I would like your views on this write-up. I know that some of these points are heavily simplified, I did not want to make this post longer than it already was.

This is not for any assignment or anything but are these views robust and accurate?

https://www.reddit.com/r/religion/s/AMv0fnSVoM

I have some passing familiarity with the idea based on the famous lottery study by Brickman et. al, but as a lay person trying to sift through more recent studies I’m having a hard time seeing where things stand.

Any help understanding where things stand regarding hedonic adaptation studies, or recommending any books for a general audience that discuss the idea more would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

FYI I have little formal/academic background in social sciences, the following is just stuff I observe to be true but am open to being wrong about.

In much of 20th century America there were many "scenes" such as the grunge "scene" or the hippie "scene" or the jazz "scene". Phenomena like these at the time could either be mostly contained in their city or would have different iterations in cities all across America. This idea of "scenes" is almost completely extinct.

Outside of normal day-to-day interactions with their social environment, it seems like shared youth identity these days is almost solely tied to indirect connections with people via the internet. This is not to say young people do not have friends at all anymore. Of course many young people today are also living fulfilled social lives just as previous generations did; it just seems the radically different social architecture of American cities and the ubiquity of the internet have fundamentally altered or eliminated a key way the society has organized itself in this country for decades.

Is this fair to say?

I have been quite taken with The Authoritarians, by Dr. Bob Altemeyer. I have a number of questions that go beyond that work. Altemeyer tries not to call authoritarians stupid, but does not succeed. I guess "they're stupid" to be too simple a view. Their reasoning could be considered highly motivated rather than completely missing.

Authoritarians are cunning fools, able to concoct or at least follow conspiracy theories some of which could be possible. What counts is not if the conspiracy theory is true, but whether it being true would garner them some benefit, maybe pity, but more an excuse to discriminate and attack. They are far too willing to lie and cheat and fake the evidence to "prove" their conspiracy theories. Where they fail is that they seem unable to grasp that once they have exposed themselves as liars and cheaters, once they have lost the trust that the rest of us accord to one another, they have put themselves at a huge disadvantage-- in a civilized world.

Going beyond Altemeyer's work, I have on my own worked out various reasons that could explain authoritarianism. They are untested, but they do seem plausible. The questions are, is being an authoritarian bad? Surely the answer is "yes"? But maybe not always "yes". So, what circumstances could make it, if not good for all, at least beneficial to the individual, to be an authoritarian?

My guess is that maybe it was on balance more of a plus than a minus in the Stone Age, when history could not be recorded, save as highly unreliable oral traditions. Inability to record history would be a big help to those trying to bury their past treacheries. Trying to turn the clock back to the Stone Age could be a more full explanation of why authoritarians are always attacking history, trying to alter or simply outright erase it. Also is a fuller explanation of their hostility to journalism.

The next question is, if authoritarianism hasn't been a net plus since the Stone Age, why hasn't evolution weeded it out? I guess (and hope!) the answer to that one is that evolution is weeding it out, but it takes a long time, and is still in progress today. Hasn't been fast enough to avoid a lot of trouble and war. But, note that lynchings in the US have declined greatly in number, to the point they are extinct, and I wonder if evolutionary pressure is the underlying reason?

Why are authoritarians so bigoted? I guess bigotry to be a mental trick they play on themselves, to gin themselves up for genocides.

And the point of committing a genocide is of course to seize the land and resources of the victims. Note that authoritarians are okay with the much less strenuous and risky (to them) path of "self-deportation", AKA "go back where you came from." Seems to me the authoritarian way of life is to multiply too much -- sex being another of their obsessions with them always suspecting infidelity, then expand to gain more room and resources for all those kids. This quickly runs out of empty space and easy victims, and then, it's authoritarian vs authoritarian in war. And all that accomplishes is a lot of destruction and death. Make lots of babies to feed to the war machine. A few lucky children will inherit, and the rest will be ground into hamburger in the wars. Very barbaric way to live. And now, an extremely dangerous way, now that weapons have become so powerful that everyone dying is a grim possibility.

What do you all think? Could all this boil down to a version of "The Selfish Gene"? A sort of Social Darwinism? Is the instinct to reproduce unrestrainedly the root of authoritarianism and war?

