The sociological perspective stresses the social contexts in which people live. It examines how these contexts influence people's lives. At the center of the sociological perspective is the question of how groups influence people, especially how people are influenced by their society-a group of people who share a culture and a territory. To find out why people do what they do, sociologists look at social location, the corners in life that people occupy because of their place in a society. Sociologists look at how jobs, income, education, gender, race-ethnicity, and age affect people's ideas and behavior. Consider, for example, how being identified with a group called females or with a group called males when you were growing up has shaped your ideas of who you are. Growing up as a female or a male has influenced not only how you feel about yourself but also your ideas of what you should attain in life and how you relate to others. Even your gestures and the way you laugh come from your identifying with one of these groups.Sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) put it this way: "The sociological imagination [perspective] enables us to grasp the connection between history and biography." By history, Mills meant that each society is located in a broad stream of events. This gives each society specific characteristics-such as its ideas about what roles are proper for men and women. By biography, Mills referred to people's experiences within a specific historical setting, which gives them their orientations to life. In short, you don't do what you do because you inherited some internal mechanism, such as instincts. Rather, external influences-your experiences-become part of your thinking and motivation. Or we can put it this way: At the center of what you do and how you think is the society in which you grow up, and your particular location in that society. Consider a newborn baby. As you know, if we were to take the baby away from its U.S. parents and place it with the Yanomamo Indians in the jungles of South America, his or her first words would not be in English. You also know that the child would not think like an American. The child would not grow up wanting credit cards, for example, or designer clothes, a car, a cell phone, an iPod, and video games. He or she would take his or her place in Yanomamo society-perhaps as a food gatherer, a hunter, or a warrior-and would not even know about the world left behind at birth. And, whether male or female, the child would grow up assuming that it is natural to want many children, not debating whether to have one, two, or three children. If you have been thinking along with me-and I hope you have-you should be thinking about how your social groups have shaped your ideas and desires. Over and over in this text, you will see the way you look at the world is the result of your exposure to specific human groups. I think you will enjoy the process of self-discovery that sociology offers.