Culture, Statistics, and Social Inequality MCAT Review

[Music] Hello guys and welcome to Grow Series in MCAT Review Podcasts. This is the 10th episode for Psychology and Sociology which means it's the last episode for this topic. You know it's been a long journey doing Psychology and Sociology and it's coming to a close here but let's not be dramatic. This episode we're finishing off those societal theories then moving on to foundational concept 10 which is pretty short. We'll get into thinking about social theories and a medical perspective then we'll get into population, demographics, social movements and culture. We're going to end this with foundational concept 10 which is all about social inequality and then I'm just going to throw in statistics in the end. That's basically how we measure things in psychology. Honestly this episode is one of the easiest to understand. It's mostly just vocab that you can kind of just understand after some quick reviewing. There aren't you know 30 psychologists to remember or a thousand theories that sound the exact same. Anyways like I said in other episodes this podcast should be used as a supplemental source of content. You know I won't go over all the details but just what I find to be the most important. So let's not waste any time let's get right into it. First things first rational choice. Now remember last episode I was talking about game theory. Rational choice reminds me of that a lot. You know game theory relies on people making the right choice. It's kind of the theory of how something works if people always make the choice they're assumed to make. Rational choice theory is the assumption that people do what's rational. They'll pick the topic that you know after weighing the costs and benefits of something is best for them. Rational choice theory is pretty cake it's pretty easy. You do what's right for you you do what's rational. Exchange theory it's a branch of rational choice theory. So I'll say that again exchange theory branches off rational choice theory. Exchange theory applies rational choice theory to social interactions. So you know that's not too bad right basically saying we make the best choice for us in social situations too. Exchange theory is kind of robotic because it looks at society as a ton of individual interactions that can be studied and says you know we can figure out behavior if we know what the rewards and punishments are. So that reward and punishment thing it makes sense in obvious situations like you have the choice to go to lecture and only your underwear but based on social rewards and punishments I'm pretty confident you wouldn't do that. Now I know I went over some social theories last episode. I'm going to talk about them again here just because social theories are pretty high yield and I'm going to be applying them to medical situations to just give you a better understanding. So just a refresher near the end of the episode we talked about functionalism conflict theory social constructionism symbolic interactionism and the feminist theory today I mentioned rational choice theory and exchange theory. So in the end we have seven social theories here to remember but it's not too bad think of conflict theory and feminist theory they're basically twins you know feminist theory it branch off conflict theory rational choice theory and exchange theory those are also basically twins. Exchange theory is just the rational choice theory in a social environment so those are four out of the seven theories that we have to know and we are you know four them pretty easily. After that we have functionalism social constructionism and symbolic interactionism so I'll refresh you guys with the quote unquote twins first then I'll go over those last three. So conflict theory is how societies change and adapt over time due to conflict there's a thesis which is the norm in the antithesis which is like the rebellion it's a large scale view the feminist theory that originated from the conflict theory it's a large scale view that focuses on the inequality of genders and it has four pillars gender differences gender inequality gender oppression and structural oppression. Then the other set of twins we just went over rational choice theory and exchange theory rational choice theory says we pick the most rational choice based on what we know you know costs and benefits exchange theory is the rational choice theory in a more social perspective. So it fits the discussion of social theories better than the rational choice theory then we talked about functionalism Durkheim thought institutions and social facts they had to be balanced so society and institutions they're joined at the hip. Society adapts to institutions and institutions must adapt to the waves of society you know it's a large scale view symbolic interactionism that is focused on those day to day interactions saying we get the meaning of everything through interactions with other people and that certain symbols also hold meaning. And then lastly is social constructionism thinking life is just a web of social constructs and that we shape ourselves through social interaction. Now I know I'm going over something we just went over last episode but I added rational choice theory and exchange theory in here and I felt it was pretty important to go over all the social theories together if I brought up those two so those were those seven but obviously we're studying for the MCAT here so we got a look at it with a medical lens you might get a passage about something that's medical related where they ask which social theory fits best now I'm going over all seven in the order I just went through so the two sets of twins then functionalism then some bulk interactionism and social constructs. So these are just examples like I said in a medical lens so conflict theory in our era has a thesis which is the wealthy being able to afford the best medical care and the antithesis which is the poor going bankrupt because of crazy deductibles and insurance so they opt to even just skip on hospital visits and stay sick. Well like I said in last episode conflict theory often leads to the thesis and the antithesis clashing to form a synthesis and that is something that you can say has been tried with the affordable care act aka Obamacare but I wouldn't be too surprised if some type of universal healthcare gets implemented in America within the next 10 to 20 years if you were asked what type of social theory sums up the healthcare system right now conflict theory is kind of just a no brainer I mean we got the unequal access to valuable resources here when it comes to medical attention. But we also have an unequal access to things like education housing jobs etc which leads to health disparities and health disparities means limited access to medical care you also have that power struggle between pharmaceutical companies insurance companies hospitals physicians patients if you don't call that a conflict and you know I don't know what is. Now feminist theory in terms of medicine I mean you could say that leadership wise medicine is definitely still male dominated I mean just look at the hospital administration for almost any hospital it's usually just old guys the next set of twins rational choice theory and exchange theory that has a less obvious type of medicine compared to the conflict theory and the feminist theory so we talked about rational choices here and we can go back to the topic of hospital administration here as well. Now I'm not saying all hospital administrators do this this is just an example but what makes more sense for a hospital administrator you know making more money for himself or making the cost of healthcare cheaper for the community the rational choice for yourself is to set yourself up financially. So those kind of fit in kind of a loose example but we needed an example for both so that was that then there's functionalism how things rock around but always go back to their functional state if you get sick medications make sure you go back to your functional state. And then we have symbolic interaction is all about those little small interactions and you know in medicine that's all over the place I mean the doctor patient interaction that's a perfect example and what's the symbol of a doctor in