Women and college-educated voters are increasingly supporting the Democratic Party, while the Republican Party is doing better with men and voters without college degrees.

I'm recently reflecting on communication and what it means to me, as I'm going through the experience of unmasking as a late-diagnosed/realized autistic person. I'm curious to explore theories around the purpose and intention of communication. obviously this will differ culture to culture and situation to situation, but I'd still be interested to read explorations and ideas around this.

I'm particularly interested in the specific function of communication as it pertains to communicator or communicatee, or transmitter versus receiver. what is more important to communication: conveying information accurately, or conveying information accessibly? communicating only that which can be reasonably assumed to be understood by the listener, or conveying what is significant from the point of view of the speaker?

I feel like these questions have the "obvious" answer, especially given cultural context. but I crave a nuanced exploration of the implications of these ideas.

I have a background in psych, philosophy and social work so I'm down for meaty texts as well. thank you in advance!

The term specifically described a way by which people of a same/connected social circles hold identical ideologies informed by the shared consumption of the same staple social media content; without particularly discussing those ideologies, and without those ideologies being inter-influenced by IRL exchanges much.

I heard a theory that a nation's vocabulary actually shapes the society and not the other way around.

I read and watch debates and discussion daily during which both parties are talking about something different. They are unable to reach a common ground because a common ground is non-sensical based on their subjective definitions.

Here are the examples I can think of right now;

Racism - Need a different word for systematic-racism vs racism. This would eliminate the debate about if we can be racist against the majority. We also need a simpler word for unconscious racist bias that doesn't mean racist, implying hate.

Appropriation - Need a different word describing the emulation of a culture without having oppressed anyone.

Male/Female - We need to have an objective definition of these words. Something measurable that doesn't exclude entire portions of the population but still holds onto the traditional versions.

Gender - Either we come up with a new word or redefine gender to be a continuum, not a spectrum. A new word for traditional traits associated with traditional gender norms.

Narcissist - We need to come up with a new word that defines a lesser version of this set of traits which has less of an emotional impact and isn't used in the medical world.

Abuse - this is too subjective a term allowing people to be painted publicly as an abuser when they are in fact just an asshole. Something in between abuser and asshole.

Woke - This term has gotten a bad reputation and we need a new word for people who hold socially progressive ideas but also hold onto some traditions.

Incel - We need a lesser version of this word that describes young men in despair over romantic/sexual issues isn't hateful or misogynistic.

White/Black People - Everybody needs to stop categorizing entire groups of people based on skin color. Currently, it's ineffective because there can be no statements with a truth value when describing this broad of a demographic.

Fascist - This term was created intentionally vague to expand the government and give freer reign to common folk's imagination, making them more malleable.

Privilege - We need a word that describes privilege that occurs before one is aware of it. Also, a word that describes the unmeasurable parts of privilege.

Almost almost every topic has a middle ground and I wish there were compelling words to keep things right-sized.

Thoughts?
More examples?

I recently read a fascinating article by author Mihret Sibhat on her experiences growing up in Ethiopia, where physical affection both across genders and between members of the same gender was common. She compares this to her time in the US, where things like long tender hugs or putting your arm around someone is often read as queer.

Sibhat talks about how 'passionate same-sex friendships [...] had not been considered homosexual activities that required a rigid identity of gay or lesbian'. This started to dissolve as increasing Western influence meant that this kind of behaviour between people of the same gender was seen as queer and unacceptable, and physical contact became less accessible.

I'm writing about a related topic for a book I'm working on, but I'm finding it hard to find any more articles or studies that talk about this phenomenon. Does anyone know of any more resources that could tell me more about cultures where platonic physical affection is very widely accepted, and if homophobia has influenced this? Any information would be hugely appreciated! Even personal anecdotes could be helpful.

(I hope this is the right place for this question - I'm a queer theorist, not a social scientist, so please do recommend a more appropriate thread if there's a better place for it!)

