Explaining Behavior 15: The Lessons of Sociology
And thoughts on the future.
This is part of a series on how to explain human behavior. It is based on a course developed by the late Donald Black at the University of Virginia. The last installment was Part 14: Pure Sociology.
This is the final installment of the Explaining Behavior series. Let us take stock of what we’ve covered.
At the beginning, we looked at the nature of explanation—what it means to explain, the different styles of explanation, and how explanations are tested in both principle and practice.
Perhaps I spent too much text on the philosophy of science. But I think it’s important. In some fields, science is sufficiently institutionalized that scientists can do competent work without ever reflecting much on what makes it good science. By and large, this is not the case in sociology. The unscientific nature of sociology means that to succeed sociologists need to be more sophisticated about science, not less. Just following institutional routine isn’t going to cut it.
After covering the general logic of explanation, we surveyed different strategies of explanation—paradigms—found in sociology and other social sciences. Following Donald Black’s categories, there were eight: phenomenology, motivational theory, opportunity theory, rational choice theory, functionalism, conflict theory, neoDarwinian theory, and Black’s own pure sociology.
For each, I gave fairly pure examples so that the reader can get an idea of what the strategy looks like in isolation, and of its unique strengths and weaknesses. But the strategies are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes they arrive at the same explanatory variables, though for different reasons. Sometimes they arrive at different variables that all plausibly contribute to an outcome. Theorists are free to construct a body of propositions that combines multiple approaches. You can find plenty of explanations that do so.
Not that theorists are necessarily conscious of this. The strategies are often implicit and unrecognized. In both social science and everyday life people explain things without knowing that they’re following one strategy rather than another. This can leave them blind to alternatives, and quite surprised when you point out that, for example, they’re explaining motivation but assuming opportunity, or focusing on opportunity but ignoring incentives.
Herein lies the value of studying the different paradigms. Fluency in these strategies helps one consider multiple angles for attacking a problem. It provides greater facility for brainstorming theories and considering alternatives. It brings awareness of what kind of explanation one is coming up with, along with its assumptions and limitations.
In addition to this, I believe that each paradigm provides its own particular insights about human behavior. I refer to these as the lessons of sociology. To be fair, though, we could also call them the lessons of psychology, economics, political science, anthropology, and history.1
Consider each in turn.
The Lessons of Phenomenology
The main lesson of phenomenology is that perceptions matter. Only to a point, of course; believing you can fly doesn’t grant the ability. But sincere belief could lead you to jump off a building. Or, to give some real examples:
In the early 20th century, there were many who believed that the nations of the world were being controlled by a massive Jewish conspiracy. In Germany, the belief contributed to the Holocaust. But in Japan, officials who believed the tale concluded it was best to hedge one’s bets by courting the favor of such a formidable people, and so allowed thousands of Jews to settle in occupied Shanghai.
In 2020, a young man logged into his Robin Hood trading app to see it displaying a balance of negative $730,000. The display was only a glitch, but he did not know that. Because he believed he had suffered a catastrophic financial loss, he killed himself.
In 2023, 500 Kenyan cult members and their children died by starvation, because cult members believed starving themselves would bring salvation.
The effect of subjective belief is most obvious in cases where the belief is clearly wrong. But it’s still there when the belief is correct. The Warsaw Ghetto was in fact doomed to liquidation, but the residents didn’t rebel until they believed it.
For that matter, the impact of belief is there even in cases where reasonable observers disagree on its accuracy. That beliefs vary, and that even reasonable people disagree on them, suggests the value of being able accurately model them.
All this applies to other aspects of subjective experience: feelings like love or fear or shame or rage, understanding of communication (“did he get what you meant?”), perception of social position (“foreigners can’t tell I have a low-class accent”), and definitions of the immediate situation (“is this a formal occasion?”).
The ability to understand another’s subjective state is the phenomenological imagination. It matters for sociological explanation, even if only as a first step to orienting ourselves to behavior in question. And folk wisdom suggest it is important for practical understanding and moral judgment: “Put yourself in his shoes;” “try to see it from her point of view.”
Yet this isn’t always easy. How challenging is it to understand the experience of someone from a very different society and culture? Or someone undergoing an extreme of human experience, like the terror and chaos of battle?