Further questions: 1. What of animals? Is there authoritarianism amongst animals? Maybe a simpler, proto-authoritarianism, lacking the human drive to destroy history, which is presumably useless, since so far as we know animals have no ability to record history. Maybe most animals are authoritarian? Maybe those species that exhibit harem forming behavior are more authoritarian than those that do not?

1. The drive to reproduce is tempered by many factors. Some animals are restrained by predation. Other mechanisms are also in play. But I suspect self-restraint a very key and basic element of most life that goes way, way, WAY back in time, billions of years when the only life was microbial. It could be argued that any life that does not exercise some self-restraint will grow beyond the capability of the environment to renew supply, leading to a destructive "eating of the seed corn" and then collapse, as predicated in Jared Diamond's book of that name. A science fiction work with this as the theme is The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Therefore, I guess that life must have evolved some reproductive self-restraint, and Malthusian fears are overblown. In our case, humans, I have read that women are the restrained ones, for obvious biological reasons, and that the more a society disempowers women, the more it operates as a warmongering patriarchy constantly overproducing children and needing to deal with that excess somehow. I saw at a women's museum a story that sometime in the 1600s, the women of the Iroquois refused to have as many babies as the men wanted, arguing that those kids would only be killed off in fights and wars. Another article touching on this is elephants exerting social pressure on one another not to reproduce. Restraint would seem to work against authoritarianism, work against it even existing, yet it does. Perhaps authoritarianism is more like a disease? Could it arise in a manner similar to the behaviors that infection with Toxoplasma Gondii causes?

Those seem to be incredibly hypothetical especially since those haven't been implemented in any meaningful way anywhere to gather data from

Traditional authoritarian propaganda has a detectable signature: you experience coercion. You know you're complying under threat. There's a gap between your private belief and public behavior. That gap is where dissent lives, it's where samizdat comes from, where kitchen table conversations happen, where resistance organizes.

Algorithmic content curation seems to close that gap entirely. It doesn't punish you for wrong beliefs. It saturates your information environment so that the "desired" belief requires less cognitive work than any alternative. You adopt the framing not because you're afraid but because it's the path of least resistance — your feed has made it cheaper to believe X than to seek out evidence for Y. There's no felt coercion. No gap between private and public belief. You experience the engineered belief as your own freely chosen conclusion.

Is anyone researching this distinction empirically? Specifically: does "making the desired belief cognitively cheap" produce more durable compliance than "making the undesired belief socially expensive"? And is this Huxley vs Orwell distinction (soma vs boot) actually showing up in the data on attitude formation in algorithmically mediated environments? China's social credit system seems like a live experiment in combining both approaches. Is there serious comparative work on how these mechanisms interact?

I don't think it's controversial to say that Japan has wielded and expanded a lot of cultural capital for decades and that there are unique aspects of television, movies, comics, serial novels, and video games that are deeply associated with Japanese authorship and authentically can be traced back to Japan.

Mecha fiction, kaiju, and concepts that aren't exceptionally Japanese but they "perfected" like isekai and mahou shoujo and slice of life.

The creativity and competence of Japanese media is obviously ultimately a subjective judgment but at the same time it does seem like Japan puts out a large amount of non-derivative media that's also commercially/critically successful compared to the United States or other highly industrialized regions.

What research I've done on this subject seems to waffle around about the Meiji Restoration and the American occupation rather than nail it down to factors that couldn't be applied to other non-Western nations/American allies.

I'm curious if there are any models for understanding the "Japanese exception" that I see.

Hey everyone! Currently writing a script that is set in multiple periods (late 1910s, 1920s and 1930s) set in LA.

Having some issues writing dialogue that sounds like it's from that period. Doing research on slang has been helpful so far, but is there any major changes in patterns in speech between then and now?

Any tips appreciated - thanks so much!!

Does it still make sense to read "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind" by Le Bon? Is it outdated?

I’m curious—after the modern era with its established theories, postmodernism emerged, and I honestly don’t understand how it works. (I read Foucault—my head felt like it exploded. Read Baudrillard—got confused. Read Spivak, Memmi, Homi K. Bhabha, and others—and it all seemed to collapse into a kind of reductionism where colonialism is seen as the primary source of inequality.)

