6,078 articles
Peter Brimelow
Peter Brimelow (born 1947), British-American financial journalist, author of Alien Nation (1995), and founder of VDARE.com, a leading anti-immigration and white nationalist-adjacent website suspended in 2024.
Peter Freuchen
Peter Freuchen (Lorentz Peter Elfred Freuchen, 1886-1957), Danish polar explorer, Thule trading-post manager and writer; co-founded Thule with Knud Rasmussen in 1910, joined the 1st and 5th Thule expeditions, lost a foot to frostbite in 1924, wrote novels and memoirs about Inuit life, made the Oscar-winning film Eskimo, and won The $64,000 Question in 1956.
Peter Pan syndrome
Peter Pan syndrome, an informal pop-psychology term coined by Dan Kiley in 1983, describes adults who avoid responsibility, commitment, and emotional maturity; not a DSM or ICD diagnosis, linked to the Jungian puer aeternus and the enabling Wendy dynamic.
Peter Tatchell
Peter Tatchell (born 1952, Melbourne) is a British human rights campaigner active since 1967, known for the Gay Liberation Front, OutRage!, the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, Mugabe citizen's arrests, and the Peter Tatchell Foundation.
Petite bourgeoisie
Petite bourgeoisie (petty bourgeoisie), French for "small bourgeoisie," is the lower middle class of small shopkeepers, artisans, and small-business owners; central to Marxist, Weberian, and Bourdieusian class theory.
Petun
The Petun, self-named Tionontati, were an Iroquoian-speaking people farming near Georgian Bay in Ontario from about 1580 to 1650, named the Tobacco Nation by the French.
Phallic stage
Phallic stage (phallische Phase): Freud's third psychosexual stage, ages 3-6, genital libido, Oedipus and castration complexes; basis of phallic monism, Horney's critique, and Lacan's phallus as signifier.
Phallus
Phallus: the erect penis as cultural symbol, distinct from the anatomical penis. Sacred imagery attested some 30,000 years back; Greek fertility deities, Roman apotropaic amulets, the Vindolanda wooden phallus, and psychoanalytic theory.
Phantom vibration syndrome
Phantom vibration syndrome, also called ringxiety or phantom phone signals, is the false perception of a phone vibrating or ringing. Prevalence reaches 68-96% in heavy users, rises under stress such as medical internship, and reverses afterward.
Phi Kappa Theta (ΦΚΘ)
Phi Kappa Theta (ΦΚΘ) is an American social fraternity formed April 29, 1959 by merging Phi Kappa (Brown, 1889) and Theta Kappa Phi (Lehigh, 1919), once Catholic-only, motto "Give, Expecting Nothing Thereof."
Philanthropy
Philanthropy (Greek philos + anthropos, love of humankind) is voluntary giving for public purposes, distinct from charity and taxation; spans ancient gift traditions, Carnegie-era foundations, and modern nonprofit, foundation, and donor-advised fund giving.
Philanthropy and advocacy of Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton's philanthropy, run through The Dollywood Foundation (1988), includes the Imagination Library book-gifting program (1995), the My People Fund wildfire relief, Vanderbilt COVID-19 vaccine research funding, and scholarships.
Philip Zimbardo
Philip Zimbardo (1933-2024), American social psychologist and 2002 APA president at Stanford, led the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, ended after six days, and later founded the Heroic Imagination Project.
Philippe de Rothschild
Baron Philippe de Rothschild (1902-1988), also known as Philippe Georges de Rothschild, ran Château Mouton Rothschild from 1922, introduced chateau bottling in 1924, created Mouton Cadet, and won Mouton's 1973 elevation to First Growth.
Philippine kinship
Philippine kinship, the bilateral (cognatic) family reckoning system of the Philippines, also called Malayan-type kinship. Descent traced equally through both parents; generation-based, weakly sex-differentiated terminology; compadrazgo godparenthood; regional variation including segmentary lineal-like organization in the Islamic south.
Philomena Lee
Philomena Lee, Irish woman separated from her son Anthony at Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea, in the 1950s; subject of Martin Sixsmith's 2009 book and the 2013 Oscar-nominated film Philomena; advocate for adoption-record access and Philomena's Law.
Phoebe Gates
Phoebe Gates, youngest daughter of Bill and Melinda French Gates, co-founded the AI shopping assistant Phia with Sophia Kianni in April 2025; it raised $35M at a $185M valuation, then faced 2026 cookie-stuffing and privacy controversies.
Phoebe Plummer
Phoebe Plummer, British Just Stop Oil activist who threw soup on Van Gogh's Sunflowers in 2022, jailed two years in 2024, later given suspended M25 conspiracy sentence.
Phoenix Lights
Phoenix Lights: mass UFO sighting over Arizona on March 13, 1997, in two events, an early V-shaped light formation and a ~10 p.m. row of flares near Gila Bend; seen by up to 10% of Arizonans, partly explained as military flares and A-10s.
Phone sex
Phone sex: erotic conversation by telephone, intimate or commercial, including voice, video, and text forms. Covers 1980s dial-a-porn origins, 900-number billing, per-minute rates, operators, and recording law.
Photovoice
Photovoice is a participatory action research method in which community members photograph their own lives and use the images to spark group discussion and advocate for change.
Phrenology
Phrenology, or Schädellehre, is the discredited 19th-century practice of reading personality from skull bumps, founded by Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, popularized by George Combe and the Fowlers, and rejected as pseudoscience.
Physical abuse
Physical abuse: intentional use of physical force causing injury, a form of child maltreatment alongside sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect; global pooled prevalence 22.6%, distinct from corporal punishment by definition but overlapping in practice.
Physical attractiveness
Physical attractiveness is the degree to which a person's face and body are judged appealing. Also called beauty; studied via averageness, symmetry, sexual dimorphism, the halo effect, the beauty premium, and cross-cultural variation in standards.
Physical attractiveness stereotype
The physical attractiveness stereotype, also called attractiveness bias, is the tendency to see attractive people as having better traits and life outcomes, summarized as "what is beautiful is good."
Physical intimacy
Physical intimacy is bodily closeness between people, spanning sexual contact and non-sexual touch such as hugging and hand-holding. Distinguishing facts: it calms stress via cortisol and oxytocin pathways, follows bond-strength touch maps across cultures, and is governed by cultural, gendered, historical, and legal norms.
Physiognomy
Physiognomy is the pseudoscientific practice of judging character or personality from facial and bodily appearance; practiced since ancient Mesopotamia, revived by Lavater in 1775, distinct from phrenology, and revived again in AI facial analysis.
Piaget's theory of cognitive development
Piaget's theory of cognitive development, also called genetic epistemology, is Jean Piaget's constructivist stage theory: children build knowledge via assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration through four invariant stages, a framework now revised by inhibitory-control and cross-cultural research.
Picketing
Picketing, also called a picket line, is stationing protesters outside a workplace to publicize a labor dispute and discourage workers or customers from entering. Covers primary versus secondary picketing, US and UK legality, and the 2026 ICJ right-to-strike opinion.
Pickup artist
Pickup artists (PUAs) are self-styled seduction experts in a commercial online community selling techniques like negging and kino; tied to the manosphere, popularized by Mystery and Neil Strauss's 2005 The Game, and criticized as manipulative and misogynistic.