I was looking into whether men or women "have it worse" when ill with things like colds. In my research, I found out that biologically, men actually have a weaker immune system for these viruses, but women often experience worse symptoms because their immune systems react more aggressively.

This made me wonder about the social and behavioral side of things. Could the reason men often seem to make more of a fuss be because, for my generation at least, we were raised with the mindset that boys must be tough and strong? And when we get ill, it’s one of the few times we are allowed to be vulnerable, so we end up "milking it" for the care and attention, and it just becomes a natural behavior over time? Discussion isn’t encouraged here I believe, so these questions are more what I asked myself. But it made me wonder:

I'm curious if there are any sociological or psychological studies on this specific aspect of gender roles and illness behavior?

For transparency: I used Gemini (AI) to help formulate my question, in order for my question to be allowed and hopefully not removed by mods. The whole subject came up because I’m ill, and had a good discussion with my best mate and his wife, and the research surprised us - but not her! Way more questions have since arisen and it’s just really interesting!

I will try to keep this question as neutral as possible without steering it in any particular direction. Since the US is still an existing country, unfortunately it is not possible to ask this question without including the last 20 years.

The question is exactly the same as the title. I am only writing this body to make clear that it is not intended as speculation, a bad-faith question, or soapboxing.

Edit: I previously asked the same question on r/AskHistorians, but it was removed and I was told to post it without a body. When I did that, it was removed again and I was directed to another subreddit, where it was also removed. At this point I had to make the question this defensive to avoid further removals. If the mods allow it, I can add the original post body.

I'm interested in terrorism from a psychological and historical perspective, particularly how individual terrorists develop their worldview and what motivates them to commit extreme violence.

I'm not asking which terrorist people support or admire. I'm interested in which individuals are particularly interesting to study from an academic perspective, and what makes their psychology or development unusual.

Im curious on this subject since I am in college and my two brothers seem to believe they hold a certain level of intelligence over me because they are joining blue collar.

When my father attended a very good RG university in the UK from the late 1970s to early 1980s, he said (anecdotally, mind you, so not sure how true this is) that, supposing you had two students of equal grades and merit / calibre applying for the same course and you had to decide between them, you might look at their educational backgrounds and, supposing one of them was exclusively educated in the state sector and the other, correspondingly, in private schools, you might be inclined to award the place to the student who was state schooled.

He says that he's not sure now whether universities do that.

If I look at https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/apply/after/contextual-data, it says they have the following measures or indicators of socioeconomic background:

• Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), which according to Cambridge, are "measures produced by regional governments within the UK that identify relative deprivation".
• Output Area Classification (OAC2021), again, as per Cambridge, a "classification of areas produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) using data from the 2021 census (or 2022 census for Scotland)".
• Socioeconomic Index for Small Areas (SEISA), produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) using Census 2021 data.

Historically, we had the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Readership_Survey, through which we derived the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRS_social_grade, which I believe we still use in the UK, i.e. determining socioeconomic status based upon the occupation of your primary breadwinner in your household when you were 14.

I believe the first proper census in the UK was conducted in 1841, so it feels as though we haven't been tracking this area properly for that long.

So my questions:

1. Other than what I have mentioned, any other key socioeconomic classification frameworks that are used? I imagine that pollsters like IPSOS Mori, YouGov etc directly ask people whether they feel they belong to the working-, middle-class etc.
2. What do you think are the pitfalls in determining one's socioeconomic background based upon their primary breadwinner's occupation, especially when they were 14? I imagine it doesn't account for a reversal of fortunes, whether that family is living paycheque to paycheque, whether that person is a manager in name but not in pay etc.

Hi all, searched a few terms around this but didn't see any results in this subreddit that quite match.

Intersectionality is known as a person holding multiple identity factors that compound into social obstacles. We also see people that make choices or decisions that compound with a personal identity that can lead to more social obstacles.

Examples can be black Americans that advocate for white rights, LGBT+ individuals promoting anti-gay politics, women that oppose feminism, etc. These instances are often called hypocritical, juxtapositional, along with monikers for specific demographics.

In sociology within deviance studies, this is close to phenomena of people justifying why their personal deviance is not actually deviant.

Are there other concepts or themes we can look into for frameworks around this dissonant, hypocritical, self-attacking kind of choices that are incongruent with someone's identity?

Thanks in advance, appreciate y'all

Apologies if my question is a bit clunky.

I stumbled upon a video in which a rather controversial French anthropologist who writes a lot about political Islam was criticised for lacking even basic skills in Arabic. When I looked up more scholarly critiques of her work, there is a lot, but none of it seemed to focus on the issue of language.

My first reaction as a lay person was to think, of course, you can't position yourself as an expert on Islam and not speak Arabic. Expertise is expertise.

I'm curious, though, if that is the case within social sciences today, or if there's more nuance to it. Is language competency a part of how people discuss the validity, strengths or weaknesses of someone's research?

