Social life and human behavior

Cross-situational word learning

Cross-situational word learning is a laboratory paradigm in which learners infer which words refer to which objects by tracking co-occurrences across many ambiguous exposures, without feedback.

Crow people

The Crow people (Apsáalooke, children of the large-beaked bird) are a Siouan-speaking Northern Plains nation, a Hidatsa offshoot on the Yellowstone River, whose Montana reservation of about 2.3 million acres is the state's largest.

Crowd psychology

Crowd psychology, founded with Gustave Le Bon's 1895 La psychologie des foules, studies how group membership changes individual behavior; deindividuation theory failed meta-analytic testing and was replaced by social identity models (SIDE, ESIM) used in crowd safety and evacuation planning.

Crowdsensing

Crowdsensing is a sensor-based subtype of crowdsourcing in which many people use mobile device sensors to capture measurements, aggregated into large-scale datasets and maps of phenomena of common interest.

Cruising for sex

Cruising for sex is the search for sexual partners in public spaces, chiefly among men who have sex with men, via coded looks in parks, toilets, and heaths; documented since the 18th century and now largely displaced by geosocial apps that move encounters into homes.

Crush fetish

Crush fetish: sexual arousal from crushing; its animal-harming form, animal crush videos, is banned in the US under 18 U.S.C. § 48 (1999, 2010, PACT 2019), penalty up to 7 years.

Crying

Crying: shedding tears with vocalization in response to emotional stimuli; emotional tears are uniquely human. Covers lacrimal-gland origin, Frey's disproven toxin theory, social-glue effects (d = 0.49), gender and cultural differences, and mood effects.

Cryptomnesia

Cryptomnesia, also called inadvertent or unconscious plagiarism, is a source-monitoring memory error in which a person presents a previously encountered idea as an original thought. Coined by Flournoy, first demonstrated experimentally by Brown and Murphy in 1989.

Cryptoterrestrial hypothesis

The cryptoterrestrial hypothesis (CTH) holds that some UAP come from non-human intelligences hidden on or near Earth, not from space. Developed by Mac Tonnies, academically framed by Lomas, Case & Masters in 2024; no verified physical evidence exists.

Cub Scouts (Scouting America)

Cub Scouts is Scouting America's program for boys and girls in grades K-5, organized into dens meeting 2-3 times monthly; launched 1930, open to girls since 2018, revised June 1, 2024.

Cuban Americans

Cuban Americans: Americans of Cuban origin, 2.9 million in 2024, concentrated in Florida. Distinctive Cuban Adjustment Act (1966) path to residency, four migration waves since 1959, and a Republican-leaning political profile centered in Miami-Dade.

Cuban diaspora

The Cuban diaspora is the population of Cubans and people of Cuban ancestry living outside Cuba, mostly in Florida, built by successive exile waves since 1868.

Cuban exodus

The Cuban exodus is the sustained emigration of Cubans since the 1959 revolution, primarily to the United States, with the wave since 2021 the largest.

Cuban internationalism

Cuban internationalism in Angola was Cuba's deployment of combat troops and roughly 50,000 civilian teachers, doctors, and engineers in support of the MPLA government from 1975 to 1991.

Cuban migration to the United States

Cuban migration to the United States is the movement of Cubans to the U.S. since the 1959 Cuban Revolution, one of the largest refugee flows in the Western Hemisphere.

Cuban–American migration accords

The Cuban–American migration accords are US–Cuba agreements signed in 1984, 1994, and 1995, committing the United States to admit at least 20,000 Cuban migrants yearly.

Cubans

Cubans, also called the Cuban people, are the inhabitants of Cuba, a multiracial Caribbean nation of mainly Spanish and African origin with a large diaspora.

Cuckquean

Cuckquean (also cuckqueaning) is the female counterpart of cuckold: historically a wife of an unfaithful husband, recorded from the 1540s, revived today as a consensual kink term.

Cudjoe

Cudjoe, also rendered Cudjo or Codjoe, from the Akan day name Kojo, led the Leeward Maroons of western Jamaica in guerrilla war before signing a 1739 peace treaty with the British that recognized their autonomy.

Cued recall

Cued recall is a memory retrieval paradigm in which studied items are produced with the help of a partial cue, sitting between free recall and recognition.

Cultivation theory

Cultivation theory is a media effects theory, proposed by George Gerbion and colleagues in 1976, which posits that heavy television exposure reshapes viewers' perception of reality.

Cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology, also known as socio-cultural anthropology, is the study of human cultural variation, from religion and politics to economics, and one of anthropology's four subdisciplines.

Cultural appropriation

Cultural appropriation is the taking of practices, symbols, artifacts, dress, music, or knowledge from one culture by members of another, typically across a power imbalance, without consent, credit, or compensation; also called cultural borrowing, distinct from exchange and appreciation.

Cultural assimilation

Cultural assimilation: the process by which a minority group's language, norms, networks, and identity shift toward a dominant group. Distinct from integration and acculturation; spans Park's race relations cycle, Gordon's dimensions, and modern immigrant research.

Cultural assimilation of Native Americans

Cultural assimilation of Native Americans: US federal policy via the 1887 Dawes Act land allotment and boarding schools from Carlisle (1879), reversed by ICWA 1978 and Native American Languages Act 1990.

Cultural capital

Cultural capital (capital culturel), Pierre Bourdieu's sociological concept of non-financial social assets like education, tastes, and credentials, existing in embodied, objectified, and institutionalized forms, introduced with Passeron in 1964 and central to social reproduction theory.

Cultural discourse about the Gaza genocide

Cultural discourse about the Gaza genocide: academic, media, platform, and public debate over applying the term genocide to Israel's Gaza war since October 2023, including the IAGS 2025 resolution, ICJ proceedings, media framing studies, and content moderation controversies.

Cultural globalization

Cultural globalization, also called the globalization of culture, is the worldwide intensification of cross-border cultural flows in media, arts, and language. Key debates: homogenization, hybridization, cultural imperialism, glocalization; trade in cultural goods reached US$254 billion by 2023.

Cultural imperialism

Cultural imperialism, also known as cultural colonization, describes how dominant states impose their culture and media on weaker ones, a theory developed by Herbert Schiller in the 1970s.