Consider that modern Americans often have trouble putting themselves in the shoes of a neighbor who voted differently in the last election. Many fail the so-called Ideological Turing Test of being able to describe a political opponent’s beliefs in a way that opponent would see as accurate. Men and women fail to understand one another’s feelings, rural and urban people fail to understand one another’s experiences, and multitudes assumes their worldview if far more universal than it is. Failures of phenomenological imagination abound.
The Lessons of Motivational Theory
Pure motivational theory is, in its way, just as individualistic as phenomenology. Even when the theories speak of social structures and aggregate actions, the locus of explanation remains the person—the person who is socialized to believe in this or that, who experiences more or less strain, who forms or fails to form attachments, who feels social pressure to conform or obey.
But the first lesson of motivational theories is that no person exists in a vacuum—or, as John Donne wrote, “no man is an island, entire of itself.” If phenomenology shows us that people want or feel or perceive differently, motivational theory asks why this is so. The duelists would not feel compelled to settle their quarrel with violence had they not been reared in an honor culture; the masses would not have sought to overthrow the government if not frustrated by rising food prices; the convert would not have accepted the cult’s beliefs is he had not developed emotional bonds with the members.
The flowering of behavioral genetics should caution us against thinking social forces have total leeway in shaping the individual. But innate dispositions express themselves in concrete circumstances. I can’t tell you anything about Adolph Hilter’s genetic risk of suicide; I can tell you he wouldn’t have shot himself in 1945 if his army had been winning.
Perhaps maybe my dharma was always to write about social science topics; but would I write so much about pure sociology had I not met Donald Black and developed bonds with others who appreciate his work?
It may be overstated in pop psychology, but people do respond to their social environment, and prior experiences can shape later ones. The greater the variation in circumstances, the less ability individuals have to self-select into circumstances that match their inclinations, the greater the effect of social forces. If put into a time machine as a child and raised in Phillip II’s Macedonia, you might not have grown up to be a typical Macedonian—but you surely would be different than your current self.
Motivational theory asks us to understand experiences people have been through, and what forces are shaping them. This too is something relevant both to scientific explanation and to everyday understanding and moral judgment. Folk wisdom cautions us to “never judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.” And the saying “there but for the grace of God go I” points out that if our circumstances were different, we might go down a different path indeed.
The Lessons of Opportunity Theory
Opportunity theory reminds us that what people want to do and what they actually do are often different things. Thus the first lesson of opportunity theory is that not every difference in behavior requires a difference in disposition.
The successful job hunters might have greater ambition and talent than the unsuccessful ones—but even among those of equal personal qualities, some will have social networks that bring them into contact with more jobs. The rates of theft might have gone up because of increasing desperation or failure to instill morality—or it might just be there’s more stuff to steal and fewer guards to stop it. Changed behavior doesn’t necessarily mean changed people.
Indeed, opportunity theory leads us even further away from a focus on the individual actor. Rumors, job tips, and contagious diseases spread as far and as fast as the network structure will allow.
Opportunity explanations often provide seemingly mundane causes of collective behavior. The result can be easier solutions. Rather than tackling all the myriad social influences that might incline a person to commit crime, we can reduce crime just by having an officer stand on one street corner rather than another, or having a business refuse cash transactions.
But opportunity logic can also point us toward some grand patterns of history. What is the evolution of science and technology but a history of opportunity? The invention of numbers allowed the invention of algebra. The invention of rockets allowed the invention of satellite internet. The phenomenon of multiple discovery in science suggests opportunity is often the limiting factor in innovation: There are enough people disposed to a discovery that as soon as it becomes possible, it is nigh inevitable.
The Lessons of Rational Choice Theory
The first lesson of the rational choice paradigm is that incentives matter. Increase the cost of a behavior, through punishment or taxes or even just minor friction, and, in aggregate, less will occur. Decrease the cost or increase the reward, and, in aggregate, more will occur.
The lesson sounds obvious, but it is often ignored. In policy debates, people might speak as if the rates of various behaviors were constant rather than variable: “We can afford to cease punishing this crime, since so few people do it.” From the growth of shoplifting rings to the flight of billionaires to other states, people doing more of what costs them less and less of what costs them more surprises folks more than it should.