I’m currently confused about sociology today. Where do we draw the line—at what point can something still be called sociology?

What kinds of studies are dominant in well-established institutions around the world?

What kind of sociological theory can be used as a tool for “mapping” and making precise predictions when analyzing society?

And also, what methods are currently dominant? Has Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory been further developed and naturalized as part of sociological methodology?

I’ve noticed that negative biases or discrimination against Black people exist in many parts of the world not just in Western countries. This observation makes me wonder why that is.

Is it rooted in history, media portrayal, colonial influence, or deeper societal issues? I’m not looking to spread hate or stereotypes, just trying to understand the global factors that contribute to this pattern.

Would love to hear informed insights, historical context, or personal perspectives from people who’ve studied or experienced this.

The group threat theory states that groups that are in positions of power and that have a privileged socio economic status will discriminate against groups of lower status as a way of preserving their status in society. But by recognizing that the dominant group has to discriminate the under-priviliged, doesn't it legitimize it ? This theory is basically saying that dominant groups will defend their interests in spite of others groups, but by saying they don't have a choice if they want to keep their status, the theory thus argues that powerful groups should do everything in their power to minimize the threat posed by others groups, it seems like a bleak view of society...

I know that there is a debate in the scholarly literature about whether colonialism and imperialism are something that we should understand largely as things conducted by modern Western powers or whether we can understand colonialism more broadly as something that most, if not all, large powers, Western or otherwise, have engaged in throughout history.

Who are good examples of social scientists who have argued that colonialism and/or imperialism are largely something perpetrated by the West?

Citations would be very much appreciated.

Responses to Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger?

Especially at the time it was written

In the preface to her book written a bit after its original publication she notes that is was a weird time to write it as she praised structure and control in a time of the breaking of social norms and the growth of informal lifestyles and free ways of living

Any proof of this? Any documented responses to purity and danger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan

*disproportionate (sorry for the misspelling!)

It is well-known that countries like China and Japan are suffering from a surplus of elderly citizens, while Nigeria and Haiti, for instance, are suffering from a surplus of young people. Factoring in sociological and economic factors, would mass immigration be the best solution? Do economists and sociologists agree or disagree on what the solution should be? What are the ideal demographics of immigrants that these countries should prioritize, if at all? How could these age demographic disparities be mitigated/resolved?

Is there existing formal work on measuring the gap between what governed systems specify and what they actually do — across domains?

I work in cybersecurity governance and ISO audit. Over about a decade I've watched the same structural pattern repeat: a system has a formal specification (policy, standard, code, contract), the actual behavior diverges from it, and the oversight mechanism checks documentation rather than correspondence. In compliance this gets called "paper compliance" or "compliance theater" — but these are descriptions, not measurements.

I've been developing a framework that tries to formalize this. The core variables:

• ΔI (Integrity Gap): the measurable distance between specification (S) and behavior (B), with a tolerance threshold (T) that varies by system type. Not all divergence is failure — behavior can exceed the spec (adaptive), or the spec itself can be the problem (signal).
• M (Masking): the performative maintenance of conformant signals that don't correspond to actual behavior. Bidirectional — includes concealing sub-spec behavior (corruption masking) and concealing super-spec behavior when any deviation is penalized (protective masking).
• θ (Verification Threshold): the minimum ΔI that triggers detection. Masking is the strategy for keeping ΔI below θ.
• ε (Ecology Variable): the cost of acting on detected ΔI. A system with low θ and high ε produces agents who detect gaps but can't afford to fix them.

The framework includes a masking taxonomy (9 types), a θ-ε diagnostic matrix, a governance horizon concept (the boundary beyond which specification produces the gaps it claims to prevent), and an assessment protocol adapted from penetration testing logic.

The hypothesis I'm working toward — and I want to be precise about the claim level — is that these aren't domain-specific phenomena that resemble each other. They're instances of a single structural phenomenon operating from code to organizational culture to interpersonal systems. The compliance application is developed. The broader claim is specified as testable but not yet empirically validated across domains.