a hospital you know their white coat so symbolic interaction is you can really see that in the hospital in a medical setting a lot and then social construction is it's where we attach certain meetings to certain things and we have preconceptions about different people if you listen to the last episode you remember me talking about medicalization or patients or doctors they construct in the hospital. So we talked about alcoholism that's an illness that really didn't exist a century ago you know someone to argue alcoholism is a social construct especially in college so social constructionism basically attaching certain meetings to certain things so those were all social theories now I'm going to make a shift into population and demographics for a bit studies on large populations it's what makes psychology psychology it's important to understand how studies occur and how we draw that population in. And important aspect of population demographics is age so society must adjust for the older population and there's two important theories you got to know for that there's the life course theory says aging is social psychological and biological and it begins when you're born and ends when you die so life course theory it says it's not all biology your mental head space is a part of your age as well and most importantly it says it's a process that occurs from birth to death. Then there's the age stratification theory which says the age is a way of manipulating behavior of a generation what does that mean well different age groups are treated differently we don't let 10 year olds drive cars or join the military and a deeper example there's different levels of political power based on age two so age obviously a demographic structure society you just got to know two theories life course theory and age stratification theory. So there's two other important demographic structures of society race and ethnicity the most important thing to know about race and ethnicity is that it's socially defined so race is socially defined based on physical characteristics ethnicity is socially defined but it's more of a fluid definition you know it's someone's language religion nationality etc so racial differences can cause things like genocide interclonialism which is when minorities are segregated and exploited. And racial differences lastly can also cause assimilation where someone's culture resembles that of another group with demographics we also look at sex gender and sexual orientation so some people see gender is binary you know simply male versus female. Others argue there's five considerations, biology, identity, expression, attraction, and fornication. So five considerations of gender, biology, identity, expression, attraction, and fornication. What you really have to know though is that biological sex differs from gender, which differs from sexual orientation. So biologically, of course, we have xx or xy, and then the rare intersex, which either has one chromosome or three. That's pretty kind of dry. Gender, it's a little more complicated. Gender is a social construct, and a house is two of the five that I talked about earlier. Identity and expression. Then there's sexual orientation, which doesn't matter on gender or sex. This houses attraction and fornication. So the stereotypical norm is that men are attracted and fornicate with females and vice versa. But a man could also be attracted to males but fornicate with females. Basically, just know biology, gender, and sexual orientation. So there are two quick vocab words for gender that we're going to talk about. Gender schema theory and gender script. Gender schema theory basically talks about how you get gendered in society and how your characteristics based on your sex get transmitted from person to person. So a guy who lives in an overly macho home would think that men are good for heavy lifting and hard labor. So basically, gender schema theory is saying you learn your gender norms from the culture you live in. Gender script, that basically says our designed ideas about gender, they translate into the things we use. So why do razors for women have to be pink while razors for men have to be metal and look super crazy? That's gender script right there. So now onto some pretty easy terms. We're going to shift away from demographics here. I'm going to talk about urbanization. That's the movement of people from rural areas to urban areas. So one thing you might often be forced to do is apply these concepts to the social theories. So if we go back to the conflict theory, we can say cities are more prone to inequality. That's kind of related to urbanization there. But if we look at urbanization through a symbolic interactionism lens, cities are where people can interact with lots of people and they can get a different view on life. So just practice looking at things through different social theory lenses like that. Suburbanization, that's the movement away from cities, but they can also become economic centers themselves. Look at Silicon Valley, for example. Urban renewal, that's basically where you revamp old parts of the city to become better. But that can also possibly lead to gentrification. You know, that's a term that's pretty popular nowadays. It basically means when those old parts are revamped, they want wealthier communities to come in and that basically prices out those old communities. So as you can see, we're shifting here into population dynamics. An important thing to know, a pillar in population dynamics is the three factors that contribute to growth rate. That's fertility, migration and mortality. So fertility, it's an ability to basically have babies. But there's another interesting vocab word that's for "condity", which is the potential reproductive capacity for a female. Migration, now that's a number of people moving in and out of countries. And then mortality, pretty simple death, I mean, come on. So with population, we measure rates both annually and per 1,000 people. So we don't measure per 10,000, not 100. We measure population per 1,000 people. And then there's demographic transition. That's a really important model you got to know. It basically looks at population growth with birth and death rates. And it made five stages for this model. So you start off early with a high birth rate. If you look at most of those European countries prior to the 18th century, people are just popping out kids like crazy. You have a big population of kids and then a smaller older population. Then as the years go on, the population rises because the death rate decreases. Medicine comes in. We get better at prolonging health. All right, so death rates and birth rates, they both start to fall because of things like birth control, less childhood death, etc. That's the third stage. And then there comes a point where the population is stabilizes. So both the birth and the death rate, they're low and the population is big. So the fifth stage, that's speculative. We don't know whether it's going to decrease or increase. But the assumption is that the world population will stabilize and then will slowly decrease. I guess we'll live to see how that goes. So we're talking about the world here. Globalization, that's an important term to know. And that, you know, that means the sharing of culture, money, products between countries. But globalization is important to know because it leads into the theory of world systems. So the world systems theory says the world is a unit. And we divide the world into three groups. There's the core, which is like Western Europe and the US. What people consider the West, basically. Then there's the periphery countries, which is like countries in Africa. Basically, countries which are influenced by the West and consume lots of the goods from the West while really exporting cheap labor and raw materials. Finally, there's semi-prifory, which are kind of in the middle. You know, countries like India that are industrializing and moving towards becoming a coronation. But, you know, they're still in between where they're selling raw materials and selling cheap labor a lot. So, core countries are already really developed. They're quote unquote, "high-income countries." Perfury countries, they're low-income countries that really push out labor and raw