Perhaps part of the problem is the inability to think in aggregates. Many of us are no more inclined to steal if theft goes from felony to misdemeanor—but as long as at least some people are, theft rates will rise.
Another problem might be confusing the logic of incentives with the logic of opportunity. People sometimes conflate making something more difficult with making it impossible. They then conclude that since one cannot make something impossible, raising costs won’t make it less likely or less common.
We should be cautious that incentives are not obvious. Human beings are devilishly clever and can game systems in ways you haven’t yet imagined. Paying criminals to turn in their knives and guns might seem a quite rational way to align the incentives of criminals and the law—until someone sets up a business manufacturing ultra-cheap weapons solely to profit from this arrangement.
That incentives are not always obvious is also partly because neither are costs and benefits. Given the diversity of things that people might value or despise, it can even take some phenomenological imagination to classify them.
But costs are always there—even doing nothing carries the opportunity cost of not having done something. Hence another lesson of rational choice thinking, summarized by economist Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” The trade might be well worth it, but don’t delude yourself. Everything comes at a price.
The Lessons of Functionalism
Functionalism is much maligned in contemporary sociology, but usually for the wrong reasons. Its main shortcoming is a poor track record of testable explanations. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to use this paradigm to create them; it just means its most famous practitioners so far failed to do so. Maybe a young thinker can buck the trend.
But functionalism too teaches us lessons. Any sufficiently long-loved human group must produce behaviors that contribute to its survival—either the physical survival of its members or the persistence of the organization as such.
Critics are right that we shouldn’t assume every single feature of society has survival value, or that all behaviors are optimal. But neither should we look at a human group and assume that all of its features are arbitrary, or that none solve an important problem. Nor should we assume these functions are obvious to either ourselves or the people we study.
There’s a reason this paradigm was influential in early twentieth century anthropology. Anthropologists were keen on showing how tribal customs that seemed strange and senseless to a foreigner actually made sense in context. Whatever else it might be, human culture is an adaptation, a solution to the problem of making a living on planet earth. Life on earth evolves into systems, and systems of systems, the parts of which can be understood in relation to one another as well as the broader environment.
I don’t think it’s accurate to characterize academic functionalism as politically conservative. But the paradigm does carry a lesson often emphasized in conservative thought: Before you tear down that seemingly pointless old fence, you ought to know why it was put up in the first place. Culture might be solving a problem we forgot we ever had.
This doesn’t mean being a slave to tradition, or believing current institutions are optimal and society can’t be improved. Rather, the practical lesson of functionalism is humility in the face of complex systems.
This counsel might read as liberal or progressive when we consider foreign cultures, as conservative when we consider our own, and as hard-nosed practical advice for a manager orienting himself to a new organization. Either way, the lesson stands.
The Lessons of Conflict Theory
I have more than a little criticism of the paradigm whose vulgar forms have devoured large swaths of the social sciences and humanities. But conflict theory does have lessons of its own.
True, the paradigm often leads people to misunderstand the positive-sum exchanges of markets. But zero-sum competition exists. Status symbols and other positional goods are valuable to the extent others lack them. If two political parties push for opposite policies, at least one must be disappointed. If one claimant for the throne wins, the other must lose.
Like as not, the human animal is a political animal, prone to factions that vie for power, prestige, and limited resources. Not all of these factions are on equal footing. Some are better able to obtain what they seek. Cumulative advantage often means that strength breeds strength, victory breeds victory. Life isn’t fair.
Domination might be as obvious as military conquest, or the deference expected toward superiors in a caste system. But just as the survival value of a behavior might be opaque to both insiders and outsiders, so too might the ways that some benefit at the expense of others. Human cultures are shaped by survival constraints on the group, but also by power dynamics within the group.
The tribe’s meat-sharing rules give the best cuts to the adult men— is it a functional adaptation that makes sure the most valuable hunters and warriors can best provide for the rest? Or is it just that the preferences of the strongest tend to get enshrined in tradition? Or maybe it’s a little of both: Group survival sets upper and lower bounds on equity, and power decides the exact spot in between.
