The Interdisciplinary Potential of Pure Sociology

All life is social life

Last year I published this piece in The American Sociologist as part of a special issue on the sociology and legacy of Donald Black. You can view the official version here, if you can get past the paywall. I, ironically, cannot. I reproduce a slightly edited version below. These are my most ambitious ideas so far, and therefore most likely to be wrong. It was fun to write, though.

Contents:

1. Introduction

2. Blackian Theory and Social Psychology

3. Social Structure and the Individual

4. Social Perception and Behavior

5. Social Structure and Ethology

6. The Social Geometry of Evolution

7. Conclusion

Introduction

In his 1967 book The Nature of Social Science, sociologist George Homans made two important points about sociological theory. One is that most extant theory did not actually explain anything—it consisted, rather, of conceptual definitions and metatheoretical orienting statements. Few and far between were propositions that specify a quantitative relationship between two aspects of the social world, allowing us to say why we get more of something under one set of conditions than under another. The other point was that to the extent sociology did have general propositions, they were, at core, psychological. Every sociological theory worth its salt was rooted in some statements about what individual human minds wanted or needed, how they understood their situation, and how they made decisions. There was thus no difference between sociology and social psychology—all sociology was social psychology, and pure sociology did not exist.¹

It seems that many who heard this argument either ignored it or accepted it. But there was one sociologist, then still a graduate student, who took Homan’s claim not just as a criticism, but as a challenge. Upon encountering the idea that pure sociology did not yet exist, Donald Black vowed to create it. As he later wrote, he became a “sociological fundamentalist” and “vowed to say only what is truly sociological, or to say nothing at all”.²

He set out to create a kind of explanatory theory that lacked reference to human psychology or even individuals as such. He did it because he believed Homans’s claim that it hadn’t been done but rejected the idea that it was impossible. He wanted to create something new, so that he could see what value it had.³ After years of thought, he presented this new type of sociology to the world in a book showcasing his theory of law.

One of his key insights is displayed in that book’s title: The Behavior of Law. Black viewed law itself—governmental social control— as a kind of natural phenomenon, like gravity or electricity. And his goal was to explain the behavior of law as such, not the behavior of people. Thus, he did not produce a theory of why crime victims decide to report, based on personal factors like their commitment to street culture, their trust in police, or their fear of retaliation. Nor was it a theory of why police decide to make arrest, based on factors like their career incentives, stereotypes of offenders, or moral beliefs. Nor was it a theory of when prosecutors choose to bring more severe charges or when judges and jurors decide to convict a defendant.

Like iron filings arranging themselves along lines of magnetic force, all these individual decisions merely demonstrate the behavior of law itself. Explain law, and you explain the actions of all these individuals. Whatever increases the quantity of law makes crime victims more likely to call police, police more likely to arrest, jurors more likely to convict, and so forth.

And like natural forces, law is something that varies with its immediate environment. The quantity of law varies with its location and direction in the status distribution, increasing at high elevations and in downward directions. At every phase of the legal process, cases between high status people tend to attract more law, and cases where higher status people mobilize law against lower status people tend to attract even more. Law also varies with the distances it spans. Gravity and magnetism increase with physical closeness, but law increases with social distance. Stranger cases attract more law than intimate cases, and cases between culturally distant strangers attract still more.⁴

These and other abstract features of the social world have predictable relationships with the quantity of law, and these relationships can be described by general principles applicable to all human societies. Such principles allow us to predict and explain the outcomes of different legal cases, or why some societies or segments of society generally have more governmental social control. And they do this without reference to the preferences, feelings, goals, or perceptions of any particular individual involved.

Thus was born pure sociology, a paradigm that explains forms of social life like law, moralism, partisanship, predation, science, art, altruism, therapy, religion, and more.⁵ It explains variation in social life with its location and direction in social space, also known as the social structure or social geometry of the behavior. Does the behavior cross greater or lesser social distances? Is it directed upward or downward in the status structure? What is the exact configuration of relationships involved in this instance of social life? Is it occurring between close groups of equal status, or between distant individuals of unequal status, or what? Social life varies with its social structure.

Using this paradigm, Black told us not only how law varied, but also much more about the handling of conflict—including that 1) settlement occurs in an isosceles triangle of social distance and social status with the settlement agent at the apex; 2) spanning long distances in downward directions leads moralism to cool and harden, producing greater legalism and harsher punishments; and 3) classic blood feuds, an exchange of one killing at a time, occur between groups that are roughly equal, functionally independent, culturally close, and of intermediate relational distance.⁶

Beyond conflict, he told us about the behavior of ideas. For instance, Black proposed that science was a curvilinear function of distance from the subject, that downward ideas were greater than upward ideas, and that the attractiveness of a subject increased with its social elevation.⁷ He also formulated propositions about the behavior of medicine, art, and religion.⁸ Black bequeathed the field a large body of general principles that predict and explain social life.

The validity of any particular principle is something to be determined by empirical research. But it seems clear that Black’s strategy has proven fruitful for generating testable theory and stimulating such research. No doubt many critics will balk at Black’s insistence that his paradigm is the most scientific or most sociological sociology—they value other approaches and are not keen on having them defined as inferior in the field, or out of the field altogether. Fair enough.

But it is unquestionable that Black’s paradigm is indeed a distinctive kind of sociology, different from socialization theories or conflict theories or rational choice theories. And while we might quibble over the concept of purity, Black’s approach is indeed something unique to the field of sociology. It is certainly different from how psychologists and biologists generally explain the behavior of humans and other organisms.

My starting point for this essay is that a new and distinctive kind of sociology exists, and that it is valuable. The question I explore is what value this paradigm holds beyond the boundaries of sociology.

The question is one that might seem strange or even paradoxical, given Black’s emphasis on disciplinary purity. But while his theoretical achievements were the result of eschewing other approaches, there is no necessary reason why this novel paradigm cannot have wider relevance. Scientific progress often rests on specialties striking off in different directions and becoming distinct, only for later cross-fertilization between them to provide fresh opportunities for discovery.

The goal of my essay is to explore the interdisciplinary relevance of Black’s pure sociology. In particular, I address how Blackian ideas and the Blackian paradigm are relevant to the study of 1) psychology (including social psychology, personality psychology, and cognitive psychology) 2) ethology (the study of behavior in non-human animals) and 3) to understanding the evolution of traits and behaviors by natural selection.

I begin with the easiest and most intuitive applications, and end with the most difficult and ambitious. Consider first how we apply Blackian theory to mainstream social psychology.

Blackian Theory and Social Psychology

The simplest applications of Blackian theory lay in social psychology, where researchers often study the very same phenomena that Black’s theories predict and explain. For instance, social psychologists sometimes study the decision making of real or simulated juries, asking how characteristics of the defendant, the individual juror, or the jury as a whole shape votes to convict or acquit.⁹ One could readily use such methods to test hypotheses derived from Black’s theories of law, settlement, and partisanship, such as his idea that low status jurors are less authoritative, or his idea that juries will tend to side with culturally close litigants against culturally distant ones, or his idea that cases between relationally distant parties attract more severity than cases between intimate parties.¹⁰

The same goes for other methods of studying conflict, including the study of aggression. For example, in one study a team of psychologists drove around their town and purposefully failed to accelerate when traffic lights turned green, provoking a grievance from drivers stuck behind them in traffic.¹¹ Their independent variable was the social status indicated by their car—in some conditions a newer luxury model, in others an old beater. They aimed to see whether frustrated drivers were quicker to honk at the apparently low status car than the high status one. Their method, or something similar to it, could be used to test Black’s idea that tolerance increases with the social superiority of the offender.¹²

And one could test Black’s propositions about third party intervention—such as “third party intervention varies directly with relational distance”—by using something like Shotland and Straw’s method of exposing subjects to a staged conflict.¹³ In this experiment, subjects ostensibly recruited for another task witnessed a fight between a man and a woman—in some trials, apparently strangers, in others, apparently intimates—with the dependent variable being whether they tried to intervene either directly (in which case they were stopped and the deception revealed) or indirectly (by using a nearby telephone to call for help). Black’s proposition makes a clear prediction about which situation is most likely to produce intervention. A replication of the original study would double as an appropriate test of Black’s theory.

