Sociology
149 articlesNovak Djokovic and the Healing Water Crystals
The story of the tennis star spotlights the pseudoscience that bedevils science and society.
Lessons for a Young Scientist
A masterclass on what science needs now.
The Attack of Zombie Science
They look like scientific papers. But they’re distorting and killing science.
What Makes Group Decisions Go Wrong. And Right.
Why intellectual laziness doesn’t have to lead to groupthink.
How to Build a Society for All to Enjoy
To make social structures more equal, we can’t blind ourselves to genetics.
We Have to Talk About Doubt
How to tell the difference between scientific and conspiratorial skepticism.
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, […]
When a Good Scientist Is the Wrong Source
How a bad “fact” helped the lab-leak hypothesis go viral.
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.
Science Isn’t Here for Your Mommy Shaming
When people sensationalize research, parents pay the price.
Gaia, the Scientist
What if the first woman scientist was simply the first woman?
The New Taboos
By re-imagining ancient practices, Pacific Islanders are charting a new course for ocean conservation
We Need More Feminist Dads
It’s not easy to overcome the masculine conception of fatherhood.
Why Humans Wage War
War is purposeful and calculating. The more organized we are, the better we get at fighting.
You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends!
The trouble with academia.
A Model for a Just COVID-19 Vaccination Program
The pandemic exposed racial injustice in healthcare. Vaccine distribution must not.
How Eugenics Shaped Statistics
Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers.
The Self-Driving Car Is a Red Herring
Ghost roads of robot workhorses will power cities through the shocks of the 21st century.
Thank You for the 7 PM Clapping, But Camaraderie Is Needed More Than Ever
Handwashing, mask-wearing and physical distancing are the easy part. The true challenge is to face the pain and suffering that exists all around us and know that doing so will not break us.Illustration by Blinx / Shutterstock COVID has reached peak unsexiness. The thought occurs to me as I scroll through previously lively physician COVID forums where […]
The Problem in the Lab
A new film shines a light on the discrimination women often face in science practice.
How Rising Education for Women Is Shaping the Global Population
In their 1968 book The Population Bomb, biologists Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne foretold a Malthusian future of famine and disease if humanity failed to control its growth. The Ehrlichs’ warning made sense. At the time, the global population sat at about 3.5 billion, and its rate of growth was 2.1 percent—close to […]
The Anonymous Culture Cops of the Internet
This sort of research can, piece by piece, help reshape the online landscape so it isn’t quite so tribal and awash in misinformation and vitriol.Photograph by Prostock-studio / Shutterstock Giant tech companies and governments largely determine what content is and isn’t allowed online, and their decisions impact billions of people: 55 percent of internet users […]
Sexless in the City
Together, the data imply that the post-pandemic cityscape may be less sexy than the countryside.Photograph by Tero Vesalainen / Shutterstock The pandemic is making its way into every corner of our lives—even the bedroom. While many parts of the world gradually return to normal, the United States still wrestles with the fallout of a mismanaged […]
You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends!
Stuart Ritchie is a Lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London. His new book, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, explains the ideas in this comic, by Zach Weinersmith, in more detail, telling shocking stories of scientific error and misconduct. It also proposes […]
No Country for Old People
The COVID-19 death rate in Sweden has exposed worldwide bias against the elderly.
A Vision of Our Post-Lockdown Future
China’s health codes allow people to resume their lives with confidence. At what cost?
A Window on Africa’s Resilience
Amid one disaster after another, Mozambique rebuilds.
How Science Trumps Denial
Scientists putting their career and health on the line can take heart from Galileo.
Galileo the Science Publicist
Scientists putting their lives on the line can take heart from a great astronomer.
How COVID-19 Will Pass from Pandemic to Prosaic
The final outcome of COVID-19 is still unclear. It will ultimately be decided by our patience and the financial bottom line.Castleski / Shutterstock On January 5, six days after China officially announced a spate of unusual pneumonia cases, a team of researchers at Shanghai’s Fudan University deposited the full genome sequence of the causal virus, […]
Why False Claims About COVID-19 Refuse to Die
Tracking the information zombie apocalypse.
