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Advanced sociological theoryWatts (2011): a sociologist’s apology
‘’Gribbin clearly hated it, judging Becker’s insights to be the kind of self-evident checks that
‘’real scientists learn in the cradle’’
‘’the book had merely reinforced (versterkt) his opinion that all of social science was
something of an oxymoron and that any physicist threatened by cuts in funding ought to
consider a career in the social sciences, where it ought to be possible to solve the problems
the social scientists are worked up about in trice’’
‘’I think I can say that the problems sociologists, economists and other social scientists are
‘’worked up about’’ are not going to be solved in a trice, by me or even by a legion of
physicists’’
‘’If there’s a lesson here, you might think it would be that the problems of social science are
hard not just for social scientists, but for physicists as well. But this lesson, it seems, has not
been learned’’
‘’Rather it appears that she (Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison) doesn’t consider social problems
to be scientific problems, worthy of the prolonged attention of serious scientist’’
Lazarsfeld ame up with the report: ‘’men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits
during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds’’ when every answer and its
opposite appears equally obvious, then something is wrong with the entire argument of
obviousness
‘’typically people in higher positions do not expect to get everything right all the time. But
they also feel that the problems they are contemplating are mostly within their ability to
solve’’
‘’common sense is indeed exquisitely adapted to handling the kind of complexity that arises
in everyday situations. And for those situations its every bit as good as advertised. But
situations involving corporations, cultures, market, etc. exhibit a very different kind of
complexity from everyday situations. And under these circumstances, common sense turns
out to suffer from a number of errors’’
‘’the paradox of common sense is that even as it helps us make sense of the world, it can
actively undermine our ability to understand it’’
Illusory superiority effect = people rate themselves higher in different abilities
‘’people are much more willing to believe that others have misguided beliefs about the world
than that their own beliefs are misguided’’
‘’Questioning our own beliefs isn’t easy, but it is the first step in forming new, hopefully more
accurate, beliefs’’
, Coleman (1987): the Micro-Macro link
Social theory continues to be concerned with the functioning of social systems of behaviour,
whereas empirical research is largely concerned with explaining individual behaviour.
Given that much of social theory is concerned not with individual behaviour but with the
functioning of social systems of behaviour, and given that the most common and most natural
observations are of individuals, a central intellectual problem in the discipline is the
movement from the individual level, where observations are made, to the systematic level,
where the problem of interest lies. This has been called the ‘’micro-to-macro problem’’.
Weber:
1. Protestant religious doctrine generates certain values in its adherents
2. Individuals with certain values (referred to in item 1) adopt certain kinds of orientations
toward economic behaviour
3. Certain orientations toward economic behaviour (referred to in item 2) on the part of
individuals help bring about capitalist economic organization in a society
- Capitalist economic organization is a system of action, and to show how that system
comes into being, or even how it functions once in being, the aggregate value
orientation of the population is not sufficient
Frustration theories = the problem taken by these theories of revolution is the puzzling one
of why revolutions often seem to occur during periods of social change in which conditions are
generally improving. Frustration theorists resolve this problem by arguing that the improving
conditions in the society create frustration on the part of individual members of the society,
leading to revolution.
Good social history makes the transition successfully. It attempts to establish a causal
connection which shows not only how the doctrine affects the behaviour of individuals but
how that behaviour then comes to be combined. The most successful example of modelling
this transition is the model of a perfect market in neoclassical economic theory. The
starting point is a set of individuals, each possessing a particular utility function, a particular
set of goods, and a behaviour principle that states that a person will act so as to maximize
utility subject to the initial resources with which he or she begins. The ending point is a
general equilibrium: a set of prices for goods and an equilibrium distribution of goods among
the actors.
The use of sample of sample surveys to study social stratification makes it necessary to
ignore the interdependence. There has been an evolution in the use of these samples. The
uncomplete nature of the evolution is evidenced by the fact that the relations remain wholly
at the individually level. The individual-level character of the proposition:
, When asking a macrosocial question you attract the attention far wider (Does the level of
education in society affect the inequality of income?).
Easly and Kleinberg (2010): Games
Game theory is designed to address situations in which the outcome of a person’s decision
depends not just on how they choose among several options, but also on the choices made by
the people they are interacting with.
6.1 What is a game?
Game theory is concerned with situations in which decision-makers interact with one another,
and in which the happiness of each participant with the outcome depends not just on his or
her own decisions but on the decisions made by everyone. A game is any situation with the
following three aspects:
1. There is a set of participants whom we call the players
2. Each player has a set of options for how to behave; we will refer to these as the
player’s possible strategies
3. For each choice of strategies, each player receives a payoff that can depend on the
strategies selected by everyone. The payoffs will generally be numbers, with each
player preferring larger payoffs to smaller payoffs.
6.2 Reasoning about behaviour in a game
When a player has a strategy that is strictly better than all other options regardless of what
the other player does, we will refer to it as a strictly dominant strategy. When a player has a
strictly dominant strategy, we should expect that they will definitely play it.
6.3 Best responses and dominant strategies
Best response: it is the best choice of one player, given a belief about what the other player
will do.
We say that a strategy S for Player 1 is a best response to a strategy T for Player 2 if S
produces at least as good a payoff as any other strategy paired with T: P1(S, T) ≥ P1(S’ , T).
For all other strategies S’ of Player 1. We can emphasize that one choice is uniquely the best
by saying that a strategy S of Player 1 is a strict best response to a strategy T for Player 2 if S
produces a strictly higher payoff than any other strategy paired with T: P1(S, T) > P1(S’ , T) for
all other strategies S’ of Player 1. When a player has a strict best response to T, this is clearly
the strategy she should play when faced with T.
- We say that a dominant strategy for Player 1 is a strategy that is a best response to
every strategy of Player 2.
- We say that a strictly dominant strategy for Player 1 is a strategy that is a strict best
response to every strategy of Player 2.
6.4 Nash equilibrium
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