What Is The Sociological Imagination?

And how can it help you be a better person?

Imagine this (no pun intended): You’re at a coffee shop and there’s a group of loud people sitting near the entrance.

Initially, you think that they’re obnoxious and should take their loud conversation elsewhere, such as their home.

But then you wonder why these people are being so loud.

• “Could it be a cultural thing?”
• “Is it because of the community I’m at? Maybe they’re regulars here.”

These types of questions are what sociologist C. Wright Mills calls the sociological imagination.

Mills explains in his book, The Sociological Imagination:

“The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society… Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”

What Mills is getting at here is that for us to understand society, we have to know both the history of the place and the full context of the person because it helps us understand larger societal issues.

For example, if we want to understand the homelessness problem, we can’t just say unhoused people are lazy and need jobs. This won’t solve anything because there are larger issues at play.

Instead, we have to look at what each individual’s background is and group them, we have to look at what groups are largest in the unhoused community, we have to look at the group’s history, we have to look at the economy, we have to look for why there aren’t enough affordable housing options, etc.

This, Mills believes, is how social scientists get a full scope of a societal issue.

How Can The Sociological Imagination Make You a Better Person

The sociological imagination will make you a better person because it will make you more empathetic to people.

You’ll try to understand people rather than judge them -similar to the example I shared earlier- which will make you more compassionate towards them and their problems.

You might even start to change how you view certain people and communities.

Guidelines

If you want to start viewing issues with the sociological imagination, here are Mills’ guidelines.

Via Simply Psychology:

1. Scholars should not split work from life, because both work and life are in unity.
2. Scholars should keep a file, or a collection, of their own personal, professional, and intellectual experiences.
3. Scholars should engage in a continual review of their thoughts and experiences.
4. Scholars may find a truly bad sociological book to be as intellectually stimulating and conducive to thinking as a good one.
5. Scholars must have an attitude of playfulness toward phrases, words, and ideas, as well as a fierce drive to make sense of the world.
6. The sociological imagination is stimulated when someone assumes a willingness to view the world from the perspective of others.
7. Sociological investigators should not be afraid, in the preliminary and speculative stages of their research, to think in terms of imaginative extremes, and,
8. Scholars should not hesitate to express ideas in language that is as simple and direct as possible. Ideas are affected by how they are expressed. When sociological perspectives are expressed in deadening language, they create a deadened sociological imagination.

Give it a try.

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