Colin Jerolmack

Talk Is Cheap

This article examines the methodological implications of the fact that what people say is often a poor predictor of what they do. We argue that many interview and survey researchers routinely conflate self-reports with behavior and assume a consistency between attitudes and action. We call this erroneous inference of situated behavior from verbal accounts the attitudinal fallacy. Though interviewing and ethnography are often lumped together as “qualitative methods,” by juxtaposing studies of “culture in action” based on verbal accounts with ethnographic investigations, we show that the latter routinely attempts to explain the “attitude–behavior problem” while the former regularly ignores it. Because meaning and action are collectively negotiated and context-dependent, we contend that self-reports of attitudes and behaviors are of limited value in explaining what people actually do because they are overly individualistic and abstracted from lived experience.

Religion, Rationality, and Experience: A Response to the New Rational Choice Theory of Religion

This paper is a critical response to the newest version of the rational choice theory of religion (RCTR). In comparison with previous critiques, this paper takes aim at RCTRs foundational assumption of psychological egoism and argues that the thesis of psychological egoism is untenable. Without that thesis, the normative aspects of religious commitment cannot be reduced validly to instrumental reason. On neither conceptual nor empirical grounds therefore can religion or religious commitment be defined comprehensively in terms of exchange theory. With the failure of psychological egoism as a point of departure, the paper articulates an alternative theory of religion, one based on the epistemic rationality grounded in religious experience and religious emotion.

Animal practices, ethnicity, and community : The Turkish pigeon handlers of Berlin

Though largely overlooked by scholars of ethnicity and culture, animal practices can structure and reflect identity and social relations. Based on individual and group interviews and observations in Berlin, Germany, this study examines how a group of Turkish men experience and assign significance to the activity of caring for domestic pigeons. Building on approaches to ethnicity that follow the “cognitive turn,” as well as recent studies of human-animal interaction and cultural examinations of nature and the environment, this article demonstrates how: (1) these men frame their animal practices within their understandings of ethnicity, culture, and territory; and (2) communal relationships formed through pigeon caretaking reinforce definitions of Turkish ethnicity and culture for participants. Beyond offering in situ data on the link between animal practices and ethnicity, the analyses and case suggest how and why sociologists should consider animals and nature as potential constitutive objects of ethnic identity and culture.

Humans, Animals, and Play: Theorizing Interaction When Intersubjectivity is Problematic*

Simmel (1949) argues that humans have an “impulse” toward sociability, defined as noninstrumental, playful association that is enjoyed as an end in itself. While sociability as conceived of by Simmel necessitates a shared definition of the situation, recent studies problematize symbolic interactionist assumptions by documenting the ways humans engage in analogous sociable play with animals. Drawing from ethnomethodological and pragmatist perspectives, this article offers a way to theorize human-animal encounters and their relationship to interactions among humans. Beginning with a conceptualization of play as an interpretive frame (Goffman 1986) that actors can employ to organize situated interactions, this article argues that humans can engage in playful associations with animals even if animals do not share in the play frame. It illustrates how play with animals can preserve some of the forms and satisfactions of interaction with humans, and it clarifies how interaction can be coordinated and understood when we cannot assume that interactants share intersubjectivity. The article concludes by offering a tentative set of conditions that structure the possibilities of sociable play, based on the degree of potential intersubjectivity and other situational factors.

Molds and Totems Nonhumans and the Constitution of the Social Self

The role of nonhumans in social life has recently generated significant scholarly interest. The two main paradigms for explaining the sociological significance of nonhumans are constructivism and actor-network theory. We propose a pragmatist synthesis inspired by George Herbert Mead, demonstrating how interactions with nonhumans help constitute the social self—that is, the identity one constructs by imaginatively looking upon oneself as others would. Drawing upon observations of humans interacting with objects, animals, and nature, we identify two complementary ways that nonhumans organize the social self and enable people to experience group membership in absentia: (1) by molding how one is perceived by others and constraining alternative presentations of self and (2) by acting as a totem that conjures up awareness of, and feelings of attachment to, a particular social group. This formulation moves beyond constructivist claims that nonhumans reflect people’s self-definitions, and it offers a corrective to actor-network theory’s neglect of sociality.