materials. So you might ask, could periphery countries theoretically become core countries? Well, according to the modernization theory, yeah. Modernization theory says that all countries go through a similar path towards development to what we consider to be modern society. But then on the other hand, there's the dependency theory. It's a retaliation to the modernization theory. It says that if core countries are dependent on periphery countries for raw goods, which they then use and they sell higher-priced goods to periphery countries, then how can periphery countries work towards becoming a core country? You know, if you're always consuming at a price that's higher than what you're selling, you're going to be at a loss. So modernization theory says, yeah, periphery countries can become core countries. But then the dependency theory says, no, core countries are core countries because they push down periphery countries. So earlier, we talked about the conflict theory. And I mentioned a thesis in antithesis. So often, the antithesis is a social movement. So what is a social movement? That's when people come together. They have an idea and they go, you know what? We can do something to change the future of our society. There's two types of social movement. There's activists and they want to change something. And then there's regressive social movements. Those resist change. So activists are actually a lot more common than those regressive social movers. But both of them, they start with a certain stage and we call that the incipient stage. So the incipient stage is where the public takes notice of something. And at that point, those activists or social movers in any way, they're either going to succeed at their mission of, you know, change or for regressive social movers, lack of change, or those activists or regressive social movers must adapt to the times. They just have to face whatever they're dealing with. So there's a few theories here on why social movement occurs. But the two most important ones to remember are number one, the relative deprivation theory and two, the rational choice theory. So obviously you're pretty comfortable with the rational choice theory. We've talked about that before. People weigh the pros and cons and make the best choice for themselves. This can also apply to social movements. You know, if the government decided to install a curfew at 8pm for no reason, besides the fact that, you know, people mess around at night, well rationally, that wouldn't really make much sense to you now, wouldn't. So a social movement might just occur to resist that change. The interesting one here is the relative deprivation theory, which says that actions occur with people who are oppressed or they're deprived of something. So an obvious example is the civil rights movement. I mean, oppressed, deprived of rights. The relative deprivation theory says that there's three pillars for social movement. Number one, obviously it's in the name, relative deprivation. So basically, people are lacking in something for the civil rights movement. That was equality in things like resources, education, etc. Then the second pillar is the concept of deserving better. It's a byproduct of deprivation. So if you're deprived of something, you think you deserve better. You're two out of three here on the relative deprivation theory. The third one is that you think conventional methods are useless. So people say, you know what? Asking nicely isn't really helping screw this. We need a social movement. So those three come together. The relative deprivation theory says a social movement will occur. The main criticism, though, for this relative deprivation theory, is that you don't have to be deprived of something to join a social movement. And on the other side of things, oppressed people won't always join a movement. If I have the risk that I might get fired if I make or join a union, even if I'm oppressed at that job, I might second guess my decision to join that movement. All right, there's another theory here called the resource mobilization theory. But the reason I didn't include it earlier is because this isn't really explaining why social movements occur, but really how they occur. So this theory says that a social movement needs a good political head, you know, someone charismatic. Then it also needs a strong political influence. Then you need money, materials, etc. Basically the resource mobilization theory says, social movements need resources. So that was a lot of the population stuff. Now we have three more things to talk about. Culture, social inequality, and psychological statistics. After that, we're done with psychology and sociology. So culture, it's something we've talked about before. Basically culture is a way of life that many people share together. How does that differ from society, though? You know, people usually talk about them in the same breath, society and culture, whatever. But society, it's the way people organize themselves. Culture is the way of life. So if life with cereal, society is like the bowl holding everything together. Culture is a cereal itself. We're not eating the cereal without the bowl. Culture needs that structure that society provides. There are four main points of culture to know. First, all people share culture with others in their society. you know the rules and expectations that call culture brings is shared by everyone. Second, culture is adaptive. It can change and evolve. Third, culture builds on itself. So society builds on existing cultures so that we can overcome any challenges we might face. So at the time of this recording, the corona pandemic is occurring. A culture change might be that people use hand sanitizer a lot more, and they work from home a lot more. We have a current challenge we're facing, which is the coronavirus, and a culture change might occur, which is a usage of hand sanitizer and working from home. The last and fourth point of culture is that culture is transmitted. What I mean is that culture goes down the generations. A good example is pizza. You know, in America, the concept of having pizza for certain events is passed down. Pizza, which is like a staple in American culture and diet, is given to us when we're kids by elders and it's eaten throughout all stages of life. Another example here of culture being transmitted is how we react to each other on public transport. You know, culture here in America says you stick to yourself, put your headphones in and listen to an MCAT podcast, and we learned that from observing the culture around us as well as it being passed down from elders. Your parents might not have told you, "Hey, Jimmy, don't talk to the crackhead who's doing some results on the subway, but their body language and demeanor insinuated that." So culture transmission, it's not always obvious. It can be the little things too. Of course, culture though, it's not one unified blob. The culture of endiagram includes different sub-cultures as well as counter-cultures and micro-cultures. So a micro-culture, that's something that affects people during limited time periods of their life. If you guys are in college, you know, fratts and sororities, that's a perfect example of a micro-culture. They have their own culture that's there with you for a few years, but it's not a culture you're immersed in for a super long period of your life, unless you're a fifth year. Now a sub-culture, that's a medium-sized culture. You know, it's a community that kind of separates itself from the larger dominant culture of society. Of course, it's not a bad thing to separate yourself from the dominant culture. You know, an example of that is an American being immersed in Latin culture or Asian culture. You know, they might not be barbecuing hot dogs on a Sunday afternoon, like what the dominant culture implies you should do. You know, someone born and raised a Miami could be immersed in their own Cuban sub-culture they got going on there. So sub-cultures, as you can see, they can be ethnic, you know, Asian or Latin culture I just mentioned, but they can also be from city to city. You always hear about that in New York culture, that Cali culture, et cetera. And then there's counter-cultures where the values are really different from the larger society. Amish