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Social Change
Questions & Theories In Social Science
What is Social Change?
 Broad definition: Social change refers to changes in the way a
society is organized, and in the beliefs and practices of the
people who live in it
 Narrower definition: A change in the social structure and the
institutions of society
 You can expect enormous political, economic, and social
changes to take place in Canada during your lifetime.
Questions About Social Change
In groups, discuss the following:
 Which area of Canadian life have changed the most since you
were a kid?
 What factors have caused these changes?
 Have the changes been positive or negative?
 Will the acceptance of alternative lifestyles such as commonlaw marriage increase or decline?
Questions About Social Change
Think of the changes that will take place by the time you are 85
years old.
In groups, discuss the following:
 What areas of life will change more rapidly than others?
 Will the changes be, on the whole, beneficial or detrimental?
 How will you be affected as an individual?
Predictions
You can expect enormous political, economic and social changes
to happen in your lifetime.
Some changes can be predicted with reasonable certainty.
 The global population is expected to reach between 7.5 and
10.5 billion by 2050
 Canada’s population is over 35 million. By 2031 predicted to
be 43 million.
 About one-third of Canada's population — up to 14.4 million
people — will be a visible minority by 2031, Statistics Canada
projects.
Predictions Continued
It is difficult, however, to predict the nature of social changes
that will accompany these changes.
 Will the influence of organized religions grow or diminish?
 Will the acceptance of gay marriage increase or decline?
The Social Science & Social
Change
 Each of the social sciences look at social change differently
 Instead of trying to predict the future, social scientists try to
understand the nature of social change and what forces drive
it.
 Very little change occurs as a result of peoples conscious
efforts. Most change occurs almost naturally, as a result of a
multitude of factors operating within society.
 This makes the study of social change a great challenge.
How Psychologists Look at
Social Change:
 Investigate social problems as they affect the individual.
 Focus on peoples’ behaviours and attitudes and work to change
both.
Psychologists Ask…
 What must people do to change their behaviours?
 What does a successful behaviour modification program look
like? (i.e. what kinds of reinforcements, how often, working in
teams or alone?)
Psychologists Also Ask…
 Do people need help or can they change on their own?
 What factors make behaviour modification programs
successful.
 How effectively do the media mould and change our
attitudes?
 What personal qualities make it easy or difficult to persuade
an individual to change?
 Research suggests: Peoples’ attitudes are linked to their
behaviours. And, this is often the key to change. If you can
change the attitude you can change the behaviours.
Psychology and Social Change:
• When it comes to psychology and social change we are
essentially looking at changes that can occur to an individual’s
attitudes(what they think), beliefs and behaviours (what they
do) and the effect of these changes on the rest of society.
Changing our Minds?
Cognitive Consistency- want to avoid attitudes the
conflict with each other.
- Ones desire to regain cognitive consistency forces us to
change one of the two conflicting attitudes.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory- What you do conflicts with
what you think- either change behaviour- or STOP what
your doing ie. Smoking
Aesop’s Fable… A Case Study:
The Fox and the Grapes…
One hot summer’s day a Fox was
strolling through an orchard until he
came to a bunch of grapes just ripening
on a vine…. “Just the things to quench
my thirst,” said he. Drawing back a few
paces, he took a run and a jump, and
just missed the bunch. Turning round
again with a one, two, three, he jumped
up, but with no greater success. Again
and again he tried after the tempting
morsel, but at last had to give it up, and
walked away with his nose in the air,
saying: “I am sure they are sour.”
Bart’s fable… a Case Study:
The teen and the house party
A teenager wants to got to a party
that they anticipate will be
amazing.
The teen is not allowed to go out
and must stay home.
The teen becomes sad.
After a while the teen decides the
party “wouldn’t have been that
good anyway” and feels better.
Cognitive Dissonance
 The teen is reducing the conflict between her thoughts and
her actions, a.k.a. COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.
 She wants to go the party but can’t.
 To feel better, she changes her mind about how good the
party will be.
 She no longer cares about missing out.