Hello, I am wondering whether this subject regarding population growth dynamics has been quantitatively studied in any capacity.

So here is my question:

(1) When there is a surplus of reproductively viable women in a population, does the deficit in reproductively viable men act as a "saturation point"? That is, the number of men put a hard limit on how many children are had? Or, does it play out differently in the real world? If a given population has a surplus of women, does this not affect birth-rates in the way I just predicted despite there being, generally speaking, hegemonically monogamous relationship norms at work in many societies?

And I suppose I should also ask the inverse while I am here:

(2) Has it been studied how birthrates change in response to surpluses of reproductively viable men in a given population?

To motivate the questions I pose: I commonly see in political spaces the argument that it is, from a purely game-theoretic standpoint, rational for a given community to send men to fight (and thus die disproportionately) in violent conflict as opposed to women, because it is more advantageous to protect a surplus of women than a surplus of men when it comes to repopulating. Women bear children and can only have one child, in most cases, at a time.

This makes sense so far I guess, - until you consider hegemonic monogamy. There are reasons a society would try to not, I would think, allow the number of single mothers to skyrocket just because there is a deficit of men. But maybe this is not the case empirically.

And yet, the political argument that women should not be sent into violent conflicts because of this population dynamical thinking appears highly influential. Though it seems like an unexamined premise that needs empirical backing. There are, obviously, probably a host of other sociopolitical reasons why women are by and large, except for a handful of cases, not the primary participants in militaries, but I want to focus on this one aspect of the discussion for now.

It is also important to consider both general and special circumstances in which the situation has been studied. For instance, you have the baby boom after WWII, but I don't think that analyzing the baby boom is the way of understanding how population dynamics work generally in the presence of gender imbalances. How population dynamics work both generally and under special circumstances would be most appreciated!

Or possibly a theory/term that identifies a similar or related phenomenon?

I tried to Google this, but I hope reddit can make me proud; TIA♡

I have often seen stories regarding this or that psychological test and how its results correlate with political orientation. The stuff I'm thinking of includes:

• A purported quote from someone who administered various assessments to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and noted that one thing they pretty much all had in common was a distinct lack of empathy;

• Bob Altemeyer's Right-wing Authoritarianism scale which shows a rather obvious correlation;

• Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations theory, where self-described liberals show distinctly different results from self-described conservatives;

• "Black and white" thinking vs. "shades of grey" thinking;

• Willingness and/or ability to learn new things and change one's mind when presented with new information.

So what I'm wondering is, has anyone ever taken a look at all these kinds of things together, and done a kind of meta-analysis of it all? If do, I'd love to see it; if not, maybe I'll give someone a thesis idea.

I have a friend who I’m very close with, but we disagree a lot regarding gender. An example would be the gender pay gap. My friend believes that women get paid much less for the same job because of widespread gender discrimination. I tend to wholesale accept Claudia Goldin’s explanation of the gap since she won the 2023 Nobel for her work on it (Claudia breaks it down into many causes, with reduced hours from motherhood related issues being the largest cause she identifies. This gets into systemic issues like the career choices that hetero couples make, but is unrelated to traditional workplace discrimination. Goldin thinks we should destroy workplace gender discrimination, but that it doesn’t explain much of the gap).

My friend says that I shouldn’t act like I know what I’m talking about, because I never took a gender studies course. I proposed that I read a genders studies book of her choosing, and she read a gender book of my choosing. Does anyone know a readable book that covers the scientific consensus on gender differences in an impartial way (preferably with paper citations)?

I've read this meta-analysis about how men prefer "thing" related careers and women prefer "people" related careers. According to the analysis men are much more realistic than women, and women are much more social than men. Men are somewhat more investigative than women and women are somewhat more artistic than men. The things-people dimension had a huge effect size (d=0.93) too. It even had a graph along with it to show how many women should be in a field given their interests. And it's not as bad as I thought it would be, but it still upsets me to see women with such low interests for engineering.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full

https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/125967/fpsyg-06-00189-HTML/image_m/fpsyg-06-00189-g001.jpg

I have heard some criticism that these conclusions are being driven from surveys, which may not be sufficient enough as evidence. Is this true? On one online thread sharing a study (not the same as the meta analysis above) people were pointing out how data was collected through a Time magazine survey, and how this group of people is not representative of people as a whole.

