I'm an undergrad working on both a Political Science degree and a Psychology degree with a minor in Sociology. Some people will immediately understand the premise I am getting at. To those who don't, please keep reading anyway. I will do my best to explain as I go. Please read it critically and assuming earnest intent. This is a rough concept piece but I know it needs to get out there before I alone can perfect it. I want this conversation to begin as soon as possible.

A meme is a self contained piece of cultural information and the societal analog to a biological gene. Like genes, a meme is capable of self propagating through transmission from individual to individual. As this replication occurs, occasionally adaptations or mutations to the initial meme will occur, think of the game of telephone. Also like a gene, as a meme continues to change and more variants of it emerge, the variants which have more favorable attributes for propagation are the ones that are most likely to do so.

What we are frequently experiencing right now in mass media, both in commercial media outlets and social media platforms, is no longer a simple meme, but a memetic virus. They have no structure or integrity of their own. Instead they replicate by being transmitted to a "host" where it attaches itself to the host's existing memetic structure; their ideology and core values. The host then sheds the "infected meme" which spreads the virus further and much more rapidly than a non-viral meme. This makes disposing of viral memes extremely difficult and dangerous because it is impossible for the host to purge it from themselves without the deconstruction of their core values.

This premise is where I derived the notion of meme inoculation. The same way our immune system is inoculated to a virus either through minor exposure, or by recovering from a more severe exposure, we need to inoculate ourselves, and by extension our system, to viral memes. We need to partake in marginal exposure to mass media wherein we critically engage with the material. Everything that passes through our individual minds should be analyzed so that we can more rapidly, readily and efficiently respond to these viral memes as a collective. The same way all white blood cells are re-educated on how to address a virus once an infection has been recognized by the body, we need to do the same with one another. We need to hold one another accountable to this collective responsibility we share by being members of a larger body. We need to show respect and honor to one another as we engage in this re-education. We need to lay down our pride, and the satisfaction of being in the right. This is the only way to properly address the misinformation and disinformation that is rapidly propagating without proper sociological immune suppression. There are some viruses and auto-immune disorders that turn the immune system against itself. We have societally experienced a multitude of these. The difference here is that we are more than our base instinct and social programming. We are capable of seeing that the person in front of us is in fact a person and not a problem, a disease, an animal, a drain on the system or any other self destructive propagandized rhetoric that we have all been fed our entire lives. Some cells are too specialized to address general infection. That's okay as long as they are given the proper instruction to know how to maintain their function while staying out of the way and not inflict more damage on the system in an ignorant attempt to help.

Hi! I'm a 19 year old waiting to enter College in Singapore. While I am still considering the courses I'd like to enroll in, I know that I am definitely choosing something from the Social Sciences (e.g. Sociology, Political Science, Social Work). In preparation for these courses, what are some books you'd recommend to a rookie in the Social Sciences?

Currently, I am reading This Is What Inequality Looks Like by Sociologist Teo You Yenn. Do share any books about Sociology which has left an impact on you! Thank you so much.

From my understanding, in political science liberal citizenship focuses on negative liberty or rights and government non interference in the lives of individuals, where citizens need not really get involved in matters of the state unless they want to. On the other hand, republican citizenship while also caring about liberty and rights, focuses more on civic duties and responsibilities for an active model of citizenship. In the articles I read on the topic it mentions a republican liberalism, in relation to republicanism and liberalism, but doesn’t elaborate on how it views citizenship. So what is the republican liberal model of citizenship? I assume it takes elements of both philosophies.

Or are they aware they’re bad and just so hateful that bad is the point? Like just angry at -insert group here- and enjoy suffering?

I’m referring more to current but old ones too I suppose

I came across a post recently that said that it's a western construct

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZ/s/3XNuddzRfv

Is this true ?

According to a lot of studies from around the world, including this one from the Pew Research Institute, women tend to practice their religion more so than men. Women are also less likely to be atheists. One would think that with many of the major religions restricting women from the clergy, generally more strict regulations on personal choices like clothing, & the most popular deity concepts being referred to with masculine pronouns women might not be as religious. Even with religions that don't have a deity, ex. women are more likely to take interest in astrology (which I would consider a religion despite the controversy with that term), women tend to take more interest & engage more. Are there any hypotheses or theories to describe why this seems to be the case in most of the world?

I don't know anything about economy.

I was reading this graph:

https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/germany/israel

I was surprised to see that Germany GDP per capita ($55,859) is pretty close to Israel's ($52,643).

Yet the average wage in Israel is almost half of in Germany.

How come? And what does this mean in economical terms? What causes this?

My thoughts are it has something to do with insecurities. I think people see a team like the chiefs win and they go alright they have won enough now its someone else turn. Me, I love it I don't care how many times you win. I like seeing history like that. I am not the jealous of envois type though. I don't get made at others success. I just try to do better for myself what I can control.