Not only are Black’s theories of law, conflict, and social control relevant to such research, but the experimental methods so often used by social psychologists are well-suited to Blackian theory because they focus on the same key unit of analysis: Variation from one instance of behavior to another. And while some of Black’s theories deal with behaviors like feuding and terrorism that are impossible to study experimentally, others—such as his theory of the behavior of ideas—present far fewer practical or ethical constraints. A clever experimentalist could make hay with Black’s treasure trove of propositions about human behavior.

Yet the influence of Blackian theory on social psychology has so far been minimal. This is perhaps understandable, given Black’s own disinterest in psychology. But it is unfortunate, as his theories might not only offer parsimonious explanations of social psychological findings, but also suggest many new lines of inquiry.

Guidance from general theories—especially those which, like Black’s, are developed with an eye on cross-cultural and historical literature—might be useful in another regard as well. For while many discuss the statistical sources of social psychology’s replication crisis—such as small samples and p-hacking—it’s possible that a lack of quality theory shares some of blame. Perhaps many researchers are simply looking in the wrong places for important influences on human behavior.

While social psychologists will surely want to develop their own ideas about whatever mental mechanisms are involved, they can derive testable hypotheses directly from pure sociological theories, just as they would from any other sociological or psychological theory. If the dependent variable is human behavior, Black’s pure sociology can predict it. When applied to social psychology, Blackian theory can be used “as is.” The situation is somewhat different for branches of psychology focused more exclusively on individual traits, such as personality, intelligence, and perception. Here the relevance of pure sociology is less obvious—but it still exists.

Social Structure and the Individual

The logic of Black’s pure sociology is to explain variation in social life with the structure of each instance of the behavior. Pure sociologists compare conflicts to other conflicts, legal cases to other legal cases, ideas to other ideas. We do not study individuals as such.

Indeed, a point that pure sociologists sometimes make is that the same person might be violent or litigious in one conflict but not in another, be scientific about one topic but not another, and so forth. Thus, in their study of homicide, Phillips and Cooney used the innovative method of having each respondent describe a matched pair of conflicts in which they had taken part—one leading to homicide, and one that was similar but led to a different outcome. Individual propensity for violence—being a hothead or a psychopath—could not explain why the subjects killed in one scenario but not another. Rather, as the authors demonstrated, structural factors like the presence of third parties with cross-cutting ties were crucial. Hold the individual constant, and their behavior varies with structure.¹⁴

But hotheads and psychopaths do exist. Hold the structure constant, and behavior varies with the individual. The least violent individuals may only be moved to violence by an extremely violent structure, others are violent across a wider range of conditions. The same could be said about any other sort of behavior—litigation, having scientific ideas, or seeking therapy.

If both individual traits and social structure matter, it suggests the study of one must account for the other. The matched-pair design of Phillips and Cooney helps control for individual variation when studying structural effects. Vice versa, those who wish to study the individual must control for the social structure of the case. The impact of personality, testosterone levels, psychopathology, and so forth can only be precisely and accurately estimated when one takes pains to compare situations that are otherwise similar in terms of crucial sociological variables—including the social distances between the parties, their relative status, and the distance and elevation of third parties. Accounting for the social geometry of behavior allows social scientists to better isolate individual variation, or perhaps to better understand how it produces certain outcomes.

For instance, psychologists have various ways of categorizing and measuring mental traits, such as the “Big Five” personality traits—openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And it is common to study how personality affects this behavior or that. For example, one finding is that women who score higher on extroversion, openness, and neuroticism are more likely to be the target of intimate partner violence.¹⁵

Now consider Black’s theory of domestic violence, which explains the likelihood and severity of violence with different domestic structures, defined by varying levels of intimacy and inequality. Violence is least in the intimate and egalitarian domestic structure he calls a “close democracy,” and greatest in the distant and hierarchal structure he calls a “cold patriarchy.” Two other structures, the “loose anarchy” and “warm patriarchy,” are predicted to have intermediate levels of violence.¹⁶

Turning back the finding about women’s personality and victimization, we might ask whether the correlation is due to women with certain personality traits being disproportionately drawn to certain domestic structures. Does the combination of high openness, extraversion, and neuroticism make a woman more likely to wind up in a cold patriarchy or loose anarchy? If so, the psychological relationship is mediated by the sociological one.

Or perhaps it turns out this is not the case, and these personality traits raise the risk of victimization across all of Black’s domestic structures. Or perhaps they raise the risk of victimization in some structures, but not in others. Only when one is armed with knowledge of social geometry can such questions be properly investigated.¹⁷

The same goes for other reported effects of personality, such as the finding that juries with higher average extraversion are more likely to render a not-guilty verdict or that people who are more agreeable are more likely to choose nonconfrontational ways of handling conflict.¹⁸ Are such relationships mediated by social structure? Perhaps extroverted jurors are also more likely to be lower in social status—and Black proposes that lower status jurors are less punitive.¹⁹ And perhaps agreeable people gravitate toward settings of high social fluidity where, Black predicts, avoidance becomes more likely.²⁰

Researchers might also explore other ways that personality interacts with social geometry. Does extraversion predict a non-guilty vote in downward cases but not upward ones? Distant cases but not close ones?

One possibility is that there is a multiplicative effect between structure and personality. For instance, any personality factor that biases a judge or juror toward leniency would express itself most when the case is sociologically weak—structurally unattractive to law, such as a close and upward complaint. Contrariwise, individuals inclined to harsh judgments may have the greatest impact in cases where the structure is conducive to high quantities of law. More broadly still, “moralistic personalities” might express themselves most dramatically and forcefully in structures that encourage moralism and shrink into the background in structures that encourage tolerance.

Researchers can search for interactions with other individual traits as well, including other mental traits like intelligence or psychopathology.²¹ If, as some studies report, people of low intelligence or high psychopathy are more likely to be violent, then their presence in a social structure conducive to violence could be, to borrow a phrase from Black, “like one explosive substance added to another”.²²

Violent structures might even draw such personalities to center stage, giving them a more prominent role in violent forms of social life than they would take in less violent forms. Though the social structure of large-scale collective violence like riots and genocides might induce all sorts of people to participate, we should not be surprised to see unusually violent people at the forefront. At least in part, social life operates by selecting its agents.²³

Those interested in studying personality or other individual traits might even find that Black’s pure sociology offers new ways to conceptualize and classify such traits. If the geometry of social life is crucial to explaining behavior, then one of the most important differences between individuals is in how they respond to social geometry.

