54 articles
Snob
Snob: an English word first recorded in the 1770s meaning cobbler, later popularized by Thackeray for a person admiring wealth or rank; also the snob effect, a negative network externality in economics.
Snowflake (slang)
Snowflake (slang): derogatory English term for a person seen as overly sensitive or easily offended, popularized by Fight Club, politicized after 2015–2016 as a right-wing insult toward liberals and the 'snowflake generation.'
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 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 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 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 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 skills
Social skills: competencies for verbal and nonverbal interaction and communication. Covers definitions, component skills, history of social skills training, and effectiveness evidence in ADHD, autism, and psychiatric populations.
Social stigma
Social stigma: discrediting social marks triggering labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination per Link and Phelan, following Goffman; studied across public, self, felt, and structural forms in health.
Social support
Social support: the provision of psychological and material resources by a social network to help cope with stress (Cohen). Covers emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal types, stress buffering, and intervention evidence.
Social system
Social system: the ordered arrangement of roles, institutions, and communications analyzed as a whole, central to Parsons' structural functionalism and Luhmann's autopoietic systems theory.
Socialization
Socialization is the lifelong process of social interaction by which people develop a social identity, learn societal norms, and come to participate effectively in society.
Stereotype
Stereotype: an oversimplified belief associating traits with a social group, introduced by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922) from a printing term. Distinguished from prejudice (affect) and discrimination (behavior), studied as explicit and implicit cognition.
Stereotype threat
Stereotype threat, from Steele and Aronson (1995), is the risk of confirming a negative group stereotype in relevant situations, disrupting performance. Covers working-memory mechanisms, self-affirmation and belonging interventions, and meta-analytic evidence on effect sizes and publication bias.
Symbolic interactionism
Symbolic interactionism, coined by Herbert Blumer in 1937 and rooted in George Herbert Mead's pragmatism, is a micro-level sociological theory explaining behavior through meanings built in interaction, with Chicago and Iowa schools and labeling theory.
Terror management theory
Terror management theory (TMT), proposed by Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon in 1986 from Ernest Becker's work, holds that cultural worldviews and self-esteem buffer death anxiety; mortality salience studies support it, but Many Labs 4 failed to replicate the classic effect.
Tripartite classification of authority
Tripartite classification of authority: Max Weber's typology of legitimate rule (Herrschaft) in Economy and Society (1922), distinguishing traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal authority as ideal types of why people obey.
Trolling
Trolling: deceptive, provocative, or disruptive online behavior aimed at provoking reactions for the troll's amusement; associated with dark tetrad traits, anonymity-driven disinhibition, and situational triggers like negative mood and exposure to prior trolling.
Trust (social science)
Trust (social science), also called social or interpersonal trust, is the willingness to accept vulnerability based on positive expectations of others. Covers generalized versus particularized trust, measurement scales, and global trust trends.
Trust game
The trust game, originally called the investment game, is a two-player experiment introduced in 1995 in which the amount sent measures trust and the proportion returned measures trustworthiness.
Vagueposting
Vagueposting, first named vaguebooking, is the practice of posting deliberately cryptic social media updates that hint at drama or feelings without context, usually to draw attention or sympathy.
Victim mentality
Victim mentality, or victimhood mindset, is a self-perception of persistent victimhood, studied individually as the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (four dimensions including rumination and moral elitism) and collectively as collective victimhood in intergroup conflict.
Volunteering
Volunteering is unpaid, freely chosen work for others, formal or informal; global scale about one billion volunteers (2.4% of global GDP), with research on motivations, barriers, participation trends, and retention.
Wilkomirski syndrome
Wilkomirski syndrome names the uncritical acceptance of fabricated victim testimony, from the 1995 fraudulent Holocaust memoir Fragments by Bruno Dössekker (Binjamin Wilkomirski), exposed in 1998 and investigated by Stefan Mächler.