A sociological approach to the history of sociology

Max Weber's “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation” show that irrespective of Weber's insistence on “value-free” sociology, he was a committed critic of his society but failed to explicate his position fully. The assumption of a sociological approach to the history of sociology is that sociology must operate with the concept of a normative society, thus reestablishing continuity with sociology's first hundred years and potentially uniting, in the face of the possibility of our planet's demise, not only sociologists but all people of good will.     

Manipulations that disrupt generative processes decrease conformity to examples: evidence from two paradigms

Participants in six experiments viewed experimenter-provided examples of space creatures (Experiments 1-3) or nonwords (Experiments 4-5b) and then created their own novel space creatures or nonwords. Consistent with previous research, people borrowed many of the features found in the examples despite instructions to avoid using any aspects of the experimenter's examples. However, requiring people to include a designated shape in their space creatures or a designated letter in their nonwords attenuated this effect. Additionally, the type of shape or letter (conventional versus unconventional) also affected conformity. These results suggest that the strategies that people use to create novel products can affect the level of conformity and also highlight the importance of adopting unconventional, or at the very least, new strategies when creating new products.     

Manipulations that disrupt generative processes decrease conformity to examples: Evidence from two paradigms

Participants in six experiments viewed experimenter‐provided examples of space creatures (Experiments 1–3) or nonwords (Experiments 4–5b) and then created their own novel space creatures or nonwords. Consistent with previous research, people borrowed many of the features found in the examples despite instructions to avoid using any aspects of the experimenter's examples. However, requiring people to include a designated shape in their space creatures or a designated letter in their nonwords attenuated this effect. Additionally, the type of shape or letter (conventional versus unconventional) also affected conformity. These results suggest that the strategies that people use to create novel products can affect the level of conformity and also highlight the importance of adopting unconventional, or at the very least, new strategies when creating new products.     

The sociological study of suicide: methodological issues

This paper is a critical review of selected methodological issues in the sociological study of suicide. It first distinguishes between two broad research orientations: the micro and macro approaches to the subject. The paper than focuses on a critical assessment of the dominant macro-level methodology. Three recurrent problems are identified: measurement issues on four key variables (suicide and parasuicide, economic conditions, religion, and political conditions such as war); problems in studying the effect of mass media stories on suicide; and reasons why we need to adopt a cross-national method in order to test sociological theories for contextual effects. Partial remedies to many of these problems are discussed.     

The production of determiners: evidence from French.

In numerous languages determiner forms depend not only on semantic information but also on several other kinds of information, such as the grammatical gender of the controlling noun or the phonological properties of the context. In the present research we contrasted two possible accounts of determiner retrieval: one in which every type of required information is bundled into a unitized representation for determiner retrieval and one in which each type of information can individually activate determiner forms. These alternative hypotheses were investigated in three experiments in which native speakers of French named pictures with simple [determiner + noun] or complex [determiner + adjective + noun] noun phrases. In the experiments, the properties of the contextual cues that drive the retrieval of the determiner were manipulated - for example, we manipulated the number of determiner forms that are compatible with a given grammatical gender and the number of grammatical genders that a given determiner form can be used with. Neither hypothesis can fully account for the results of the three experiments. However, a hybrid hypothesis that combines the principal features of the two hypotheses provides a good account of the data.     

The sociology of sociobiology

This paper turns the tables on the criticisms of sociobiology that stem from a sociological perspective; many of those criticisms lack cogency and coherence in such measure as to demand, in their turn, a psycho‐sociological explanation rather than a rational justification. This thesis, after a brief exposition of the main ideas of sociobiology, is argued in terms of four of the most prominent complaints made against it. Far from embodying tired prejudices about the psychological and sociological implications of biology, sociobiology actually reverses a number of naive assumptions about the consequences of natural selection. I surmise that what really provokes the critics of sociobiology is a certain philosophical relevance of sociobiology both in the broad sense (the application of natural selection principles to behaviour) and in the narrow sense (the insistence on the centrality of certain mechanisms, such as gene selection). In both cases, taking biology seriously affects our philosophical vision of the nature of human beings. At the deepest level, however, the distinction between the level at which rational criteria apply and those where we must have recourse to psycho‐social explanations probably breaks down.