Casual observation suggests such differences exist. Some individuals evince more concern with the vertical dimension of social space, as is the case for status stivers who dedicate much time and attention to getting ahead. Others focus more time and effort on maintaining and managing intimacy or on producing and consuming culture. And some display greater sensitivity to particular dimensions of social space, altering their behavior relatively more from one structure to another: Tyrants to subordinates but sycophants to superiors; cold to mere acquaintances but lacking boundaries with intimates.²⁴

A personality might thus be defined by how someone is prone to relate to the different dimensions of social space, or how sensitive they are to a given dimension. Perhaps in the future, the “Big Five” will refer to Black’s five dimensions of social space: the relational, the cultural, the vertical, the corporate, and the normative.

Social Perception and Behavior

When he premiered his paradigm in The Behavior of Law, Black took pains to define social space objectively, with outwardly observable indicators. For example, relational closeness, as a purely sociological conception of intimacy, is measurable with such indicators as length of the relationship, amount of time spent together, number of shared activities, and links between people in a social network. Relational closeness is not, as my students sometimes mistakenly answer, “a feeling of closeness.” Nor is social superiority a matter of people “viewing themselves as superior.” Black’s pure sociology is not phenomenology, and the dimensions of social space are not defined by subjective perceptions of the actor.

Yet actors do have subjective perceptions, and they matter. At the most basic level, the influence of social structure varies with the ability of social actors to receive and process what Black calls social information.

Black discusses this in his book Sociological Justice. Here he compares how law officers typically handle parking offenses to how they typically handle moving offenses. Parking offenses are usually handled mechanically—each improperly parked car is given a standardized citation, with little additional severity or leniency from case to case. There is much more variation how police deal with moving offenses, such as speeding. Some speeders are totally ignored, some are let off with mere warnings, others are fined to the maximum extent allowed, and still others are searched and arrested.

According to Black, the reason for this is that parking violators are “socially invisible.”²⁵ The offenders themselves are usually absent from the scene, and the vehicle alone usually conveys very little information about the social status or social distance of the offender: “Where no such information enters a legal process, technically identical cases are socially indistinguishable and, regardless of the actual diversity among them, will be treated the same”.²⁶

In cases of moving violation, however, much more social information becomes visible. The very decision to pull over a speeding car might be influenced by the appearance of the driver. And if there is a traffic stop, still more information—about cultural location, social integration, respectability, wealth, mutual connections in a social network—floods into the social interaction. As more variation in social structure becomes visible, variation in law increases.

If the flow of social information can influence the behavior of social life, then it follows that social life will also vary with differences across individuals in their ability to perceive this social information.

For example, a foreign observer in a strange society might be untrained in spotting subtle differences in adornment or expression that convey important information to locals. He might thus fail to perceive important aspects of social status or social closeness. Such structure-blindness can lead to behavior extremely atypical for whatever social structure it occurs in—the sort of incongruity used for humorous effect in fish-out-of-water comedies.

Variation in the ability to process social information might also be a stable property of the individual across various situations. Sometimes this results from gross sensory deficits—e.g., visual information depends on sight—but it can also result from finer variations, less analogous to actual blindness than to the common red-green deficiency form of color blindness. That is, when it comes to various aspects of social space, some people readily pick up subtle clues and make fine discernments, others do not.

For example, people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders have difficulty following social cues or recognizing faces, and there is evidence they process social information differently than others. Most research on autistic “social cognition” focuses on how the neurodivergent perceive the emotions and motives of others—that is, researchers mostly study the folk psychology of their subjects.²⁷ But pure sociology suggests that the ability to perceive social structure is at least as important. If people with Asperger’s Syndrome respond differently to structural variables—such as being less responsive to hierarchy—we might ask if it is at least partly because they perceive them differently. The same question can be asked of those with other psychiatric diagnoses, or even about the normal range of variation within the general population.

Consider the influence of general intelligence, or g. Evidence suggests not only that individuals vary in their general ability to process and manipulate information, but that this has a great many effects on how people navigate “the complexity of everyday life”.²⁸ We might suppose that, all else equal, greater intelligence also allows quicker and more sophisticated processing of social information.

This leads to the perhaps counterintuitive hypothesis that more intelligent individuals are more responsive to differences in social structure. Rather than their reasoning ability rendering them immune from social influence, they are actually more apt to vary their conduct according to fine differences in social geometry: Structural sensitivity is a direct function of intelligence. All else equal, smarter people are more likely to be structural conformists, their behavior adhering closely to the contours of social space.

One might also ask whether individuals vary in which dimensions of social space they readily perceive. This may itself vary with social structure, or with an individual’s social location within that structure. One example is research suggesting that the ability to perceive status cues is itself a function of relative rank. There is also evidence of variation across the life course, with adolescents being more sensitive to status indicators than are either younger or older people.²⁹

And we can study factors that might distort the subjective perceptions of social structure in one direction or another. For example, some research finds that young children are prone to overestimate their family’s overall social elevation.³⁰ On the other hand, depressed individuals report lower subjective social status after controlling for indicators of their objective status.³¹ There might also be occasions where someone believes another to be much relationally closer than they actually are, and there might be those prone to perceiving others as more distant.³² Likewise, sometimes people falsely believe others are culturally closer or more distant than they actually are—perhaps over-or-underestimating the extent to which certain classes of people (such as friends or enemies) consume the same entertainments or espouse the same beliefs.³³

If Blackian theories are right about these dimensions of social space being fundamental aspects of our world, drivers of variation great and small, then to learn more of how people perceive and respond to them is to teach us something important about human cognition, personality, and perhaps human evolution.

But the applicability of pure sociology is not limited to humans alone.

Social Structure and Ethology

Ethology is the study of animal behavior. It is usually seen as a separate field from the study of human behavior. Yet pure sociology is a theory of social life, not of people as such. While developed in the study of human beings, Blackian theories are general enough that they can apply to the social life of other species. Black has already done this. In “On the Origin of Morality,” he writes:

Pure sociology applies to all social life —nonhuman as well as human. The same principles of structural relativity predict and explain differences in the handling of conflict within a single species, between members of a species in the wild and those in captivity, and between species, including differences between humans and nonhumans. Morality everywhere varies with its social structure.³⁴

The explanatory variables of pure sociology are defined at a level of abstraction that allows us to observe them not only across the wide range of all known human societies, but in animal societies as well. Regarding chimpanzees, Black writes:

The social distance between chimpanzees is measurable with such observables as the time they spend together in close proximity, the activities they share, and the amount and nature of communication and physical contract between them . . . Close male chimpanzees groom each other, for instance, and very close males may even synchronize their body movements as they walk side by side.³⁵

Regarding the vertical structure of chimpanzee society, he writes:

Inequality among chimpanzees is known by the presence of ‘dominance’ in a chimpanzee relationship. A dominant chimpanzee receives a ‘submissive greeting’ from a subordinate. Such a greeting normally involves a sequence of short, panting grunts . . . in a lowered posture, often accompanied by a series of deep bows.³⁶

Thus we can observe whether principles developed to explain social life in human societies also apply to non-human ones.