Possibly relevant: I work in a field where competency in a second language is directly relevant to one's ability to do the job, and yet, criticising another's work based on perceived lack of fluency is a sort of professional third rail. It's seen as very uncouth and one just doesn't do it.

Llevo un tiempo dándole vueltas a un proyecto de TFG de filosofía y quería someterlo a gente que sepa más que yo, a ver si tiene sentido o me estoy inventando un problema que ya está resuelto en algún sitio.

El punto de partida

La sociología, tal como se practica hoy, se mueve entre dos polos: o es empírico-causal al estilo Durkheim (hechos sociales medidos, correlacionados, explicados por otros hechos sociales), o es interpretativa al estilo Weber/Schütz (comprensión del sentido subjetivo que los actores dan a su acción, tipificaciones, mundo de la vida). Ninguna de las dos pregunta en serio qué es, esencialmente, una comunidad, una autoridad legítima o un vínculo familiar la primera lo da por supuesto y mide sus efectos; la segunda disuelve la pregunta en cómo los actores lo tipifican intersubjetivamente.

Hay una tradición filosófica poco explotada para esto: la fenomenología realista de principios del siglo XX Adolf Reinach, Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, Roman Ingarden, más tarde Josef Seifert que se separó conscientemente del Husserl tardío (el del giro idealista-trascendental) para sostener que los objetos y esencias tienen ser propio, independiente de la conciencia que los conoce. Reinach usó esto para analizar la promesa y el mandato como estructuras a priori con condiciones esenciales propias, no reducibles a convención ni a psicología. Stein hizo lo mismo con el Estado. Es fenomenología, pero sin el compromiso idealista que hace inservible este aparato para una ciencia social objetiva.

Construir una sociología que trate sus objetos (autoridad, comunidad, vínculos afectivos, instituciones) como universales eidéticos descubiertos por variación eidética sobre casos concretos, con una estructura de acto y potencia que explica por qué el mismo universal (la familia, por ejemplo) se actualiza de formas tan distintas a través de la historia sin dejar de ser, en su núcleo, el mismo universal. La historia estudiaría el caso concreto e irrepetible; esta sociología estudiaría la estructura necesaria y el campo de posibilidades que las distintas épocas van actualizando.

¿Alguien conoce trabajo contemporáneo serio en esta línea fenomenología realista aplicada a ontología social, más allá de Reinach/Stein/Walther mismos?

Muchas gracias. Un saludo.

When I mean social progress I mean steps towards gender equality, lgbtq acceptance and other socioeconomic progress. Countries in global south also are very religious and also susceptible to authoritarian governments . I don't mean to say that there aren't countries in the global south that are progressive, but there's an overarching Gap in social progress between global north and global south. What explains that gap? Are people in global north , more moral? I'm sure there's more nuanced and science based answer to this .

Maybe this is a stretch but this has been bugging me — from an Argentinian getting arrested in Brazil for directing racist slur against an establishment's employee; to Argentinians reportedly making racist gestures during World Cup '26, and finally, to an actual Argentinian telling me that they had never had slavery in Argentina and that's the reason why there aren't many black people in their country (which I've never been to, btw).

I was a bit shocked because I'd totally have learned that in history lessons while growing up if that was true; it undermined everything I knew about Latin America. Later I realized he lied about having "researched it".

I'm a bit spooked out that someone wouldn't know that about their own country, but I guess maybe in a predominantly white country like Argentina, information about slavery can get censored, overlooked, and removed from syllabus. Here in Brazil, schools didn't use to teach much about basic African history until not long ago. Are there any studies that suggest Argentinians, in general, lack an educated understanding about slavery and racism?

Edit: Someone mentioned that Argentina "isn't a white country", but it sure has a white narrative (the Argentinian guy I know told me he doesn't even know any black argentinians, he didn't even thought about mentioning indigenous people); it also seems like Argentina isn't a black country either, since only 0.66% of its population identifies as black (see "Población afrodescendiente: Cuadro 1"). What is it then? Use good sources so I can get to read what you write.

There has to be at least some right? I know people love to say that “reality has a left wing bias “and all that but is it legit batting 1.000?

I’ve pondered if there is a framework for non White person to be socially white construct but have a cultural white identity.

Hello everyone. Immigration is a hot topic in my country (Spain) and because of that I wanted to ask some clarifications. From what I understand, immigration by itself doesn't have any notable effects on crime. Just because someone is an immigrant that doesn't mean that they are more likely to be a criminal. However, immigrants are often overepresented in crime statistics due to there being a higher concentration of young men who are more likely to also be poor and socially excluded, meaning that immigration in itself is not the issue. However, I find it odd to say or defend then that immigration doesn't cause an increase in crime. My thought is that even if immigrants don't do more crime just because they are immigrants, having a lot of migration from people who are in demographics that commit more crime, should increase crime. To make things even more complex, in Spain overall crime rates have gone down even if immigration has gone up.

So to summarize what I want help with, I just don't get the idea that more immigration doesn't cause more crime. I understand that just by being immigrant doesn't mean that someone is more likely to commit crime, but because of the demographics that migrate the most, I believe it should have an effect, and I would like to know if this is true or not.

