By Sally Raskoff

The world is interdisciplinary. In education and academia,
we’ve divided the world up into multiple perspectives or academic disciplines;
it’s good to be reminded that we’re all looking at the same things from
different perspectives – and that those perspectives sometimes converge.

I’ve encountered some news stories and books that illustrate
that the more research we do, the more we realize that psychological issues and
sociological concepts converge. While we typically reserve the field of social psychology for
those areas in which psychology and sociology overlap, recent research confirms
that psychological issues involve social contexts – and sociological concepts –
more than previously thought.

For example, David Greene and Shankar Vedantum did a lovely piece
on whistleblowers on NPR. They discussed the classic psychological research
and individualistic issues of the person who becomes the whistleblower but
concluded, using recent research, that the environment- the context or
situational factors – are more predictive of such behavior. Altruism does not
rest with one’s individual psychology, but is more closely connected to one’s
social environment and dynamics.

I’ve been reading The Mindful Brain:
Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being, by Dr.
Daniel Siegel, as a counterpart to my Mindfulness Meditation classes and
practice. Expecting a purely psychological perspective, imagine my joy in
reading about how the brain – especially the frontal cortex – is wired to be
social.

According to Siegel, the secure attachment
style depicts a strong relationship in which a parent and child are attuned to
each other. This secure attachment or attunement affects the prefrontal area of
the brain and grows more fibers in that area. Research on mindfulness practice
shows the same structural results in the brain that are seen in parent-child
secure attachments; Siegel depicts these as attuning to oneself. These patterns
are important as they are found to be “promoting the
capacity for intimate
relationships, resilience and well-being,” notes Siegel on page 26.

This research, like much of the research on genetics and the
brain, is discovering that biology is not necessarily destiny – biology
responds to our experiences rather than just the other way around. Genetics may
show a potential for diseases to develop or other characteristics but it’s not
a given – the findings are reported as statistical chances.

I’m not saying that  nurture is more important than nature. Pitting
one against the other, nature versus nurture, is not useful as it assumes that
the complexity of life can boil down to one type of explanation over another
alone.

Auguste
Comte, the nineteenth century sociologist, pointed out a long time ago that
sociology is a science that incorporates many of the other sciences. He
believed that science and research could solve most problems. While he may have
overstated it a bit and many don’t pay that aspect of his thought much
attention today, he may have had something there.  The sociological perspective often includes or
at least acknowledges the perspectives and contributions of social (and other)
sciences.

What sociological work have you seen that specifically
includes psychological or anthropological concepts? On the flip side, where
else do you see the other sciences including a sociological view? What other
psychological theories inculcate sociological concepts whether overtly or
indirectly? Identifying these convergences can help us better understand the
unique contributions of the disciplines and their perspectives.