people, that's a great example of a counter-culture. One that's super isolated from the dominant culture of America and they don't even interact much with the dominant culture at all. So I keep talking about American culture here 'cause, you know, I'm American, but it's obvious with a big country, there's a big culture. And with anything that large, there's a lag in things. Culture lag is when cultures take their time to catch up with any technological innovations and that can lead to problems in society. So cultural lag defines those problems, you know, when material culture changes rapidly and the non-material culture resists the change, you get that lag. A good example of that is how people primarily look at the news on their phones now. Despite that, it's not frowned upon to read a newspaper doing breakfast, but it is frowned upon to pull up your phone to read the news when you're having breakfast with your family. So you know, in both examples, you're reading the news, but the change in the way it's done is still not really culturally acceptable with the whole population. Another example where you can see society tangibly change is with cars. You know, when cars were first invented, there was no rules or regulations and people were driving like it was fast and furious 17. But the laws got written, people changed. Material culture kind of equaled out with non-material culture over time. So we have culture lag here, then we also have culture shock. That's something we use a lot more in common language. It's just like a certain feeling of, "Oh crap, so much is going on "when you adjust to a new culture." A country boy going to New York would have culture shock and American moving to Somalia would get culture shock, et cetera. So those were a ton of culture terms here. We had four points of culture, which were that first, all people share culture with others in their society and that the rules and expectations that culture brings is shared by everyone. Second, culture is adaptive, it can change and evolve. Societies build on existing cultures so that we can overcome any challenges we might face. And then lastly, culture is transmitted. It gets passed down generations. Then we talked about micro-culture, which is culture you're in for a limited amount of time, like a frat, a sub-culture, which was a medium-sized community that distinguishes itself from the larger culture. But you know, it still interacts with the larger culture. So let's say hip-hop heads, they're a part of the bigger culture and they have their own sub-culture. And then there was counter-cultures, those violate the laws of the dominant culture. Their values differ a lot from the larger society, think like homage people. Cultural lag, that's when non-material culture takes time to catch up with the technological innovations and the material culture. And then lastly, culture shock. It's those feelings of uncertainty when experiencing unfamiliar cultures. All right, so how does culture spread? I mean, in America, we have so many cultures meshing together, it's pretty insane. The spread of culture, that is called diffusion. So how do we share culture? You know, one great way is media and mass media is a really important part of psychology. So a role of mass media is important because it varies depending on what perspective you take. And then for that, we're going to go back to the social theories. Specifically, functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and the feminist theory. So just to jog your memory, what is functionalism? It was a theory made by Durkheim, talks about societal equilibrium and says that all parts of society need each other to function. So by that definition, you know that for functionalists, mass media must hold some significance. And that's pretty true. Functionalists, they see mass media as a piece of entertainment and an enforcer of social norms. You see what people are doing and that's good and bad. But there's a con that people say, you know, mass media, it glorifies behavior that's wrong in society. So another big part of mass media that functionalists say is true is that it's an agent of socialization. You know, when everyone's watching the Super Bowl together, we're all watching something in a shared space. It's a collective experience. So it makes sense that mass media like that is considered an agent of socialization. All right. So for conflict theorists, they're obviously going to say that mass media promotes conflict. So conflict theorists say it exacerbates the divisions that already exist in society like race or social class. For feminist theorists, they're similar to conflict theorists, which makes sense because you know, feminism theory is an offshoot of conflict theory. So feminist theorists, you're going to assume will have an argument for mass media that has to do with feminism. For those feminist theorists, they say mass media has to do with stereotyping women, emphasizing traditional sex roles, et cetera. And then lastly, we have symbolic interactionism. Here, we're talking about those small, person-to-person interactions. They look at mass media on a micro level. They see how mass media shapes our day-to-day behavior. So an example of that is like how media shapes how we interact with each other. You know, just look at the gradual shift from phone calls to texting or the explosion of online dating. So as you can see here, mass media, they kind of stretched that definition to talk about basically technological innovation, media in general. But nonetheless, mass media is a big part of psychology. Last bit of culture we'll talk about is how culture is transmitted through evolution. So let's talk about the initial culture when humans were first getting started. We started shifting into those communal societies. And compared to before, there were those small pockets of humans. Then humanity started growing to bigger and bigger groups. But you know, that came with consequences. One consequence is that the transmission of disease happened a lot faster and a ravaged a lot more people. But what did that do? Well, you know, if only the strong can survive, then only the strong pastor genes on. And evolutionarily, that changed our immune system. Another example of that is with lactose intolerance. The cultures that always drank cow's milk like northern Europeans, they didn't get lactose intolerance. All right, so just like that, we're done with culture and therefore we're done with foundational concept 9. We're going to move on to the last concept here, foundational concept 10. And then we'll call this a wrap. All right, foundational concept 10, probably shortest one here. It's strictly about social inequality, which you should know is basically just when resources in a society aren't really distributed equally. So there's barriers such as those from financial inequality, like Rich versus Poor. There's race inequality, and then there's gender inequality. Two aspects of gender inequality you should know are the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling effect. The glass ceiling effect, it's an important term to know. Basically, it says that women aren't really taking those higher positions in companies. You know, I talked earlier with the feminist theory. I talked about how if you Google any hospital administration, the odds that it's majority old males is high. But of course, that's changing over time, which is phenomenal. With inequality, we always talk about mobility. The ability to move classes. We classify society into social layers that you're aware of, lower class, middle class, and upper class. We classify that based on income. So someone moves from being a manager of a restaurant to becoming the CEO of fast food chain. That's a vertical movement. And horizontal movement is like you switching jobs in the same field, like a computer programmer switching jobs. All right, so moving on here, there's three types of social constructs you have to know. And they're varying amount of social mobility. So the cast system, that's an example of one with very little social mobility. An example that is the Hindu cast system. Although it's not as enforced as it was in the past, it's still a good example of a cast system. In these systems, your role is determined by your background and who you