What the three social sciences study
A social science studies people and society using evidence. Three closely linked ones are:
- Anthropology: the study of humans as a whole, especially culture (shared beliefs, customs, language, tools), across all times and places.
- Psychology: the scientific study of the mind and behaviour, usually of individuals.
- Sociology: the study of society, groups and social institutions (family, education, economy, religion, government) and patterns like inequality.
They overlap: a question about bullying, for example, has a psychological side (the bully's feelings), a sociological side (school culture, power) and an anthropological side (how different cultures treat it).
Anthropology: branches, thinkers and methods
Four branches:
- Cultural (social) anthropology: ways of life today, kinship, rituals, economies.
- Biological (physical) anthropology: human evolution, bodies, primates.
- Archaeology: past societies through objects and remains.
- Linguistic anthropology: language and how it shapes thought and culture.
Key thinkers: Franz Boas (cultural relativism: judge a culture by its own standards), Bronisław Malinowski (long fieldwork with participant observation), Margaret Mead (how culture shapes growing up), Claude Lévi-Strauss (patterns in myths). Schools of thought include functionalism, cultural relativism and structuralism.
Methods: fieldwork, participant observation, interviews, genealogies, digs. Anthropologists also study how cultures change through diffusion (ideas spreading), assimilation (a minority adopting the main culture) and globalization.
Psychology: approaches, thinkers and methods
- Behaviourist (Pavlov, Skinner): behaviour is learned through conditioning, rewards and punishments.
- Cognitive (Piaget): how we think, remember and solve problems.
- Biological: brain, nerves, hormones and genes.
- Psychoanalytic (Freud): hidden, unconscious wishes and early childhood.
- Humanistic (Maslow, Rogers): free will, self-esteem and reaching your potential (Maslow's hierarchy of needs).
Methods: the experiment (change one variable, measure another, keep the rest the same), case studies, observation, questionnaires. Psychology explains how nature (genes) and nurture (environment), as well as context like peer pressure, shape what a person does.
Sociology: perspectives, thinkers and methods
- Functionalism (Émile Durkheim): each institution has a job that keeps society stable, like organs in a body.
- Conflict theory (Karl Marx): groups compete for money and power; society has winners and losers.
- Symbolic interactionism (Max Weber's ideas, George H. Mead): people create meaning in everyday interaction.
- Feminist perspective: how gender shapes power and opportunity.
Sociologists study prejudice (a negative attitude to a group) and discrimination (unfair action), social class, deviance and change in institutions, such as smaller families or online schooling. Methods: surveys, statistics, interviews, content analysis of media.
Socialization: where the three meet
Socialization is the lifelong process of learning the norms, values and skills of your society. Agents of socialization:
- Family: the first and usually strongest (primary) agent.
- Peers: friends of a similar age, very strong in the teen years.
- School: rules, teamwork, a shared curriculum.
- Media: films, games, social media.
- Also religion, workplace and the state.
Anthropologists show that socialization differs between cultures; psychologists show how it shapes personality traits; sociologists show how it passes on social structures such as gender roles. Classic cases of children raised in isolation show that without social contact, language and social skills do not develop normally, though such studies raise serious ethical problems.
Doing research in the social sciences
- Plan: write a clear question and a hypothesis (a testable guess).
- Collect: primary data (your survey, interview, observation, experiment) and secondary data (journal articles, census data, books).
- Judge sources: author, date, evidence, bias.
- Ethics: informed consent, no harm, right to withdraw, confidentiality.
- Analyse: put data in tables and graphs, look for patterns, remember that correlation is not causation.
- Be honest: cite every source in a standard style; never copy or invent data.
- Communicate and reflect: report, poster or talk using correct terms; then ask what you would improve.
Key formulas and definitions
- Anthropology = culture; psychology = individual mind and behaviour; sociology = groups and society
- Anthropology's four branches: cultural, biological, archaeology, linguistic
- Psychology approaches: behaviourist, cognitive, biological, psychoanalytic, humanistic
- Sociology perspectives: functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism (+ feminist)
- Main methods: fieldwork (anthropology), experiment (psychology), survey (sociology)
Worked examples
1. A researcher lives for a year in a fishing village, joining in work and festivals, to understand their beliefs about the sea. Which subject and method?
Studying a whole culture by living in it is anthropology, using fieldwork and participant observation.
2. Two groups of students learn a word list. One group sleeps 8 hours, the other 4 hours, then both are tested. Which subject and method?
It tests one variable (sleep) on individual memory: psychology, using an experiment.
3. A study finds that children from richer families are more likely to go to university. Which sociological perspective would stress that this keeps the rich in power?
Conflict theory, which sees institutions like education as places where groups compete and the powerful keep their advantage.
Common mistakes
- Thinking psychology is only about mental illness. It covers all thinking, feeling and behaviour.
- Thinking anthropology only studies ancient or "exotic" peoples. It studies all humans, including modern cities.
- Mixing up prejudice (an attitude) with discrimination (an action).
- Assuming a link between two things proves one causes the other. Correlation is not causation.