The idea of men and women having interests that are "separate but equal" really bothers me. But if it's a meta analytic review, that means that it's well replicated and not just a bunch of nonsense. And I'd like to think that it's all fake, but it looks like lots of evidence suggests that biology and environment shapes the two genders into being different.

This has been my first Us election. As a Cuban immigrant I have been a little decepointed about how easy is to offend latinos ,especially immigrants without causing any kind of indignation. More specifically the last presidential debate Trump called criminals,human traffickers, accuse Haitians (not exactly latinos but immigrants as well) of eating dogs and cats etc. My main issue is not with Trump specifically as he is a known racist,but with the general public that it isn't outraged. I am even more upset with Democrats that prefer to mock Trump stupidity instead of defending immigrants that myself, especially nationalities like Mexicans ,Venezuelans ,Colombians and Cuban that tend to have higher immigration numbers to the US. Why is this still normalized?

I think if there is a question about china, then this will be THE question.

So a lot of people have been saying a lot of things about the economy of china, those who are in favor range from calling it "market socialism" to "free market capitalism" (belive it or not). Those who oppose it call it state capitalist or communist.

Since i think most articles are biased one way or another, i would like to ask, what is, if any, the consensus amongst political economists about the nature of the economy of china?

Is there data for the hiring practices of minority ethnic groups with African Americans. It seems to me that when immigrant ethnic groups establish a community they have plenty of connections to hire from within and it goes unchecked. Also, as the communities grow, they have their own construction workers and services. They usually have their own real estate agents that service the community. Whether its Asian communities, Arab communities, or European enclaves. Usually they need workers that speak their own language.

Hey i have a question “How can a city serve as both a place of conflict and a place of unification? I’m curious about how urban spaces can simultaneously bring people together while also being sites of tension. How do cities balance these roles, or what factors push them more toward one or the other?”

I first posted to /r/english but they redirected me to some community that discusses cultural phenomena.

I noticed that particularly in online environments, English speakers have found a way to quickly identify and label real or perceived antisocial behavior. Words such as weird, edgy, creep, dork, neckbeard, incel, r*pey etc essentially function as speech antibodies that attach to the opposing party and neutralize it in clear view before everyone else. On the one hand, discussions can be more easily moderated and remain civil. On the other hand, those characterizations can be a powerful tool to invalidate legitimate grievances and unpopular yet sound viewpoints.

Now compared to my original language and culture, Greek. We don’t have this type of linguistic machinery as developed. People may go up to weird or pervert if they are annoyed too much, but we don’t have equivalents for edgy or creepy for example. If someone is actually threatening online, people may not talk at all or even believe the threat. Some people from younger generations do import English words for that. So how did this linguistic and cultural change take place? After all, I don’t remember it from the time I was learning English neither I was reading anything similar to that in English language forums at earlier stages of the Internet. Typically in English forums, people were using more creative insults and if nothing else worked, a fight would break out, just like in Greek or other language environments. Also I noticed that in those confrontations people were of around equal status, whereas now those labels are used by a majority to quickly label a minority or a single person. So they are not exactly equivalents to traditional insults. This must be a change around one and a half decades old. Still, it feels too black and white to me.

It seems to be foundational to most modern states and ingrained into citizens thereof, but it doesn't seem intuitive that the average person would want the law to be applied equally to themselves and groups they're a member of, for the presumed greater good of society, helping them out in the long-run. Is it a fairly recent invention, and, if so, how and why?

History shows that high ranking men in East Asia, South Asia and the Middle East kept large harems. This is still done in Africa, and polygamy with up to 4 wives is still practiced by around 1% of Muslims in countries where it is permitted.

