53 articles
Active listening
Active listening, from Carl Rogers's client-centered therapy and the 1957 Rogers and Farson booklet, is a non-directive communication technique using paraphrasing, questions, and non-judgmental responses to confirm understanding.
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), British social anthropologist and founder of structural functionalism, contrasting with Malinowski's functionalism; held chairs at Cape Town, Sydney, Chicago, and Oxford; wrote The Andaman Islanders.
Altruism
Altruism is costly behavior benefiting others at the actor's expense. Explained by kin selection (Hamilton 1964), reciprocal altruism (Trivers 1971), and group selection; debated whether reciprocity and kin selection are separable; studied in genetics, neuroscience, and effective altruism.
Amateur
Amateur, from Latin amator (lover): a person pursuing art, science, sport, or leisure for love rather than pay. The term carries dual connotations of passion and unskill, and amateurism as an ideology originated in 19th-century British sport.
Asociality
Asociality is reduced desire for social connection and initiation of social interaction, a negative symptom of schizophrenia; distinct from antisocial behavior, it also occurs in schizoid personality disorder and autism.
Attachment in adults
Attachment in adults: stable patterns of security or insecurity in close relationships, measured dimensionally (attachment anxiety and avoidance) or as categories (secure, anxious/preoccupied, dismissing, fearful) via the AAI and ECR.
Autistic supremacism
Autistic supremacism, often called Aspie supremacism, is a belief within the autistic community that "Aspie" or "high-functioning" autistic people are superior to other autistic and non-autistic people.
Belongingness
Belongingness, the need to belong, sense of belonging: the universal human need to form and maintain enduring interpersonal attachments, defined by Baumeister and Leary (1995), traced to Maslow (1943), and linked to wellbeing, education, suicide risk, and social connection policy.
Black fatigue
Black fatigue is the chronic exhaustion Black people experience from coping with anti-Black racism, coined by Mary-Frances Winters in her 2020 book Black Fatigue and distinct from racial battle fatigue and racial trauma.
Body language
Body language, or kinesics, is communication through facial expressions, gestures, posture, and gait. Traced to Darwin (1872); not a true language, cues are context-dependent, culturally variable, and poor lie detectors (54% accuracy).
Bowing
Bowing (ojigi, お辞儀) is a noncontact greeting gesture of inclining the head or bending the trunk, standard in Japan with graded angles (eshaku 15°, keirei 45°, saikeirei ~90°), used for greeting, thanks, and apology, with roots in Chinese ritual and distinct East Asian variants like namaste and wai.
Brownie points
Brownie points are notional credit earned by doing good deeds or small favors for someone in authority, an American idiom first recorded in the 1940s and often tinged with pejorative irony.
Cannibalism in Europe
Cannibalism in Europe is the consumption of human flesh, documented from the Early Pleistocene to the modern era, including historical cases of famine and medicine.
Charles Horton Cooley
Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) was a University of Michigan sociologist who coined the looking-glass self (1902) and primary group (1909), founded Michigan sociology, and co-founded the American Sociological Society.
Chauvinism
Chauvinism is exaggerated, blind devotion to a group one belongs to, usually one's nation, involving perceived superiority and xenophobia; it is named for a French soldier.
Christopher Thomas Knight
Christopher Thomas Knight, known as the North Pond Hermit, lived alone in the Maine woods for 27 years until his 2013 arrest for about 1,000 cabin burglaries.
Chronemics
Chronemics is the study of time use in nonverbal communication, also called temporal communication. It covers punctuality, waiting, pauses, and response latency, Hall's monochronic versus polychronic cultural time orientations, and chronemic cues in computer-mediated communication.
Communication theory
Communication theory: frameworks describing how messages are sent, interpreted, and answered. Covers Shannon-Weaver's 1948 linear model, Berlo's 1960 SMCR, and the interactional and transactional models with feedback and simultaneous exchange.
Confidence
Confidence: belief in one's own abilities and judgment (self-confidence), trust placed in others, and graded certainty about one's judgments; distinguished from self-esteem and self-efficacy, with calibration and overconfidence research.
Conversation
Conversation: structured back-and-forth talk analyzed by conversation analysis (CA), founded by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson in the 1960s–1970s. Key concepts: turn-taking rules, adjacency pairs, and repair.
Cyberball task
Cyberball is a computerized ball-tossing game used in social psychology to manipulate social inclusion and ostracism, reported by Kipling Williams and colleagues in 2000 and now a standard induction of social exclusion in experimental research.
Dehumanization
Dehumanization is the attribution of subhuman qualities to people or groups. Key frameworks are Haslam's dual model (animalistic vs mechanistic) and infrahumanization; it is linked to violence, genocide propaganda, and contested trait-based measurement.
Dictator game
The dictator game is a behavioral economics experiment in which one player unilaterally splits an endowment with a recipient who cannot reject it, indexing altruism.
Donation task
The donation task is an incentivized behavioral paradigm, usually a dictator game variant, in which a participant decides how much of a sum to donate to a charity.
Dramaturgy (sociology)
Dramaturgy (sociology), also called Goffman's dramaturgical analysis, is Erving Goffman's framework from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956/1959) treating social interaction as performance, with front stage, back stage, and impression management.
Dumpster diving
Dumpster diving, also called skip dipping or bin-diving, is recovering usable goods, especially food, from waste receptacles; it spans food insecurity, freegan anti-consumerism, and legality under California v. Greenwood.
Dunbar's number
Dunbar's number is the ~150-person limit on stable human social relationships proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar from primate neocortex size, with layers of 5, 15, 50, and 150 and contested empirical support.
Effeminacy
Effeminacy: feminine appearance, mannerisms, or behavior in men or boys; from Latin effeminare. Known via Greek malakos and kinaidos, Victorian sexology, and modern femmephobia research; distinct from sexual orientation and gender identity.
Emily Post
Emily Post, American etiquette authority (born 1872 or 1873, Baltimore; died 1960), author of Etiquette (1922), which sold 1.5 million copies in her lifetime; her family's Emily Post Institute still publishes the Centennial Edition.
Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman (1922–1982), Canadian-born American sociologist of the Chicago School tradition, author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums, and Stigma; developer of dramaturgy and the interaction order; 37th ASA president.