Someone I know new "gotcha" moment is this heatmap based on this study. Can someone smarter than me explain to me exactly what this encompasses? It seems as if this study has some glaring flaws like saying these categories are "non-overlapping" yet the options given to people do overlap in some ways.

Study: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Heatmaps-indicating-highest-moral-allocation-by-ideology-Study-3a-Source-data-are_fig6_336076674

Heatmap of study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6763434/figure/Fig5/

I’m so confused and not very exposed to many conservative people, but I want an unbiased answer. I’m a little nervous since conservatism is on the rise, “trad wife” culture or whatever, trump is president, project 2025, and what could possibly happen. From what I’ve read and seen, many conservatives believe in traditional gender roles, but what I want more than anything is to become a firefighter as a woman. I’m going into the fire academy/emt program in September; I’m so scared incase I encounter an overwhelming amount of sexism and if I can’t get employed because of stigma and misogyny. Regardless, if the doors closed on me, I’ll break it down like my life depends on it, but I’m still so nervous for what the future holds when it comes to bias and stigma. I’m in a red state as well so I’m very, very, very nervous, but I’ll prove myself until I physically can’t anymore if I need to.

The title says it all. I’m just wondering what books I should be reading at the moment. I’ve already read Marx, but there’s gotta be some other stuff out there, too, right? Thank you!

I have seen a couple threads where if the age gap is greater than 5 years you automatically see people immediately telling the poster to abandon the relationship even if it's working out without any real warning signs. I believe women and men are on equal footing although I do believe women do tend to mature faster than men. There are of course always people out there who will take advantage of others but there are people like that in all adult phases.

Hey,friends,my major is computational social science. And I am preparing my graduation thesis,my topic is how social network influences the labor market( I would like to narrow down it to Sweden immigrants).I want to use the ABM model to simulate how network influences employment. While now I met some problem to collect the data. I can not find the data how many ties(social network) people have and if they find the job by social network, And I don’t know the company preference (if they prefer the candidate introduced by someone) Do you think I can continue my research topic or should I change another one ? Thanks a lot in advance!

What does the research say about which group of voters is more in alignment with economic consensus?

How many people, total, in the world, in the US, actually "support themselves" solely based on income from either microplatforms (patreon, onlyfans, substack) or as an "influencer" on more traditional social media platforms? What about supplemental income?

Obviously lots of work to define what supporting oneself, supplemental means, what level of income we are talking about numerically.

Are there any insights to be gained by analyzing class origins, gender, racial categorizations, etc. of who is and isn't earning their income that way?

How can we compare that section of the economy to society 20-30 years ago when those income sources did not exist? Where would that money have gone? Is there any relation to the economies of now-absent platforms such as traditional media?

I've been working on some projects around this, and I was just wonderingvwhat do people in the field think about the limitations? Could this be a good use of AI?

In spring 2022, Reddit hosted the second edition of its collaborative pixel art event, Reddit Place. Over four days, this international event became a fascinating display of various nationalist expressions, ranging in scale and character.

Our latest article, "Reddit Place: A Window into Understanding Nationalist Conceptions in the 21st Century", delves into this unique phenomenon. By analyzing the final image produced during the event, we classified patriotic representations based on territorial scale, the use of memes, and expressed international relationships.

While the results aren't fully representative of the global Zeitgeist, they provide a thought-provoking starting point for reflecting on the evolving role of nationalism and the symbols it employs in the digital age.

Read the full article and join the discussion on nationalism in the 21st century!

https://papers.uab.cat/article/view/v110-n1-castro-gonzalez-de-la-fuente

What are your thoughts on how digital spaces reflect and shape modern nationalism? Let’s discuss!

Hey, My question is about building bourdieu's theory on archaeological materials. For example, what does it mean if a find in a settlement contains cultural and social capital but not economic capital? Is it a product made only for aesthetic reasons or is it made based on taste?

Or do we necessarily have to assume that there is economic capital?

Suppose someone is half, say, Italian. Is it equally correct for them to claim they are "ethically Italian" as it is for them to claim they are "genetically Italian"? I ask for the purpose of learning the distinction between ethnicity and genetics, which I have a good but not perfect understanding of.

I'm not a social scientist myself, but I had reason to work in the are of Nigeria and the power of political narratives there as part of my job. It seems to me like Trump is highly skilled at the use of political narratives of a means of attracting popular support. One example of his being his "American carnage" narrative used in the first election.

So I was wondering if there were any good academic papers about that analyzing this?

