Mikhail Sokolov European University. Mikhail Sokolov: “Sociology as the exact science of seduction

Well-known Russian sociologist, professor at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology of the European University in St. Petersburg Mikhail Sokolov came to Kaliningrad to give lectures at the Immanuel Kant IKBFU as part of the educational project “Universarium” and take part in a seminar.

In an interview with the site, the scientist talked about which people are most likely to create strong unions (including marriages), where the happiest people on Earth live and how much you can trust sociological surveys.

Mikhail Mikhailovich, sociology is a very interesting science, but in most cases, yesterday’s schoolchildren, entering university, know very little about it. What is needed to understand its essence as quickly as possible?

Start doing sociological research yourself. Probably the best way to quickly learn sociology is to find a question that interests you, such as how people make friends, or where people find the love of their lives, and try to approach the answer to this question strictly scientifically, by studying the literature, collecting data, analyzing it, drawing conclusions.

You know, we all love the story about Cinderella, about princes and paupers. That is, about when people from different walks of life find each other. But in reality, the chances of forming any truly successful union that crosses many social boundaries are extremely low. Therefore, each of us has the greatest chance of spending the rest of our lives with those who are similar to ourselves in the greatest number of parameters (except, of course, gender, if we are talking about marriage, but including gender, if we are talking about friends) - by age, by education, by occupation, by interests, and largely by property status, that is, with those who belong to the same class. And the point here is not so much about financial situation, but about common interests, which often directly depend on wealth. Young people, when they meet, may not think that they are making some useful economic connections or that they are resolving some issues with the inheritance of land, property, and so on. At this moment, it is important for them to have common topics for conversation, it is important to listen to the same music, read the same books. That is, we, as a rule, choose life partners and friends according to the call of our hearts. But in most cases, it turns out that people with a similar economic situation also feel that they have kindred spirits. If we look closely at an established capitalist society, we will find that its economic strata correspond to different educational levels and different consumption patterns, based on which we draw conclusions about personality similarities.
There was such a famous French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who described France as a system of class reproduction, built on the fact that it is not wealth that is inherited, but cultural capital that is passed on from generation to generation, and only then it turns into wealth.

Bourdieu came to the conclusion that high culture is a tool for drawing social boundaries.
When high culture in our understanding is just taking shape - it did not exist in the Middle Ages - then only people who have a lot of free time and money can consume its benefits. The peasants have no time to teach their children to read and write, and the urban bourgeoisie generally have no time for exposure to high culture. Then the opportunities for cultural participation seem to grow, but it turns out that some layers still participate in this process much more actively than others, and, as Bourdieu shows, these are primarily those who come from hereditarily rich families, and these families are not eroded, remaining endogamous - their children usually marry other similar children, simply because the boys and girls from these families have something to talk about with each other. Yes, at least about opera music, which they were tormented with since childhood!
But, for example, some successful IT specialists, despite the fact that these are also, to put it mildly, not poor people, have very little chance of entering this environment. They spent a long time learning useful things, worked hard, and had no time for opera. Although in France, says Bourdieu, the first concern of the new rich will be to ensure that their children enter into an appropriate environment. It turns out that, according to Bourdieu, our entire high culture is created and reproduced due to the fact that it is a very convenient social tool. People often ask if this has anything to do with Russia - we all have in mind the “new Russians” from the 90s, who were definitely not the cultural elite. But, surprisingly, research shows that in former socialist societies, on average, the intelligentsia survived the crisis with fewer losses - it was difficult for everyone, but it was a little easier for them than others - and that intellectual families remained an endogamous group, albeit not the richest, but according to Russian quite prosperous by standards, if judged not only by income, life expectancy or criminal risks.

- Sociology helps you look at life philosophically...

One of the classics of sociology, Emile Durkheim, believed that sociology is the highest empirical, truly scientific variety of philosophy, since, among other things, it answers the questions: “What is the meaning of life?” and “What is happiness?” Durkheim associated this concept with social connections. And, it must be said, modern research, in general, confirms the correctness of these conclusions. They say that the more friends a person has, the more happy he feels.