Functionalism counsels humility, but conflict theory warns against naivete. And it points us toward asking what exactly allows one faction to get what it wants, even at the expense of others.
The Lessons of NeoDarwinian Theory
If motivational theory shows us ways in which the individual is malleable, NeoDarwinism reminds us that he is not infinitely so. Like as not, humans are an animal with innate capacities and instincts. Social life operates on a biological substrate. A lesson of neoDarwininian theory is that human nature exists.
We navigate the high-tech world with traits that were advantageous to stone age hunters and prehistoric farmers. These traits may no longer have the same results, but that doesn’t undo them. Our ancestors only had to worry about getting too few calories, while we have to worry about getting too many—but the crispy salted fatties still taste good to us.
It is useful to keep these instincts in mind when planning any social engineering. Witness the history of utopian schemes to smash monogamy and establish free love or group marriage. They come to grief because a strong tendency toward pair-bonding and sexual jealousy cannot be undone by fiat. You build a society with the species you have, not the species you wish you had.
But even leaving aside questions of the spirit, it is clear humans are not merely biological beings. We are a cultural species as well, our instincts supplemented and channeled by all the myriad knowledge and custom we learn from our social group.
Culture doesn’t free us from natural selection but adds another layer. Our capacity for culture is itself the result of evolution: The branches of humanity better at developing culture must have outcompeted those that were not. And once unleashed, culture follows evolutionary dynamics of its own: The ideas at succeeding within the group are not necessarily the best for keeping the group alive.
Over the long term, handy software outcompetes malware. But it does so, in part, through the ruthless culling of extinction. Groups and organizations ignore this fact at their peril.
The Lessons of Pure Sociology
Other paradigms tell us the importance of understanding the individual and what shapes him or her. Black’s pure sociology tells us the individual is only part of the story.
Not even the most violent or litigious person is violent or litigious in every conflict. The same person might join in a genocide, helping kill members of the targeted group, and turn around and rescue other members of that same group. The same person might be scientific about one topic, but unscientific about another.
That people behave differently toward strangers than intimates, or differently toward superiors than inferiors, might seem obvious enough. But this lesson sometimes falls by the wayside as we focus myopically on the person rather than the behavior. Behavior does not just vary across individuals. Nor does it just vary across countries and cultures and classes. It varies from instance to instance—from conflict to conflict, from idea to idea, from case to case.
Behavior varies with a social structure defined by the statuses and relationships of all involved. Yet even research focused on individual cases often ignores major aspects of this social structure. Witness discussions of whether the legal system treats low status defendants differently than high status defendants, completely ignoring the social status of their alleged victim.
Third parties are also part of the social structure of behavior. A conflict is less likely to turn violent when it involves third parties with cross-cutting ties to both sides. Remove these, violence becomes more likely. Add many parties with close ties to only one side, the violence is likely to be collective and unilateral, as in a lynch mob. Give both sides a cluster of solidary ties, the violence is likely to be collective and reciprocal, as in a blood feud. Increase the relational and cultural distance between the sides, the violence becomes more severe.
In this way we can model the behavior of violence, asking what structural variables make it grow in severity and scale, or become more one-sided rather than two-sided. By explaining forms of behavior like violence or science or altruism, pure sociology offers another lesson: We can predict and explain behavior without getting into the exact mix of motives, feelings, needs, interests, constraints, and incentives faced by every individual or group involved.
If other paradigms help us understand the person, pure sociology tells us that for many scientific problems, understanding the person just isn’t necessary. The great simplification that results illustrates a broader lesson of science: Behind daunting complexity, elegant simplicity waits to be found.
The Future of Sociology
To many critics, the term social science is an oxymoron. Indeed, the problems are numerous. Even if we ignore those who openly proclaim their opposition to doing scientific work, we are still faced with poor measures, phantom correlations, unreplicable research, and ideological blinders. And when it comes to theory—the focus of this series—we find that much of what passes for it does not explain anything. Rather than simple principles that predict facts, we find definitions and classifications, metatheory and orienting statements, exegeses and interpretations.