marry to. All right, and then if we move up one level, the class system allows for some type of social mobility because there is the educational influence. So class system means lower class, middle class, [BLANK_AUDIO] class, you know, in theory, if someone is lower class, but they work their butt off to become a doctor, they can jump social classes, you know, solely due to their education and how hard they work. Of course, there's obstacles in the way, financially, environmentally, etc., which means vertical mobility in a class system isn't really that easy. And then lastly, there are meritocracies where people achieve social situation by their abilities and their achievements. So in a meritocracy, what your parents do doesn't really matter that much. When it gets equal opportunity, capitalism in theory is a meritocracy. All right. And then the last thing we got to talk about with mobility is intrad generational mobility and intergenerational mobility. So intrad generational mobility, well, from the name we know that it is within one generation. So it's within a person's lifetime, you know, if Bill goes from a janitor to an astrophysicist, he moved social classes within one lifetime. That's intrad generational mobility. But then if we zoom out a bit, we can talk about intergenerational mobility. Now if Bill's parents were dirt poor, they'd be defined as lower class. And then with Bill being upper class, there's an intergenerational mobility going on. But if Bill's parents were rich and then Bill became poor and then became rich again, there wouldn't be any intergenerational mobility. Kind of get it, you know, for intergenerational mobility, there always has to be a case of intrad generational mobility. All right. So we've been pretty focused on financial inequality here. We'll talk about absolute poverty and relative poverty. Then we'll move into more of the social inequality. So absolute poverty, it's basically the bare minimum level of stuff you have. You know, absolute poverty is the lows you can get to. You're scraping by barely making just enough to survive, but of course the amount you make varies based on where you are. As a country gets richer, there's less absolute poverty. But if you look at many Asian and African countries, absolute poverty is, you know, really common. So relative poverty, that's a term that applies to more of the developed countries. It's a percentage level that is below the medium income of the country. So for the US, the medium income is 80 bucks a day, which is around 29,000 year. So if someone makes less than 60% of that, they're relatively poor. So a person that makes 50 bucks a day, which is around $18,000 a year, they're relatively poor in the United States. Relative poverty doesn't really have to do with survival like absolute poverty. It's more of a social inequality. You know, people are excluded from certain aspects of society if they're relatively poor. So moving from primarily financial inequality, let's talk about social inequality. So remember earlier, we talked about intergenerational mobility with bills, parents being poor and bill being riched. He moved economic classes. Now for social inequality, if the social class is passed down from generation to the next, we call that social reproduction. So let's say there's a guy named Zach, his parents are rich, he's rich, and most importantly, the whole family has a high social status due to their financial status. We call that social reproduction. Zach's family had that high social status and when his parents had Zach, he joined their social status, social reproduction. But from this example, you can see financial capital and social capital, they're linked. But financial capital and social capital, they're also linked to cultural capital. People who isn't that well off and has invented past a 50 mile radius of his hometown has less cultural capital than a rich family that takes international vacations every six months. So with social inequality, there's a ripple effect. Someone who's poor not only doesn't have the access to quality education, quality housing, quality employment, they're also at risk for worse environmental conditions. Areas that have high poverty, you can assume have more environmental issues. In third world countries, you can see people burning scrap tires for heat and since the fumes for those are more carcinogenic than almost anything else people burn, those in lower social classes also get more health problems like asthma and lung cancer. So you can say the same thing about obesity, areas with higher poverty go for the cheaper food, which is often more fattening. So they have worse environmental conditions, they have really fattening food around them and that leads to worse health. There's also residential segregation when people are separated into different neighborhoods. You know, this is important because of three reasons. Political isolation, linguistic isolation and spatial mismatch. So political isolation is a factor in itself. Segregated communities, they often have political interests that don't really overlap with other communities and since they're so isolated, they don't really have their needs addressed. Linguistic isolation is where communities who are isolated may also have their own language which can limit jobs. Someone who lives in Miami comes from a Cuban household, lives in a Cuban neighborhood and goes to a Spanish speaking school. They might have some issues speaking English and then they might have less job opportunities and lower access to quality education and health compared to someone who was instead bilingual. And then the last one I said was spatial mismatch. If everyone is focused on a specific community, there may be resources that are further away and harder to access. So the MCAT brings a lot of things back to healthcare and social inequality is no exception. You might hear the term health disparities. That's what we're going to be talking about here. So first of all, social economic status is a pyramid. The higher you get on the pyramid, the more health-related resources you get. But like I said before, social economic status isn't the only thing. Race also plays a pretty significant factor. In America, Hispanics and African Americans have higher morbidity and mortality rates. To remind her, morbidity rates are the rates of which people are getting diseases and mortality rates are the rate of which people are dying. We also see disparities with gender. Men use less vaccines. They go to less checkups, but with women, depending on where they're situated, they could have less access to certain reproductive services. A big gender difference here is in research. A study came out just a few months ago that showed that women constitute only 38.2% of research participants in cardiology studies. That's a big worry because the heart works differently for men and women. For example, the female heart is smaller than it is in males, which also means smaller arteries. Then there's often discrimination with the LGBTQ+ community. Some healthcare workers don't really have as much of an understanding on LGBTQ+ issues, and that can lead to further feelings of isolation. It's important here to take into consideration all the levels of disparities here. So poor African American means they're struggling in two ways. They have that lower socioeconomic class, as well as the race disparities that are present. When we look at multiple factors like this, we're looking at intersectionality. The theory of intersectionality tells us to look at all the layers present in a person's discrimination. And finally, the last piece of social inequality we'll talk about before we move on to statistics is class consciousness and false consciousness. This is a little bit of an interesting one because Karl Marx said that the working class don't realize they're being exploited and oppressed by capitalism. According to Marx, a farm worker who works on a huge farm and makes $8 an hour doesn't realize he's a cog in the machine for a farm owner who makes $200,000 a year. For Karl Marx, he thought workers can develop class consciousness. They can know that they have solidarity with each other and can possibly overcome the oppression and exploitation. So as you can see, Karl Marx wasn't really the biggest