It's easy to find murder rates year to year and it's easy to see those rates divided by sex but I am having a hard time finding specifically the rate at which women were killed by their intimate partners. I have found tid bits here and there from as back the late 19th century so i am sure this data is available but I cannot find it. Can someone help me out please?

https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/africans-violence-and-genetics

this study posits that violence, mainly in the black community is genetic and hereditary. they debunk the "socioeconomic" model or the "colonialism" model because other countries/races have checked the same "boxes" yet are never at a similar percentage.

im very unknowledgable about this type of discourse and very easily influenced so before i take this as fact i really want someone to take the time and get it out of my head and explain why this study is false or where the leap in logic is.

I am just wondering if it exists. All I ever hear are anecdotal accounts from internet strangers. I know feminists claims that these things were not reported or taken seriously back then. Maybe so, but you would think someone would have run surveys of women in the 80s 90s and 2000s who worked to see sexual harassment stats or were married to see domestic violence stats. Very suspicious that I cannot find anything like that.

I'm currently researching this topic for a blog post I'm going to write. I have no qualifications in this area, but will be focusing more on public perceptions and and misuse of terms for my contribution. I want to make sure it has solid foundations.

I'm looking for ways to have it peer-reviewed.

I want to make sure my assessment of the academic literature is accurate, and I'm not going beyond my scope, before moving on to conclusions I've already started to form, based on how I find the topic is discussed in day to day life.

The aim of the blog is to better my understanding, and communicate to people who might be genuinely curious, but who might be confused about the broader topic of gender identity.

Hi all! I'm not religious but I do know religion has its merits: bringing peace to people's minds, giving them mean, unifying groups, etc.

It's also important to not forget the tragedies that arose out of religious discrimination, like the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.

So the question I ask, would societies that are less religious be less discriminatory, since they have less reasons to discriminate?

Or perhaps, is religious discrimination analogous to "Guns don't kill people, people kill people...." meaning that discriminatory people would interpret and weaponize religion regardless? And it's not the fault of the religion, but rather the fault of the person or group.

Can someone help me out? Thank you!!!

Hi there. I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this. I have noticed this thing that humans do and I am not sure if I can find a solid term or academic field that studies it. So I thought I’d ask here.

Here goes…

So, we should all be familiar with the bare facts of stellar nucleosynthesis if we paid attention in our high school science class. The idea is that all the chemical elements were created in the hearts of dying stars when the universe was still young.

One could take that at face value and that’s it.

Then you get people who wax on about how we should never be afraid because we are stardust and every element of our being was forged in the crucible that was the heart of dying stars in the primordial universe.

But I see so many people generate beautiful meaning out of that bare fact. Like the kind of things that theologians and poets do. When they take a bare fact and draw from it an endless amount of meaning and beautiful significance that seems to change our very psychology at times.

What do we call that approach? What do we call that process?

Is there a word or term for the insatiable meaning-making that humans do?

I see people like Carl Jung do this a lot. It’s not particularly scientific so it’s probably something fluffier?

I half remember a debate that Jordan Peterson had with Sam Harris where Harris accused Peterson of doing this and he uses the example of taking a sushi menu and then waxes poetically on about sushi for a second to illustrate his point. And I get where Sam Harris is coming from. Most Theologians and Bible Scholars worth their salt haven’t much time for Jordan anyway. 

But that thing that he does, that Jung, Sagan, and Campbell did.

This thing of taking a bare fact and spinning so much deep meaning out of it. What is it?

Looking for book suggestions on the dangers of pleasure - both from a historical perspective and also psychological

I'm not sure if this question fits the subreddit perfectly, partly because it's sort of a multidisciplinary question, and partly because I'm asking for a sort of estimation that is not strictly speaking academic. But I could think of no better place to ask than here.

There's been a lot of discourse about the dark times ahead. Russia is shut out almost entirely, for obvious reasons, and as an indirect consequence many countries have started to be a lot more wary about China as well. No-one knows how things will go with Trump, but I guess it's safe to say that everyone is expecting the road to be bumpy even in the best case scenario.

As a result of all this, the expectation seems to be that especially Europe will be in trouble. The lack of trade with Russia has already done harm and if Trump starts some sort of a trade war things will go from bad to worse. The billionaire friends seem to already be in a crash course with the EU and that may end up having even more negative effects.

I'm aware that a lot of above is still speculation, but I think most can agree that it is indeed a fairly likely scenario. What I'm mainly interested is if this could actually end up having a positive effect on EU? There's a lot of negatives in sight, but is it realistically possible that the result will be that EU will increase production, creating more work, and basically a stronger and more self-reliant Europe? I'm aware that there is definitely not an easy way to conclude that yes, it will happen, but I'm curious if there are some obvious reasons why this would NOT happen (something like lack of resources, unfitting worker population or something like that) or if it's a more of a thing that could realistically end up happening if the decision makers can pull their shit together.