But it’s extremely rare for men in the modern western world to choose this lifestyle. I wonder why that is given that it has historically been a coveted choice for powerful men in number of societies.

One might say that it’s not legal or accepted here, but men do all sorts of things that are neither legal or accepted in order to satisfy their desires. For example, Leonardo DiCaprio’s habit of dating 20 year old girls for a few years and then dumping them at 25 is unusual. Elon musk maintains strange relationships with Grimes and Shivon Zills, but neither are his girlfriend. Both DiCaprio and Musk have the means to maintain a harem, but it is evidently not in their interests. We almost never see powerful men that openly parade around with two girlfriends. Many such men cheat, but they keep that discrete while having one official wife or girlfriend they admit to. Almost no one openly claims to have two long term girlfriends with the expectation that these women be faithful to him.

Hefner was an exception, but he almost the only one that comes to mind. He set curfews and strictly maintained who his many girlfriends could invite over in efforts to keep them faithful. But generally, a powerful man in the west only expects fidelity of his wife or main girlfriend. Trump seems somewhat typical of a powerful man who desired more than one woman in that he would expect fidelity of Melania, but not of Stormy Daniels who he secretly cheated with.

What’s the reason polygamy, which came with a rigid expectation of multiple women’s fidelity to one man, was not that uncommon throughout the world, but modern men very rarely pursue it?

NSFW due to topic.

Let me start by saying I am not trying to pass judgement on the women (and men) who put themselves out there as models nor am I trying to shame those that pay to consume their content.

So I saw on r/dataisbeautiful (I think) the annual earning for the top 10 models at OnlyFans. I was stunned that these women had made profits in the hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. Certainly these women are outliers as the vast majority of models are simply supplementing their income, but that seems like a truly staggering income for a sex worker, particularly one that is not actually having sex with their clientele. I suppose in my own mind I can more easily wrap my head around paying a literal prostitute for her services than I can paying tens, hundreds, or even thousands of dollars paying for pornographic pictures or videos of a woman who will, in all likelihood, never meet me much less perform sex acts with me or develop anything beyond a purely transactional business relationship. These women are, rightly, taking steps to keep themselves safe in a potentially very dangerous world, but essentially means certain money making activities are off the table.

What are subscribers/patrons getting, or feel like they are getting, that makes this a reasonable expenditure to them? Particularly in light of the sheer overwhelming quantity of pornographic material available on the internet.

They sound like the same discipline to me.

Like the title says, what contributed to decline of authority of traditional Christian church in the 1960 and what contributed to rise of some of new religious movements like UFO religion and etc.

While earning my bachelor's degree about a decade ago I was taught extensively about the differences in the waves of feminism and how they shaped those movements as a whole and how the shift from wave to wave is what caused some friction between two groups of people claiming to be the same group.

Do other social movements use waves as designations? If so what are they? Do they have more or less "waves"? If none use "waves" then why?

I was thinking about how poor people in developed nations tend to have diets that have good taste but bad nutrition. I would even say food that is traditionally considered working-class food is much better than "gourmet" food. I think the reason is because poor people have very little things going on in their life. So the flavor of their food is very high on their list of priorities.

On the other hand, people who are affluent just have better things to enjoy. If you forced me to eat bland bread, bland chicken, and bland steamed vegetables every day, I wouldn't be too upset about it. In fact, I have had this meal 3 times a day for weeks just because it was simple and didn't require mental energy to plan. I have even went on a soylent diet for some periods of my life. When I have so many things going on, preparing and eating food became more of a time-sink than a source of enjoyment.