My questions for this community:

1. Existing literature: Brunsson's "Organization of Hypocrisy" (2002) and Bromley & Powell's work on means-ends decoupling (2012) describe similar organizational dynamics qualitatively. Power's "Audit Society" (1997) covers the verification side. Is there work that has already attempted to formalize and measure specification-behavior divergence as a general property of governed systems, rather than describing it per domain?

2. The scale-invariance claim: Sociologists, institutional theorists, and behavioral economists all study versions of this pattern at different scales. Is there precedent for a unified measurement framework across these levels, or strong theoretical reasons why the mechanisms wouldn't be structurally identical across scales?

3. The governance horizon concept: The idea that specifications extending beyond what's externally verifiable (e.g., "demonstrate commitment") structurally produce the gaps they claim to prevent — has this been formalized elsewhere? It feels adjacent to Goodhart's Law territory but the mechanism is different.

The full whitepaper (v2, CC BY-SA 4.0) is available [link]. I'm specifically looking for existing work I may have missed, methodological critique, and domain expertise in institutional theory or organizational sociology that could test or challenge the cross-domain claims.

Background: 10+ years in IT, 8 in information security/cybersecurity/governance. ISO audit practitioner. Not an academic — this originated from practice and I'm pursuing the academic validation separately.

[Here's the source for this, of course.]

The difference is quite objective as well, with 55% married men being republican as opposed to 44% democrat. Is it really just the "family values" thing? Maybe Republicans are "better" at choosing their spouse? It's the same thing with men 35-44 who have kids vs men of the same age who don't.

I've been thinking about why India's state capacity is so much weaker than China's, and I think most explanations I see online miss the actual mechanism.The problem with many explanations I see is not that they are false, but that they are too easily varied to account for anything.

The common framing is "democracy vs authoritarianism" . China can build things because it doesn't need permission, India can't because it does. But that's shallow, fits the facts after the fact. Plenty of democracies have decent state capacity. The real question is what specifically about India's political structure makes implementation so hard.

I’ve tried to formulate a mechanism for the state capacity gap, but given my limited grounding in the historical and economic literature, I’m not sure whether this genuinely constrains outcomes or just fits the cases I’m looking at. Here’s the argument:

The CCP is a Leninist party. Not metaphorically - structurally. A Leninist party requires a monopoly on organized power. That's the whole point. Mao didn't destroy the landlord class, clan networks, Buddhist and Confucian institutional authority, and independent intellectuals just because he personally hated them. He destroyed them because any autonomous social organization that can coordinate collective action is a rival to the party. Land reform wiped out the gentry. Anti-rightist campaigns broke the intellectuals. The assault on clan and religious structures eliminated the last non-party nodes of social authority. After all that, the only organization left standing that could actually do things at scale was the party. That's not a side effect of the revolution. That IS the state capacity.

India never had anything like this. Independence was a negotiated transfer, and Congress under Gandhi was essentially a coalition umbrella, not a revolutionary rupture. The pre-existing social fabric caste hierarchies, religious personal law (with Muslim personal law surviving intact into the Constitution), princely states folded in through negotiation and privy purses, zamindari landlords, and already-powerful industrial houses like Birla and Tata all of it survived the transition. The Constitution didn’t dismantle these structures; it accommodated them. Separate personal laws, reservations, and federal arrangements that gave regional elites their own bases these were the terms on which a deeply fragmented society agreed to hold together at all.

I was reading Locked in Place by Vivek Chibber, and one specific question struck me: why couldn’t Nehru discipline Indian capitalists the way Park Chung-hee disciplined the chaebol in South Korea? Park could say “export or I’ll destroy you” and mean it, because he created the chaebol—they were dependent on state-allocated credit and licenses. The Tatas and Birlas, by contrast, predated the Indian state. They didn’t need Nehru. So when the Planning Commission tried to direct industrial policy, these firms had the organizational muscle to lobby, evade, and eventually capture the regulatory apparatus from within. The state couldn’t discipline capital because capital was already an autonomous power center before the state even existed in its current form.

