained on the basis of two published papers of which each is cited twenty times is more influential than an author who has an h-index = 3 obtained on the basis of three published papers of which each is cited three times.

He [Matthew Salganik, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, who is affiliated with several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers] explained to me that, broadly speaking, the difficulty with looking for answers in data sets is you become like a drunk looking for his keys under a lamppost. Ask the drunk why he's looking for his keys under the lamppost, an the drunk says, "Because that's where the light is." Data sets shed light only on what's in the data set.

For some researchers and animal protection organisations, the connection between animal cruelty and human violence has become a moral crusade pursued with missionary zeal. Some researchers, however, have come to question simplistic Link thinking. They worry that Link advocates and the media are perpetuating an irrational moral panic among the public. Link skeptics don't argue that we should ignore animal abuse. Rather, they believe that we should treat animal abuse as a serious problem in its own right, not because it turns children into adult psychopaths.

In 1939, the British crystallographer J. D. Bernal published a remarkable book, The Social Function of Science. The book’s thorough accounting of scientific institutions, research salaries, career trajectories, educational systems, and national priorities makes it a landmark publication in the sociology of science, but Bernal’s careful research wasn’t what sparked a public controversy and political backlash. Bernal, a Marxist and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, premised his book on the idea that the scientific process was intimately tied to social and economic conditions. Bernal acknowledged the concept of “science as a pursuit of pure knowledge for its own sake,” but he described the attitude as only one end of a spectrum bounded at the other by “science as power.” He relentlessly pointed out how capitalism shaped the production of knowledge in the United States and repeatedly referred to scientists as “scientific workers.” The book was, in many ways, a brief on behalf of Soviet-style planning as the surest and swiftest path to transform society and improve the human condition.1

It is at the heart of my research: black women are rational and human. Working from that assumption, I work my way analytically through political theory, economics, history, sociology, and culture. It rarely fails me. I thought about this rarity recently. Donald Trump's election had been one thing. There was clearly as aspect of race and gender at play. Women, some of them black, weighed in on what it meant that 53 percent of the white women who voted did so for Trump. But, as Trump's eclectic, manic style of governance set in, public discussion turned to ideas about Russia and fascism and economic anxiety. I understand all of these issues as ones to which black women contribute meaningful analysis.

Culshaw was an AIDS researcher who slowly became disillusioned by the gaping chasms in the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, and by government corruption in maintaining the orthodoxy. Her book offers a sociological explanation as to how the theory was anointed by the media and scientific community.

Has she grown up keenly observing, scrutinizing the children around her as if she were researching the most intricate sociology report: their clothes, their games, their television shows, their preferred methods of cruelty, their figures of speech? Has she sought invisibility among them, hoped they would not notice her, because the least bit of attention could transform into physical cruelty?

These experiences, called “psychic” or psi, suggest the presence of deep, invisible interconnections among people, and between objects and people. The most curious aspect of psi experiences is that they seem to transcend the usual boundaries of time and space. For over a century, these very same experiences have been systematically dismissed as impossible, or ridiculed as delusionary, by a small group of influential academics and journalists who have assumed that existing scientific theories are inviolate and complete. This has created a paradox. Many people believe in psi because of their experiences, and yet the defenders of the status quo have insisted that this belief is unjustified. Paradoxes are extremely important because they point out logical contradictions in assumptions. The first cousins of paradoxes are anomalies, those unexplained oddities that crop up now and again in science. Like paradoxes, anomalies are useful for revealing possible gaps in prevailing theories. Sometimes the gaps and contradictions are resolved peacefully and the old theories are shown to accommodate the oddities after all. But that is not always the case, so paradoxes and anomalies are not much liked by scientists who have built their careers on conventional theories. Anomalies present annoying challenges to established ways of thinking, and because theories tend to take on a life of their own, no theory is going to lie down and die without putting up a strenuous fight. Though anomalies may be seen as nuisances, the history of science shows that each anomaly carries a seed of potential revolution. If the seed can withstand the herbicides of repeated scrutiny, skepticism, and prejudice, it may germinate. It may then provoke a major breakthrough that reshapes the scientific landscape, allowing new technological and sociological concepts to bloom into a fresh vision of “common sense.” A long-held, commonsense assumption is that the worlds of the subjective and the objective are distinct, with absolutely no overlap. Subjective is “here, in the head,” and objective is “there, out in the world.” Psi phenomena suggest that the strict subjective-objective dichotomy may instead be part of a continuous spectrum, and that the usual assumptions about space and time are probably too restrictive. The anomalies fall into three general categories: ESP (extrasensory perception), PK (psychokinesis, or mind-matter interaction), and phenomena suggestive of survival after bodily death, including near-death experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation (see the following definitions and figure 1.1). Most scientists who study psi today expect that further research will eventually explain these anomalies in scientific terms. It isn’t clear, though, whether they can be fully understood without significant, possibly revolutionary, expansions of the current state of scientific knowledge.