Cognitive Dissonance
 The fox is reducing the conflict between his thoughts and his
actions, a.k.a. COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.
 He wants the grapes but can’t have them.
 So to feel better, he changes his mind about how good the
grapes are.
 He then leaves them alone.
Cognitive Dissonance
 “When we choose to do something that conflicts with our
prior feelings, values or beliefs, we are in a state of cognitive
dissonance.” - Dr. Leon Festinger
 Stated differently, cognitive dissonance is a conflict between
what we feel and what we do.
Cognitive Dissonance
• Most of us want cognitive consistency in our beliefs.
• We want to avoid attitudes that conflict with each other.
• What makes us change our attitudes is the discomfort we
experience when two attitudes conflict
• Our desire to regain cognitive consistency forces us to change
one of the two conflicting attitudes.
A UFO Cult
Leon Festinger's 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails
 He studied a cult which believed that the earth was going to
be destroyed by a flood, caused by a UFO
 He was interested to see what would happen to its members
(esp. the really committed ones who had given up their homes
and jobs to work for the cult) when the flood did not happen.
 While fringe members were more inclined to recognize that
they had made fools of themselves, committed members
were more likely to re-interpret the evidence to show that
they were right all along (the earth was not destroyed because
of the faithfulness of the cult members).
Another Example: Smoking
 You smoke, but also believe that smoking causes cancer and other
serious diseases.
 Dissonance: What you do conflicts with what you are thinking.
 In your desire to regain consistency, you will probably try to avoid
facing the conflict.
 You may avoid smoking in front of a friend who is strongly opposed to
smoking (thereby avoiding a lecture)
 You may avoid reading newspaper articles about the latest studies on
smoking and health (thereby avoiding thinking about the ways that
smoking can kill you)
Another Example: Smoking
• However, if a relative who is a smoker gets lung cancer, your
dissonance will unavoidably increase.
• Ultimately, the only way you can effectively reduce the dissonance
you feel is to do one of two things:
a.
b.
You can change your behaviour to make it consistent with your
attitudes and stop smoking .
Or you can reinforce your attitudes.

I.e. You can tell yourself it won’t happen to you. “Grandma was a heavy smoker
and lived to be 93.”
Exercise
 Working in groups, come up with your own example of
cognitive dissonance.
Psychological Theories About
Social Change:
As we know psychology is divided into two broad fields;
1. Experimental- deals with measuring and explaining
human behaviour
2. Clinical- focus on treatment of problem human
behaviours
The main focus of psychological investigation is on how
humans change their attitudes and behaviours.
Treating Mental Disorders:
Psychologist classify mental disorders into three categories;
1. neuroses- suffers experience high levels of anxiety or tension in
managing their daily lives. Ie. Phobias, panic attacks, obsessivecompulsive disorders.
2. Psychosis- patient has lost touch with the real world, may suffer
delusions or hallucinations, and needs treatment before he/she
can live a life with any degree of normality. I.e.. Paranoiairrational thoughts, schizophrenia- feelings of distress and social
isolation
3. Anti-social personality disorder- habitual pattern of rulebreaking and harming others. I.e.. Pathological lying, absence of
empathy towards others, deliberately causing them pain, lack of
feelings of guilt for the damage caused. Paul Bernardo, Karla
Homolka
Videos
&
Hall
of
Fame:
Sigmund Freud• The founder of psychoanalytic theory
• He believed our early childhood experiences, usually involving our relationships with
parents and family, are stored in our unconscious mind, particularly anything that is
unresolved
• While we are normally unaware of these memories, they can have a powerful influence
on the way we function
• “A man who did enough cocaine to kill a small horse?” (Good Will Hunting ,1997
Learning TheoristsIvan Pavlov- Classical Conditioning
• Pavlov’s experiments with dogs showed that is was possible to get a dog to associate
the sound of a bell with the imminent arrival of food
• At the sound of a bell, the dog would salivate in anticipation
• Essentially, when you pair one stimulus with another you can condition someone to
learn to associate one stimulus with another
B.F Skinner- Operant Conditioning
• Skinner proved that pigeons could be trained to peck at a particular coloured disk to
get food rewards
• His experiments with rats found that they can be trained to press a lever when
rewarded with food
• He believed that if the subject is correctly rewarded it will give the appropriate
response (positive reinforcement results in encouraging behaviour)
• Operant Conditioning is based on some type of operation or behaviour which is then
rewarded ~ Big Bang Clip
Videos
&
Hall
of
Fame:
Albert Bandura: Modelling or
Observational learning
• Bandura concluded that learning is largely
a modeling experience or learning
through social interaction – also includes
motivation of rewards
• When humans observe behaviour – either
acceptable or unacceptable – they are
more likely to practice it
• Question - What does this mean to us?
