China’s social credit system, reminiscent of a dystopian nightmare, has invaded yet another level of Chinese citizens’ lives: determining where their children can go to school. In 2014, the Chinese regime first rolled out plans to create a social credit system, which ranks each citizen based on their levels of trustworthiness and compliance with the regime’s rules.

A recent study finds that young people who get financial support from their parents have greater professional success, highlighting one way social inequality is transmitted from one generation to the next. “The question underlying this work was whether parental support gives adult children an advantage or hinders their development,” says Anna Manzoni, an associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University and author of a paper on the work.

Even your selfies and brunch photos aren’t safe from the long arm of Facebook, it was revealed overnight, as the tech giant admitted it had taken billions of photos from Instagram accounts around the world to boost its own research. More than 3.5 billion photographs were harvested from the photo-sharing platform without users’ knowledge, chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer told the audience at the company's annual developers' conference F8, revealing they had been used to enhance the company’s artificial intelligence technology.

Amazon started widely selling its Echo speaker, voiced by the Star Trek-inspired personal assistant Alexa, in 2015. That year, 6,050 baby girls in the United States were named Alexa, or 311 for every 100,000 female babies born. Since then, the name has declined in popularity 33 percent, according to new data from the Social Security Administration crunched by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen. Last year, just 3,883 baby girls were named Alexa.

People who live in rural areas are happier than city dwellers, new research has found. The study surveyed 400,000 people across Canada using a widely-recognized happiness scale. Cities have higher salaries, higher education levels and lower unemployment rates. However, that meant nothing in terms of joy: people who lived in the countryside were, on average, eight times happier than people in urban areas, the study found.

If you want to give a little boost to your life satisfaction a year from now, you may want to try socially-focused strategies over strategies that involve nonsocial pursuits, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Less intelligent people are more likely to hold discriminatory attitudes towards same-sex couples, according to new research from Australia. The finding, which appear in the journal Intelligence, adds to a growing body of literature that indicates less intelligent people tend to express more prejudicial attitudes.

Older men with higher levels of the sex hormones testosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) in their bodies tend to become less religious, according to a new study. The findings, published recently in the journal Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, suggest that physiology can influence religiosity. “Most of my research is on how social factors get ‘under the skin’ to influence human physiology — and the other way around,” said study author Aniruddha “Bobby” Das of McGill University.

New research on consensually non-monogamous relationships indicates that having one partner who meets your sexual needs is linked to increased satisfaction not only in that relationship, but also in a concurrent relationship. The study was recently published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. “Generally I am interested in how having partners who are motivated to be responsive to your needs is associated with satisfaction,” said Amy Muise, an assistant professor at York University and corresponding author of the study.

Children as young as age 4 express dislike of and are willing to punish those who freeload off the work of other group members, a new Yale University study has found. But kids also make a clear distinction between those who freeload intentionally and those who have good reasons why they can’t contribute.

People who are labeled as transgender are viewed as less attractive dating partners, according to new research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. The new study, which was conducted with heterosexual college students, indicates that gender identity affects perceptions of attractiveness.

Alex Jones. The infamous conspiracy theorist has been throwing out the dangers of the “New World Order” for decades. Like an insane Santa Claus, he has a list of everyone who is naughty or nice. Except he is sharing the list every day of the year and nearly everyone is naughty. His targets have included parents of dead children, presidents, and pizza joints. For someone who rarely talks about his faith, he does use a plethora of apocalyptic rhetoric that quotes the Old Testament.

On Sunday 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant was awoken by his alarm at 6am. He said goodbye to his girlfriend as she left the house, ate some breakfast, and set the burglar alarm before leaving his Hobart residence, as usual. He stopped briefly to purchase a coffee in the small town of Forcett, where he asked the cashier to “boil the kettle less time.” He then drove to the nearby town of Port Arthur, originally a colonial-era convict settlement populated only by a few hundred people.

New research suggests that having a firmly held religious belief can provide a sense of increased purpose in life among those who are socially disconnected. The findings, which were published in the Journal of Personality, indicate that religion can be one way that individuals cope with the reduced sense purpose in life that is associated with loneliness.

Toddlers aged just 1 1/2 years prefer individuals whom other people yield to. It appears to be deeply rooted in human nature to seek out those with the highest social status. This motive might have evolved because being close to high-ranking individuals has given people access to resources, territory and mates.

A new study suggests that women’s makeup is perceived as a signal of greater interest in casual sex. But the research found evidence that this was actually a “false signal.” The study, which was published in Personality and Individual Differences, examined the relationship between women’s makeup use and sociosexuality.

Past research has found that women tend to be less attracted to men who are shorter than themselves. Now, a new study suggests that women are also less attracted to men who are dumber than themselves. The findings appear in the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences.

The person who leaves the party without telling his friends is an asshole, right? Well, not necessarily. And it took me a while to realize this. Personally, the Irish exit didn't flash its brilliance until I experienced my first post-college networking event -- that distinct void where bleak reality meets stark desperation. Young men wore ill-fitting navy suits instead of jeans to look older. Old men wore scrotum-hugging skinny jeans instead of suits to look younger.

It feels selfish to fret – it’s the other person who is suffering – but agonising over what to say to a friend in need can be incredibly anxiety provoking. If you want to be supportive (and not make matters worse), what are the right words to say to someone who has experienced a relationship break-up, for instance, or lost their job?

The use of emojis can impact the effectiveness of online messages, according to research published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture. “The idea for the study came out of a brainstorming session with my co-author Alecka. She is interested in psychology and social media, and I am interested in basic cognition, so studying how we view emojis felt like a perfect mix of our backgrounds if you think about the hypothetical Venn-Diagram,” said T. Alex Daniel of Westfield State University, the corresponding author of the study.