Looking for fears, indeed, may be a more fruitful research strategy than a literal-minded quest for thinkers who “created” fascism. One such fear was the collapse of community under the corrosive influences of free individualism. Rousseau had already worried about this before the French Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century and after, the fear of social disintegration was mostly a conservative concern. After the turbulent 1840s in England, the Victorian polemicist Thomas Carlyle worried about what force would discipline “the masses, full of beer and nonsense,” as more and more of them received the right to vote. Carlyle’s remedy was a militarized welfare dictatorship, administered not by the existing ruling class but by a new elite composed of selfless captains of industry and other natural heroes of the order of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. The Nazis later claimed Carlyle as a forerunner. Fear of the collapse of community solidarity intensified in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century, under the impact of urban sprawl, industrial conflict, and immigration. Diagnosing the ills of community was a central project in the creation of the new discipline of sociology. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the first French holder of a chair in sociology, diagnosed modern society as afflicted with “anomie”—the purposeless drift of people without social ties—and reflected on the replacement of “organic” solidarity, the ties formed within natural communities of villages, families, and churches, with “mechanical” solidarity, the ties formed by modern propaganda and media such as fascists (and advertisers) would later perfect. The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies regretted the supplanting of traditional, natural societies (Gemeinschaften) by more differentiated and impersonal modern societies (Gesellschaften) in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), and the Nazis borrowed his term for the “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) they wanted to form. The early twentieth-century sociologists Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Roberto Michels contributed more directly to fascist ideas.

This paradox—a worldview that survives despite evidence that repeatedly challenges its basic assumptions—is well known among researchers interested in the sociology of science and technology, who often have noted the “obduracy” of established perspectives or paradigms in the face of anomalous information.

There are some differences in the political views of researchers in these different fields of study, but they lean heavily Democrat. Democratic economists outnumber their Republican counterparts by almost five to one, while in sociology (of which criminology is a subfield) there are about 37 Democratic faculty members for every Republican.5 No similar numbers are available for the field of public health, but political campaign donations indicate that few medical school faculty members make donations to Republicans.

a machine which learns from patterns in human-generated data, and autonomously manipulates human language, knowledge and relations, is more than a machine. It is a social agent: a participant in society, simultaneously participated in by it. As such, it becomes a legitimate object of sociological research.

A trend is in fact any change in popular taste or preference over time. Consequently, researching trends is primarily about understanding the causes and effects of a broader sociological evolution and how this comes to life through product choices.

The institutionalized practices of excluding women from the ideological work of society are the reason we have a history constructed largely from the perspective of men, and largely about men. This is why we have so few women poets and why the records of those who survived the hazards of attempting poetry are so imperfect.40 This is why we know so little of women visionaries, thinkers, and political organizers.41 This is why we have an anthropology that tells us about other societies from the perspective of men and hence has so distorted the cross-cultural record that it may now be impossible to learn what we might have known about how women lived in other forms of society. This is why we have a sociology that is written from the perspective of positions in a male-dominated ruling class and is set up in terms of the relevances of the institutional power structures that constitute those positions.42 This is why in English literature there is a corner called “women in literature” or “women novelists” and an overall critical approach to literature that assumes it is written by men and perhaps even largely for men. This is why the assumptions of psychological research43 and of educational research and philosophy take for granted male experience, orientation, and concerns and treat as normative masculine modes of being.