The Pandemic Is Showing Us How to Live with Uncertainty
How to be vigilant and cautious without slamming the panic button.
How Geology Can Ease Your Mind
Take comfort that we live on a very old, durable planet.
The Cultural Distances Between Us
Mapping the world’s psychological traits.
How Single Women Are Changing Society
Thinking out of the nuclear family box.
Lessons for a Young Scientist
A masterclass on what science needs now.
How Freedom Divides
An expert on animal societies on what sets human societies apart.
The Parallel Universes of a Woman in Science
In physics and in life, choice and possibility play against each other.
Humans Are Wired for Goodness
We’re not as bad as the headlines make us out to be.
Why Women Choose Differently at Work
Psychologist Susan Pinker on the role of choice in gender differences in the workplace.
The Woman Who Gave Us the Science of Normal Life
Before Rachel Carson there was Ellen Swallow Richards, MIT’s first female student.
Families of Choice Are Remaking America
Through their networks of friends, singles are strengthening society’s social bonds.
Collective Intelligence Will End Identity-Based Politics
It is possible to imagine, explore, and promote forms of consciousness that enhance awareness as well as dissolve the artificial illusions of self and separate identity.Photo illustration by Shane Taremi / Flickr The Canadian poet Dennis Lee once wrote that the consolations of existence might be improved if we thought, worked, and lived as though […]
Six Degrees of Separation at Burning Man
What our experiment in the desert taught us about social networks and human cooperation.
Why Our Postwar “Long Peace” Is Fragile
You could be forgiven for balking at the idea that our post-World War II reality represents a “Long Peace.” The phrase, given the prevalence of violent conflict worldwide, sounds more like how Obi-wan Kenobi might describe the period “before the dark times, before the Empire.” And yet, the “Long Peace” has been a long-argued over […]
Why We Need Court Jesters in Space
Behavioral scientists explain why Mars missions need humor.
Wikipedia and the Wisdom of Polarized Crowds
A lesson in how to break out of filter bubbles.
The Well-Meaning Bad Ideas Spoiling a Generation
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt on politics, morality, and the coddling of the American mind.
Watch and See: The Medium Really Is the Message
How communication technologies shaped the arts and sciences.
Why We Should Think Twice About Colonizing Space
There are lots of reasons why colonizing space seems compelling. The popular astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson argues that it would stimulate the economy and inspire the next generation of scientists. Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX, argues that “there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multiplanetary…to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event […]
Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think
Two philosophers of science diagnose our age of fake news.
Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think
Two philosophers of science diagnose our age of fake news.
Why Poverty Is Like a Disease
Emerging science is putting the lie to American meritocracy.
How We’ll Forget John Lennon
Our culture has two types of forgetting.
5 Places Where People Slow Down Aging
Around the world, people are living longer, healthier lives than ever before. One area this is most visible is in the number of centenarians, or people living to the age of 100. In 1840, there were 90 centenarians in the United States—one for every 189,000 people—according to United States Census Bureau records. Today, there are […]
The Problem with Scientific Credit
Our algorithm said a courtesy driver should have won the Nobel Prize.
Geology Makes You Time-Literate
A scientist tells us how her field instills timefulness.
The Euclidean Metrics of Trump’s Twitter Account
How online personalities are quantified and compared.
Thomas Kuhn Threw an Ashtray at Me
Why Errol Morris is still outraged by the famous philosopher of science.
Eating for Peace
How cuisine bridges cultures.
What a Russian Smile Means
How culture and history make American and Russian smiles different.
Does Theranos Mark the Peak of the Silicon Valley Bubble?
John Carreyrou talks to Nautilus about the lessons of a $1 billion fraud.
We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
Our discrete cultural universes are not easily bridged.Inca Princess – La Gran Ñusta Mama Occollo (early 1800s) / Denver Art Museum / Wikicommons If they’re honest and humble enough, people who study societies that existed in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans will admit that they don’t really understand those societies. They’ll know the facts about […]
How My Nobel Dream Bit the Dust
My team thought we’d proved cosmological inflation. We were wrong.
