Society

In the spring of 2020, everything changed. Many people's lives moved online. Court trials were no exception.... Read more

By the time the next US election takes place in 2028, millennial and gen Z voters—who already watch over six hours of media content a day—will make up the majority of the electorate. As gen alpha (people born between 2010 and 2024) also comes of voting age, social media platforms... Read more

A study of the Liverpool boycott of The Sun newspaper following the Hillsborough disaster has found that the boycott shaped people's perceptions of political parties and made people more left wing.... Read more

As climate hazards escalate, communities facing repetitive disasters in high-risk areas must weigh the economic and social trade-offs of rebuilding versus relocating. A Risk Analysis study has found that residents and government officials may have different ideas about how public funds should be spent to adapt to extreme weather events... Read more

The international community must reverse cuts to humanitarian aid for the Rohingya and work with Dhaka authorities to improve conditions in refugee camps, a new study says. The work is published in the journal Third World Quarterly.... Read more

The United States could achieve modest economic benefits by applying uniform tariffs on all trade partners, according to new research led by a University of California, Davis, economist. However, the complicated realities of supply chains, global trade and its downstream effects on people and businesses could offset economic gains and... Read more

Reducing the rising tide of political extremism—and violence—in the United States and beyond may require a rethinking of how we understand the forces that drive polarization, according to a study from the University of Toronto.... Read more

When the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's urban search and rescue team resigned after the deadly July 4, 2025, Texas floods, he told colleagues he was frustrated with bureaucratic hurdles that had delayed the team's response to the disaster, according to media reports. The move highlighted an ongoing... Read more

Whether in Belgium, Poland, or Ukraine, when asked about their nation's role under Nazi occupation, many Europeans today primarily see their own population as victims—or as heroes. This is the key finding of a cross-national study led by Dr. Fiona Kazarovytska from the Department of Social and Legal Psychology at... Read more

If you've interacted with an artificial intelligence chatbot, you've likely realized that all AI models are biased. They were trained on enormous corpuses of unruly data and refined through human instructions and testing. Bias can seep in anywhere. Yet how a system's biases can affect users is less clear.... Read more

What turns a democratically elected leader into an authoritarian? The process is rarely abrupt. It unfolds gradually and is often justified as a necessary reform. It is framed as what the people wanted. All this makes it difficult for citizens to recognize what is happening until it's too late.... Read more

The world entered its nuclear epoch 80 years ago on August 6, 1945. The US dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing between 70,000 and 140,000 civilians by the end of that year.... Read more

New research by the University of South Australia finds a silver lining to the struggling media landscape in the face of the digital age, revealing that social media is enhancing the diversity of news the community receives.... Read more

Each election cycle, thousands of candidates vie for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. Until now, there has been no comprehensive, publicly available resource cataloging what those candidates say about who they are or what they stand for.... Read more

Are professional economists truly objective when forecasting economic projections? New research from Wake Forest University suggests otherwise, revealing a subtle yet powerful influence of political affiliation on predictions of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth.... Read more

A study led by McGill University researchers challenges the theory that language change over time requires new generations to replace older generations of speakers. Rather, when words change meaning, speakers of all ages participate; while older speakers might take two or three years longer than their younger colleagues to adopt... Read more

A fundamental problem for governments is getting citizens to comply with their laws and policies. They can't monitor everyone and catch all the rule-breakers. "It's a logistical impossibility," says Lily L. Tsai, MIT's Ford Professor of Political Science and the director and founder of the MIT Governance Lab.... Read more

As global trade tensions mount and countries recalibrate their economic priorities, tariffs may have the ability to play an unexpected role in the sustainability conversation. Tariffs on imports, while often viewed as controversial and protectionist weapons, could paradoxically drive the shift not only toward less production, but also toward more... Read more

Transparency is vital to our democratic system of government.... Read more

Partisan animosity is a powerful driver of protest participation—sometimes nearly matching or even exceeding concern about the actual issues, according to a new study published in the journal Social Forces.... Read more