Even those theories that provide some form of explanation can fall short. They might offer little more than simplistic teleology that predicts hardly any variation. They might be difficult or impossible to falsify. And some testable ideas, even promising ones, simply turn out to be incorrect.
Other theories languish untested by researchers who have little interest in conducting tests. Perhaps because so little theory is testable in the first place, the institutional machinery of sociological research has learned to proceed without it. Obtain data, find a significant correlation, and then figure out which theoretical “perspective” best provides linguistic window-dressing—this is a reliable method for publication. Establishing simple, general, and valid principles of social behavior is a minor part of the academic game.
But to borrow a phrase from Donald Black, let us not be “philosophers of failure.” Most of this series is borrowed from him, so we might as well borrow his unshakeable optimism as well.
Consider that over the course of history, scienticity has increased. We might now view Ptolemy’s earth-centered astronomical model as laughably wrong, but in terms of generality and predictive accuracy it was superior to the astronomy of prior civilizations. These in turn had more scientific astronomy than their tribal ancestors. Civilizations rose and fell, literacy waxed and waned, and specific bits of knowledge were lost. But the overall pattern is that ideas with greater generality, simplicity, and predictive accuracy have staying power. Galileo was heir to the best of Babylon.
And when we consider the history of science in detail, we see that social science isn’t quite so retarded as it first seems. The more scientific sciences did not always look as they do now, and our historical memory tends to compress their slow evolution. The reality is that sometimes generations pass between idea and application, first step and the achievement that builds on it.
For instance, in 1638, Galileo produced mathematical descriptions of how projectiles move in a parabolic arc. He knew this would lead to a science of ballistics that revolutionized war. But it took half a lifetime for the first limited applications, and over a century and a whole line of research into wind resistance until a fully developed ballistic science became broadly useful.
If we are ever tempted to throw up our hands in despair that some promising theory hasn’t had the impact we hoped, keep in mind that the day is still young. It only takes one special mind in a subsequent generation to carry forward that stalled research program. Even if there be only a handful of real theoretical achievements in all the social science of the past century, the best social scientists of the coming centuries will build on them.
Another reason for optimism is that never before in history have we had so much data on human behavior. Emile Durkheim’s pioneering work on suicide happened, in large part, because his was the first generation of intellectuals with data on suicide rates. Patterns not easily observed by even the most well-travelled observer became visible, and these new subjects attracted scientific ideas.
We currently live in a great data overhang, with more behaviors recorded than have ever been analyzed. Archives like the Human Relations Area Files and databases like Seshat centralize, index, and code the observations of thousands of ethnographers and historians. The ubiquity of video cameras gives us thousands of hours of footage of various kinds of human interaction. The online age provides innumerable written correspondences and recorded conservations.
The logical positivists were wrong that we can simply add up the data to create theory. But as Black’s theory of scienticity tells us, the history of science is a history of relationships, with the greatest scienticity occurring where new methods of observation allow contact with subjects previously unobserved. The rapid growth of data promises to allow such new observations, and so inspire new theory and provide better means of testing old theory.
There’s another way in which the march of technology brings us into contact with new subjects. It’s no coincidence that the field of sociology first emerged in the generation who experienced the massive social changes wrought by the industrial revolution. When thinkers like Durkheim or Tönnies or Weber struggled to characterize the difference between traditional and modern societies, they were addressing the differences between their current world and the world they were born into. When social change is rapid, even the recent past is a foreign country, and to those of us with one foot in it, the present is foreign as well. All is strange, and all cries out for explanation.
It appears that we’re currently in another period of unusually rapid change. Old institutions will wither or collapse, and new patterns of behavior will confront us every day. The change will be dizzying—but scientifically stimulating. There will be much to explain, and new theory to explain it.
I cannot say whether this new theory will come from university sociology departments, or from people with degrees in sociology. But what of it? Sociology is the science of social life, and it exists wherever and whenever people predict and explain the social world. Let sociology be done, though the universities fall.
Sociology will endure, even if people call it something else. Sociologists will exist, even if they don’t have degrees or academic appointments. And, over the long term, sociological theory will advance. It will continue to explain behavior. It will offer us new lessons yet.
Thanks for reading!
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In fact, my title is a nod to Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History.