Why Women Choose Differently at Work
Psychologist Susan Pinker on the role of choice in gender differences in the workplace.
How We Make Gods
Taking lessons from the rise and fall of divinity in online games.
Communities
There’s an easy narrative about the fracturing of the modern community: Falling marriage rates produce more single-person households, digital technologies disrupt in-person interactions, and identity politics cast one group against another. Our centuries-long devotion to the idea of the individual, it seems, has gone too far. But, as sociologist Gary Marx observed 20 years ago, […]
Why Hasn’t the World Been Destroyed in a Nuclear War Yet?
In broadest terms, the danger facing the world is that the superpowers have institutionalized a major nuclear showdown.Photograph by U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps / Wikipedia When opposing nations gained access to nuclear weapons, it fundamentally changed the logic of war. You might say that it made questions about war more cleanly logical—with nuclear-armed belligerents, […]
Your City Has a Gender and It’s Male
Why city designers are increasingly thinking about the female perspective.
Your City Has a Gender and It’s Male
Why city designers are increasingly thinking about the female perspective.
Would Twitter Ruin Bee Democracy?
Simple-majority democracy is used by many animals. But they don’t have social media.
Why Garbage Science Gets Published
Predatory journals keep the pseudoscience flowing.
Love, Death, and Other Forgotten Traditions
What we don’t tell our children.
When Did Tribalism Get To Be So Fashionable?
“I against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.”—Nafisa Haji, The Sweetness of Tears Last month, I published an article on Nautilus called “Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction?”. It was a meditation on a series of computer experiments in the study of Prisoner’s […]
Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction?
What computers teach us about getting along.
What If Scientists Were Celebrities?
GE’s marketing chief speaks about inspiring new science and technology workers.
Why You Need Emoji
Emojis are the body language of the digital age.
Why New York Is Just an Average City
Understanding any city requires understanding how all cities scale.
The Inflated Debate Over Cosmic Inflation
Why the majority of physicists are on one side of a recent exchange of letters.
The Oldest Problem in American Prisons
U.S. prisons aren’t prepared for an inmate population that is getting older and sicker.
The Case for Less Solidarity
The surprising effects of reducing empathy for your own ingroup.
The Hidden Sexism of How We Think About Risk
If men take more risks than women, it’s not because of biology.
The Oldest Problem in American Prisons
U.S. prisons aren’t prepared for an inmate population that is getting older and sicker.
How to Solve Oncology’s Labor Crisis
Cancer doctors are overworked, retire early, and attract fewer recruits than other specialties, leaving the rising cancer-patient population vulnerable. Here’s what must be done.
Found: The World’s Favorite Number
One nice thing about favorite numbers is that there are so many to choose from.Image by Ecelop / Shutterstock Go ahead, admit it. Like a lot of people, you have a favorite number. Maybe you’re not as extreme as Sheldon Cooper, the arch-nerd character on television’s Big Bang Theory, who loves the number 73: “73 […]
Are We Being Too Superficial About the Gender Problem in Science?
Hope Jahren, a geobiologist at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, is “very cynical about efforts to get girls into science.”Photograph by GSK / Flickr Why should the share of women in a given occupation affect its average pay? It’s a curious inverse relationship. Census data show that when the former increases, the latter decreases—when […]
Retiring Retirement
A growing portion of the elderly look and act anything but.
The Race Problem in Breast Cancer Screening
Genetic cancer screening is a microcosm of racial disparities in breast cancer care.
Why These Researchers Are Drawn to the World’s Edge
The joy and toll of doing remote science.
How Single Women Are Changing Society
Thinking out of the nuclear family box.
Minority Groups Lose When They Collaborate with Power
Cailin O’Connor—a philosopher, scientist, and mathematician—may not enjoy tense situations, but they fascinate her. Last year, in a Huffington Post article titled “Game Theory and The Walking Dead,” she wrote that the zombie show’s “plot lines are rich with strategic tension.” She goes on to analyze three of what she calls “the most strategically compelling […]
How We Got From Doc Brown to Walter White
The changing image of the TV scientist.
