All articles A–Z
519,064 articles
Social media and suicide
Social media and suicide covers contagion risks (Werther effect, nearly threefold risk from exposure to suicidality in one's network) and protective uses (Papageno effect, AI-based risk detection, crisis support) across platforms like Instagram, Reddit, and Facebook.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing, also known as social network marketing, uses platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to promote products, now the largest ad channel at $241.8 billion in 2024.
Social media sentiment analysis
Social media sentiment analysis is a natural language processing method that detects opinions in posts, classifying them as positive, negative, or neutral, with lexicon, machine learning, and transformer approaches.
Social media use by Donald Trump
Donald Trump's social media use spans Twitter/X from May 2009 (about 57,000 tweets, 88.9 million followers, January 2021 ban, November 2022 reinstatement) and his platform Truth Social, his main outlet with heavy second-term posting but lower engagement.
Social medicine
Social medicine is an approach to health that analyzes how social conditions such as poverty, inequality, and racism shape disease, and seeks to act on those conditions.
Social mobility
Social mobility, also known as vertical or class mobility, is the movement of individuals or families between social and economic positions, within a lifetime or between parents and children.
Social movement
A social movement is a sustained network using unconventional means, shared beliefs, and solidarity to pursue conflictual aims. Covers classical, resource mobilization, political process, new social movement, and framing theories, plus digital-era protest.
Social navigation
Social navigation is the capability of a mobile robot, vehicle, or virtual agent to move through environments shared with people while respecting social norms such as personal space.
Social needs screening
Social needs screening is a health care method that uses standardized questionnaires to identify unmet needs such as food insecurity, housing instability, and transportation problems for referral.
Social network
Social network: a set of actors (nodes) connected by ties (relationships), studied via social network analysis founded in Moreno's 1930s sociometry; distinct from social network sites like Facebook, which make networks visible online.
Social network analysis
Social network analysis (SNA) studies social structure by mapping relationships among actors, such as people, organizations, or countries, rather than treating individuals as independent units.
Social networking service
Social networking service (SNS): online platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and X where users build profiles and connection lists. Defined by boyd and Ellison; began with SixDegrees.com in 1997; distinct from topical forums and social media generally.
Social neuroscience
Social neuroscience: interdisciplinary field studying neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms of social behavior; term coined early 1990s (Cacioppo and Berntson); distinct from the journal Social Neuroscience (2006).
Social norm
Social norm: an informal, self-enforcing rule of behavior in a group, distinct from law and moral norms, sustained by descriptive and injunctive expectations and by sanctions ranging from disapproval to ostracism.
Social norms approach
The social norms approach is a health promotion method that surveys a population and communicates true majority norms to reduce risky behavior, most commonly student drinking.
Social novel
The social novel (French: roman social) is a literary genre denouncing social problems and their effects on the working classes through realist fiction, shaped in nineteenth-century France with Zola's Germinal.
Social order
Social order is the stable, predictable arrangement of social life that makes cooperation, trade, and justice possible; sociologists since Comte and Durkheim have studied how it arises.
Social organization
Social organization: the patterned arrangement of relationships, roles, groups, institutions, and networks coordinating a society, studied through functionalism, conflict theory, interactionism, network science, emergency-response frameworks, and digital platforms.
Social ownership
Social ownership, also called socialisation of production, is the collective ownership of productive property by a state, community, cooperative, or society, central to socialist thought.
Social parasitism (offense)
Social parasitism (tuneyadstvo, příživnictví) was a socialist-era criminal offense punishing able-bodied people who avoided work and lived by unfair means, used in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and briefly Belarus against beggars, prostitutes, and dissidents such as Joseph Brodsky.
Social physics
Social physics, also called sociophysics, is the application of physics, especially statistical physics, to collective social phenomena like opinion formation, voting, and the spread of ideas.
Social policy
Social policy: government laws, programs, and institutions protecting people against poverty, unemployment, sickness, and old age; also called the welfare state, studied through Esping-Andersen's welfare regime typologies and OECD social spending data.
Social programs in the United States
Social programs in the United States, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, SNAP, and TANF, form a decentralized safety net created mainly by the 1935 Social Security Act and the 1965 amendments.
Social Progress Index
Social Progress Index (SPI): composite measure by Social Progress Imperative, devised by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in 2013, scoring 171 countries on Basic Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity using 57 non-economic indicators, excluding GDP.
Social proof
Social proof, popularized by Robert Cialdini's Influence (1984), is the tendency to decide what is correct by observing what similar others do, strongest under uncertainty; an informational form of conformity distinct from normative influence.
Social psychology
Social psychology, a field shared with sociology (sociological social psychology), is the scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave in social contexts. Key facts: Lewin's Behavior = f(person, situation), Sherif, Asch, Milgram, Zimbardo landmark studies, and the replication crisis.
Social realism
Social realism, an international realist art movement of the interwar period depicting working-class and poor conditions critically; distinct from Soviet Socialist Realism (Stalin, 1934); figures include Orozco, Rivera, Shahn, Gropper.
Social rejection
Social rejection: being explicitly told one is not wanted; related to ostracism (being ignored and excluded) and social exclusion. Threatens belonging, self-esteem, control, meaningful existence; studied chiefly via the Cyberball paradigm; meta-analytic effects large (d > 1.4).
Social relation
Social relation: a connection between people who are at least minimally interdependent, influencing each other's thoughts, feelings, or behavior; central concept of sociology (Weber, Simmel, Marx), classified structurally and functionally, and measured in relationship science and health research.
Social research
Social research: systematic study of human societies using surveys, field research, experiments, and secondary data analysis. Rooted in Enlightenment thought and Comte's positivism, shaped by Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, and now including mixed methods designs.