All articles A–Z
519,064 articles
Social entrepreneurship
Social entrepreneurship, also known as SocEnt or civic entrepreneurship, is the practice of running revenue-generating businesses whose central mission is social change, sitting between conventional firms and charities.
Social environment
Social environment: the relationships, institutions, cultural practices, and material conditions in which people live and interact, also called the human or sociocultural environment; distinguished from the natural environment and studied as a determinant of health, development, and behavior.
Social equality
Social equality: the condition of people relating as equals with equal standing and rights. Also called relational or civic equality; distinct from equity, distributive egalitarianism, and equality of opportunity.
Social exchange theory
Social exchange theory, also known as exchange theory, is a framework treating social interactions as exchanges of rewards and costs, pioneered by George Homans in 1958.
Social exclusion
Social exclusion, also known as marginalization, is the process of preventing individuals or groups from full participation in economic, social, and political life, a concept that originated in France in 1974.
Social fantasy
Social fantasy (социальная фантастика) is a branch of speculative fiction in which invented societies and technologies analyze social structures, politics, and power rather than showcase novelty.
Social fascism
Social fascism (Sozialfaschismus): Comintern Third Period doctrine, 1928–1935, equating social democracy with fascism; it blocked KPD-SPD unity against the Nazis and was replaced by the 1935 Popular Front line.
Social force model
The social force model is a pedestrian simulation method introduced by Dirk Helbing and Péter Molnár in 1995, treating crowd motion as social forces and reproducing lane formation.
Social Gospel
The Social Gospel was a Protestant reform movement in the United States, prominent from about 1870 to 1920, teaching that the kingdom of God requires social as well as individual redemption.
Social group
A social group, known in sociology as a sociological group, is any set of at least two people who interact regularly and share a sense of aligned identity.
Social History of Medicine
Social History of Medicine is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal, published by Oxford University Press for the Society for the Social History of Medicine, covering health, illness, and medical treatment in the past.
Social hygiene movement
The social hygiene movement, or hygienism, was an American Progressive Era reform campaign led by physicians to eliminate venereal disease and prostitution through sex education and legal reform.
Social identity theory
Social identity theory (SIT), by Henri Tajfel and John Turner (1979), explains intergroup discrimination via categorization, identification, and comparison; with self-categorization theory it forms the social identity approach.
Social impact assessment
Social impact assessment (SIA) is a systematic process of analyzing, monitoring, and managing the intended and unintended social consequences of planned interventions such as projects, policies, and programs.
Social impact of the phonograph
The social impact of the phonograph covers how recorded sound moved from failed office dictation to coin-operated arcades and, by the late 1920s, most US homes.
Social inequality
Social inequality is the unequal distribution of resources and outcomes among individuals and groups in a society, commonly measured by the Gini coefficient, which ranges from 0 for perfect equality to 100.
Social influence
Social influence, also called group influence, is the change in a person's thoughts, feelings, or behavior caused by others present or implied, and includes conformity, compliance, and obedience.
Social intelligence
Social intelligence, proposed by Edward Thorndike in 1920, is the ability to understand and behave wisely with others; distinct from emotional intelligence (r = 0.23) and general IQ, with roots in the social intelligence hypothesis and modern AI benchmarks.
Social isolation
Social isolation, an objective lack of social relationships and interactions, distinct from loneliness (subjective disconnection). Covers prevalence, health risks, measurement scales, and interventions, especially in older adults.
Social issue
Social issue (social problem): a condition or behavior harming large numbers of people that the public recognizes as needing action. Combines objective measurable conditions with subjective concern; studied via constructionist claims-making theory, with data on poverty, inequality, and public priorities.
Social justice
Social justice, a normative political concept with no single accepted definition, concerns fair distribution, procedures, and recognition in society; coined by Taparelli in 1840, developed by Rawls, contested by Hayek, Sen, and Fraser.
Social justice warrior
Social justice warrior (SJW) is a pejorative for promoters of progressive views; positive in the early 1990s, pejorative from about 2009–2011, mainstreamed by 2014 GamerGate, later displaced by "woke".
Social learning theory
Social learning theory, developed by Albert Bandura (1925-2021), explains how people learn behaviors by observing and imitating models through attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation, with vicarious reinforcement and reciprocal determinism; known from the 1961 Bobo doll experiments.
Social Liberal Party (Brazil)
Social Liberal Party (Partido Social Liberal, PSL), Brazilian party, ballot number 17, founded 1994, originally social liberal with the Imposto Único Federal proposal; carried Bolsonaro to the 2018 presidency with 52 deputies, then merged into União Brasil in 2022.
Social liberalism
Social liberalism, also called new liberalism (UK) or modern liberalism (US), is a liberal ideology endorsing a regulated market economy and civil rights, holding that state intervention secures the real conditions of individual freedom, distinct from social democracy by its wariness of state power.
Social loafing
Social loafing is the reduction in individual effort that occurs when people work in a group rather than alone, first named in 1979 clapping and shouting experiments.
Social market economy
Social market economy (Soziale Marktwirtschaft): West Germany's post-1948 economic order combining competitive markets with state-guaranteed rules and social policy; coined by Alfred Müller-Armack, implemented by Ludwig Erhard, rooted in ordoliberalism.
Social Marketing
Social marketing is the application of commercial marketing concepts and tools to influence voluntary behavior for social good rather than profit, widely used in public health campaigns judged against eight benchmark criteria.
Social media
Social media is a family of internet services where users create profiles, share content, and interact within networks of connections, reaching 5.24 billion users worldwide in early 2025.
Social media age verification laws in the United States
US state laws requiring social media platforms or app stores to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent for minors; first enacted in Utah in 2023, mostly blocked in federal court under strict scrutiny, though Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (2025) established intermediate scrutiny for age-verification requirements.