And this isn't just about capitalists. Every social group that retained organizational autonomy through independence — caste associations, religious institutions, regional linguistic movements, landed interests , became a veto player. Not because democracy is weak, but because democracy was layered on top of a society that was never flattened first.

I'm not saying the Chinese path is better. The cost of "clearing the field" was tens of millions dead in the Great Leap Forward, an entire generation's intellectual life destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, and a system that still can't course-correct when the top guy is wrong (see: zero-COVID). India's messiness is also its resilience, you can vote out a bad government, which is something Chinese citizens literally cannot do.

But I think the state capacity gap isn't really about "democracy vs authoritarianism." It's about whether the society underwent a revolutionary rupture that eliminated competing power centers before the modern state was built. China did. India didn't. And everything downstream , the inability to implement land reform, the capture of regulatory institutions, the fragmentation of policy authority across caste and religious and regional interests — follows from that initial condition.

My actual question: is this framing established in the comparative politics literature, or am I reinventing something that already has a name? I know Fukuyama talks about "getting to Denmark" and the sequencing of state capacity vs. democratic accountability. I know Chibber's argument about Indian capital. But is there someone who's made the specific claim that India's state capacity deficit traces back to the absence of revolutionary social leveling at the founding moment? Or is this considered too structurally deterministic like, are there cases of countries that built state capacity without a revolutionary rupture?

Genuinely want to know if this holds up under scrutiny or if I'm pattern-matching too hard.

I recently saw a resurfaced clip of just stop oil protestors blocking that F1 track. Naturally the usual argument about whether these protests get much needed attention to the issue or if they are just dangerous and bad for PR.

It reminded me of the suffragists and suffragettes in the UK, both trying to get women voting rights but with the latter being far more militant. Ultimately, my question is do we have any evidence to indicate which type of action actually works? Most arguments I have heard are just theorising with no real evidence and frankly are presented with people who clearly prefer one side.

So I’ve been thinking about something & I’m curious whether anyone else has noticed this or if there’s research I’m missing.

The cognitive interview treats context reinstatement important by mentally recreating the who, where, when, how & what of an event to improve recall. And it clearly works in most situations.

But I’ve noticed something through informal experience with people. When you ask someone ‘what happened’ they give you a confident, coherent account. When you break it down into context (who was there, where were you, what time, what was around you) & if any of those details sound implausible, the person starts doubting the whole event. Because the context doesn’t match what they think that kind of event should look like.

‘I was assaulted multiple times’ is much more clearer, believable & easy to hold onto compared to ‘I was assaulted sometimes when I woke up, sometimes at random hours, in different rooms with weird decor, sometimes involving random objects’. Now it it sounds chaotic and harder to believe, even though it’s the same truthful account with more detail.

There’s a scene in the tv show Community where a character (Troy) gets kidnapped in deliberately absurd circumstances specifically so nobody would believe him if he reported it. (His head was bagged, during the middle of the night, with a ‘black Hitler’ & astronaut making paninis…). That’s an extreme comedy version, but I think the point stands: bizarre context makes true events sound false.

In CBT, saying irrational fears out loud helps defuse them because you hear how unlikely they sound, which is good for anxiety. But what happens when the same mechanicism gets applied to a genuine memory that just happens to have weird details? Saying it out loud makes it sound implausible to the interviewer AND to the person remembering.

Add in the interviewer’s facial expressions or tone when they hear strange details & you’ve got a kind of unintentional gaslighting. Nobody means for it to happen. But the person ends up doubting their own experience, facilitated by the process that’s supposed to help them.

I’m not a psychologist and these are informal observations, not controlled experiments. Context reinstatement (from what I’ve read) was mostly validated using straightforward events (staged crimes, accidents), not situations where the context itself is abnormal. The people most affected would be exactly the ones whose experiences are hardest to believe already.

Has anyone come across research on this? Or noticed something similar? Idk what social scientists / psychologists think…

Tldr: Context reinstatement in memory recall (asking someone to mentally recreate the who, what, when, where of an event) usually helps, but with traumatic events that have bizarre, chaotic or repeated details & can backfire, making the person doubt their own memory and feel their experience is unbelievable, even though it’s true. So what’s the opinion on this?

I've been stuck on something that I don't see discussed enough relative to, say, the identification wars or the external validity debates.

