Sociological perspective on society and human behavior

Objectivity in Sociological Perspectives

The United States of America is a melting pot of a wide range of beliefs, cultures, and traditions. Some say that the history of this nation will show an even wider variety not only of cultures, but of subcultures, cultures that arise in opposition or nonconformance with the main cultures. As human understanding of how we work in groups increases, some have theorized that there is really no such thing as a counterculture. The basic premise of this argument is that countercultures can't exist where all of us in the United States for example, technically share one culture. The norms, values, and beliefs shared by our culture even if they differ from others, are still part of just that, a larger culture that encompasses all, even those who are traditionally classified to be part of a counterculture.

My goal is to understand if this interpretation of cultures vs. subcultures holds under an objective standard or if my own analysis will be too colored to successfully come to a complete determination of the truth as to this matter. I suspect the truth will arise after analysis, that there is no truth, that definitions of cultures change, contracting and expanding to fit the present situation as it oscillates from one stage to the next. I will use the Electronic Journal of Sociology (2002) Topic identification ISSN: 1198-3655 "Elements of Trust: The Cultural Dimension of Internet Diffusion Revisited."

This article is quite unique in that it is one of the first that goes into attempting to understand the new culture that arises from the use of the Internet by seeking to develop heuristic models of understanding how trust works online. Because trust is the primer for innovative actions on the internet, the article's authors have classified this trust into a) rational trust and b) moral trust. Furthermore, the article's authors have decided to expound on how the aggregate levels of trust in ordinary society depend on moral trust more, but because it cannot necessarily be enforced, how fragile a notion moral trust can be in the culture on the Internet.

Rational trust depends on experience according to the article, and I find this to be objectively true, and I cannot argue this no matter whether culture can be seen as one encompassing body overriding sub-classifications of subcultures. The data used in the research is shown in charts that show parameters of subjects such as wealth, education, internet access and correlates this data with another chart that shows trust levels in factors such as civil rights, freedom of the press, democracy and other abstract notions. This data so far seems to be objective in being able to categorize the Internet culture.

It is precisely when the authors of the article decide to construct a model to show how such increased levels of trust would result in more efficient world system designs that I begin to see how the culture of the writers themselves affects the way the model is constructed. Obviously, the fact that these authors make use of mathematical linear models does not surprise me, but it shows a taste for what seems to be evolutionary psychology, in that the writers were influenced to conclude something that would fit into a structure that ended up "being in the best interests of everyone."

Does this mean that the authors are necessarily moral themselves? Does this mean the authors would use this model of trust if they ran billion dollar companies and were asked to contract with some sort of ambiguous party with ambiguous terms? Trust in this case should also be reasonable, but that's where my culture steps in and mars (or enhances?) my analysis in that from a legal background, I believe trust would make one liable to accepting something which maybe they had the right to refuse.