Consider the idea that violence grows more likely and more severe with social distance. This explains why humans in tribal societies tend to reserve their spears and arrows for fights with outsiders, while their internal fights happen with fists or short clubs.³⁷ And it explains chimpanzee violence as well:

Wild chimpanzees are more violent toward members of other chimpanzee communities than members of their own community. A group may attack, mutilate and kill a chimpanzee stranger, whereas violence of this degree is less common among captive chimpanzees who have no contact with chimpanzee strangers.³⁸

Within their own communities, wild chimpanzees are also less likely to bite and tend to limit biting to extremities.³⁹

Another example is that chimpanzees, like people, might intervene as third parties in a conflict. Black’s theory that settlement becomes more likely and more authoritative as the third party becomes more superior holds among chimps as well as among humans:

Like humans, chimpanzees of higher status are more likely to intervene in conflicts and to do so more authoritatively. For example, male chimpanzees—socially superior to females—intervene more often and use more authoritative methods, including coercion and violence. Females normally intervene in a warmer and less direct fashion, such as by kissing a male and leading him to his adversary or by taking a stick or rock out of an angry male’s hand. But ‘dominant’ chimpanzees of both sexes are more likely to intervene in conflicts and to do so forcefully, and the highest ranking males are the most likely and the most forceful of all.⁴⁰

Such examples are evidence that purely sociological principles of conflict are valid in chimpanzee societies as well as in human ones.⁴¹

While it may be unsurprising that principles developed in the study of human society apply to our closest evolutionary relatives, they also apply far more broadly. Thus relational distance predicts aggression in many other species. In experiments with Turkish hamsters, males who were familiarized with one another were less likely to fight, slower to fight when they did, and their fights were shorter. Seals too attack familiar neighbors less fiercely than rivals who are strangers. Nor is this effect of relational closeness—what ethologists call the “dear enemy” effect—found only in mammals. It can be observed in birds, such as the southern pied babbler, which is less aggressive toward kin but also toward familiar non-kin. Among even simpler animals, such as salamanders and damselfish, a history of interaction reduces aggression⁴²

The effect even occurs in interactions between members of different species. For example, water rails and little crakes are two bird species that live in the same areas and compete for food and nest sites. Both are relatively less aggressive toward more familiar individuals of the other species than they are toward strangers of the other species.⁴³

The applicability of pure sociology to non-human social life goes beyond the study of conflict and violence. Consider Black’s theory of what is interesting—that is, of which subjects attract the most ideas and attention. He proposes that “the attractiveness of a subject is a direct function of its social elevation. Higher subjects such as the rich and powerful attract more ideas and attention than lower subjects such as the poor and weak.”⁴⁴

Among humans, this explains why so much spoken and written communication deals with the lives and affairs of social elites, such as political leaders, movie stars, and wealthy businessmen. Among other primates, it explains where members of a group direct their gaze. Studies of such primate species as gorillas, baboons, monkeys, and chimpanzees find a hierarchy of visual attention that follows the contours of the group dominance hierarchy: Lower ranking individuals spending more time gazing at higher ranking individuals than vice versa, and the dominant individuals attract more overall attention than other members.⁴⁵

Or consider social contagion. Humans are not the only species to engage in social learning, with behaviors spreading from one individual to another through imitation and adoption. And the contagion of ideas or behaviors varies with social distance. Among both humans and non-humans, social contagion is a direct function of relational closeness.⁴⁶ Those who study sperm whales, for instance, group them into different “clans” with unique vocal dialects. The more that two clans share a range, the more their vocal repertoires become similar.⁴⁷ In Southwestern Australia, where some dolphins have learned to beg for food from fishermen, a major predictor of whether dolphins will adopt this behavior is how much time they spend around dolphins who already do it.⁴⁸

Vertical direction also matters: Downward contagion is greater than upward contagion.⁴⁹ In human society, fashion, language, technology, and so forth are more likely to spread from the wealthy and prestigious to those of lower social standing.⁵⁰ Among chimpanzees, for whom hand-clasping is a common social gesture, individuals are more likely to adopt the hand-clasp style of the highest-ranking member of their group than of the lowest ranking member.⁵¹

Extending pure sociology beyond human society requires thought about how to measure the relevant dimensions of social space. The problem is not different in kind from applying pure sociology to different human cultures.

For example, Black conceives of wealth as a vertical location defined by the “material conditions of existence,” including food, shelter, tools for obtaining them, and anything that can be exchanged for them.⁵² In modern society, we measure wealth with money, such that even illiquid assets like homes and cars can be denominated in dollars, pounds, shillings, won, or yen. But when considering tribal or ancient societies, where money is rare or absent, we might follow the locals in measuring wealth with heads of cattle, units of farmland, or numbers of slaves.

When studying other species, we might likewise operationalize wealth in ways that make sense for that social setting. For instance, some species claim and defend a dwelling or territory. Just as we consider a person wealthier if they own a home or land, we can consider an animal wealthier if it controls such a resource.

For still greater generality, consider that the body itself—with its stored energy and capacity to produce food and shelter—is the most fundamental form of wealth.⁵³ Various non-human species lack any kind of external stores of wealth, but we might nonetheless measure the wealth stored in their bodies with indicators like size, weight, or the extent of their fat reserves. The ultimate common denominator of wealth is not the dollar, but the calorie.⁵⁴

Another kind of social status is position in a hierarchy of authority. Human hierarchy is often marked by formal ranks and titles in some organizational chain of command. In other species, it is known by the distribution of aggression and submission. Using dominance rank to predict aggression or violence may therefore seem tautological, but it is an example of the reciprocal relationship between social space and social life. Just as a history of criminal convictions can make someone attract more severe legal sanctions, a history of submission makes an animal more vulnerable to further aggression.⁵⁵ For example, when researchers experimentally engineer streaks of wins and losses among mice, repeated winners grow increasingly aggressive and repeated losers grow increasingly deferential.⁵⁶ Social life tells social space how to bend, and social space tells social life how to move.

Social structures in other species vary with their biological capacities. No species has humanity’s degree of behavioral plasticity, and no other species has the same astounding range of social structures. If their behavior is less variable, it is partly because the structure of their encounters is more homogeneous. The cultural dimension of social life is absent in most, and so of no consequence to their behavior. And in solitary, itinerant species, there is little variation in relational closeness from one encounter to another: They are strangers to all their own kind. But even extremely simple organisms like anemones have the ability to distinguish between themselves and different classes of competitors, predators, or prey. They can also perceive kinship, and only use their stinging tentacles against competitors from a different genetic line.⁵⁷ Perhaps genetic distance was the first kind of social distance.

The Social Geometry of Evolution

Ethologists typically develop hypotheses about animal behavior using evolutionary theory —specifically, neoDarwinian theory, or the Modern Synthesis of Darwin’s theory of natural selection with genetics. And some readers will readily see how natural selection might have produced the relationships proposed by Blackian theory. Indeed, to the extent that any Blackian proposition is valid, it must be compatible with the logic of natural selection.

But the mutual relevance of neoDarwinian theory and pure sociology is not merely a matter of evolutionary thinking helping us better understand sociological patterns. Understanding the geometry of social life also helps us predict and explain evolution.

If the claim seems far-fetched, then consider that social scientific theory has already proven useful to evolutionary biology.

Game theory is a body of ideas analyzing strategic choices in competitive situations. Developed most extensively in economics and political science, it utilizes the rational choice paradigm to model actors as self-interested decision-makers who weigh costs and benefits, and explains their behavior as maximizing their rewards. The rational choice paradigm, also found in sociology, is not a theory of biological evolution, and is as distinct from the neoDarwinian paradigm as it is from Black’s pure sociology. Yet game theoretic models are nonetheless compatible with evolutionary theory. The logic of natural selection implies that, over time, organisms will evolve in ways that approximate a rational strategy for passing on their genes. This allows theoretical biologists to adapt theories formulated in the rational choice paradigm to explaining the evolution of behavior.⁵⁸

Consider too that while we can explain patterns of human behavior and social organization with biological evolution, the reverse is also true: Patterns of social behavior and social organization act as a selective force that shapes evolution.⁵⁹ For example, anthropologist Christopher Boehm argues that ancient patterns of cooperation and social control—including the punishment of bullies and free-riders—shaped human biological capacity for shame, guilt, and morality.⁶⁰ And some evolutionary theorists propose that social complexity in humans and other group-dwelling animals drives the evolution of intelligence.⁶¹ The social environment is no less relevant than the physical environment in selecting which traits spread and which go extinct.