Well, I wouldn't rush to such conclusions. Practice shows that rich, career-successful people have more friends than poor and unsuccessful people. Alas. And the point here, again, is not that people make friends with rich people for selfish reasons. Successful people attract people because they are easy to be around, because they don’t complain about life, because they don’t need to constantly show sympathy, and so on. In addition, a wealthy person is able to provide a lot of small services and thereby evoke a sincere feeling of gratitude. That is, wealthy people win here too. Of course, the connection here is two-way - not only are the rich easier to make friends, but also people with a large number of friends easily find, for example, a new good job if they have lost their old one. Sociologists will call this the conversion of social capital into economic capital and vice versa.
So the immediate best predictor of happiness is the number of close friends you have. But this kind of happiness, even if you can’t buy it, then money has something to do with its acquisition. According to research conducted over the past decades, residents of countries with high levels of GDP per capita feel the happiest. Well, and maybe also Latin American Catholics.

- Tell me, how objective are street surveys?

Polls that deal with elections, for example, are quite reliable. The point here is that in developed democracies people have a good idea of ​​why such polls are conducted, they know that the results will be published in the press, so they answer honestly in order to increase the chances of success of their candidate and increase his rating. That is, people understand that the poll is a kind of rehearsal for the real elections and advertise who they will vote for.
The situation is much worse with surveys on more abstract topics. For example, about values. The sociologist does not know how a person who was asked “whether money is a serious value for you” will reason. There are a dozen ways to approach understanding the answer to this question - one person decides that since he chose a career that made him rich, then money is probably important; the second will think that since he spends a lot of time earning them, then they are significant, and the third will think that since he constantly thinks about them, then they are significant. But these could be three completely different people.

You said that election polls are mostly correct. But, for example, no one predicted Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

This is definitely a failure. The only thing that can justify sociologists here is that the vote gap between Clinton and Trump was minimal. They reached the finish line, as they say, neck and neck, and the main mistakes were not related to the polls, but to how the results of these polls were subsequently processed. To eliminate factors associated with respondents’ different readiness to participate in elections (say, a person says that he supports Clinton, but most likely will not vote - should his vote be taken into account when making a forecast?) and with different readiness to answer sociologists’ questions ( in general, the higher the education, the higher the willingness to talk about oneself) different weights are introduced for different categories of respondents. In 2016, it turned out that the procedures used in previous years did not work. The error in absolute values ​​was small, but the effect was catastrophic.

There are several promising directions. One of them is related to the large volume of new data, which is very easy to operate. There are, for example, millions of accounts on social networks that generally give a very complete picture of cultural or political life - especially as regards the younger age group. It is more difficult with the older age group, because there is a fairly clear social stratification. If a person is about fifty years old and has a page on a popular social network, then this person has most likely written and read a lot in his life. That is, a researcher in this age group is very likely to have an account, but his peer driver, on the contrary, is very unlikely to have one.

- What are your plans for cooperation with the Immanuel Kant IKBFU?

I hope that our joint work will be fruitful. In particular, the possibility of organizing on the basis of IKBFU was discussed. I. Kant, a series of regular seminars with the participation of famous sociologists studying all the topics we talked about - social and cultural capital in Russian and European societies, borders, prospects for using social networks as a research tool.

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Scientific knowledge had the status of the official Soviet religion because there was the only true Marxist-Leninist teaching, which, based on scientific ideas regarding everything, predicted the future development of society, the victory of communism and everything else that it predicted. And from this point of view, science really occupied a very important place in official mythology and ideology. True, this was rather a headache for science, because science categorically refused to supply what was built into this picture of the world. There was economics, there was demography, there was history, which produced inconvenient data, there was biology, which also created some anomalies around itself. Therefore, it turned out that knowledge, on the one hand, had to be officially integrated into Soviet ideology, and on the other hand, it regularly turned out that because of this it became a problem.

The official ideology lies in the normative sphere, in the moral sphere. It may contain some ideas from political philosophy, but certainly not from microbiology or genetics. But in the Soviet Union it turned out that all this was also somehow tied into a single picture of the world, so in order to prevent this picture of the world from falling apart, it was necessary to intervene in different scientific fields.