fan of capitalism. So for Marx, his biggest fear was that of false consciousness. Where the farm worker doesn't think, oh man, I make $8 an hour just so the owner of the farm can make $200,000 a year. They instead are happy with their position and think, oh, you know, one day I can own my own farm and make $200,000 a year. For Marx, he said, if people didn't realize their place in society, they might be unintentionally helping the wealthy. An example of that is when people who are less fortunate vote for something that might benefit the wealthier class more than those in their economic range. All right, so all done with social inequality, but you got to know where we get all this information from. For example, how do we know that those in a lower socio-economic class have a higher likelihood of asthma and obesity? It's through research and analyzing research means statistics. You have to be comfortable with a few vocab words here, but once you get it down, you'll be fine. So first things first, we got to find out what type of study we're doing, but also let's get comfortable with the types of controls we have. Because of course, a control is what we compare with the experimental variable to see if there's any significance in the experimental group. You know, there's three types of controls. There's a positive control, which is when we give a treatment, but we know that the treatment produces a result. Then there's a negative control, which is like a group with no response expected. So let's say we're studying fertilizer and we want to see if this new organic fertilizer works to increase the size of a fruit. We have a negative control and a positive control. The negative control group is just no fertilizer. We know with no fertilizer, there won't be a response expected. Then the positive control group is a known chemical fertilizer that we know for sure increases the size of the fruit. It's a treatment we know has a result. Then the last control is vehicular control. This is a type of negative control where you do what the experimental group does, but without the direct impact. What do I mean by that? Well, let's say I had an experimental group of mice that I injected with a special serum, a vehicular control would be me injecting another coherter mice with saline solution. It's a negative control because we don't expect a response, but it's important to put the mice through the same amount of stress here. So we do vehicular controls to make sure there isn't any data that's due to the experiment itself. Let's say I didn't do the vehicular control of saline with these mice. I gested the special serum with the experimental group, but I also noticed that mice who had the special serum had a higher heart rate after injection. Well, was that because of the special serum or was it because of the active getting injected? With a vehicular control, if we saw elevated heart rates after the other mice got injected with saline, we could say, all right, the heart rate isn't because of the special serum. It's because the mice got scared after they got injected. As for the types of studies, there are a lot. There's cross-sectional studies. we look at a group of different people. at one moment in time. So think of it kind of like a picture. You know, I could look at the stress level of men in different age groups, but I'd be taking it from all the participants at that specific time. So I wouldn't really be comparing it to maybe five years down the line or whatever. It's just one and done. Then we have cohort studies where we follow a subset of a population over time. A cohort is a group of people with similar characteristics. So a cohort study would be like seeing the lifetime effects of people who, you know, vape. Then there are longitudinal studies where the data is gathered repeatedly over a long period of time. If I saw the progression of arthritis and athletes, I do a longitudinal study and maybe record data once every year. We also have case control studies. So case control studies are a retrospective study. We're looking back in time and we can see the risk of something, you know, let's say exposure of secondhand smoke and an outcome like cancer. So that's the case study we have and we compare it to a control group. So for example, people who don't have cancer but actually experience secondhand smoke or control group of people who just don't experience secondhand smoke at all. There are clinical trials. These are interventional studies. You know, interventional studies are where someone gets some type of intervention, call it a new medicine, perhaps. Then their reaction is evaluated. And the last one is randomized control trial where people are studied and randomly given a treatment to test the efficacy and side effects of medical intervention like drugs. And this is what you want if you're doing a clinical trial. So randomized control trials are the best of those clinical trials. Hopefully for people listening in the future there is some more decisive information. But as at the time of recording this, we're trying to get these randomized controlled trials for medications to help with COVID-19. But I guess we'll see how that plays out. All right, so let's say we did our study. Now how do we analyze the data we got? Here we use actual statistical tests. There is correlation. The correlation coefficient of one means a perfect correlation. So if every time I tap my desk, I hear tapping sound, then it's completely correlational. It's a perfect one. If it's negative one, it's the opposite. So if we're looking at the correlation between absences and grades and saw that with more absences came worse grades every single time and of the exact same amount, it would be a negative one correlation coefficient. And then a correlation coefficient of zero means it's completely random, no correlation whatsoever. So negative one and one half correlation zero does not. Then there's chi-square test where we look at categorical variables and see if two distributions of categorical data differ from each other. Now remember, a categorical variable is something that's qualitative. The color of a ball is categorical. The breed of a dog, that's categorical. So how do we compare two qualitative things? Well, chi-square tests would be used for something like comparing education level and marital status, trying to see if there's a trend. We also have t-tests that are used to compare the mean values of a dependent variable between two groups. So the bigger the t-value, the more of a difference there is between the two groups. So let's say you wanted to know whether people from Cali and people from Wyoming spend a different amount of money on restaurants every month. You obviously can't ask every single person from those states, so you take a sample from each place. Let's say 300 Californians and 300 Wyomingites. And then you figure out on average, Californians spend, let's say, 350 bucks on average every month on restaurants and Wyomingites spend 200. The t-tests ask whether the difference is probably representative of a real difference between Californians and Wyomingites, generally, or if it's just this sample group. And then lastly, we have ANOVA. It's like a t-test, but it can be used for three or more groups. All right, so we had that. We found a trend. Finally, let's talk about validity. We did the studies, we got the data, we analyzed the data, and now we have to decide, is it valid? Internal validity is when we go, okay, a cause can for sure be shown from this experiment. So what stops us from saying something is internally valid if there are confounding factors. So internal validity, we're just focusing internally on the study, does it show causation or any type of conclusion like that? Yes, perfect, okay. External validity asks whether the study can be generalized to other situations and other people to make sure this is true, we must have a completely random sample and all those situational variables have to be controlled. So for external validity, basically the sample must be perfect to be applied to all situations. Then lastly, we have a construct validity. Seeing if a tool is measuring what we wanted to measure. So let's say we're trying to figure out if an educational program at a certain school helps make their kids more