John Levi Martin

What Is Field Theory?1

Field theory is a more or less coherent approach in the social sciences whose essence is the explanation of regularities in individual action by recourse to position vis‐à‐vis others. Position in the field indicates the potential for a force exerted on the person, but a force that impinges “from the inside” as opposed to external compulsion. Motivation is accordingly considered to be the paramount example of social structure in action, as opposed to a residue of chance or freedom. While field theory is often castigated for its necessarily tautological definition, this may be far more of an advantage than a defect. Field theory offers social scientists a combination of analytical insight and attention to the concrete; further, the implicit definition of “explanation” that it brings is one that, unlike conventional sociological definitions, is internally consistent and in accord with everyday usage.

Power, Authority, and the Constraint of Belief Systems1

This article proposes an approach to studying the formal properties of the belief systems of groups. Belief systems may be quantified in terms of their degree of consensus (the degree to which all group members agree) and their degree of “tightness” (the degree to which holding some belief implies holding or not holding other beliefs). Two theoretical claims link the production of tightness and consensus to formal properties of social structure. Cognitive authority is hypothesized to produce tightness, as beliefs that are in the same domain of authoritative judgment may be connected via webs of implications. The clarity of the power structure is hypothesized to produce consensus, as an inability to conceive of alternatives to the domestic order translates into an inability to conceive of alternatives in beliefs. These claims are tested with data on 44 naturally occurring communities.

The Looking Glass Self: An Empirical Test and Elaboration

We test the hypothesis inspired by Mead and Cooley, that ones self-perceptions are an internalization of the perceptions of the views of others, using a large set of network data from 56 naturally occurring communities. The results are compatible with an internalization model, whereby self-conceptions are instilled through interaction with high-status alters. Yet it does not seem that personality is simply an impression made in a malleable mind by the force of social interaction — examination of longitudinal data demonstrates that over time, it is possible for individuals to bring others around to their self-conceptions, presumably because they are able to build up a reputation through consistent acts.

The Authoritarian Personality, 50 Years Later: What Questions Are There for Political Psychology?

Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanfords The Authoritarian Personality is probably the most deeply flawed work of prominence in political psychology. The methodological, procedural, and substantive errors of this study are well known, but they are frequently simply attributed to poor methodological judgments, issues of scaling (such as response set), or Freudian theories that legitimated circular interpretations. But a more fundamental bias arose from the attempt to empirically verify the existence of a “type” of person whom the researchers thought dangerous and with whom they did not empathize. This attempt involved two dangerous procedures: (1) the fusion of nominalist research procedures (in which empirical results were used to type respondents) with a realist interpretation of types (in which some people “just were” authoritarians and others not), and (2) a theoretically rich critique of the authoritarians and a lack of interest in the psychodynamics of liberals. This combination led to an intrinsically biased interpretive project that could not help but accumulate damning evidence about authoritarians. These subtler problems have haunted contemporary work in political psychology that avoids the methodological problems of Adorno et al.; Altemeyers work on authoritarianism, which not only is free from the defects of the Adorno et al. study but also involves some methodologically exemplary experiments, is similarly distorted by asymmetries. The same fundamental problems seem to be at the heart of the weaknesses of the theory of symbolic racism to which critics have pointed. Political psychologists should regard The Authoritarian Personality as a cautionary example of bias arising from the choice of methodological assumptions.

What do animals do all day?: The division of labor, class bodies, and totemic thinking in the popular imagination☆

Abstract This article uses relatively new methods of the analysis of qualitative data to investigate the socio-logical relation between animal species and occupation in the popular imagination, specifically in the world of childrens literature, in order to test a claim that the class habitus that naturalizes the division of labor, erasing the contingent nature of class domination, does not simply arise via the internalization of objective social divisions into a subjective social vision, but rather begins with the application of a totemic logic which maps differences between people onto differences between animals, thereby exaggerating and naturalizing them. Children are evidently instructed in the reality of class bodies and the logic of social structure before they have any first-hand acquaintance with these social processes; indeed, by working the embodied relations of class domination into the role play and role learning of the pre-school years, we make it difficult for them to have any unmediated first-hand experience that would militate against these habitual distinctions.