However, the area of ​​control, the area in which the primacy of party philosophy was recognized, was gradually narrowed. The great discussion that freed the physical and mathematical sciences from dialectical materialism took place while Stalin was still alive, in the late 40s and early 50s. This was connected with the atomic bomb. And after Lysenko, it became clear that it was better to keep one’s hands away from biology.

When everything collapsed, it turned out that there were ardent communists, but their fractions of a percent were much smaller than party members. Everyone else happily began to master what they had always wanted, but in the Soviet Union it was impossible. Astrology has blossomed. One of the first products sold in cooperative newsstands was various astrological forecasts.

“The elephant has nothing to debate with Moska!” - United Russia deputy Boris Reznik referred to the unprecedented advantage of the party in power. And the head of the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), Alexander Oslon, explained that there is and cannot be any all-Russian system of falsifications for the United Russia party: there is no proper local loyalty, but the exorbitant ratings for Putin’s list are correct and true. The choice is this: believe the Kremlin sociologist contractor and accept the deputy’s logic, or still believe your own eyes, as well as the experience of recent years.

In the spring, election participants knew about a direct order from above to let the party in power and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation into the Moscow Regional Duma. Then observers from the SPS, Yabloko and A Just Russia exposed hundreds of cases of manipulation and falsification: from military units moving from precinct to precinct, to blatant stuffing when members of election commissions were caught in the act. As a result, the Socialist-Revolutionaries entered the Moscow Regional Duma with a scandal, and the right-wingers fell short of half a percent. The victims are suing, proving the illegitimacy of the elections. (Similar stories occurred in March in five more regions).

If in one province the bureaucracy is capable of organizing systemic falsification, then why is this not possible throughout the country? A comparative analysis of survey data from the Association of Regional Sociological Centers (ARSC) in 2003 and the actual results of United Russia showed the extent of election manipulation. In 2003, the poll gave United Russia only 22-25%. And she got about 37. Thus, 12-15% is the bonus that the party in power receives due to its special position, administrative resources and direct fraud. In 2007, United Russia did not weaken: almost all governors became part of the electoral machine, topped the lists, received plans of at least 55%, starting an informal competition for 75% of the votes. Allegedly, with this result, Putin promised to lead United Russia.

According to a study by the ARSC in October 2007, in 19 regions, from 57% in Novgorod to 35% in Moscow and 30% in St. Petersburg were ready to vote for United Russia. The head of the Zircon center, Igor Zadorin, gave a forecast based on a survey (obviously adjusted for administrative resources): 52-55% for the party in power, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the Socialist Revolutionaries and, possibly, the Liberal Democratic Party will also enter the Duma. FOM claims: 56% of those who intend to participate in the December elections are ready to vote for United Russia, 8% for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, 6% for the LDPR, 4% for A Just Russia, 1% each for the APR , "Yabloko" and SPS.

It would seem that the state machine, armed with the figures of loyal sociologists and using them to zombify the electorate, has nothing to fear. Why are there reports from everywhere about administrative pressure? Yabloko, A Just Russia and even the Liberal Democratic Party have problems, which can also be attributed to the “competition” of governors. But the arrests of newspaper circulation by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, carried out throughout Russia, which paralyzed the SPS campaign, were only within the power of the federal government.

Meanwhile, besides propaganda sociology, there is another science. They began to “damage” the SPS after a leak from VTsIOM about a rating of 5.2%. In ARSC surveys, the SPS rating in October ranges from 8% in Perm to 6% in Chelyabinsk and 5% in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Agree that this is not 1%! Moreover, Apple is not hopeless either. Even before the start of the November campaign, the party had 6% in Moscow and Chelyabinsk, and a solid 3-4% in other cities. So it is no coincidence that the authorities raised the barrier to 7%.

Back in the spring, I wrote that the Kremlin’s main target would not be the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, but any the fifth party that has some chances of getting into the Duma. It deprives Gryzlov and his associates of a simple majority. Actually, during fair elections, “United Russia” did not get it at all, let alone the constitutional majority that is now planned!

