Intro Sociology CLEP Flashcards
A status that individuals secure on the basis of choice and competition
achieved status
Type of suicide that occurs where ties to the group or community are considered more important than the individual identity
altruistic suicide
When one’s actions are geared to helping them join or connect with a particular social status
Affiliation motivated
Societies that cultivate large amounts of crops with the plow and other relatively advanced tools and equipment
Agricultural societies
Suicide that results from social isolation and individualism
egoistic suicide
Suicide that occurs as a result of “too much” social regulation
Fatalistic suicide
Suicide that occurs as a result of “too little” social regulation
Anomic suicide
A social condition in which people find it difficult to guide their behavior by norms they experience as weak, unclear, or conflicting.
Anomie
Social position a person receives at birth or involuntarily later in life
Ascribed status
A social position that a person holds
Status
All the statuses a person holds at a given time
Status set
The study of the evolution, development, and functioning of human society
Sociology
The transformation of culture and social institutions over time
Social change
A group’s formal and informal means of enforcing its norms
Social control
A division of society by rank or class
Social hierarchy
A change in position within the social hierarchy
Social mobility
A widely shared demand for change in some aspect of the social or political order
Social movement
A system by which a society ranks categories of peopel in a hierarchy
Social stratification
The process by which people, especially children, learn socially desirable behavior by means of verbal messages; the systematic use of rewards and punishments, and other teaching methods
Socialization
The people, institutions, and organizations that exist to help ensure that socialization occurs
Socialization agents
An extended social group having a distinctive cultural and economic organization
Society
Self-ism or “i”ism views self as reality and all other indiviudals as essnetially unreal
Egoism
A political system in which the government tolerates little or no opposition to its rules but permits nongovernmental centers of influence and allows debate on issues of public policy
Authoritarianism
A system of exchange in which goods or services are traded directly for other goods or services without the use of money
Barter system
The ratio of live births in an area to the population of that area
Birth rate
Those individuals who control the means of production. Upper class
Bourgeoisie
A social structure made up of a hierarchy of statuses and roles that is prescribed by explicit rules and procedures and based on a division of function and authority
Bureaucracy
A social structure in which classes are determined by herdity
Caste system
Power that is legitimated by the extraordinary superhuman or supernatural attributes people attribrute to a leader
Charismatic authority
A religious organization that considers itself uniquely legitimate and enjoys a positive relationshp with the dominant society.
Church
Piaget’s theory that children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world; children experiences expand as their brain develops; they move through 4 stages: Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.
Cognitive development theory
Voluntary, often spontaneous activity that is engaged in by a large number of people and typically violates dominant-group norms and values
Collective behavior
Concrete operational stage of Cognitive development theory
Begins around age 7-11. Children begin thinking logically about concrete events, but have difficulty understanding abstract or hypothetical concepts.
A sociological approach that assumes that social behavior is best understood in terms of conflict or tension between competing groups.
Conflict perspective
An approach to crowd behavior that emphasizes the part played in crowd settings by rapidly communicated and uncritically accepted feelings, attitudes, and actions.
Contagion theory
The group that afford a neutral standards against which the changes in an experimental group can be measured.
Control Group
An approach to crowd behavior stating that a crowd consists of a highly unrepresentative body of people who assemble because they share the same predispositions.
Convergence theory
A subculture deliberately and consciously opposed to certain central beliefs or attitudes of the dominant culture.
Counterculture
A religious movement that represents a new and independent religious tradition.
Cult
The social heritage of a people; those learned patterns for thinking, feeling, and acting that are transmitted from one generation to the next, including the embodiment of these patterns in material items.
Culture
A value-free or neutral approach that views the behavior of a people from the perspective of their own culture.
Culture relativism
The ratio of deaths in an area to the population of that area
Death rate
A government in which the rulers are elected by the people through fair, free, competitive, and periodic elections. Public decision making is delegated to the representatives elected by the people.
Democratic government
Behavior that a considerable number of people in a society view as reprehensible and beyond the limits of tolerance.
Deviance
A general theory of crime that states that deviants come to learn the motivations and the technical knowledge of criminal activity through exposure to deviants and deviant behavior.
Differential Association theory
Division of work into a number of separate tasks to be performed by different workers
Division of labor
A two-member group
Dyad
Social rules that specify appropriate and inappropriate behavior in given situations
Norms
Broad ideas regarding what is desirable, correct, and good that most members of a society share.
Values
An approach to crowd behavior stating that crowd members evolve new standards for behavior in a crowd setting and then enforce the expectations in the manner of norms.
Emergent-norm theory
Involve situations where there are conflicts between one or more values and uncertainty about the correct course of action
Ethical problems
A shared cultural heritage
Ethnicity
The tendency to judge the behavior of other groups by the standards of one’s own culture.
Ethnocentrism
The requirement that marriage occur outside a group
Exomgamy
Leaders who achieve group harmony by making others feel good
Expressive leaders
A family arrangement in which kin-individuals related by common ancestry-provide the core relationship; spouses are functionally marginal and peripheral.
Extended family
A nuclear family that consists of oneself and one’s father, mother, and siblings
Family of Orientation
A nuclear family that consists of oneself and one’s spouse and children
Family of procreation
The average number of children a woman of childbearing years would have in her lifetime, if she had children at the current rate for her country
fertility rate
Norms people do not deem to be of great importance and to which they exact less stringent conformity
Folkways
A group formed deliberately for the achievement of specific objectives
Formal organization
An approach to group problem solving that assumes that to achieve a group goal, group members should perform certain communication functions.
Functional approach
A school of psychology that focuses on how mental and behavioral processes function - how they enable the organism to adapt, survive, and flourish.
Functionalism
A type of society in which life is intimate; a community in which everyone knows everyone else and peopel share a sense of togetherness
Gemeinschaft
A crime control policy that depends on the fear of criminal penalties, convincing the potential law violator that the pains associated with crime outweighs its benefits.
General deterrence
A community, often urban, that is large and impersonal, with little commitment to the group or consensus on values.
Gesellschaft
The degree to which group members accept and follow group norms
Group conformity
The degree to which we alter our behavior, attitudes and points of view to fit into our perceived expectation of what is appropriate
Conformity
The mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives (Myers Psychology 8e p. 740)
Groupthink
Phenomenon in which participants’ knowledge that they’re being studied can affect their behavior
Hawthorne effect
Society in which people plant seeds and crops rather than merely subsist on available foods
horticultural societies