Increased Control and the Replacement of Human Beings with Non-Human Technology: These last two processes of McDonaldization are linked. When the industry replaces a human with technology, the industry maintains greater control of its operations.

5.6.2. Egocentricity "The linguistic phenomenon of evidentiality reflects a strong awareness of the self in Japanese language usage, however primordial and simplistic such a notion may be. In order to use the language appropriately, the speaker needs to be aware of the distinction between self and all others. This fact runs counter to many researchers in anthropology, linguistics, and sociology who contend that the Japanese people lack the concept of the individualistic self akin to the Western notion of self. Some even insist that Japan is a "selfless" society. Actual observation of Japanese society clearly demonstrates these notions to be myths. Quite the contrary, Japanese is a highly egocentric language, in which the presence of "I" as the speaker is so obvious as to not have to be expressed overtly.

Compared to other emotions (joy, sadness, anger), there is a lot of physical evidence that love is actually a concept closer to hormone activity than emotion. Biologically, love is a powerful neurotic condition. Desire to love is accompanied by sexual desire, but it is similar to hunger and thirst for hormonal reasons. When you fall in love, the brain releases several chemicals: pheromone, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin, and so on. Just by hugging a loved one or simply looking at a photograph of a boyfriend, the hormone oxytocin is released in the body and acts as an analgesic for headaches. What is interesting is that if you break up, the symptoms you experience are similar to the withdrawal symptoms of drug addicts. In some cases, withdrawal from the demonstration may release a chemical that weakens the heart in the body. Biochemically, phenylethylamine , which secretes in the brain's limbic system, acts as a stimulant, a kind of natural amphetamine. The phrase love is a drug is no longer a metaphor but an explanatory note in this scene. But it takes 2 seconds to look at the opponent and take the so-called saying at first sight. In just two seconds, phenylethylamine is secreted and becomes full, stimulating the brain, making the opponent look barefaced. If you can make your opponent secrete phenylethylamine, this is the birth of XXX, a grossly outbreak of creatures. However, the secretion of phenylethylamine has a shelf life and generally does not exceed 2 years. [10] After that period, I will get back to my mind. From this time on, love has passed through the stages of chemistry and sociology. But a new fact has been announced. It is said that there are quite a couple who secrete this phenylethylamine throughout life. (...) In this case, however, it is not the same as the whole life, but the period when it is secreted like other normal couples, and the time when the secretion is diminished repeatedly. However, the cycle of this pattern is similar to the two people, so it is a good fit for a lifetime. If you think about it a little differently, you will come back bump bang for a while and then fall back to each other. On the contrary, the broken couples still have one secretion, and the other side breaks into the resting period, and the secretion side considers that the other's love has cooled, Perhaps the main pattern that a man and a woman make and break is confessing - fellowship - Confession feels that the opponent is obsessed with the pattern of departure - separation, It may be that the action of the opponent, who started the pause more quickly and began to climax at the apex of the secretion at that point, is regarded as an obsession. However, it is difficult to justify the feeling of love as a simple hormonal change. It is not possible to reveal what kind of change is happening in any situation, even if it is revealed that what kind of hormone change occurs when feeling love, and it is impossible to tell. Just as you do not secrete phenylethylamine, which is one of the most common types of phenylethylamine you encounter on the roadside, you can not say that this research has 'revealed the principles of love' and 'why you fall in love'. The latter is influenced by individual values, experience and situation, first impressions, and the conditions of the opponent.

