SOC 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Maple Syrup, Poutine, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Thursday, May 10th, 2018
Cultural Adventures
Research Gone Wrong
• Humphries (1960s) - psychologist
o Graduate student who did a study on the T-room trait
• It breaks down like you're going to a public park and there's a bathroom there and
then you meet someone else and then you wait for a third person. The two people
engaged in sexual activities and he was the lookout but never engaged in any
activities.
• He wrote down the license plate numbers of the participates and then he would find
them and visit them at their house.
• The research itself was interesting - the males were in heterosexual relationships and
then engaged in homosexual activities - they didn't know they were subjects.
• Zimbardo - social psychologist
o It's the standard prison experiment (tons of movies - it's on netflix). What he did was: took a
bunch of university males and divides them up into being correctional workers and prisoners
because it was authentic - actual police officers would arrest them and admitted to the
prison like any other prisoners (it was supposed to last 10-15 days) but the prisoners started
to actually act like prisoners and the correctional workers actually acted like correctional
workers.
o At the end, it becomes problematic:
• The prisoners planned an escape
▪ Zimbardo contacted the actual sheriff and knew there was a plan to escape and
wanted them to go actual jail.
• He takes the students with actual blindfolds and then moved them across to other
buildings.
• Milgram - social psychologist
o He wanted to study the issue of authority;
o May 1962 - new haven area where males were in university at Yale University;
o It used a shock generator;
o People literally thought people were being hurt;
Culture
• Culture consists of the beliefs, values, behaviours, and material objects that define a people's way
of life, passed on from one generation to the next.
• Culture has two basic components: nonmaterial culture or the intangible creations of human
society, and material culture, the tangible products of human society.
o For example:
• Tangible creations in Canada: a bag of milk, maple syrup (we have a national syrup
fort), Churchill Manitoba (bear jail), hockey/lacrosse, aboriginal art (also to them),
mountie in red suits, poutine (could be also Quebecois), lumberjacks, the beaver;
• For example: the university of Ottawa was started by a catholic priest and therefore we're the
only university with a 4 day weekend for Easter.
• Only humans depend on culture rather than instincts to ensure the survival of their kind;
o For example: Christmas, Easter that exist for thousands of years.
• Culture gives us the ability to actively shape the natural environment for ourselves;
o In Canada, we have houses that have central heating and air conditioning because of the
climate we live in. However, when you go to Mexico, there's no central heating - only
houses built out of concrete.
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