Why researchers can't agree after decades of studies

The sociologist Margaret Hagerman spent two years embedded in upper-middle-class white households, listening in on conversations about race. By Joe Pinsker. (Sept. 4, 2018)

A number of psychological experiments over the years have yielded terrifying conclusions about the subjects. By Alexandra Gedrose. (May 6, 2008)

The Berlin Wall has been down as long as it stood. One generation lived with the wall, one without it. But in many ways it is still a tale of two countries.

Genetic ancestry tests are often advertised as a tool to uncover new connections to diverse cultures and ancestries, but new research from the University of British Columbia has found people tend to pick and choose which races they identify with based on preconceived biases. Ancestry testing is part of a rapidly growing, billion-dollar industry that claims to use DNA to tell people about the parts of the world from which their ancestors originated.

Can mapping neural pathways help us make friends with our enemies?

I sat without speaking, my food getting cold on my plate. Three thoughts ran through my mind fast as flipping an egg. First, I couldn’t see the connection between social class and garbage. Second, I didn’t like having my thirty-year career reduced to a single subject matter. Third, I’d never heard of anything called “trash food.”

Faced with injustice, we’ll try to alleviate it – but, if we can’t, we’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: blame the victims of the injustice.

Huli in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Before They Pass Away is a powerful documentary series by photographer Jimmy Nelson featuring dozens of cultures around the world whose people live in seclusion and are at risk of fading away.

A look back at Parkway Village, the birthplace of The Feminine Mystique

Half the picture of student success is something other than academic. So why can't someone come up with a better name for them?

Our brains are wired to prepare us, during quiet moments, to be socially connected to other people, neuroscientists report. Facebook is aligned with the state of our brains at rest -- which can explain why it's such a popular activity when we want to take a break.

Teaching competition from kindergarten up makes us stupid and uninventive.

We begin the damaging process of turning boys into men long before boyhood ends.

Social media still gets too much credit for the Arab Spring and social change. Change needs people, not just tech

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

How do you fix a broken system that isn't yours to repair? Advocates for fairer, safer online spaces are turning to the conservation movement for inspiration.

Scandals over two books on wealthy Manhattan wives and inner-city youth prove we still prefer stories to facts

The Holocaust and other genocides taught us ordinary people can enact horrors. Now we might understand the science

Was one of psychology’s most controversial studies about individual fallibility or broken institutions?

Did Alice Goffman commit a felony while researching her book on young black men in the criminal-justice system?

A rise in commonly owned spaces and services hopes to reclaim the city for the public good, providing a participatory alternative to exclusive urban development. But how can it be upscaled from local garden projects?

A Supreme Court decision fifty years ago raised women’s incomes and expanded opportunities for their children.

Federal government money is used to build housing that further segregates black and white Americans. Many don't think that's a problem.

It might seem frivolous to share photos of cute pets, or photobombing animals, but there is scientific evidence from psychological research that viewing certain pictures can combat stress and make us happier. So why are photos able to evoke our emotions so readily?

For many people, listening to just one person describe their dreams is a nightmare. But for G. William Domhoff, it’s a calling; as a dream researcher, he listens to them professionally. But even a dream doctor has his limits...

All young people make mistakes, some more serious, and some less so, than John, our fictional example. But the results of those experiences are vastly different for youths in different classes, according to Robert Putnam and Charles Murray, two sociologists who spoke about opportunity in America at an event at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on Monday.

You don’t have to be a monster or a madman to dehumanise others. You just have to be an ordinary human being. By David Livingstone Smith. (2014)

Social networks affect every aspect of our lives, from the jobs we get and the technologies we adopt to the partners we choose and the healthiness of our lifestyles. But where do they come from?

Reading Women in Clothes, the sprawling collection edited by Heidi Julavits, Sheila Heti, and Leanne Shapton, is like spending Saturday afternoon at Nordstrom Rack. Massive, chaotic, and noisy, both are messy in a way that could be inadvertent but could be purposeful: is this disarray a sign of how much they have to offer, or a commercial tactic to make their goods seem limitless?

The conversations between a young woman in rural Washington State and a British man with ties to radical Islam may provide clues about how ISIS recruits new members around the world.

“But something important has changed since the 1990s when a lot of discussions of deliberative democracy took place. This is the workings of social media -- blogs, comments, Twitter discussions, Facebook communities. Here we have millions of people interacting with each other and debating issues -- but we don't seem to have a surge of better or more informed thinking about the hard issues...”

Network scientists have discovered how social networks can create the illusion that something is common when it is actually rare.

Farah Pandith cites Jane Goodall as a figure who helped her learn how to reach the truth. "I recall thinking about the concept of knowledge and understanding.  What was the difference between knowledge and understanding? We learn and think we understand.  But what if we don’t really?"