Use Your Common Sense Day 2024 is on Monday, November 4, 2024: what is the difference between thinking sociologically and common sense?

Monday, November 4, 2024 is Use Your Common Sense Day 2024. Common Sense Button Common Sense Button

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Many thanks to Bud Bilanich for producing Use Your Common Sense Day on the childbirth day of Will Rogers, which encourages us to make use of applied sound judgment-- considering that "common sense ain't that common".

1)Common sense thinking refers to the day-to-day, seemingly self-evident truths that we tell ourselves. They are not based in evidence and are uncritical. For example, we may assume that poor people have more children than they can afford because they are stupid. Scholarly research (that is rigorous and analytic research, based on empirical evidence) has shown however, that low socio-economic status is significantly positively correlated with desired family size, whereas I.Q. is not. Sociological thinking is thus rigorous and systematic in nature. - We look for evidence to back-up our claims. - - In this sense, use of references is one of the differences between common sense thinking and Sociological thinking, however, we may also do our own research. We must ensure, however, that the work we cite is reliable.

2) The field from which we draw our claims is sociology is far wider than it is in common sense. Common sense thinking usually makes reference only our own ‘life worlds.’ – The views that we draw from our own (classed, gendered, raced etc) experience may not be applicable to other contexts. More often than not, however, we assume it is and transpose it inappropriately onto other contexts. In sociology, our field is large. – We ensure that we are drawing off sufficient sources of information (be they textbooks or interviewees), so that our claims are representative of phenomenon we study.

3) Sociological thinking is responsible. - It accounts for the reasons for its claims and directs readers to the sources from which these claims are drawn, lest there be any questions. Common sense thinking does not do this. - People may make rhetorical appeals to back up there claims ( e.g."it's common sense") or may direct us to spurious sources that we usually cannot access (for e.g. "my grandmother said so", "a friend of a friend said so" etc).

4)Sociological thinking does not accept the world at face value, whereas common sense does. Common-sense, may suggest, for example that people contract HIV/AIDS because they are irresponsible. This makes the issue an entirely individual one. As sociologists, we delve deeper and are critical of "easy solutions". We find, that, in many contexts, people (particularly women) are unable, for a variety of reasons, to negotiate safe sex, owing (amongst other reasons) to their economic dependence on their male partners. The problem is thus one of gender inequality, not personal irresponsibility.

5) Sociological thinking attempts to draw connections between the individual and the world they live in. - That is between the psychological and the social, or as C. Wright Mills referred to it, connection between history and personal problems. This exploration is referred to as the "sociological imagination." The sociological imagination acknowledges the complexity of life, and resists attempts to understand phenomena as either strictly social or strictly personal. Rather, the social and the personal intersect in dynamic ways.

Take, for e.g. societies with high HIV/AIDS prevalence rates. We know that there are social reasons for this. People may not have the money to access condoms, or in cases where they are provided for free by the state, may not have money for transport to access them. We also know that the disease is stigmatized. - This is a social phenomenon. - If only one person in the entire society felt negatively about persons infected with HIV/AIDS, we would dismiss his/her views as judgmental & possibly cruel. If most people in the society hold pejorative views, however, the problem is a social one.

We may note that this stigma is one of the factors that makes it difficult for infected persons to access treatment (in many developing countries, provision of ARVs is not funded by governments, and is usually out of the reach of HIV patients). In countries where they are, people may be afraid to access them because of the likely social reprisals they will encounter if they are seen by others. These are both personal problems (ill-health, feelings of shame etc) & social issues (lack of political will to overcome stigma, prevalent social norms that lead to stigma etc). Thus, as some feminists have said "the political is personal." That is, social and political issues, whilst seemingly far removed from us, play out in our lives in very real ways.As said, sociological thinking attempts to understand the intersection between the social and the psychological, as well as the factors that make them seem unrelated.

6) Nevertheless, it is often the about social world (as opposed to, say, nuclear physics) that people make common-sense assumptions. Moreover, the ideas of Sociologists may start in common-sense (we may want to check the validity of an assumption, for example) but transcend it. Sociology thus has a special relationship with common sense.

Is "common sense" less common these days?

Common sense is very less to people who don't understand.

why do people lack common sense now days?

"common" sense is no longer common.