Bandura Clip-bobo doll experiment
Abraham Maslow: Hierarchy of Needs
• Argued that you have to satisfy the need at
one level of hierarchy, rather than
becoming satisfied overall, we tend to
move on and try to satisfy the need at the
next level.
Sociologists and Social Change:
The Sociological Questions:
• While psychologist look at why and how individuals
change their attitudes and behaviours, sociologist tend to
focus on the massive shifts in the behaviours and
attitudes of groups and whole societies.
• See change as an inevitable process
• Major issues for sociologist is whether social change is
patterned, and predictable, or arbitrary and irregular.
The Sociological Questions:
1. How does social change come about?
Developed 3 main ways of explaining social change;
1. From Decay- caused by decline or degenerationbelieved all societies began in an ideal state.
2. From cycles of growth and decay- don’t believe that
societies head inevitable toward destruction, but
instead go through cycles of growth and decay
3. From Progress- social change occurred as a result of
continuous progress.
4 Aspects of Social Change
Sociologists look at 4 aspects of social change:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Direction of Change
Rate of Change
Sources
Controllability
4 Aspects of Social Change…
1. Direction of change:


Is it a positive or negative change and who says so?
I.E. Are Canadian emission laws sufficient to protect
the environment? If you as the CEO of a major oil
and gas company and a member of Greenpeace
Canada you will get different answers.
2. Rate of change:
 Is the degree of change slow, moderate, or fast?
 Is it a radical change over a short period or slow
change that will continue for decades?
 What factors are affecting that rate?
4 Aspects of Social Change…
3.
Sources:
 What factors are behind the influences of change
in a society?
 Are they exogenous (coming from another
society) or endogenous (coming from within
society itself) influences?
3.
Controllability:
 Many sociologists are interested in the degree to
which social change can be controlled or
engineered.
 How successfully can be eliminate racism, spousal
abuse, or teenage smoking in Canada?
Sociological Theories About Social
Change:
• Major influence of structural functionalist- focus more on social structures
than social change.
• Early 20th C believed that where change did occur, it was the result of
tension & adaptation.
• Felt that when one part of the social system changes, tension arises
between that part and the rest- it cannot continue and therefore member's
of society will seek to reduce or eliminate the tension by adapting other
aspects of society- therefore equilibrium is restored.
• Accumulation- change as a process of accumulation through which the
growth of human knowledge from generation to generation allows society
to develop new ways of doing things.
For Example- TV- family communication patterns- cost- availability- channels…
Anthropologists
 Study social change from a cultural perspective – cultural change.
 Anthropologists regard cultures as constantly changing organisms.
 Change is normally gradual. Cultures do not normally change
suddenly and completely.
 Cultural changes are generally broad and affect all members of a
culture.
 I.e. Did your parents go to daycare when they were children? Did
you? What caused these changes?
Anthropologists Ask:




Was a cultural change caused by a change in society’s
leadership?
Was it caused by a shift in the values and norms of the
culture’s members?
Is technological change a factor in an observed cultural
change?
Have changes to the environment resulted in changes to the
culture?
3 Sources of Social Change:
 Invention: New products, ideas, social patterns that affect the
way we live
 Example: The invention of the portable stereo headset in the
1980s changed the way we listen to music.
