Number 4: Commonality in Diversity

This is part of a series of Top 7 Things Sociology Offers the World.

Sociology offers a way for people from diverse countries, cultures and languages to find common ground.

In my home county alone, the population has shifted to more diversity between 2000 and 2010 census. This shift is being seen almost everywhere in the United States.

But we are interacting globally at a much higher rates as well. This means there are lots of ways we can screw up inter-cultural relationships. Such screw-ups can have lots of fun, unintended consequences like war, trade barriers and extreme wealth imbalances.



Being able to place oneself in the position of the "other," what sociologists call "social empathy," is becoming a more important skill no matter where you live in the contemporary world. Sociology helps find common ground. While there is great diversity in the world, there are also commonalities.

Sociologist Georg Simmel first noted (over 100 years ago) how the mechanisms of stranger relationships work: we keep our distance from people we perceive as different and we welcome people we perceive as similar. The more commonality we find with others, the more likely we are to welcome them into our lives and our social circles. Thus, we have the potential not only of keeping worthwhile people out of our lives because we perceive them as different on some arbitrary factor, we also have the potential of inviting destructive people into our lives because we perceive them as similar. Every successful con artist knows this even if they don't know how to talk about it like this.



A good understanding of differences and commonalities plus a healthy dose of critical thinking and social empathy serves an individual well in choosing whom to let into one's social circles and whom to avoid. It also serves the collective well because it teaches us that we should be paying attention to how people act, not in which category we place them.

This is part of a series of Top 7 Things Sociology Offers the World. (Published March 29, 2013, 6am PDT)