artistic. Construct validity is trying to see how you're measuring if someone is artistic or not, 'cause that's not a concrete thing, it's very subjective. So just like that, we're done with that section and we're actually completely done with all psychology and sociology. You know, I know at this time of recording, there's some if you miss with whether the MCAT is even happening in these upcoming months with Corona. So I wish the best of luck to everyone studying. I know having a stressful situation on top of an already stressful exam doesn't really help, but try to adjust your study schedule, have a few days to relax, try to keep the content in your mind, but don't go too hard that you'll burn out. Since this is the last psychology episode, if you listen this far and actually liked it, I appreciate all the support. If you like the episode and you're listening on the Apple Podcast app, it would be awesome if you could just drop a rating or a review. It takes weeks of getting content, recording and editing for me to give this to you guys. So it's nice to see that you guys are liking it. But of course, no biggie if you don't want to, not a big deal. Just as we've done in the last episodes, I'm gonna give the best high yield summary here. So let's just get started. We start talking about two more social theories, rational choice theory and exchange theory. Well, rational choice theory is the assumption that people do what's rational. They'll pick the topic that, you know, after weighing the costs and benefits of something is the best for them. Exchange theory is the rational choice theory, but in perspective of social situations. Exchange theory looks at society as a ton of individual interactions that can be studied and says we can figure out behavior if we know what their reward and punishments are. Then we win over all the social theories together as a whole. So functionalism, conflict theory, social constructionism, symbolic interactionism, the feminist theory, and then the rational choice theory and exchange theory. So that's seven social theories, but to remember them, remember the set of twins. So conflict theory and feminist theory are basically twins, and the rational choice theory and the exchange theory are another set of twins. So if you know those four, you already know the majority of the seven social theories. Conflict theory is how societies change and adapt over time due to conflict. There is a thesis, which is the norm, and the antithesis, which is like the rebellion, and it's a large scale view. The feminist theory originated from the conflict theory and it's a large scale view as well, and it focuses on the inequality of genders and it has four pillars. These are gender differences, gender inequality, gender oppression and structural oppression. Then the other set of twins we went over were the rational choice theory and exchange theory. Rational choice theory says we pick the most rational choice based on what we know, you know, the cost and benefits of something. Exchange theory is, like I said before, the rational choice theory and a more social perspective. So it kind of fits the discussion of social theories better than rational choice theory. We also talked about functionalism. Here, Durkheim thought institutions and social facts had to be balanced. Society and institutions are joined at the hip. Society adapts to institutions, and institutions must adapt to the waves of society, which is a large scale view. Symbolic interactionism is focused on those day-to-day interactions, saying we get the meaning of everything through interactions with other people, and that certain symbols hold meaning. And lastly, is social constructionism. Thinking life is just a web of social constructs and that we shape ourselves through social interaction. When we looked at the social theories through a medical lens, we got some good examples. Conflict theory, we talked about universal health care. There's a thesis, which is, you know, the wealthy getting great medical care. And the antithesis, which is the others thinking that it's unfair that they have to be financially burdened for medical care. A synthesis, possibly of, you know, universal health care, could be implemented in the future here in America. It's implemented in other countries, although you could also consider the Affordable Care Act to be that synthesis, the implementation. The feminist theory says that medicine is lacking female leaders, not too hard. Rational choice theory and exchange theory, we can group together with one example that is a bit of an overreaching judgment, but you could ask for some hospital administrators, what is the more rational choice to benefit them, making money for themselves or making healthcare cheaper for the community? A lot of people would say being richer is nicer. Like I said, pretty overreaching judgment, but good example. With functionalism, we said a healthcare example is like medications making sure you go back to your functional state. Symbolic interactionism is all about those small face-to-face interactions. The physician, patient interaction is a great example of that and social constructionism. We talked about medicalization, how we made something like alcoholism a disease, something that wouldn't really be considered a disease a hundred years ago. We talked about population demographics and things like age, race, sexual orientation, gender, and sex, for age, know the two theories of what aging is, the life course theory and the age stratification theory. Life course says it's a process that occurs the day you're born, age stratification theory thinks age is a way of regulation of behavior for a whole generation. All right, for race and ethnicity, know that both of those are socially defined. Then we talked about gender schema theory and gender script. Gender schema theory is about how people get gendered in society and how sex-linked characteristics are transmitted from person to person. Gender script basically says our designed ideas about gender translate into the things we use. So, you know, we're going to talk about gender, Why do raisers for women have to be pink while raisers for men have to be metal and you know look all crazy So that's gender-script with population dynamics There are three factors to contribute to growth rate of a population fertility migration and mortality So fertility is ability to have babies migration is the number of people moving in and out of countries and mortality is death rate With population we measure rates annually and we measure per 1,000 people an important model You have to know is the demographic transition model just be comfortable with the stages within the model. There's five stages Starts early with high birth rate that's stage one then death rate decreases that stage two then death rate and birth rate Both fall that stage three then there's some stabilization at stage four and a big population and stage five is speculative But it's suggested that the population will decrease but like I said speculative nobody really knows We discussed the world systems theory which thought of the world as a unit and divided the world into three groups Core countries is what people consider the West Perfury countries are like some of those in Africa where they export cheap labor and raw materials and consume a lot of the goods made in the core countries and Semmy periphery are in the middle countries that are industrializing and moving towards becoming a coronation, but they're not really there yet There's a yin and yang of the world systems theory the modernization theory says that all countries can go through a similar path and Become a modern core country, but the dependency theory says that core countries need periphery countries to succeed and the constant cycle They have at this moment seems like it's unable to stop we talked about social movements Which is when people come together and decide they want to change the future for a society? There's activists that want change and regressive social movements that resist change the two most important theories on Why social movements occur is the rational choice theory and the relative deprivation theory? Rational choice theory says that people weigh the pros and cons and make the best choice for themselves Sometimes