My country that will act as a baseline now has a quite low alcohol consumption rate for EU standards. We tend to have the perception that more northern countries drink more. However, I noticed a difference as regards to drinking depending on the region discussed. Western and northwestern European drinking is associated with party life, being outgoing and having a good time. Even the phrase getting wasted has a positive connotation in many of those countries. Meanwhile, Eastern European drinking is associated with violence, irresponsibility, poverty, corruption and a low level of development. Sometimes labels can shift, for example once Czechia started following a Western model, it no longer was a drunk nation. Often those judgements are made by Western Europeans or Americans. In very broad terms, Germanic and Anglo drinking is good, Slavic drinking is bad. How much do those stereotypes concur with reality? Are they rooted in racism? When and how did they start and how have they evolved over time?

I read that ISIS discriminates against non-Arabs. So Africans, Europeans, South Asians, and other groups are treated worse and differently compared to Arabs. It doesn't matter if they are all Sunnis.

Is that still true? I was just wondering that because now ISIS is most active in sub-Saharan Africa.

My dad passed away on the 1st of August 2024. It’s 12 weeks today. Every Thursday, around 1-1:30pm (time I found out he had died) I can smell the smell of his dead body.

What is this sensation called?

I was looking back at a comment I made over at r/changemyview a while back, and thought I drop the question I raised here.

The crux of the question is, as Affirmative Action can't be classified as racist/prejudicial, is there a label/category that would apply to it? Would it simply fall under the "anti-racism" header, or is there a more narrow term for actions/policies/etc. that require distinguishing between racial categories, but are not necessarily prejudicial and don't perpetuate pre-existing power imbalances?

I'll reproduce that here, but here's a ink to the original comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/17nqvow/comment/k7ua4gj/

• Redditor usernames sanitized to avoid pinging people unnecessarily on a rather old conversation
• Text in bold is where I raise the question in more detail.

[redditor] asked:

So, affirmative action is an example of structural racism...?

My response:

So this gets into some really interesting crunchy territory, but I'll give it a go clarifying this.

First, consider the perspective of defining race as prejudice + power. I already went into what prejudice is above, and that's probably the more intuitive of the two, but here we need to clarify what is meant by "power" here.

When we're using power in this context, what we're talking about is, from a societal level view; which stake holders have more agency. In the US that's generally white people, just due to how the country developed. Systems were built up/designed/structured overtime largely with white people in mind and often at the expense of others. So when we're talking about racism, we're taking about that reality.

This definition, however, immediately is going to generate some confusion; because if we're applying this lens, when you call something/someone/some entity "racist," you specifically referencing how that noun of interest is perpetuating racism, or the dominant racial power structure at a societal level. Importantly, it's not a moral question in the colloquial sense of "racism," its merely descriptive.

So applying this lens, is affirmative action "racist" or an example of structural racism? Well of course not, because it's a policy specifically designed to undermine pre-established inequity that that racism as a concept considers. By definition it can't be. This is what [another redditor] was referencing in their reply to your comment (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong).

However, and to your point, it is a policy whereby the state makes specific and explicit choices on the basis of race, and if it's not racism; and its not racially prejudiced insofar as it hasn't been enacted due to an explicit negative view of whiteness, but it certainly is discriminatory in that it requires discriminating/distinguishing between people based on race then... what is it?

Honestly on that I don't know. I'm not sure what word I would use to describe that. You may disagree with me on the basis of whether or not it's prejudicial given how subjective that assessment is, but from a raw descriptive standpoint, which is what "racism" in academic circles functions as; I'm not sure how I'd categorize affirmative action. Honestly it would be interesting paper to read.

Since we know that the Neoclassical school of Economics is, at a minimum, just far too simple to accurately reflect the real world and, in many specific cases, made up of demonstrably false theoretical underpinnings, why is it still the most widely used and taught school of economics?

More importantly, why is it even used at all?

Thanks for your thoughts!

All of these fields are extremely or closely related to each other and are inseparable from one another.

I always feel depressed whenever I come across or read how the Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern era Philosophers used to study or excel in multiple fields, including the fields of Biology and Medicine!! 😭

What caused the Balkanisation of Social Sciences and Humanities field? And why is this trend allowed to be continued, as of 2024?