As social geometry predicts and explains what forms of social life occur across shorter time scales, so too can it predict and explain which forms of social life evolve across long ones. Doing this, though, requires us to think about structures at a higher level of aggregation—as the typical or average structure of an interaction between individuals or groups in a large population over time.

Pure sociologists already do something like this when explaining differences between societies—for instance, when I explain that a certain pattern of female suicide is more common in patriarchal cultures because women in such settings are more likely to have grievances with a social structure (close, upward, and isolated) that encourages suicide.⁶²

In evolutionary terms, the relevant unit of aggregation is the breeding population. We can describe the social structure of this population in much the same way we characterize different social environments among humans. For example, it may be an unstable agglomeration marked by individuation, functional independence, social fragmentation, absence of hierarchy, and fluidity.⁶³

In such a population, individuals interact exclusively as individuals, rather than members of a pack or colony. And individual conspecifics tend not to cooperate or rely on one another, with each foraging, finding shelter, and evading predators on its own.⁶⁴ Such relationships that they have are single stranded rather than multiplex— even mates do not interact outside of courtship and copulation. There is no stable dominance hierarchy in which some individuals repeatedly and reliably defer to others. And there is a high turnover of relationships—frequent changes in which individuals share an overlapping range, and different mates from season to season.

Among humans, Black predicts such a structure leads to frequent and extensive avoidance, with this method of handling conflict growing more common relative to alternatives like aggression and negotiation. On an evolutionary timescale, we might predict that populations with this structure evolve instincts and physical traits conducive to avoidance. Thus species inhabiting such an avoidance structure would be quicker to break off agonistic confrontations with minimal violence, and to not evolve exaggerated physical weapons (like the enlarged claw of a fiddler crab) for intraspecific conflict. Such a population is also more likely to evolve mechanisms of preemptive avoidance, such as using scent-marking to disperse themselves in time and space and so avoid confrontations in the first place.

We can also characterize the social geometry of relationships between species. Ecological relationships—predator and prey, parasite and host, mutualistic symbiotes —are themselves a kind of social relationship characterized by different levels of interdependence, inequality, and relational closeness. For two species to be symbiotes means that individual members of both populations tend to live in close proximity and interact frequently—the two species are relationally closer than species whose members typically have little to do with one another. Furthermore, we can measure the relational closeness of different populations with the length of their association over time—some species pairs have a long co-evolutionary history, while others have come into contact with one another much more recently.

And social stratification, including dominance hierarchies, can be found in relationships between species as well as those within them:

When two species with similar ecological requirements coexist both may contract their niche, thus reducing niche overlap. However, more commonly one species behaves as dominant over the other, and experiences less niche contraction relative to the subordinate.⁶⁵

This commonly occurs among bird species that share overlapping ranges and food sources. In New Guinea, for example, friarbirds dominate the smaller orioles, who in turn dominate the still smaller honeyeaters.

The social structure of interspecific relationships can predict and explain not only the forms of social life that occur between the species at any given time, but which forms will evolve over generations. Consider deceptive mimicry, in which one species evolves an advantageous resemblance to another. Just as people are more likely to adopt the styles, fashions, and ideas of their social superiors, birds are more likely to evolve a resemblance to theirs:

On the islands of the Australasian region orioles, friarbirds, and the honeyeater. . . form a guild of birds with similar diets and similar feeding sites. There is a high frequency of fighting among the members of the guild with the large friarbirds being dominant to the smaller orioles . . . Orioles are usually brightly colored, but when they are sympatric with a friarbird they are brown and similar in plumage to the friarbird. The friarbirds tolerate both conspecifics and the oriole mimics more than they do other species in the guild.⁶⁶

Such social dominance mimicry has now been observed in numerous species of birds.⁶⁷ Because physical size and strength predict dominance, mimics are on average about half the mass of the dominant species they model. Sometimes an interspecies dominance hierarchy extends to a third or even fourth species, resulting in a chain of mimicry as each subordinate species mimics its immediate superior. Thus, on New Guinea, the honeyeater has evolved to mimic orioles who in turn mimic friarbirds, resulting in all three species looking increasingly similar.⁶⁸

Mimicry in general has a three-sided social structure defined by the relationship between the mimic (the imitator), the model (the one being imitated), and the dupe (the target of the deception).⁶⁹

This structure is found both in biological mimicry, which arises from genetic changes that make one organism resemble another in appearance or behavior, and in non-biological mimicry, as when a human criminal dons a police uniform to gain compliance from his victim. And we can formulate propositions that apply to both. One example: the attractiveness of the model increases with relational closeness. Humans who impersonate police officers, for instance, tend to have prior exposure to, interaction with, and network ties to their models. And social dominance mimicry among birds increases with range overlap and length of co-evolutionary history.⁷⁰

Also: The attractiveness of the model increases with phenotypic closeness. Among humans, phenotypic closeness includes cultural closeness, such that human mimics tend to choose models of similar cultural backgrounds. Thus 18th century working class Londoners were more likely to mimic police than they were to mimic the culturally distant aristocracy.⁷¹ Likewise, famous mafia infiltrator Joseph Pistone—who successfully posed as a criminal named Donnie Brasco—was selected for the job because of his Sicilian heritage and upbring in an Italian-American neighborhood. Among animals, the greater the initial similarity in physical appearance, the greater the chances that one species will continue to evolve a resemblance to the other.⁷²

Mimicry is successful to the extent the target of the deception treats the mimic as the model—that is, when the dupe is actually duped. The success of mimicry increases with the social distance between the model and the dupe. Criminals posing as Inquisitors in Colonial Mexico were able to operate because the colonial peasants had little familiarity with how such high church officials should look and act. Contrariwise, contemporary police imposters are often caught when they try to fool people with close connections to law enforcement. The hardest to fool are the models themselves.⁷³

It follows that among animals, the success of mimicry is lesser when the model and dupe are the same species than when they are different species. Thus, predatory mimics should have a lower success rate per hunt if they mimic their target species rather than some nonthreatening third species. There appears to be no research comparing success rates in this way, suggesting that this is a novel hypothesis. If so, it is a new hypothesis generated by the application of pure sociology to the realm of biological evolution. Surely there are more novel hypotheses awaiting, at least some of which will generate fruitful and informative lines of research. Pure sociology has wide potential for the study of living things and how they change over time. And why should it not be so? All life is social life.

Conclusion

Donald Black was one of sociology’s most innovative and ambitious figures. He dreamed of a new science of social life, something distinct from what had come before. He sought general principles that applied throughout the entire social universe, that revealed an elegant simplicity behind what at first seems like chaotic complexity. In doing so he created a new strategy for explaining behavior, and a set of concepts and propositions with wide and varied applications.

Pure sociology predicts social life with its social geometry. It is indifferent to whatever psychological or biological mechanisms may be involved. Perhaps any sufficiently general and valid principle of social life operates through numerous mechanisms – perceptions, incentives, instincts, selection effects—all of which tend to point in the same direction, accounting for why that regularity is indeed a regularity. Or perhaps the social world really is sui generis, a level of reality with its own laws. Is it possible to have a society where close conflicts attract more intervention than distant ones, any more than it’s possible to have a planet in a universe where gravity increased with distance and decreased with mass? Could a social species ever evolve in which closeness bred moralism and distance bred partisanship?

