Sociology
126 articles-
The Physics of Crowds
Why dangerous crowds behave the way they do.
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The Pandemic Your Grandparents Forgot
Sixty years later, will anybody have heard of COVID-19?
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How Can Science Be More Creative?
One question for Ruth Morgan, a professor of crime and forensic sciences at University College London.
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Who Should Make the Rules That Govern AI?
One question for Laura Weidinger and Iason Gabriel, research scientists at Google DeepMind.
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How Can We Discourage Mass Shootings?
One question for Maurizio Porfiri and Rayan Succar, dynamical systems engineers at New York University.
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The Misguided History of Racial Medicine
An evolutionary biologist on the harm still being done by unsubstantiated beliefs.
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Where Are the Black Female Doctors?
Representation of Black women in medicine remains stuck in the 1800s.
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Yes, Your Loud Neighbors Are Driving You Bonkers
Why are we so sensitive to residential noise?
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Test Your Trivia Knowledge for Science
Identify these people and help chart how they will be remembered or forgotten in history.
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Is COVID-19 Becoming Less Polarizing?
One question for Sara Constantino, a psychologist and public policy researcher at Northeastern University.
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Why Do Americans Own More Guns Per Capita Than Anyone Else?
One question for Jennifer Carlson, a sociologist at the University of Arizona.
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The Wisdom of Gay Albatrosses
Same-sex couples are everywhere in the animal kingdom. Only humans make a big deal about it.
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Do International Treaties Work?
One question for Mathieu Poirier, an assistant professor of social epidemiology at York University.
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Novak Djokovic and the Healing Water Crystals
The story of the tennis star spotlights the pseudoscience that bedevils science and society.
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The Attack of Zombie Science
They look like scientific papers. But they’re distorting and killing science.
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What Makes Group Decisions Go Wrong. And Right.
Why intellectual laziness doesn’t have to lead to groupthink.
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How to Build a Society for All to Enjoy
To make social structures more equal, we can’t blind ourselves to genetics.
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We Have to Talk About Doubt
How to tell the difference between scientific and conspiratorial skepticism.
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What Misspellings Reveal About Cultural Evolution
Stable cultural forms do not have to result from close replication; they can emerge continuously out of subtle changes.Illustration by VectorMine / Shutterstock Something about me must remind people of a blind 17th-century poet. My last name, Miton, is French, yet people outside of France invariably misspell it as “Milton”—as in the famed English author, […]
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When a Good Scientist Is the Wrong Source
How a bad “fact” helped the lab-leak hypothesis go viral.
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How to Take Back the Power to Change the World
Redford Center Stories Grand Prize-winning film spotlights ways even a tiny ripple can change the narrative.