American Sociological Review

I wrote a paper called Alienation Reconsidered, and the subtitle was The Strength of Weak Ties, and I sent that to the American Journal of Sociology.

No, actually I sent it to the American Sociological Review.

Uh, and I got back a, a rejection with two scathing reviews from reviewers whose names I never tried to find out and I still don't know.

But I suspect that at least one, maybe both were European, and they were particularly, I think, offended by my use of the term alienation, and they implied that I didn't really understand alienation properly, which is the way Karl Marx understood it, and that anyway everything I said was, was quite obvious.

And so I wrote a paper called The Strength of Weak Ties.

I took that alienation, not just the title, but I made sure that the word alienation didn't appear anywhere in the paper, so I couldn't get that kind of review ever again.

And I sent that off to the American Journal of Sociology this time, because I, I decided the American Sociological Review was not necessarily my best outlet.

And I got back an R&R, and I think I later found out that the reviewer whose comments were so useful was James Davis, who found what I was doing very interesting, but had some very useful suggestions for me to revise.

Um, and that's kind of led me down a path to looking into this research and, and at the time there was very little research on the topic really.

Um, and I remember being kind of inspired by a paper by, uh- By Penny Edgell and colleagues in 2006, in I believe American Sociological Review, where they made the case that atheists were kind of the most excluded-- among the most excluded groups in American society.

And they had a combination of these willingness to vote polls, but also they had similar results if you look at questions of like, "Who would you most disapprove of your child marrying?" Again, American participants said, "I don't want my kid marrying an atheist." Um, if you'd asked people like, "Which-- Here's a bunch of groups of people.

Who shares your vision of America versus who has a different vision of America?" Again, atheists scored on the bottom of that, which seemed really strange.

The second is less famous, and I love it for that.

So in 1968, Two American sociologists, Marvin Scott and Stanford Lehman, published a paper in the American Sociological Review, volume 33, page 46 to 62, with a plain and perfect title, Accounts.

And what they studied was this.

The moment when a person is required to explain themselves, they notice that in ordinary life, most of what we do slides by unremarked, No one asks you to justify it.