107 articles
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is the tendency to judge other cultures by one's own group's standards and regard one's ingroup as central and superior. Coined in use by Sumner's Folkways (1906), it spans ingroup favoritism, measures like GENE and CETSCALE, and links to conflict, threat, and nationalism.
Exceptionalism
Exceptionalism is the claim, made by or about a nation or group, that it is morally superior to comparable others, a concept best developed for the United States.
Eye contact
Eye contact, or mutual gaze, is the direct look exchanged between two interacting people. Covers its social functions, cone of direct gaze, neural basis, development, autism-related atypicalities, and cross-cultural variation in comfort and interpretation.
Famous for being famous
Famous for being famous: pejorative phrase for celebrity without identifiable accomplishment, traced to Charles Godfrey Leland (1896) and Daniel Boorstin's 1962 'well-known for his well-knownness,' now applied to reality-TV and social-media celebrities.
Flirting
Flirting is playful, deliberately ambiguous verbal and nonverbal communication used to signal or probe romantic or sexual interest. Covers detection accuracy, gender differences, context effects, and AI-assisted digital flirting.
Fragile masculinity
Fragile masculinity, also called precarious manhood or masculinity threat, is the theory that manhood is an earned, easily lost status defended when challenged; meta-analysis shows small-to-medium effects (d=.45) on emotions and self-perception, though political-attitude findings failed replication.
Gen Z stare
Gen Z stare (Zoomer Stare) is slang for the blank, expressionless look Gen Zers give instead of a greeting or small talk, common in customer service. First posted on TikTok July 29, 2024, viral mid-2025; contested between generations and partly debunked by 2026 survey data.
Gossip
Gossip is evaluative talk about absent third parties; researchers define positive, negative, and neutral forms. Key facts: 52 minutes daily on average, three-quarters neutral, over 90% of employees gossip at work, and gossip sustains cooperation via reputations.
Grey rock method
Grey rock method, or gray rocking: a self-protective communication tactic of emotional flatness and minimal disclosure to make an abusive or manipulative person lose interest; anecdotal only, with escalation risks.
Habitus (sociology)
Habitus (sociology): durable, transposable dispositions linking class conditions to regular conduct, defined by Pierre Bourdieu in Outline of a Theory of Practice and rooted in Aristotle's hexis, Mauss, and Elias.
Hacker ethic
Hacker ethic: informal values of hacker culture codified by Steven Levy in Hackers (1984), six tenets from free information to decentralization, originating at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club and extended by the Chaos Computer Club.
Haptic communication
Haptic communication: conveying information and emotion through touch, directly or via tactile/kinesthetic devices (mediated social touch). Distinguished by CT-afferent affective touch, discriminative mechanoreceptors, VR haptic systems, and the Tactile Internet.
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, by Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede (first published 1980), models national culture on six dimensions such as power distance and individualism, scored 0-100, derived originally from IBM employee surveys; widely used in business research but criticized for weak replication and measurement validity.
Honour
Honour (honor) is social standing and self-worth in one's own and others' eyes, studied as a cultural logic alongside face and dignity; honor cultures emphasize reputation defense, reciprocity, and retaliation against insults.
Identity (social science)
Identity in social science is the self-definition of persons and groups through personal traits and group memberships. Central concepts include Tajfel's social identity theory, self-categorization theory, and Erikson's personal identity.
Impression management
Impression management, or self-presentation, is the control of information to steer others' opinions, originating in Goffman's 1959 dramaturgical theory and studied via Leary and Kowalski's motivation-construction model, tactics like self-promotion and ingratiation, and measurement as socially desirable responding.
In-group favoritism
In-group favoritism, also called ingroup love, is the tendency to favor one's own group over outgroups; explained by Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory, it arises even in minimal groups and drives most everyday discrimination more than outgroup hostility.
Interpersonal attraction
Interpersonal attraction is the positive affective or behavioral response one person has toward another, central to social psychology. Key determinants are similarity (Byrne's reinforcement-affect model), physical attractiveness, reciprocity, and mere exposure; speed-dating studies challenge similarity's role.
Intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity is the shared understanding or interchange of thoughts and feelings between two subjects, coined by Edmund Husserl as a critique of Descartes' problem of other minds.
Kinesics
Kinesics, also known as kinemics, is the study of body movements, such as gestures, facial expressions, and posture, as communication in social interaction, often called body language.
Legitimation
Legitimation is the social process by which authorities, institutions, or practices come to be seen as appropriate and just, producing voluntary deference; studied by Weber, Berger and Luckmann, Tyler, and organizational and global-governance scholarship.
Loneliness epidemic
Loneliness epidemic: public-health framing of widespread loneliness, named in Vivek Murthy's 2023 US Surgeon General advisory and the WHO's 2023 concern declaration; prevalence varies by measure, and trend evidence is contested.
Mentalizing task
A mentalizing task is a behavioral paradigm, usually built from stories, vignettes, or films, that measures how well a person infers others' beliefs, intentions, and feelings, called theory of mind.
Models of communication
Models of communication are simplified representations of messaging: linear (Shannon-Weaver, Lasswell), interactive (Schramm, Osgood, Berlo), and transactional (Barnlund), covering sender, message, channel, noise, feedback, and context.
Musa al-Gharbi
Musa al-Gharbi, American sociologist and Guardian columnist at Stony Brook University, author of We Have Never Been Woke (2024) on symbolic capitalists, the Great Awokenings, and elite status competition.
Negotiation
Negotiation is a communication process where parties seek an agreement by balancing shared and opposed interests. Roger Fisher and the Harvard Negotiation Project founded the field in 1979.
Nerd
Nerd: American slang, first attested 1951, for a socially awkward person devoted to intellectual or technical pursuits; related to geek, reclaimed by hacker culture, and central to stereotypes about STEM, gender, and fandom.
Non-apology apology
Non-apology apology (nonapology): a statement in the form of an apology that acknowledges no responsibility or regret. Covers its etymology, rhetorical devices like "if anyone was offended," and why politicians and corporations use it.
Nonverbal communication
Nonverbal communication (NVC), also called body language, is meaning transmission without words via face, voice, gesture, touch, and space; studied through encoding, decoding accuracy (r ≈ .32), and the disputed Mehrabian conjecture.
Norm activation model
The norm activation model is a social-psychological model, proposed by Shalom Schwartz in the late 1960s, explaining prosocial and pro-environmental behavior through activated personal norms, feelings of moral obligation.