Why Presidential Elections Aren’t Really About the Candidates
Political pundits have had some explaining to do since the Presidential election. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver and other analysts have come under fire for assigning a high likelihood to Hillary Clinton’s victory—their predictions ranged from a 70 percent to 99 percent chance of her winning the Electoral College. Clinton’s loss prompted people to question the trustworthiness […]
Why Fake Data When You Can Fake a Scientist?
Making up names and CVs is one of the latest tricks to game scientific metrics.
Why Are US Presidential Elections So Close?
Even this one.
Don’t Fall Prey to Selection Bias in Your Career Choice
It’s your last year of college and you’re trying to answer the dreaded question of what comes next. Whether your major once seemed incredibly broad or totally specialized, you’ve realized that the path ahead is still wide open. It’s a huge decision, of course, so you want to make sure you’re fully informed. You’ve thought […]
What Counts as Science?
The arXiv preprint service is trying to answer an age-old question.
To Rescue Democracy, Go Outside
Real spaces, not digital ones, will fix our politics.
The Uncanny Symbiosis of Modern Religion and Sports
There is a church in Argentina called Iglesia Maradona. In this church, God is football—soccer—and its prophet is the renowned player Diego Armando Maradona. Founded in 1998, the year after the star’s retirement, the Church of Iglesia Maradona now has some 120,000 members worldwide, who bear its insignia D10S—a portmanteau of Dios, the Spanish word […]
Four Ball Games You’ve Never Heard Of
From bouncy castle soccer to foot golf, we are still inventing new sports.
Stadiums and Other Sacred Cows
Why questioning the value of sports is seen as blasphemy.
Are Fantasy Sports Really Gambling?
Fantasy sports are more skill-based than real ones.
The Lessons of a Ghost Planet
Vulcan shows us science beyond the scientific method.
Ingenious: Nathaniel Comfort
The science historian talks to Nautilus.
Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese
The stories have become all too familiar in Japan, though people often do their best to ignore them. An elderly or middle-aged person, usually a man, is found dead, at home in his apartment, frequently right in his bed. It has been days, weeks, or even months since he has had contact with another human […]
Why Is Biomedical Research So Conservative?
Funding, incentives, and skepticism of theory make some scientists play it safe.
Selfishness Is Learned
We tend to be cooperative—unless we think too much.
What Do Women Want in a Political Career?
On New Year’s Day, perhaps as a way to celebrate, the National Women’s Political Caucus endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. The NWPC, based in Washington, D.C., is a grassroots organization aiming to increase the presence of women in politics—well under one quarter of our nation’s politicians are women. Paula Willmarth, the NWPC’s Vice President of […]
Retiring Retirement
A growing portion of the elderly look and act anything but.
Retiring Retirement
A growing portion of the elderly look and act anything but.
Are There Barbarians at the Gates of Science?
The increasingly complex border between science and society is changing both.
Why Physics Is Not a Discipline
Physics is not just what happens in the Department of Physics.
Parents Shouldn’t Spy on Their Kids
Apps that make it easy to invade kids’ privacy are a recipe for arrested development.
Divorce Rates for Different Groups
We know when people usually get married. We know who never marries. Finally, it’s time to look at the other side: divorce and remarriage. The chart below shows cumulative rates for different groups of people in the United States, based on 2014 American Community Survey, 1-year estimates. For example, by age 60, among the employed in 2014 […]
Why Do Taxonomists Write the Meanest Obituaries?
The open nature of the science of classification virtually guarantees fights.
Why Are Wheelchairs More Stigmatized Than Glasses?
Improving the lives of disabled people is more than an engineering project.
How Single Women Are Changing Society
Bella DePaulo never fantasized about a dream wedding or being a bridesmaid. Instead, she saw herself as “single at heart,” pursuing intellectual refinement, friendship, and solitude as a young psychologist. Still, she had internalized the popular idea that married people were happier and healthier than the unmarried, and took her own pleasant experience to be […]
Families of Choice Are Remaking America
Through their networks of friends, singles are strengthening society’s social bonds.