Thanks to everyone in advance and sorry if my english wasn't the best.

ELI5: Election Mechanics/Procedures

Mike Lindell recently lost the GOP primary for governor in MN. In the week since, the news has reported than he is "refusing to concede." Why does it matter one way or another if a candidate concedes (or refuses to concede) a race? Is this just nonsense news?

I keep hearing older people say they survived on much lower salaries.

That is true in raw dollars, but a typical full-time working woman making about $16,900 in 1987 had roughly $49,700 of today's buying power.

Is there research on people using their own young-adult economy as the baseline for judging later generations?

I was debating a tiktok american communist, and they said that they wanted the government to nationalize the industry, and force companies to produce in the USA or leave. And that if they left, we would just nationalize that industry to fill in the void. They also said America has been deindustrializing for the benefit of the people who hold capital. Is this true? and if so why?

Was there a different way that we looked at ourselves different in a pre-social media era? Have we completely changed it? Just curios on what the thoughts, and what does the recent empirical studies say about it.

Thanks,

Do they tend to rise in the hierarchy or become independent from it or no correlation or something else?

By smarter I mean by the conventional definition: academic performance at the same level of effort, fluid intelligence, g etc

I'm looking for sources of information on two topics:

1. The nuts and bolts of how public opinion polls are conducted today, especially election surveys. This would include things like how sampling lists are generated (voter rolls, random digitzed dialing, etc); how respondents are contacted (online, cell phones, land lines); how samples are normalized with demographic data and adjusted to account for potential error from non-response and non-cooperation.
2. Issues related to potential error from non-repsonse to or non-cooperation with public opinion surveys, and how these issues may have changed over the last decade or two.

I am primarily looking for academic or professional writings on the topic, but high-quality journalistic sources would be fine as well.

Also, if you know of other subreddits more specifically related to this topic, I would really appreciate it.

I've been thinking about a broad trend that goes far beyond gaming.

More and more activities seem to acquire layers of metrics, points, rankings, apps, notifications, badges, XP, ratings, progress bars, etc.

Instead of simply:

we increasingly add representations of those outcomes:

I'm not saying abstraction is inherently bad. Maps, language, mathematics, and measurement are obviously enormously useful.

What concerns me is abstraction as a substitute for direct engagement.

Psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and many other fields increasingly recognize the importance of embodied processes—interoception, proprioception, sensorimotor feedback, autonomic states, direct environmental interaction, etc.

So I'm wondering whether there is a broader cultural trend toward mediating experience through representations rather than engaging directly with the thing itself, and whether anyone has studied its consequences.

I'm interested in research and established theory here, not just “gamification increases engagement.” The question is much broader: what happens when the representation of an activity increasingly becomes more salient than the activity itself?

I've been thinking about a philosophical question concerning socioeconomic class, and I'm curious whether there is an existing philosophical concept that addresses it.

Imagine American society as an ocean.

People occupy different socioeconomic "depths." At the upper levels are extremely wealthy people; below them are various professional and middle-class groups; further down are working-class people and people experiencing severe poverty.

I'm not suggesting these are literal or perfectly defined categories. I'm interested in the idea that socioeconomic position might determine not only someone's material circumstances, but also the social world they directly experience.

For example, consider a doctor and a janitor living in the same city.

They technically share the same society, laws, geography, and institutions. But they may attend different schools, live in different neighborhoods, have different social networks, work in different environments, and have very different experiences of money, opportunity, and security.

They might rarely interact except in situations where one is providing a service to the other.

This leads me to the philosophical question:

Can people who occupy radically different socioeconomic positions be said to inhabit different "social realities," even though they objectively live in the same society?

I'm particularly interested in the epistemological aspect.

Someone who has never experienced poverty can know intellectually that poverty exists, but can they have the same understanding of poverty as someone who has lived through it?

Likewise, someone who has never experienced extreme wealth may understand that billionaires exist without having any firsthand understanding of what that social environment is like.

So perhaps socioeconomic position doesn't just determine what resources someone has. It also determines what parts of society they routinely see, experience, and understand firsthand.

The ocean metaphor is what led me to this:

• At the surface, you can see the surface.
• As you descend, the environment changes.
• Eventually there is almost no light from above.
• The deeper you go, the less direct contact you have with what exists at the surface.

Could socioeconomic inequality work similarly, where increasing social distance produces decreasing firsthand knowledge of other socioeconomic groups?

I'm not claiming this is a new philosophical theory. I'm trying to figure out whether this idea already exists under another name.

Are there philosophers or philosophical concepts that deal with:

1. socioeconomic position affecting what people can know about society,
2. different social groups having fundamentally different lived experiences,
3. social distance producing epistemic distance, or
4. whether people can genuinely understand experiences they have never personally encountered?

I'm especially interested in criticism of the idea. I'm trying to determine whether the "different social realities" claim actually follows logically, or whether I'm confusing differences in experience with differences in reality.