In any case, the geometrical propositions of pure sociology are as versatile as they are elegant, applicable to every form of social life, explaining its fluctuations from one situation to the next, and even its evolution over time. Social geometry shapes behavior in ways we are only beginning to understand, and perhaps in ways we have not yet dreamed. You do not have to become pure sociologists—study the mind, study the genes, study whatever captivates you. But do not ignore the geometry of social space, and the wondrous patterns of social life that pure sociology reveals.

Donald Black believed in having bold ideas, in the joy of creativity, in having faith enough to do what seemed impossible. To those with the eyes to see, Black’s work opens up new vistas to view, and new paths to explore, new puzzles to solve. Go forth and create!

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I thought the most fitting tribute to DB was to advance some ideas that even he would have found crazy. I hope it inspires some new work — even if that work puts egg on my face.

I don’t paywall any posts that were generated by my taxpayer-funded day-job. But if you want to throw me some additional support, consider dropping something in the Tip Jar or becoming a paid subscriber with the button below.

1. Homans, George. 1967. The Nature of Social Science, pp.7-19; 35-43. Donald Black emphasizes this point in Black, D. (1995). The Epistemology of Pure Sociology. Law & Social Inquiry, 20, 829–870; and Black, D. (2000). Dreams of Pure Sociology. Sociological Theory, 18(3), 343–367.

2. Black, D. (2000). Dreams of Pure Sociology. Sociological Theory, 18(3), 343–367. On Homan’s statement as a challenge, see Black, D. (2002). The Geometry of Law: An Interview with Donald Black. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 30(2), 101–129.

3. Black, D. (2010). How Law Behaves: An Interview with Donald Black. International Journal of Law Crime and Justice, 38, 37–47.

4. See, e.g., Baumgartner, M. P. (Ed.). (1998). The Social Organization of Law. Emerald Publishing; Cooney, M. (2009). Is Killing Wrong? A Study in Pure Sociology. University of Virginia; Phillips, S., & Cooney, M. (2022). Geometrical Justice: The Death Penalty in America. Routledge. See also my Bullfish Hole post on Geometrical Justice here.

5. Black, D. (1995). The Epistemology of Pure Sociology. Law & Social Inquiry, 20, 829–870; Black, D. (1998). The Social Structure of Right and Wrong. San Diego: Academic Press; Black, D. (2000). Dreams of Pure Sociology. Sociological Theory, 18(3), 343–367; Cooney, M. (2006). The Criminological potential of pure sociology. Crime Law and Social Change, 46, 51–63; Campbell, B. (2015). The Geometry of Genocide: A Study in Pure Sociology. University of Virginia; Campbell, B. (2015). Genocide as predation. International Journal of Law Crime and Justice, 43(3), 310–325; Horwitz, A. V. (1982). The Social Control of Mental Illness. Academic; Michalski, J. H. (2003). Financial Altruism or Unilateral Resource Exchanges? Toward a Pure Sociology of Welfare. Sociological Theory, 21, 341–358; Tucker, J. (1999). The Therapeutic Corporation. Oxford University Press; Tucker, J. (2002). New Age Religion and the Cult of the Self. Society, 39(2), 46–51.

6. Black, D. (1998). The Social Structure of Right and Wrong. San Diego: Academic Press; Black, D. (2004). Violent Structures. Pp.145–158 in Violence: From Theory to Research, edited by Margaret A. Zahn, Henry H. Brownstein, and Shelly L. Jackson. Newark, NJ; LexisNexis/Anderson Publishing.

7. Black, D. (2000). Dreams of Pure Sociology. Sociological Theory, 18(3), 343–367.

8. Black, D. (1995). The Epistemology of Pure Sociology, pp. 856–857; Black, D. (1998). The Social Structure of Right and Wrong, pp. 164–169.

9. See, e.g., Bray, R. M., Struckman-Johnson, C., Osborne, M. D., & McFarlane, J. B., and Joanne Scott (1978). The effects of defendant status on the decisions of student and community juries. Social Psychology, 41(3), 256–260; Myers, M. A. (1980). Social Contexts and Attributions of Criminal Responsibility. Social Psychology Quarterly, 43(4), 405–419. https://doi.org/10.2307/3033960; Zhao, J., & Rogalin, C. L. (2017). Heinous crime or unfortunate incident: Does gender matter? Social Psychology Quarterly, 80(4), 330–341.

10. Black, D. (1976). The Behavior of Law. Academic; Black, D. (1989). Sociological Justice. Oxford University Press.

11. Doob, A. N., & Gross, A. E. (1968). Status of frustrator as an inhibitor of horn-honking responses. The Journal of Social Psychology, 76(2), 213–218.

12. Black, D. (1998). The Social Structure of Right and Wrong, p.89.

13. Shotland, R., Lance, & Straw, M. K. (1976). Bystander response to an assault: When a man attacks a woman. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34(5), 990. The theory of third party involvement is from Black, D. (1995). The Epistemology of Pure Sociology. Law & Social Inquiry, 20, 829–870, cited at p. 834.

14. Phillips, S., & Cooney, M. (2005). Aiding peace, abetting violence: third parties and the management of conflict. American Sociological Review, 70, 334–354. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240507000207. See also Campbell, B. (2010). Contradictory behavior during genocides. Sociological Forum, 25, 296–314.

15. Ulloa, E. C., Hammett, J. F., O’Neal, D. N., Lydston, D. N. E. E., & Leon Aramburo, L. F. (2016). The big five personality traits and intimate partner violence: Findings from a large, nationally representative sample. Violence and Victims, 31(6), 1100–1115.

16. Black, D. (2018). Domestic Violence and Social Time. Dilemas: Revistas de Estudos de Conflicto e Controle Social, 11(1), 1–27.

17. For simplicity I only discuss the effect of social structure here. But Black also proposes that fluctuations in social space—what he calls social time—cause violence. And it is just as likely that individuals vary in how likely they are to cause or participate in the fluctuations that trigger violence. Openness to experience, for instance, likely lead to more cultural and relational changes.

18. Clark, J., Boccaccini, M. T., Caillouet, B., & Chaplin, W. F. (2007). Five factor model personality traits, jury selection, and case outcomes in criminal and civil cases. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 34(5), 641–660. Antonioni, D. (1998). Relationship between the big Five personality factors and conflict management styles. International Journal of Conflict Management, 9 No(4), 336–355; Ma, Z. (2005). Exploring the relationships between the big five personality factors, conflict styles, and bargaining behaviors. In IACM 18th Annual Conference.

19. Black, D. (1989). Sociological Justice, pp. 15–16; Black, D. (1998). The Social Structure of Right and Wrong, pp. 145–149.

20. Black, D. (1998). The Social Structure of Right and Wrong, p. 80.

21. Some research has studied the interaction of individual traits with social location. For instance, one study finds that psychopaths at lower social elevations are more likely to be repeat offenders than are psychopaths at higher social elevations—see Walsh, Z., & and David S. Kosson (2007). Psychopathy and violent crime: A prospective study of the influence of socioeconomic status and ethnicity. Law and Human Behavior, 31(2), 209–229. doi: 10.1007/s10979-006-9057-5.