Theories of Sexual Stratification: Toward an Analytics of the Sexual Field and a Theory of Sexual Capital*

The American tradition of action theory failed to produce a useful theory of the possible existence of trans-individual consistencies in sexual desirability. Instead, most sociological theorists have relied on market metaphors to account for the logic of sexual action. Through a critical survey of sociological attempts to explain the social organization of sexual desiring, this article demonstrates that the market approach is inadequate, and that its inadequacies can be remedied by studying sexual action as occurring within a specifically sexual field (in Bourdieus sense), with a correlative sexual capital. Such a conception allows for historical and comparative analysis of changes in the organization of sexual action that are impeded by the use of a market metaphor, and also points to difficulties in Bourdieus own treatment of the body qua body.

Persistence of close personal ties over a 12-year period

Abstract Using data on 60 intentional communities from the Urban Communes Data Set, we examine factors related to the persistence of ties 12 years later, when nearly all members had left the groups. We find strong evidence of triadic effects—people are more likely to remain in contact with others when they share patterns of contact with third parties. Such triadic effects retain importance even when we use alternative measures of contact, and when we control for individual-, dyadic-, and group-level effects including geographic separation. When we examine friendship as opposed to contact, we find that the triadic effects can be decomposed into some effects pertaining to hierarchy and other effects pertaining to reciprocation, giving us a sense of how networks structure themselves over time.

The relation of aggregate statistics on beliefs to culture and cognition

Abstract This paper examines a tradition of empirical research that attempts to infer the existence of some form of cognitive ordering of beliefs by using aggregate data from some sample of respondents. This approach is called ‘associationist’ in that the non-independence between two or more beliefs in the aggregate is taken as an indicator of the cognitive association between these beliefs within the mind of a respondent. This cognitive order is generally envisioned as a latent but real connection between two cognitive elements, such that a change in one will produce a psychic impetus towards a change in the other. The associationist approach has been marred by two fundamental paradoxes: first, the conception of cognitive association that is relied upon is one having to do with change, while the model of the belief system that goes along with this is fundamentally static; second, an aggregate property is used as the basis of statements about individual cognition, while that property (non-independence) tends to disappear as we approach the individual level. In this paper, I propose that this research tradition can be salvaged by examining the dispersion of persons in a multidimensional space of potential beliefs; the absence of uniformity in this distribution is then indicative of some form of social organization, which may be quantified and/or described. I also argue that, far from being a compositional artifact that must be ignored when understanding the cognitive portion of beliefs, the social distribution of persons in a belief space is itself what must be the referent of the word ‘belief’ in any sociological sense; our ability to form beliefs is inseparable from our understandings of our position in the social world with its adjacencies, hierarchies, and oppositions.

Algebraic Representations of Beliefs and Attitudes: Partial Order Models for Item Responses

A partial order of discrete beliefs based on a generalization of item order in Guttman scaling generates a nonunidimensional collection of latent belief states that can be represented by a distributive lattice. By incorporating misclassification errors under local independence assumptions, the lattice structure is transformed into a latent class model for observed response states. We apply this model to survey responses dealing with government welfare programs and suggest that our approach can retrieve information where unidimensional and multidimensional models do not fit. The concluding section discusses directions for future work.

Formation and Stabilization of Vertical Hierarchies among Adolescents: Towards a Quantitative Ethology of Dominance among Humans.

Social psychological investigations of hierarchy formation have been almost entirely confined to the case of task-oriented groups and hence have produced theories that turn on the existence of such a task. But other forms of vertical hierarchy may emerge in non-task groups. One form, orderings of dominance, has been studied among animals using systematic behavioral observations, but almost never among humans, despite many discussions of such structures existing among adolescent males. Using stochastic models, this paper examines change in vertical orderings for data on dominance encounters among same-sex adolescent campers. There seem to be different paths for stabilization of vertical hierarchies for boys and girls, both of which involve the emergence of special roles, the top boy or the bottom girl. Further, stabilization seems to be greatly facilitated (at least for boys) by members adopting Roger Goulds theory of dominance encounters and turning their attention to those close in rank.