6,078 articles
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.'
So-yeon Schröder-Kim
So-yeon Schröder-Kim (Kim So-yeon), born 1970, is a South Korean interpreter and translator, fifth wife of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (married 7 May 2018), former NRW.INVEST Seoul representative, dismissed by NRW.Global Business in 2023 after attending a Russian embassy reception.
Soaking (sexual practice)
Soaking is slang for penetrative sex without thrusting, framed as a premarital-sex loophole among Latter-day Saints and BYU students. It went viral on TikTok in 2020-2021 and via TV shows, but researchers call it largely a rumor; it carries normal STI and pregnancy risks.
Soccer mom
Soccer mom is a US informal term, coined about 1990-95, for a middle-class suburban mother who drives her children to soccer and other activities; it became a key 1996 election swing-voter label and later a cultural stereotype.
Social
Social: adjective for anything involving interaction among people. Covers social facts (Durkheim), individualism versus holism, social ontology, social structure, networks, and modern uses like social media and social capital.
Social alienation
Social alienation is the estrangement of individuals from others, society, or themselves, defined philosophically as problematic separation and operationalized by Melvin Seeman's five dimensions (powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation, self-estrangement), distinct from social isolation and loneliness.
Social anthropology
Social anthropology, the British-founded branch of anthropology associated with Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, studies societies and social institutions through long-term participant-observation fieldwork and ethnography, distinct from American cultural anthropology mainly in emphasis on society over culture.
Social behavior
Social behavior: behavior directed toward or shaped by other members of one's species, studied through situationism, attribution, Tinbergen's four questions, cultural variation, cooperation, and applied behavioral science.
Social capital
Social capital: the resources, trust, networks, and support people obtain through social connections. Key theorists Bourdieu, Coleman, Putnam; forms bonding, bridging, linking; measured via OECD's four interpretations.
Social change
Social change: the significant alteration of social structure and cultural patterns over time, explained in sociology by evolutionary, conflict, functionalist, and cyclical theories, with drivers including technology, institutions, population, and environment.
Social class
Social class: groups sharing similar standing by wealth, income, education, family background, and occupation. Central concepts from Marx, Weber, and Bourdieu; measured by schemes like EGP and PISA's ESCS.
Social class in the United Kingdom
Social class in the United Kingdom: stratification by occupation, education, wealth, and culture, officially measured via NS-SEC since 2001, academically via the Goldthorpe scheme, and multidimensionally via the 2011-2013 Great British Class Survey's seven classes.
Social class in the United States
Social class in the United States divides Americans into upper, middle, and lower classes based on income, occupation, education, and wealth. The core middle class shrank from 35.5% of families in 1979 to 30.8% in 2024 while the upper middle class grew, and class shapes health, mobility, and political power.
Social cognitive theory
Social cognitive theory, Bandura's behavioral theory from the 1986 book Social Foundations of Thought and Action, explains behavior via triadic reciprocal causation of behavior, personal factors, and environment, centered on self-efficacy and observational learning.
Social commentary
Social commentary is the act of saying something about subjects that affect society, or a work in art, literature, or journalism that voices views on society and encourages reflection.
Social construction of gender
Social construction of gender: the theory that gender roles and hierarchies are produced through socialization, interaction, and institutions rather than being natural or inevitable; contrasted with gender essentialism, central to feminist sociology since West and Zimmerman's doing gender.
Social development theory
Social development theory covers two literatures: psychological theories of children's social relationships and understanding (Vygotsky's ZPD, Erikson, Piaget), and development-studies frameworks linking economic and social progress (Midgley, Jacobs and Cleveland), plus the Catalano-Hawkins social development model.
Social ecological model
The social ecological model (SEM), also called socio-ecological model, is a multilevel public health framework with individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, and policy levels, rooted in Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory.
Social environment
Social environment: the relationships, institutions, cultural practices, and material conditions in which people live and interact, also called the human or sociocultural environment; distinguished from the natural environment and studied as a determinant of health, development, and behavior.
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 exclusion
Social exclusion, also known as marginalization, is the process of preventing individuals or groups from full participation in economic, social, and political life, a concept that originated in France in 1974.
Social group
A social group, known in sociology as a sociological group, is any set of at least two people who interact regularly and share a sense of aligned identity.
Social hygiene movement
The social hygiene movement, or hygienism, was an American Progressive Era reform campaign led by physicians to eliminate venereal disease and prostitution through sex education and legal reform.
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 impact assessment
Social impact assessment (SIA) is a systematic process of analyzing, monitoring, and managing the intended and unintended social consequences of planned interventions such as projects, policies, and programs.
Social influence
Social influence, also called group influence, is the change in a person's thoughts, feelings, or behavior caused by others present or implied, and includes conformity, compliance, and obedience.
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 isolation
Social isolation, an objective lack of social relationships and interactions, distinct from loneliness (subjective disconnection). Covers prevalence, health risks, measurement scales, and interventions, especially in older adults.
Social issue
Social issue (social problem): a condition or behavior harming large numbers of people that the public recognizes as needing action. Combines objective measurable conditions with subjective concern; studied via constructionist claims-making theory, with data on poverty, inequality, and public priorities.
Social justice warrior
Social justice warrior (SJW) is a pejorative for promoters of progressive views; positive in the early 1990s, pejorative from about 2009–2011, mainstreamed by 2014 GamerGate, later displaced by "woke".