On the general relationship between intelligence and criminal offending, see: Walsh, Z., & Swogger, M. T., and David S. Kosson (2004). Psychopathy, IQ, and Violence in European American and African American County Jail Inmates. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 72(6), 65–69; Jacob, L., Haro, J. M., & Koyanagi, A. (2019). Association between intelligence quotient and violence perpetration in the English general population. Psychological Medicine, 49(8), 1316–1323.

22. Black, D. (2011). Moral Time, p. 8. We might also expect a multiplicative interaction between intelligence and the tangled network structure that Black (Social Structure of Right and Wrong, p.83) predicts will make negotiation more frequent and extensive. If negotiation is more cognitively demanding than either aggression or avoidance, we might expect the tangled network to produce greater effects when inhabited by individuals of greater cognitive ability.

23. Compare to Arnold Kling’s theory that violent individuals are drawn to violent ideologies, rather than being transformed into violent people by the ideology: “Political extremists are people with an underlying attraction to violence. They gravitate toward ideologies that justify murder. Political moderates are people who find violence abhorrent. They gravitate toward ideologies that seek to create peaceful political orders.”

24. Some claim that people on the autism spectrum—such as those diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome—are generally less interested in status competition and less responsive to social hierarchy—see Caldwell-Harris, C. L., & Schwartz, A. M. (2023). Why autistic sociality is different: Reduced interest in competing for social status. Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/2833-1508.1145.

Such status-indifference can result in atypical behavior:

“If autistics have reduced interest in social status, they may be indifferent to who is high status in their peer group, may not defer sufficiently to high-status peers, or may not be strategic about building a social network that will protect them from peer aggression. Consistent with this, a growing literature demonstrates that autistics invest less in reputation management . . . For example, using the dictator game, autistics failed to show a typical audience effect, being equally generous when unobserved as when observed. Autistics were also less strategic than [neurotypicals] in presenting a positive image when describing themselves” (idem: 83, citations omitted).

Autistics appear to have a greater social inertia, less prone to gravitate toward peers: In a variation of the famous Asch line experiment in conformity, autistic children were less likely to give incorrect answers in conformity with the experimental confederates (idem).

25. Black, D. (1989). Sociological Justice, p. 63.

26. Black, D. (1989). Sociological Justice, p. 64.

27. Velikonja, T., Fett, A. K., & Velthorst, E. (2019). Patterns of nonsocial and social cognitive functioning in adults with autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry, 76(2), 135–151; White, S., Hill, E., Winston, J., & Uta Frith. (2006). An islet of social ability in Asperger Syndrome: Judging social attributes from faces. Brain and Cognition, 61(1), 69–77.

28. Gottfredson, L. S. (1997). Why G Matters: The complexity of everyday life. Intelligence, 24(1), 79–132.

29. Kenny, D. A., Snook, A., Boucher, E. M., & Hancock, J. T. (2010). Interpersonal sensitivity, status, and stereotype accuracy. Psychological Science, 21(12), 1735–1739; Koski, J. E., Xie, H., & Olson, I. R. (2015). Understanding social hierarchies: The neural and psychological foundations of status perception. Social Neuroscience, 10(5), 527–550.

30. Peretz-Lange, R., Harvey, T., Peter, R., & Blake (2022). From haves to have nots: Developmental declines in subjective social status reflect children’s growing consideration of what they do not have. Cognition, 223, 105027.

31. This finding is often interpreted as low subjective status causing depression, but it is plausible the relationship is reciprocal. See: Scott, K. M., Al-Hamzawi, A. O., Andrade, L. H., Guilherme Borges, Jose Miguel Caldas-de-Almeida, Fiestas, F., Gureje, O., Hu, C., Karam, E. G., Kawakami, N., Lee, S., Levinson, D., Lim, C. C. W., Fernando Navarro-Mateu, Michel Okoliyski, Jose Posada-Villa, Yolanda Torres, & Williams, D. R. Victoria Zakhozha, and Ronald C. Kessler. 2014. Associations between subjective social status and DSM-IV mental disorders: Results from the world mental health surveys. JAMA Psychiatry, 71(12), 1400–1408.

32. One complication is the two-directional nature of relational distance. Relational closeness increases with exposure, even if the one we are exposed to is never exposed to us — see Black, D. (2000). Dreams of Pure Sociology; Black, D. (2011). Moral Time, p.21. The long-dead Cicero can never get relationally closer to me, but I can become relationally closer to him by reading his biography, speeches, and letters.

Likewise, fans develop a one-sided kind of intimacy with celebrities they regularly see on screen or read about in the news. Though sometimes referred to as a “parasocial relationship,” such social closeness is no less real for being one-sided. But asymmetrical closeness can lead one to overestimate another’s closeness with oneself. Given asymmetrical closeness: The closer A is to B, the more likely A is to overestimate B’s closeness to A.

33. This may in some cases be the result of overestimating one’s own cultural conventionality. On the latter, see, e.g., Pennycook, G., Binnendyk, J., & Rand, D. (2022). Overconfidently conspiratorial: Conspiracy believers are dispositionally overconfident and massively overestimate how much others agree with them. PsyArXiv: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/d5fz2

34. Black, D. (2000b). On the Origin of Morality. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7, 107–119, cited at p. 114.

35. Black, D. (2000b). On the Origin of Morality, pp. 115, n.12.

36. Black, D. (2000b). On the Origin of Morality, pp. 115–16, n.25.

37. See examples cited in Black, D. (2004b). Violent Structures. Pp.145–158 in Violence: From Theory to Research, edited by Margaret A. Zahn, Henry H. Brownstein, and Shelly L. Jackson. Newark, NJ; LexisNexis/Anderson Publishing. See also Campbell, B. 2025. Violent time, violent space: Donald Black and the behavior of violence. The American Sociologist 56: 321-336.

38. Black, D. (2000). On the Origin of Morality, p. 115.

39. Black, D. (2004). Violent Structures , p. 9.

40. Black, D. (2000). On the Origin of Morality, p. 116.

41. Some may object that chimpanzees cannot truly have conflict or moralism, as they do not understand human notions of grievance and wrong. But Black emphasizes that:

Pure sociology disregards how humans and nonhumans might experience their own conduct and instead examines their social life alone. Nonhumans handle conflicts over right and wrong whenever they have clashes about matters such as access to territory, food, or sexual partners. Such is their morality—and it is readily observable without knowledge of their subjectivity (Black, 2000, On the Origin of Morality, p.117, n.34).

42. McPhee, M., Elsbeth, & Johnston, R. E. (2009). Nonagonistic familiarity decreases aggression in male Turkish hamsters, Mesocricetus brandti. Animal Behaviour, 77(2), 389–393; Huntingford, F. A. & Turner, A. K. (1987). Animal Conflict. Chapman and Hall Ltd, cited at p. 50; Werba, J. A., Adam, M. M., Stuckert, M., Edwards, & McCoy, M. W. (2022). Stranger danger: A meta-analysis of the dear enemy hypothesis. Behavioural Processes, 194, 104542; Humphries, D. J., Martha, J., Nelson-Flower, M. B. V., Bell, F. M., Finch, & Ridley, A. R. (2021). Kinship, dear enemies, and costly combat: The effects of relatedness on territorial overlap and aggression in a cooperative breeder. Ecology and Evolution, 11(23), 17031–17042; Jaeger, R. G., & Peterson, M. G. (2002). Familiarity affects agonistic interactions between female red-backed salamanders. Copeia, (3), 865–869; Silveira, M. M., De Souza, J. F., & Araujo-Silva, H. (2021). Luchiari. Agonistic behavior is affected by memory in the Dusky Damselfish Stegastes fuscus. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 15, 663423.