Toward a Sociology of Nature

Although we often believe that nature stands apart from social life, our experience of nature is profoundly social. This paper unpacks this paradox in order to (1) explain sociologys neglect of the environment and (2) introduce the articles in this special issue on “the sociology of nature.” I argue that sociologys disinterest in the biophysical world is a legacy of its classical concern with tracing societys “Great Transformation” from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft: while early anthropologists studied “primitive” societies that allegedly had not yet completed “the passage from nature to culture” (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 99), pioneering sociologists presumed that industrialization and urbanization liberated “modern” society from nature and therefore focused their attention on “urbanism as a way of life” (Wirth 1938). As exemplified by the articles in this symposium, environmental sociology critiques the nature-culture and town-country dualisms. One of environmental sociologys core contributions has been demonstrating that nature is just as much a social construction as race or gender; however, its more profound challenge to the discipline lies in its refutation of the sociological axiom that social facts can be explained purely through reference to other social facts. “Environmental facts” are a constitutive feature of social life, not merely an effect of it.

Primary groups and cosmopolitan ties The rooftop pigeon flyers of New York City

■ This article examines a group of working-class men who breed and fly pigeons from their rooftops in New York City. It explores how the flyers experience their neighborhoods through their animal practices and shows how ethnic whites transmitted this practice to non-whites. It also documents their gatherings at a pet shop, where the flyers campaign for status based on their birds’ performance. These men form a distinct collective that is strongly rooted in their solitary animal practices but is given meaning largely through social interactions. Most community studies find conflict among different working-class racial-ethnic groups who share urban neighborhoods, but pigeon flying fosters solidarity among Italian, Hispanic, and African American New Yorkers of varying ages. The study highlights how animal practices can organize social relationships and connections to the environment and demonstrates that shared everyday activities can be as vital as ethnicity or class in primary group formation.

Toward an Understanding of the Relationship Between Accounts and Action

We appreciate the time and thought that Karen Cerulo, Paul DiMaggio, Doug Maynard, and Stephen Vaisey put into critiquing our article. It is the greatest honor to have one’s work seriously engaged, and this is exactly what our critics have done; for this, we thank them. Taken together, their articles shed greater light on a range of methodological issues that ought to concern every scholar interested in social action. They also help us identify a suite of research strategies that sociologists can use to avoid the attitudinal fallacy. Rather than pursue a point-by-point rebuttal to all four critics, we delve deeper into our argument by concentrating our response on three central points raised in this symposium: (1) While we acknowledge that there are occasions when reported attitudes are correlated with situated behavior, it is our contention that correlations are never high enough to presume equivalence (this presumption is the attitudinal fallacy) and that sociologists have only a rudimentary understanding of the conditions under which they can expect correspondence or divergence; (2) Similarly, sociologists routinely surmise that self-reported behavior is, more or less, an accurate stand-in for actual behavior, glossing the problematic of the fallibility of accounts—we call this the accounting fallacy; and (3) The attitudinal fallacy has been and continues to be a central problem in a variety of social science disciplines, and scholars have converged on the same core solution that we propose in

The Ethical Dilemmas and Social Scientific Trade-offs of Masking in Ethnography:

Masking, the practice of hiding or distorting identifying information about people, places, and organizations, is usually considered a requisite feature of ethnographic research and writing. This is justified both as an ethical obligation to one’s subjects and as a scientifically neutral position (as readers are enjoined to treat a case’s idiosyncrasies as sociologically insignificant). We question both justifications, highlighting potential ethical dilemmas and obstacles to constructing cumulative social science that can arise through masking. Regarding ethics, we show, on the one hand, how masking may give subjects a false sense of security because it implies a promise of confidentiality that it often cannot guarantee and, on the other hand, how naming may sometimes be what subjects want and expect. Regarding scientific tradeoffs, we argue that masking can reify ethnographic authority, exaggerate the universality of the case (e.g., “Middletown”), and inhibit replicability (or “revisits”) and sociological comparison. While some degree of masking is ethically and practically warranted in many cases and the value of disclosure varies across ethnographies, we conclude that masking should no longer be the default option that ethnographers unquestioningly choose.

Nature’s Looking-Glass

How we see nature is to a large extent a reflection of ourselves. Sociologists Hillary Angelo and Colin Jerolmack use the example of New Yorkers’ fascination with two red-tailed hawks to reveal deep insights about how we represent and understand nature.