Families of Choice Are Remaking America
Through their networks of friends, singles are strengthening society’s social bonds.
She’ll Text Me, She’ll Text Me Not
The science of waiting in modern courtship.
Is Facebook Luring You Into Being Depressed?
Social media encourages us to follow those we envy.
Here’s Why Millennials Really Aren’t That Different
Shutterstock/Rawpixel.com By the year 2020 five separate generations will occupy the workplace: Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen 2020. In just five years, the newest person hired at a company could be working right next to her great grandfather. This half-century age gap is unprecedented. And with Millennials now the biggest proportion of […]
Let’s Play War
Could war games replace the real thing?
Have We Hit Peak Whiteness?
Our obsession with cleanliness is running afoul of scientific reality.
How Pantone Colors Your World
Why your wardrobe is wine-hued this year.
We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
When Italian authorities confirmed that James Gandolfini had just died in Rome of an apparent heart attack in 2013, many reports in American media fronted the fact that Gandolfini’s body would be autopsied, “as required by Italian law.” They emphasized this news for understandable reasons—an autopsy on someone who died in medical care seemed unusual. […]
Why Hasn’t the World Been Destroyed in a Nuclear War Yet?
The precariousness of game theory.
Blessed by Science: How Genetic Medicine Changed a Strictly Religious Community
A group of Hasidic Jews walking the streets of Brooklyndiluvi.com Anna i Adria via Wikipedia In 1983, Yosef Eckstein an ultra-orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn, New York, had reason to be happy: His wife had just given birth to their fifth child. But the couple’s happiness was short-lived: The child was soon diagnosed with Tay–Sachs disease, […]
Casual Sex May Be Improving America’s Marriages
One-night stands and friends with benefits are just what your brain ordered.
Why We Keep Playing the Lottery
Blind to the mathematical odds, we fall to the marketing gods.
How the Mormons Conquered America
The success of the Mormon religion is a study in social adaptation.
How the Mormons Conquered America
The success of the Mormon religion is a study in social adaptation.
Math Shall Set You Free—From Envy
How to do divorce, divestment, and death properly.
Stress Gives You Daughters, Sons Make You Liberal
We affect our children’s gender, and it affects us back.
Stress Gives You Daughters, Sons Make You Liberal
We affect our children’s gender, and it affects us back.
Best of 2013: The Hannah Montana Hypothesis
Does the Fame Virus plague our youth, and is multimedia to blame?
For Billions of People, “Wasting Time” Makes Little Sense
Monks relaxing in Sikkim, Indiaflowcomm via Flickr Robert Levine, a social psychologist at California State University, Fresno, will always remember a conversation he had with an exchange student from Burkina Faso, in Western Africa. Levine had complained to the student that he’d wasted the morning “yakking in a café” instead of doing his work. The […]
How the Law Protects the Idea of a Famous Person
A woman walks in to the room. She is wearing a white dress and has a mole over her bright red lips. She could be anybody, but you might have instantly guessed she was Marilyn Monroe. For every famous person, there is a handful of traits that we use to recognize them. Caricaturists and comedians […]
The Meme as Meme
Why do things go viral, and should we care?
The Meme as Meme
Why do things go viral, and should we care?
The Meme as Meme
Why do things go viral, and should we care?
The Hannah Montana Hypothesis
Does the Fame Virus plague our youth, and is multimedia to blame?
Famous for Being Indianapolis
How cities are like Kim Kardashian.
Famous for Being Indianapolis
How cities are like Kim Kardashian.
How Uncertainty Can Help Fight Science Denialism
Why is a statement like “vaccines cause autism” persuasive or not? Each side of the issue will no doubt claim some support, but if we know anything about psychology, it’s that facts don’t always settle an argument. Those who claim a link between vaccines and autism—without any evidence to support this claim—are just as certain […]
Giving Up Paradise
Lies, high heels, and piety.
Parenthood, the Great Moral Gamble
The decision to have a child is more ethically uncertain than you might realize.
Parenthood, the Great Moral Gamble
The decision to have a child is more ethically uncertain than you might realize.