TY - JOUR
T1 - A new unified theory of sociobehavioural forces
AU - Jasso, Guillermina
N1 - Funding Information:
Earlier versions of portions of this article were presented at meetings of the American Sociological Association, the German Sociological Association, the Swedish Sociological Society, the Southern Sociological Association, the International Society for Justice Research, the International Society of Political Psychology, the Institute on the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM), and EQUALSOC, the European Commission’s Network of Excellence on Economic Change, Quality of Life, and Social Cohesion; at the Group Processes Conferences, the Second Joint Japan-North American Conference on Mathematical Sociology, the Stanford Conferences on Suicide Missions, the Conference on Social Justice at the University of Bremen, and the Conference on Psychology and Social Justice at New York University; and at colloquia at Brown University, the University of Maryland, McGill University, Ohio State University, the University of Skövde, the University of Western Ontario, Yale University, and IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor). I am grateful to participants at those meetings and especially to Joseph Berger, Richard Breen, Peter Burke, Samuel Clark, Robert Erikson, Hartmut Esser, Thomas J. Fararo, Roberto Franzosi, James Granato, Samuel Kotz, Illoong Kwon, Kenneth Land, Allen Li, Tim Futing Liao, Eva Meyersson Milgrom, Lawrence A. Powell, Robert Solow, Jan Stets, Kjell Törnblom, Jonathan Turner, Riel Vermunt, Murray Webster, Bernd Wegener, and the anonymous referees and the Editor for many valuable comments and suggestions. I also gratefully acknowledge the intellectual and financial support provided by New York University.
PY - 2008/9
Y1 - 2008/9
N2 - This article proposes a new unified theory of sociobehavioural forces. The goal of the new theory is to integrate theories describing five sociobehavioural processescomparison (including justice and self-esteem), status, power, identity, and happinessbringing under a single theoretical umbrella diverse mechanisms together with their effects across disparate domains and for both individuals and societies. The integration is made possible by the remarkable similarity of the internal core of the theories, a core comprised of three elements: personal quantitative characteristics, personal qualitative characteristics, and primordial sociobehavioural outcomes. The unified theory posits the operation of three sociobehavioural forcescomparison, status, and powereach associated with a distinctive mechanism, in particular, a distinctive rate of change of the outcome with respect to the quantitative characteristic. Each combination of elementse.g. status-wealth-citygenerates a distinctive identity and a distinctive magnitude of happiness. Thus, the theory enables systematic and parsimonious analysis of both individuals and societies via the distinctive configurations of elements. To illustrate the unified theory, we analyse the three-way contest between loyalty to self, subgroup, and group in a two-subgroup society, deriving many new testable predictions, for example, that the bottom subgroup will have difficulty mobilizing itself; that the ablest individuals in a society will not make good leaders as their first loyalty is to self; and that the proportions loyal to self, subgroup, and group differ sharply, depending on the sociobehavioural forces, valued goods, and subgroup size. Finally, the theory provides a foundation for making explicit connections among the most important themes and insights of contemporary social science, including inequality, oppositional culture, group boundary permeability, social inclusion and exclusion, segregation and integration, social distance and polarization, and bonding and bridging.
AB - This article proposes a new unified theory of sociobehavioural forces. The goal of the new theory is to integrate theories describing five sociobehavioural processescomparison (including justice and self-esteem), status, power, identity, and happinessbringing under a single theoretical umbrella diverse mechanisms together with their effects across disparate domains and for both individuals and societies. The integration is made possible by the remarkable similarity of the internal core of the theories, a core comprised of three elements: personal quantitative characteristics, personal qualitative characteristics, and primordial sociobehavioural outcomes. The unified theory posits the operation of three sociobehavioural forcescomparison, status, and powereach associated with a distinctive mechanism, in particular, a distinctive rate of change of the outcome with respect to the quantitative characteristic. Each combination of elementse.g. status-wealth-citygenerates a distinctive identity and a distinctive magnitude of happiness. Thus, the theory enables systematic and parsimonious analysis of both individuals and societies via the distinctive configurations of elements. To illustrate the unified theory, we analyse the three-way contest between loyalty to self, subgroup, and group in a two-subgroup society, deriving many new testable predictions, for example, that the bottom subgroup will have difficulty mobilizing itself; that the ablest individuals in a society will not make good leaders as their first loyalty is to self; and that the proportions loyal to self, subgroup, and group differ sharply, depending on the sociobehavioural forces, valued goods, and subgroup size. Finally, the theory provides a foundation for making explicit connections among the most important themes and insights of contemporary social science, including inequality, oppositional culture, group boundary permeability, social inclusion and exclusion, segregation and integration, social distance and polarization, and bonding and bridging.
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U2 - 10.1093/esr/jcn023
DO - 10.1093/esr/jcn023
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:50949130739
SN - 0266-7215
VL - 24
SP - 411
EP - 434
JO - European Sociological Review
JF - European Sociological Review
IS - 4
ER -