But the goal is precisely two-thirds of the seats. Hence the “absolute weapon” - Putin at the top of the list, and the operations to collapse “A Just Russia” from the inside, and pitting the Socialist Revolutionaries against the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and the endless forecasts of the same sociologists and agitators that “old man” Zhirinovsky will not overcome 7%. The command to kill everyone came after the rise in food prices, when the ratings of United Russia began to fluctuate. The “Putin effect” at the top of the list was offset by the loss of 5% of votes, sources familiar with closed regional studies report.

The role of the especially persecuted fifth party went to the right, not even because the offended leaders of the Union of Right Forces - already without Chubais - started talking about Putin’s cult of personality and his course to return to the USSR, but because of their real rating. The pension reform program “like in the West” proposed in the seized millions of newspaper copies could attract the missing one and a half to two percent of the votes of the older generation.

There is confidence that if citizens, paralyzed by the forecasts of “sociologists” about a two-party Duma, do not come to the elections, their blank ballots will be used.

The desired 75 fake percent “for” will turn “United Russia” into a party of Asian plutocracy (such were the Kuomintang, Golkar, the Party of the Right Path), into the CPSU - corrupt dignitaries, and Putin will be given an indulgence to turn into Kemal, Suharto or Chun Doo-hwan, and , perhaps also in Stalin's modern era.

Library patrons are a fairly plausible proxy for the rest of the population. There is no feeling that these are some radically different people. Judging by the surveys, it cannot be said that people go to libraries a lot because they do not have money, and as soon as they have money, they start buying books from the store. Oddly enough, income rather has a positive effect on the ability to go to the library. If you compare the preferences of library readers with the lists of the most popular books in bookstores or online stores, you can see that they are almost the same. The most published author is Dontsova. Dontsova again has the largest number of book downloads. And finally, whose books are most often borrowed from the library? Dontsova again.

This does not answer the riddle: if library patrons are so similar to everyone else, then what is the difference? Why do some people go to district libraries, and some say that they have never been there in their lives, although these people seem to be similar in age, education, income and occupation.<...>

One of the objectives of the study was to understand whether good taste exists in modern Russia as a social phenomenon - whether there are groups in society that define themselves through taste, which they consider good, and through contrasting their tastes with the taste of other groups, which they consider bad. That is, the task of the study was to understand whether cultural snobbery exists in society as a group-forming characteristic, and if so, which groups demonstrate it.

At the level of popular belief, there has been an intelligentsia in Russia for centuries that defines itself through education, the occupation of certain professions (since the time of Chekhov, doctors have been considered classical intellectuals), and also through “culture” - good manners, good taste, especially in relation to art. Our task was to understand whether we could really find evidence that all these social characteristics - education, “intelligent” professions - correspond to some characteristic preferences in literature.<...>

Among library readers, in general, there are more people with higher education (three with higher education to one with secondary special education), however, among the 200 most popular authors we will find those whom people with a university diploma and a technical school diploma will take with approximately equal frequency (Yulia Shilova), and those whom people without higher education will not take at all (Fowles). The picture generally corresponds to the idea that there is an intelligentsia, whose representatives have higher education and turn their nose up at the conventional Shilova. However, when we look at what the tastes of individual professional groups are, we are in for surprises.

Particularly astonishing is the situation of two groups which, theoretically, should be the core of the intelligentsia - university teachers and doctors. Teachers will hire Remarque and Marquez less often than waitresses and individual entrepreneurs. For a doctor it is four times more likely to take Dontsova than for a translator, and for a translator it is two times more likely to take a generalized Pushkin. Common ideas about the real intelligentsia, consisting of doctors, teachers and librarians, turn out to be something far from reality.<...>

There is a feeling that as people get older, they stop investing in self-development and start reading simpler literature. Among readers aged 25, Dostoevsky is more popular than Akunin. Among people aged 60, Akunin is one and a half times more popular than Dostoevsky. One can assume that they have already simply read Dostoevsky, but what is confusing is that they do not read authors from the same author set. Instead, we see a switch to modern Russian prose that is largely entertaining. This picture, of course, clearly contradicts the philistine idea that generations have grown up devoid of culture, and the true intelligentsia are St. Petersburg old women.