Sociology Essay, Research Paper

Groups are the essence of life in a society for the reason that everyone is born into one, such as to a mother and father. Your family, church congregation, faculty at a university, and sports teams whether professional or not are all examples of groups. In a general sense, {!0 } Groups are people who have something in common and who believe that what they have in common is significant. {!1 } Societies are the largest and most difficult groups that are studied by social scientists. They are people who share a culture and a territory; they also contain smaller groups within itself. {!0 } The types of groups within a society are primary groups, secondary groups, reference groups, social networks, in-groups and out-groups. {!1 }

Primary groups are groups that are characterized by long term, intimate, face to face association and cooperation. Secondary groups are bigger, conformal, impersonal and relatively temporary groups. Reference groups are groups we use as standards to evaluate ourselves. Social networks are the social ties radiating outward from self-that link people together, their cliques, friends, family and acquaintances.

The focus of this A+ sociology paper is on the in-groups and out-groups of society. {!0 }Factors such as race and sex or gender play a role in in-groups and out-groups. {!1 } In-groups are groups toward which one feels loyalty. An example of an in-group, would be the Boy Scouts of America. The scouts were incorporated on February 8, 1910, under the laws of the District of Columbia. The purpose of scouting is to serve others by helping to instill values in young people, and in other ways to prepare them to make ethical choices over their lifetime in achieving their full potential. Councils provide professional counseling and administration, commissioner service, training for leaders, camping and outdoor facilities, program materials and literature, planning tools, and other program aids. In-groups exercise a high degree of control over us and it fosters ethnocentrism.

Out-groups are groups toward which they feel antagonism. Two examples of out-groups are the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and the Black Panther Party. The KKK is an organization founded on rebellion against American principles of justice and equality. The KKK developed out of Southern white citizens in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865, who were angered over the Civil War defeat and the Reconstruction period after the war. To this group, the freedom of slaves represented a defeat of their Confederate armies and their racist way of life. Their only way of victory, or satisfaction during that period was through terrorism. {!0 }Fear and hatred, however, which nourish feelings against out-groups, often give birth to highly destructive acts. {!1 } Most groups feed off of a sense of belonging, and all the members of the KKK shared the same views on how the south should be operated.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland, California in 1966. The basis for the organization was centered on a document called the Ten Point Plan, in which the Panthers believed that {!0 } the only way to deal with such a system is to destroy it and replace it with an acceptable, just society. {!1 } This group was able to directly influence public opinion and motivate individuals and communities through various activities and promoting communism.

Out-groups are almost by definition, considered dissimilar to the in-group, because people may generalize their beliefs about a single individual to his or entire group. In theory, it is hypothesized that behavioral orientations elicited by specific patterns of intergroup relationships, such as goal compatibility, relative power, and relative status, give rise to unique schematic representations of an out-group. In this article, the authors proposed and tested a functional theory of out-group stereotypes. {!0 }The representations specified in the theory include 1 positive image of an ally and 3 negative images of and enemy, dependent, and a barbarian. {!1 } The results of this experiment showed that the connection cues were satisfactory to obtain the predicted images of the ally, enemy, dependent, and barbarian. {!0 }Overall, results implicate the role of affective state and behavioral intent in shaping the content of social stereotypes. {!1 }

Another article was chosen, because it discusses how an individuals in-group, out-group affiliation affects social choice. The test was performed in Canada to see how native French Canadians, which were the in-group, are attracted to minority immigrants, which were the out-group. Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans, Arabs and Haitians represented these immigrants with similarities and dissimilarities. A class of French Canadian students was asked to participate in a cross-cultural study and was given descriptions of people belonging to the four ethnic groups. {!0 }The characteristics of each ethnic group had been derived from interviews with an individual of each group and from research. {!1 } The characteristics were then used to come up with short written descriptions of the people who were members of the ethnic groups. The descriptions contained resembling and different information, geared towards male and female. The results of these studies were that the Latin Americans and Eastern Europeans were more likable than the Haitians and the Arabs, because the out-groups member {!/ }s characteristics were similar to those of the students who conducted the study. This is true of the Latin Americans and Eastern Europeans because their beliefs or personality characteristics are similar to those of the French Canadian students.

The results of such studies have consistently indicated that feelings toward strangers are assertively affected by self-other similarity. {!0 }Similarity rather than diversity are and important component of social attraction. {!1 } This study indicated that certain ethnic groups are more attractive than others, and in order for an in-group member to relate to an out-group member as a potential friend, the out-group member had to be more similar to the participant than a member of the participants own group did.

In my opinion, the study seemed it was going to be off for the simple fact of race, whether minor or major. The groups with the non-white members would probably be most unfavorable in my view, because of stereotypes dealing with their culture, and social class. In society, Haitians and Arabs are apart of a lower class system and are located in third world countries. The Eastern Europeans and their countries are a bit more developed, so they would be deemed as more civilized in the means of stereotyping, no matter how similar or dissimilar they are to the French Canadians.

Trying to compare social groups to the three theoretical perspectives is the hardest part of the paper. With the functionalist perspective, groups bind people together. Every member of that group must share a working knowledge of the same aspects of life. With the conflict theory perspective, a societies groups are controlled by an high society that manipulates them in order to maintain its own position of wealth and power. With the symbolic interactionist see how groups perceive different things for example ideas and how it would affect their behavior.