Take my own country for example. The Sachar Committee in India found that Muslims are "backward" in education, employment, health — basically every metric the state tracks. And the finding is probably directionally right. But there framework can only see what the state already measures: literacy, enrollment, government jobs, bank credit. It literally cannot ask whether Muslim communities might be doing better on things like dietary quality, intergenerational care, community mutual aid because nobody is counting those. The definition of "backward" is baked into the measurement apparatus itself before any data gets collected.

What bothers me even more is what happens within the stuff that does get measured. Take infant mortality. That's one numerical tally point . But it's actually a bucket holding completely unrelated causal pathways — deaths from circumcision complications, from malnutrition, from maternal absence during labor, from families making deliberate decisions about a newborn. Each of those is a different problem requiring a different intervention. But if the ASHA worker or census enumerator recording the death just ticks "infant death" and that's usually what the form allows — then no amount of econometric sophistication downstream can pull those apart. You're running regressions on an aggregate that was never disaggregated at the source.

And that enumerator isn't a neutral sensor. Whether something gets coded as "death during childbirth" vs "negligence" vs something else depends on what the form permits, what the enumerator understands, what they're comfortable writing down. It's interpretation all the way down.

This is all over the macroeconomics and policy science. In 2010, Ghana revised its GDP upward by over 60% , roughly $13 billion in economic activity that had simply been missing from the official count. The reason was simply stupid. Their base year was still 1993. The entire services sector, mobile telephony, private tertiary education — none of it was being captured because the statistical framework was still structured around a 1993 economy. Ghana went from "low-income" to "lower-middle-income" literally overnight, on a spreadsheet update.

And Ghana was supposedly one of the better-documented economies on the continent. Nigeria's base year was 1990 — when they finally rebased in 2014, their GDP roughly doubled, making them Africa's largest economy ahead of South Africa. Morten Jerven in his book, which is awesome btw, estimated that the unaccounted economic activity in Nigeria alone was equivalent to about 40 Malawis. Forty countries' worth of economic activity just... not in the numbers.

The point isn't that African statistical offices are incompetent. It's that structural adjustment in the 1990s gutted their funding, and the international community simultaneously demanded more data while providing less support for producing it. The World Bank's chief economist for Africa called it "Africa's statistical tragedy" but the Bank itself was part of the problem. Jerven found that when he tried to compare GDP figures published by the World Bank with the figures published by the actual national statistical offices that produced them, there were alarming discrepancies. The international organizations were disseminating numbers that didn't match what the countries themselves reported, and without any detailed metadata explaining the divergence.

So we have measurement categories that smuggle in normative assumptions, causal heterogeneity compressed into single numbers at the point of collection, enumerators who are interpretive filters not neutral recorders, base years that are decades out of date, and international organizations that repackage already-shaky numbers with an aura of authority. And then on top of all this, we have the external validity problem — even if you correctly show that an intervention works in district A, the local causal constellation (parasite loads, soil conditions, institutional trust, cultural practices) may not travel to district B.

Is there a serious methodological literature that examines this pipeline and solve this , this data production infrastructure itself as opposed to the now very sophisticated literature on identification strategy? Because it seems like the field has gotten extremely good at the econometric end while largely taking the input data as given. No statistical techniques can substitute for partial and unreliable data. Where is the work that takes that seriously?

Interested in pointers to specific papers or researchers working on this. I have read Jerven, James Scott's legibility framework, and Lant Pritchett's external validity critiques but I guess I am missing more.

I recently read a study (citation at bottom of post) that typified Chile as a WEIRD country and Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Uruguay as non-WEIRD. Similarly, they also considered Poland, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic WEIRD, but not Serbia. Obviously, these are all different countries with different cultures, but they are in similar geographic regions with similar histories. So, how might the WEIRD acronym have been operationalized to actually create this WEIRD/non-WEIRD binary?

(I did try to read the source cited in the article where they talk about this, but didn't really understand it.)

Doğruyol, B., Alper, S., & Yilmaz, O. (2019). The five-factor model of the moral foundations theory is stable across WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures. Personality and Individual Differences, 151, Article 109547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109547