that means a social movement The relative deprivation theory says that actions occur when people are oppressed and deprived of something and there's three things They need relative deprivation the concept of deserving better and the thought process that conventional methods aren't really working So they need a social movement. We talked about culture, especially the difference between society and culture So if life was like cereal society is like the bull holding everything together and culture is a cereal itself We're not eating the cereal without the bull so culture needs structure that society provides and there's four main points of culture to know First all people share culture with others in their society the rules and expectations that culture brings is shared by everyone Second culture is adaptive. It can change and evolve third culture builds on itself Societies build on existing cultures so that we can overcome any challenges that we might face So at the time of recording this the corona pandemic is occurring in a culture change might be that people use hand sanitizer a lot more in the future and working from home is a lot more common Lastly culture is transmitted its past down generations Then there's subcultures countercultures and microcultures Microcultures are something people do for a limited period of time a frat or sorority is a microculture Subcultures are medium size cultures like a community that separates itself from a larger dominant culture of the society An example of that is like someone born and raised in Miami being completely immersed in their own Cuban subculture Then there are countercultures where the values are really different than the larger group think of like homage people for example Cultural lag is another term here. It's where cultures take their time to catch up with any technological innovations phones are socially unacceptable in certain situations Where another source of media like a newspaper would be socially acceptable. That's cultural lag Media is a big part of culture. We look at media through four different social theory perspectives Functionalists see media as entertainment and an enforcer of social norms also an agent of socialization Conflict theorists say that mass media promotes conflict feminist theorists say that mass media stereotypes women and Emphasizes traditional gender roles and symbolic interactionists think media changes are small person to person interactions Culture also changes with evolution humans develop societies and cultures and with more people huddled together The spread of disease was a lot faster those that had strong immune systems lived on those that couldn't really survive the diseases died So the production of culture and society helped us become more evolutionized another evolutionary change that happened because of culture is how northern European cultures Die includes cow milk which then allowed them to be tolerant to lactose We moved on to foundational concept 10 where we talked about inequality things like financial inequality gender inequality and race inequality Talked about the glass ceiling effect. It's an important term to know basically says that women are not really taking up those higher positions and companies Then we talked about three types of social constructs of systems that exist in societies Cast system has very little amount of social mobility class system has a bit more social mobility because of the educational influence But you know if someone has handed a better environment to start off with they tend to stay in that class and then we have meritocracies often the most movement It's where people's achievements are what carries them to success and I threw a few other vocab words that you guys hear absolute poverty is like the bare minimum level of stuff you need to survive You know as a country gets richer. There's less and less absolute poverty Relative poverty that's when someone makes less than 60% of the median income So in America if you make around $18,000 you're relatively poor with poverty comes worse environmental conditions Those who are in the lower class tend to have a higher likelihood of obesity and other ailments that wealthier people don't really face Then we talked about residential segregation which had three consequences political isolation linguistic isolation and spatial mismatch Basically they have less political power less diverse linguistics and certain resources might be further away and less reachable We talked about healthcare disparities with wealth race gender and the LGBTQ community if someone has multiple factors We call that intersectionality such as being a gay Hispanic We ended foundational concept 10 with Karl Marx and his concepts of class consciousness and false consciousness So Karl Marx hated capitalism thought it was necessary for lower class workers to understand that they're being exploited and Rise up to overcome the oppression Karl Marx also had the idea of false consciousness where people have the as Marx says the illusion that they think they can move classes without a Revolution Marx says if people don't know their place in society they might be unintentionally helping the wealthy Then we moved into the stats. I went really in depth earlier. So I'm just gonna list them off for now The types of controls we have positive control negative control and vehicular control Positive control is a treatment with a known result negative control is a group with no expected response and vehicular control is a type of negative control where we don't expect a response but we must do it to make the experimental and the control group as similar as possible So vehicular control basically controls for the effect of the method of delivery So if a needle stresses the experimental group we must also do it to the control group to make sure it's equal The types of studies we had cross-sectional studies here We look at a group of different people at one moment in time think of it kind like a picture There's cohort studies where we follow a subset of population over time There are longitudinal studies where the data is gathered repeatedly over a long period of time There are case control studies where we're retroactively looking to see a risk of a certain exposure So we have a case group of people let's say with cancer and then a control group We look at their exposure to something like second-hand smoke and see if a conclusion can be dropped and Clinical trials are also known as Interventional studies usually involve medicine and the reaction to that medicine and the peak, you know Gold standard of clinical trials are randomized controlled trials We talked about analysis here, you know correlation, chis squared test, t-test and ANOVA correlation of one is strong correlation negative one is strong opposite correlation zero is no correlation chis squared test looks at categorical variables t-test looks at Continuous variables and ANOVA is a t-test but for three plus groups With validity we talked about internal validity, which means the study showed a causal relationship Let's say a person eating an excess in calories every day gains weight If we construct an experiment that showed that that would be internally valid, you know We showed a cause and effect relationship here. There's external validity Ask if we can generalize that study can I generalize the study and say all people who eat in excess and calories gain weight? Then we had construct validity seeing if a tool is measuring what we wanted to measure All right, so boom we're finally done here. That was a lot But you know it'll all be pretty easy with a few more listens on key or MCAP book whatever This is gonna be the last episode of course the plan might change later down the road But I think I'll leave it here with psychology and sociology all wrapped up I Love making this for you guys. It was a nice project. I'm happy that you guys liked it Go pay it forward help out your fellow pre-meds after you guys kill the MCAT and Thank you guys so much for listening, you know best of luck with everything MCAT related and if you have any questions You can always hit me up at grow series MCAT at GM L.com. That's gro S e r i e s MCAT at gmail.com best of luck guys get that five twenty eight for me and peace out You [BLANK_AUDIO]