 Discovery: Finding something that was previously unknown to
a culture.
 Example: Finding intelligent life on a distant planet might change
the way humans think about themselves.
 Diffusion: Spreading ideas, methods and tools from one
culture to another
 Example: The importation of herbal remedies and treatments
such as acupuncture has changed the way in which some view
treatment of illnesses.
Social change caused by invention,
discovery or diffusion?
 Come up with your own examples of social change cause by:
 Invention (new products, ideas, social patterns that affect the
way we live)
 Discovery (finding something that was previously unknown to a
culture)
 Diffusion (spreading ideas, methods and tools from one culture to
another)
Four Parts of Culture in
Understanding Cultural/Social
Change:
1. Physical Environment- environmental influences- winter
2. Level of technology- availability- receptive a culture will
be to change- multi-lane highways- rail transit
3. Social Organization- how is the culture organized? What
is its kinship system? How is labour divided and
allocated? Are social rules flexible or tightly regulated?chewing gum- Singapore
4. Systems of Symbols- identifying a person as a member
of a particular culture- hair, gestures, dance trends
Anthropological Theories About
Social Change:
Theories of cultural Change
Example- Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert- pg. 48-49
• Changes that were forced on the San came from
interaction, or contact with other cultures.
• Although change can develop within the cultureanthropologist believe that most far-reaching changes
come from contact with other cultures.
• Most do not want to accept changes but are forced to,
and other cultures adapt what they regard as beneficial
changes from other cultures.
Theories of Cultural Change
Cont…
Adaptation- can take place in a number of ways, although the results can
be similar no matter what pattern of adaptation is followed.
1. Diffusion- when one culture borrows cultural symbols from another. i.
smoking tobacco- Aboriginal practice- Europeans embraced OR
Horses- French explores and traders brought across the Atlantic
Ocean in mid17th C- aboriginals welcomed.
2. Acculturation- results from prolonged contact between two cultures,
during which time they interchange symbols, beliefs, and customsoccurs in a few ways
1.
2.
3.
Occurs in 1 of 2 ways- People freely borrow selected elements from
the culture of another = incorporation
Direct Change- one culture defeats or controls another and forces it to
change aspects of its culture or even change the entire cultureResidential Schools
Cultural Evolution- cultures evolving according to common patternshunter-gather cultures to industrialized states in predictable stages.
Video & Hall of Fame:
“THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY”
Hall of Fame:
• Leaky Family- Mary and Louis:
•
•
Louis and Mary Leakey, two of the most famous fossil hunters of the twentieth century, are known
for their many discoveries relating to human evolution.
Their finds at Olduvai Gorge, a site in north western Tanzania, when added to the work of others,
convinced most paleoanthropologists that humans originally evolved in Africa.
• Franz Boas:
•
•
•
•
Originally from Germany, Boas travelled to Canada in the late 1800s to study the indigenous people
here
He is famous for challenging the idea of racial differences
He introduced the idea of not judging cultures as less than our own – which is anti ethnocentrism
Instead believed all cultures are relative to their own history – cultural relativism
• Dian Fossey:
•
•
•
1.
Dian Fossey believed that in order to study gorillas effectively she had to immerse herself with them
in an effort to get them to accept her presence
She was an advocate for the gorillas who were being killed by poachers for their heads and hands.
She was murdered in her cabin at Karisoke on December 26, 1985. Her death is a mystery yet
unsolved.~
Youtube- Dian Fossey, Digit's death
Jane Goodall:
•
•
Studied chimpanzees and also lived with them for over 45 years off and on in the wild
She learned that chimpanzee culture is similar to humans in many ways
Activity
With a partner or small group:
A.Discuss one social change you would welcome. How could
this social change be engineered?
B.Discuss one possible social change that frightens/bothers
you. Comment on how this change can be stopped and identify
its root causes.
Current Social Issues Daily
Assignment
• Hand-out- starting tomorrow- bring your newspaperpresentations will take place daily- will be the first 30-45
minutes of each class.