Living together

Look closely at any society and it proves to be made of positions more than of particular people. Daughter, doctor, neighbour, judge, customer: each is a place a person can hold, and sociologists call such a place a status. The word here has nothing to do with prestige. A street sweeper has a status as surely as a minister does, and everyone holds several at once.

Each status comes with a script. A doctor is expected to examine, to advise and to keep what she hears private, whoever she happens to be. The behaviour expected of the holder of a status is its role. You occupy a status and you play a role. The people are all replaced within a lifetime, yet the positions and their scripts stay put, so a society keeps its shape from one generation to the next. That lasting pattern of positions is called social structure.

Statuses reach people in two ways. Some are handed out at birth, with no effort and no choice: daughter, eldest son, member of a clan, citizen of a country. In 1936 the anthropologist Ralph Linton called such a status ascribed. Others have to be won by what a person does: surgeon, graduate, champion, hafiz of the Qur’an. Those he called achieved. Societies differ greatly in how much weight they give each kind, and so in how far a person can move from where he started.

Holding many statuses means playing many roles, and the roles do not always agree. A nurse is called in to cover a night shift on the evening of her daughter’s wedding. A judge finds his own cousin in the dock. When two roles of one person demand opposite things, the clash is called role conflict.

Step into a lift and you will turn to face the door. So will everyone else. No law requires it and nobody taught it, yet a person who stood facing the other passengers would unsettle the whole lift. The shared rules that tell the members of a group how to behave, most of them never written down, are called norms.

Most norms are invisible until one is broken. We queue, keep a certain distance from strangers, lower our voices in a mosque and do not read over a neighbour’s shoulder, all without thinking. We learn what the rules are from other people’s reactions: the stare, the cough, the pointed silence when someone gets one wrong. Written law covers only a small part of how people behave. Unwritten norms cover nearly all the rest, and they are the first reason strangers can live together without a policeman at every elbow.

Norms are not all equally serious, and sociologists sort them by how people react when one is broken. The mildest are folkways, a word coined in 1906 by the sociologist William Graham Sumner: everyday manners such as queuing, greeting a neighbour or dressing for the occasion. Break one and people think you odd or rude, and little more.

Stronger are the mores, said MOR-ayz, Sumner’s name for the norms a group holds to be right and vital to its welfare: honesty, keeping a trust, not stealing. Break one and people are angry, and may want you punished. Strongest of all is the taboo, an act so forbidden that most people recoil from the very thought of it, such as eating human flesh. The three are steps on one scale, and the test is the reaction: a raised eyebrow, outrage, or horror.

What keeps people to the norms? Mostly each other. A group rewards those who keep its rules and punishes those who break them, and every such reward or punishment is called a sanction. Most sanctions are small and informal: a smile, a word of thanks, a frown, a joke at someone’s expense. A few are formal, such as a prize, a fine or a prison sentence.

The pull is stronger than people like to think. In 1951 the psychologist Solomon Asch asked volunteers to say which of three lines matched a fourth, an easy task. Each volunteer sat among actors who had been told to give the same wrong answer. No one was threatened or rewarded, yet the volunteers gave way to the pressure of the group in about a third of their answers. Matching one’s behaviour to a group in this way is called conformity.

Nobody is born knowing the norms. A newborn has no language, no manners and no idea what a queue is. The lifelong process by which a society teaches its ways and turns a newborn into one of its own is called socialization.

The people and institutions that do the teaching are known as its agents, and they take turns. First comes the family, which gives a child its language, its first loyalties and its first lessons in right and wrong. School adds rules that apply to everyone alike and the habit of working beside strangers. In the teenage years peers, the others of one’s own age and standing, often count for more than parents do. Later the workplace takes over, while the place of worship and the media teach alongside them all. Socialization never quite ends. Each new job, marriage or country asks a person to learn again.

Socialization does more than teach rules. It shapes the picture a person has of himself. In 1902 the sociologist Charles Cooley argued that we find out who we are by imagining how others see us. A child who is laughed with comes to think herself funny. One who is always hushed concludes that she is a nuisance. Cooley called the result the looking-glass self, as if other people were a mirror. It is built from our guesses about their judgment, and the guesses can be wrong.

A picture built this way can be rebuilt. An army takes a recruit’s clothes, cuts his hair, runs his day by the clock and surrounds him with people who expect a soldier, until he becomes one. Deliberately breaking down an adult’s old habits and identity to build new ones is called resocialization. Prisons and rehabilitation programmes attempt it too.

People do not meet society all at once. They meet it in groups, and the groups come in two kinds. A primary group is small, lasting and personal: a family, a circle of close friends, a few neighbours who have known each other for years. Its members matter to one another as whole people, and nobody in it can simply be replaced. Cooley, who named it, called it the nursery of human nature, because it is where a person first learns loyalty, fairness and affection.

A secondary group is larger and exists to get something done: a company, a school class, a committee. People belong to it through a role, as employee or member, and when one leaves, another steps into the place. Modern life adds more secondary groups every year. It has not found a substitute for the primary ones.

Every group draws a line, with us on one side and them on the other. The group a person feels he belongs to is his in-group, and people favour theirs with remarkable ease. In experiments around 1970 the psychologist Henri Tajfel divided schoolboys into two groups on a trivial pretext, a supposed taste for one painter over another. Asked to share out small sums of money, the boys favoured their own group, though they did not know who was in it and gained nothing themselves.

Not every group that shapes a person is one he belongs to. A reference group is one he measures himself against and borrows his standards from. A village boy who means to become a doctor starts to dress, speak and study like the medical students he has seen, years before he is one of them.

Some needs never go away. Every society has to raise its children, pass on what it knows, feed itself and keep order, and its people ask what their lives are for. Around each lasting need stands a settled pattern of statuses, roles and norms that outlives every person in it. Such a pattern is called an institution.

Sociologists usually count five basic ones. The family raises children. Education hands on knowledge. The economy produces and shares out goods. Government keeps order and settles disputes. Religion gathers people in shared belief and worship and teaches them what their lives are for. Sociology describes only that shared, organised life. Whether a belief is true is not a question it can settle. An institution is not a building or a set of people. One school can close and one family can die out, while schooling and the family carry on as before.

What binds the members of a society into one whole is called solidarity, and the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, writing in 1893, saw two kinds. In a small traditional village everyone does much the same work, holds the same beliefs and lives the same life. People stick together because they are alike. He called this mechanical solidarity.

A modern city is the opposite. The baker, the doctor, the plumber and the programmer have little in common, and none of them could last a week without the others. They hold together because they need each other’s work, as the organs of a body do, so he called this organic solidarity. Durkheim was not the first to ask the question. Five centuries earlier Ibn Khaldūn had made group feeling, the loyalty that binds a people together, the centre of his account of how societies rise and fall.

Thinking about society is very old. Studying it as a science, by observation and the search for causes, is newer. Ibn Khaldūn did it in the Muqaddimah in 1377. He explained the fortunes of peoples by the conditions they lived in and not by the characters of their kings, and he said plainly that he was founding a new science. Few took it up, and the idea had to be found again.

In 1838 the French thinker Auguste Comte gave the study its modern name, sociology, and at the end of that century Durkheim showed what its method could do. Sociologists since have disagreed about a great deal, and their theories are best read as the history of an argument, not as settled findings. What they share is where this reading began: people are shaped by the groups they live in, in ways that can be observed and explained.