43. Jedlikowski, J., Polak, M., & Paweł Ręk (2022). Dear-enemy effect between two sympatric bird species. Animal Behaviour, 184, 19–26.

44. Black, D. (2000). Dreams of Pure Sociology. Sociological Theory, 18(3), 343–367, cited at p. 350.

45. See, e.g., McNelis, N. L., & Boatright-Horowitz, S. L. (1998). Social monitoring in a primate group: the relationship between visual attention and hierarchical ranks. Animal Cognition, 1, 65–69; Pannozzo, P. L., Kimberley, A., Phillips, M. E., & Haas and Eric M. Mintz. (2007). Social monitoring reflects dominance relationships in a small captive group of brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). Ethology, 113(9), 881–888.

Black also proposes that attractiveness is an inverse function of the social distance of the subject. Relationally close subjects, such as intimates, are more interesting. And this too applies to other primates: Among macaques, for instance, individuals pay more attention to relationally closer members of the group, even when those members are not interacting with them — see Schülke, O., Dumdey, N., and Ostner, J. (2020). "Selective attention for affiliative and agonistic interactions of dominants and close affiliates in macaques." Scientific Reports 10, no. 1: 5962.

46. Manning, J. (2020). Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction. University of Virginia, cited at p. 165.

47. The exception is to particular vocalizations that appear to function as markers of clan identity. Researchers hypothesize that this is analogous to human ethnic identity being sharpened by contact with outsiders. See: Hersh, T. A., Gero, S., Rendell, L., Cantor, M., Weilgart, L., Amano, M., Dawson, S. M. (2022). Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(37), e2201692119; Whitehead, H. (2024). Sperm whale clans and human societies. Royal Society Open Science, 11(1), 231353; Leitao, A., Lucas, M., Poetto, S., Hersh, T. A., Gero, S., Gruber, D. F., Bronstein, M., & Giovanni Petri. (2024). Evidence of social learning across symbolic cultural barriers in sperm whales. eLife, 13.

48. Cantor, M., & Hal Whitehead (2013). The interplay between social networks and culture: Theoretically and among whales and dolphins. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 368(1618), 20120340.

Social space tends toward isomorphism, such that closeness along one dimension begets closeness along other dimensions. Relational closeness encourages cultural closeness by increasing social contagion. But similarity in culture also encourages relational closeness: People preferentially associate with those who share their language, beliefs, occupation, and hobbies. Where populations of non-human animals display substantial variation in socially learned behaviors, the same principle holds. For instance, in one population of bottlenose dolphins some individuals adopted the use of sponges as a foraging tool. Those who adopted the technique preferentially associated with one another, an effect that was independent of genetic relatedness or range overlap. Among another dolphin population dolphins, some adopted a technique of following prawn trawlers for food, while others did not. Each group associated more often with their own kind, until the prawn trawlers stopped coming to the area and the separate cliques merged into a single social network See: Cantor, M., & Hal Whitehead (2013). The interplay between social networks and culture: Theoretically and among whales and dolphins. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 368(1618), 20120340.

On the isomorphism of social space, see Godard, E. (2025). A legacy of scientific time: black swans, black holes, and black skies in Donald Black’s social geometry. The American Sociologist 56: 215-236.

49. Manning, J. (2020). Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction. University of Virginia, cited at p. 165.

50. Sorokin, P. A. (1959). Social and Cultural Mobility. The Free Press of Glencoe, cited at pp. 575–577; Tarde, G. (1903). The Laws of Imitation, translated by Elsie Clews Parsons. New York: Henry Holt and Co, cited at pp. 201–245.

51. Van Leeuwen, Edwin, J. C., & Hoppitt, W. (2023). Biased cultural transmission of a social custom in chimpanzees. Science Advances, 9(7), eade5675.

52. Black, D. (1976). The Behavior of Law, p. 11.

53. Black, D. (2011). Moral Time, p. 79.

54. See, for example, the influence of body weight on aggression among mice — Hilakivi-Clarke, L. A., & Lister, R. G. (1992). The role of body weight in resident-intruder aggression. Aggressive Behavior, 18(4), 281–287.

55. On past legal sanctions as a predictor of future legal sanctions, see Black, D. (1976). The Behavior of Law, pp. 113–118.

56. Kovalenko, I. L., & N. N. Kudryavtseva. (2016). Changes in the social behavior of male CBA/Lac mice in response to agonistic interactions. Neuroscience and Behavioral Physiology, 46(9), 1070–1077; Delbarco-Trillo, Javier, & Johnston, R. E. (2011). Effect of losing a fight on later agonistic behavior toward unfamiliar conspecifics in male Syrian hamsters. Current Zoology, 57(4), 449–452.

57. Huntingford, F. A. & Turner, A. K. (1987). Animal Conflict. Chapman and Hall Ltd, cited at p. 15.

58. See, e.g., Smith, J. M. (1974). The theory of games and the evolution of animal conflicts. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 47(1), 209–221; Axelrod, R., & Hamilton, W. D. (1981). The evolution of cooperation. Science, 211, 4489: 1390–1396.

59. See generally Cohran, G. and Harpending, H. (2010). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Basic Books.

60. Boehm, C. (2012). Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. Basic Books.

61. Johnson-Ulrich, L. (2017). The social intelligence hypothesis. Pp.1–7 in Encyclopedia of evolutionary psychological science, edited by T.A. Shackleford and V.A. Weeks-Shackleford. Springer.

62. Manning, J. (2012). Suicide as social control. Sociological Forum, 27(1), 207–227; Manning, J. (2020). Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction. University of Virginia.

63. Black, D. (1998). The Social Structure of Right and Wrong, p. 80.

64. In every sexually reproducing species, the sexes have at least a minimal degree of functional interdependence: They need one another to reproduce. In those that cooperate to build nests, defend territory, or care for young, the degree of interdependence is correspondingly higher.

65. Huntingford, F. A. & Turner, A. K. (1987). Animal Conflict, p. 238.

66. Huntingford, F. A. & Turner, A. K. (1987). Animal Conflict, p. 248.

67. Prum, R. O. (2014). Interspecific social dominance mimicry in birds. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 172(4, 1), 910–941.

68. Huntingford, F. A. & Turner, A. K. (1987). Animal Conflict, p. 248.

69. My discussion of the social structure of mimicry is clearly modelled on Black’s theory of ideas, in which each idea has a structure defined by the relationship between source, subject, and audience. My propositions about attractiveness and success likewise reflect his propositions about the attractiveness of subjects and success of ideas. See Black, D. (2000). Dreams of pure sociology. Sociological Theory.

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71. Hurl-Eamon, J. (2005). The westminster imposters: Impersonating law enforcement in early eighteenth-century London. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38(3), 461–483.

72. Franks, D. W., Thomas, N., & Sherratt (2007). The evolution of multicomponent mimicry. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 244(4), 631–639.

73. Villa-Flores, J. (2008). Wandering swindlers: imposture, style, and the inquisition’s pedagogy of fear in Colonial Mexico. Colonial Latin American Review, 17(2), 251–272, cited at p. 252. Rennison, C. M. (2012). and Mary Doge. Police impersonation: pretenses and predators. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 37, 505–522. Gambetta, D. (2005). Deceptive mimicry in humans, Pp.221–242 in Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuros Science to Social Science, Volume 2: Imitation, Human Development, and Culture, edited by Susan Hurley and Nick Chater. MIT Press.