SOCI 1000U Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Structural Functionalism, Conflict Theories
Document Summary
Review: we need to socialize; we are not rational. Integral to the limbic system - generates maternal response, empathy, emotional expressiveness, and motivation to communicate. When it is damaged, all of these things disappear. We have natural drives to be altruistic and we dislike too much inequality. Healthy humans suffer depression, reduced immunity, even die without communication. Our culture, society, institutions are produced and reproduced through communication. We need these institutions to survive they make our world intelligible and navigable (structural functionalism) Sometimes inequalities are built in to these institutions however (conflict theory) These inequalities tend to reproduce and even amplify themselves over time. But, remember, humans have an aversion to inequality, especially when they are on the bottom themselves. We become emotionally attached to our view of reality. The emotional pathways in our brain are faster than the rational.