The racial conflict and self-segregation described [...] are not what we would expect if widespread assumptions about the advantages of diversity are true. The prevailing view in the media and some parts of academia is that race is not even a legitimate biological category, and that it is only because of prejudiced conditioning that we even notice it. This view ignores the large body of scientific work that suggests racial and ethnic consciousness is deeply rooted in human psychology. Our species seems to have an instinct for determining who is in our group and who is not. Studies of individuals point to unconscious processes in the brain that reflect a suspicion of people unlike ourselves, leading some researchers to conclude that ethnocentrism is part of human nature. At the same time, studies at the group level show that ethnic conflict is universal. In all countries, diversity of religion, ethnicity, or race causes conflict. For the better part of the post-war period, sociologists and political scientists downplayed ethnic conflict, on the assumption that it was a pre modern relic that would be replaced by competition based on class or professional affiliation. This has not happened. As one researcher has concluded, “ethnicity based on common descent tends to be more important than class based on common interest. Blood runs thicker than money.” It is from two directions, therefore, that scientists have begun to question the view that ethnic or racial mixing can be easily achieved. Laboratory investigations of individuals have found what may be tribal or ethnocentric instincts, while analysis of societies suggests that diversity invariably brings conflict.

In provisionally characterizing the object which serves as the theme of our investigation (the Being of entities, or the meaning of Being in general), it seems that we have also delineated the method to be employed. The task of ontology is to explain Being itself and to make the Being of entities stand out in full relief. And the method of ontology remains questionable in the highest degree as long as we merely consult those ontologies which have come down to us historically, or other essays of that character. Since the term "ontology" is used in this investigation in a sense which is formally broad, any attempt to clarify the method of ontology by tracing its history is automatically ruled out. When, moreover, we use the term "ontology," we are not talking about some definite philosophical discipline standing in interconnection with the others. Here one does not have to measure up to the tasks of some discipline that has been presented beforehand; on the contrary, only in terms of the objective necessities of definite questions and the kind of treatment which the 'things themselves' require, can one develop such a discipline. With the question of the meaning of Being, our investigation comes up against the fundamental question of philosophy. This is one that must be treated *phenomenologically*. Thus our treatise does not subscribe to a 'standpoint' or represent any special 'direction'; for phenomenology is nothing of either sort, nor can it become so as long as it understands itself. The expression 'phenomenology' signifies primarily a *methodological conception*. This expression does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as subject-matter, but rather the *how* of that research. The more genuinely a methodological concept is worked out and the more comprehensively it determines the principles on which a science is to be conducted, all the more primordially is it rooted in the way we come to terms with the things themselves, and the farther is it removed from what we call "technical devices," though there are many such devices even in the theoretical disciplines. Thus the term 'phenomenology' expresses a maxim which can be formulated as 'To the things themselves!' It is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is opposed to taking over any conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated; it is opposed to those pseudo-questions which parade themselves as 'problems', often for generations at a time. Yet this maxim, one may rejoin, is abundantly self-evident, and it expresses, moreover, the underlying principle of any scientific knowledge whatsoever. Why should anything so self-evident be taken up explicitly in giving a title to a branch of research? In point of fact, the issue here is a kind of 'self-evidence' which we should like to bring closer to us, so far as it is important to do so in casting light upon the procedure of our treatise. We shall expound only the preliminary conception [Vorbegriff] of phenomenology. This expression has two components: "phenomenon" and "logos." Both of these go back to terms from the Greek: φαινόμενον and λόγος. Taken superficially, the term "phenomenology" is formed like "theology," "biology," "sociology"―names which may be translated as "science of God," "science of life," "science of society." This would make phenomenology the *science of phenomena*. We shall set forth the preliminary conception of phenomenology by characterizing what one has in mind in the term's two components, 'phenomenon' and 'logos', and by establishing the meaning of the name in which these are *put together*. The history of the word itself, which presumably arose in the Wolffian school, is here of no significance." ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 49-51

How can this be squared with the above-mentioned psychological and sociological findings that, for example, married people are happier on average than singles? First, these findings are correlations – the direction of causation may be the opposite of what some researchers have assumed. It is true that married people are happier than singles and divorcees, but that does not necessarily mean that marriage produces happiness. It could be that happiness causes marriage. Or more correctly, that serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin bring about and maintain a marriage. People who are born with a cheerful biochemistry are generally happy and content. Such people are more attractive spouses, and consequently they have a greater chance of getting married. They are also less likely to divorce, because it is far easier to live with a happy and content spouse than with a depressed and dissatisfied one. Consequently, it’s true that married people are happier on average than singles, but a single woman prone to gloom because of her biochemistry would not necessarily become happier if she were to hook up with a husband.