Social Control

         Social control is a way for a society or an institution to enforce norms, or behavior they deem acceptable. These can be enforced by laws or in a more subtle relaxed way in how people react to something you do. Positive and negative sanctions play a large role in social control (Henslin, 2012).  If you hold the door open for someone they will most likely smile or thank you, on the other hand if you shut the door in someone’s face they will probably glare at you and in some cases make a rude comment. This encourages courtesy and simply being aware of your surroundings. Another more structured example is school attendance in grade school or high school. Of you are late to class you usually have to go to the office or you get marked late on the attendance sheet. If you have perfect attendance for the year, at least at my high school, you got a certificate at the end of the year assembly. This encourages students to go to class and be on time as well as prepare them for college where professors won’t keep them accountable for coming to class.

            Ivan Pavlov did a famous experiment involving and a bell. It was much more complicated than that but the main idea was getting the dog to drool at the sound of a bell. He did this by ringing the bell each time he was going to feed the dog. By doing this he tied the sound of the bell to food thus making the dog salivate when the bell rings even if there is no food present (Mergel, 1998). My brother did a similar experiment with goldfish; he trained them to swim to the top of the tank at the ring of a bell. This reminds me of social control because in a way it a way to modify behavior. Just like the fish learned to swim to the top of the tank because they knew it meant food, a lot of the things we do are done with the thought of how people will react positively or what we will get for doing it. In a lot of ways society has trained us to swim at the ring of a bell.

Works Cited

Henslin, J. (2012). Sociology a down-to-earth approach. (11th ed.). Pearson.

Mergel, B. (n.d.). Instructional design & learning theory. Retrieved from http://members.iinet.net.au/~aamcarthur/11_March_2008_files/Learning_Theories_of_Instructional_Design.pdf