Geopolitical shocks are much more likely to trigger price bubbles in the British and European electricity markets than extreme weather events—and they are predictable, new academic research concludes.... Read more

A recent sociological study indicates that, despite increasing polarization and partisan animosity in the United States over recent decades, employers are not hiring based on political affiliation. The study "Partisan Affiliation and Hiring in Public Education: The Selection of School District Superintendents" appears by Greer Mellon (Brown University) in the... Read more

Female candidates in recent UK General Elections were less likely to be retweeted than male candidates and less likely to receive media coverage, research shows.... Read more

Why do images of Donald Trump as a galactic emperor or Luigi Mangione as a Catholic saint resonate so deeply with some people? Memes don't just entertain—they shape how we identify with power, grievance and justice in the digital age.... Read more

A law intended to stamp out child marriage may have had the opposite effect and lead to an increase, new research by King's College London shows. The study is published in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization.... Read more

Cyberstalking is increasing at a faster rate than traditional stalking and is disproportionately affecting young people, women, and members of the lesbian, gay and bisexual community, according to a new study led by researchers from UCL.... Read more

In the face of a growing migration crisis in 2021, the Polish government declared a state of emergency along its border with Belarus, suspending basic civil liberties for citizens in the affected areas. A new study in The Journal of Politics investigates whether these restrictions sparked a political backlash at... Read more

A new study of Instagram posts has uncovered strong statistical correlations suggesting that social media images may play a key role in shaping public opinion towards events, with notable social and political effects.... Read more

A new study suggests both defendants and complainants are equally prone to memory distortions in sexual assault cases.... Read more

Anthony Albanese's recent visit to Chengdu's panda breeding base showed the enduring power of China's panda diplomacy.... Read more

Women politicians in Europe receive uncivil tweets regardless of how known they are—and women also receive more identity-based attacks than other politicians, reveals a new study in Politics & Gender.... Read more

A new analysis suggests that posts in hate speech communities on the social media website Reddit share speech-pattern similarities with posts in Reddit communities for certain psychiatric disorders. Dr. Andrew William Alexander and Dr. Hongbin Wang of Texas A&M University, U.S., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Digital... Read more

A mobile phone, a computer with an internet connection and a platform for video calls can be used in many ways inside a prison. Prisoners can use them to stay in contact with illegal activities outside the prison, or they can create stress and tension among the inmates. However, they... Read more

A five-year study dispels the stereotype of conspiracy theorists as angry loners or keyboard warriors. Rather, social and emotional connections provided by conspiracy theorists are recruiting diverse participants on a growing scale.... Read more

The ideological divide between opposing political groups has been drastically increasing in various countries worldwide. This phenomenon, known as political polarization, can lead to greater social division, extremism and political violence.... Read more

The IRS will offer religious congregations more freedom to endorse political candidates without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status, the agency said in a July 2025 court filing. President Donald Trump has previously vowed to abolish the Johnson Amendment, which bars charitable nonprofits from taking part in political campaigns—although the latest move... Read more

"We're actually facing, in many parts of our country, nothing short of societal collapse." This was the dire warning from Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, in setting out his party's goal of halving crime.... Read more

A decade after the government raised the participation age in England to 18, a new study from the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath finds the policy has had limited impact—with only modest gains in education and training, and persistent gaps in support for the most vulnerable... Read more

There is a heightened concern about the current state of democracy around the globe. These include worries about a decrease in freedom, the growing number of autocracies around the world and citizens' dissatisfaction with democracy or government.... Read more

A growing body of research tracking the spread of misinformation online has largely focused on presumably false stories from unreliable sources—websites that fabricate content or intentionally mislead readers. But a recent study co-authored by researchers affiliated with the University of Maryland indicates that some social media users deliberately repurpose credible... Read more

Once an electoral candidate is in the lead, the public views them as the winner. If the candidate then loses, fraud seems a likely explanation, and even the winner's supporters might be inclined to be suspicious about the final result. This is because of the cumulative redundancy bias (CRB).... Read more

Conspiracy theories are a widespread occurrence in today's hyper-connected and polarized world.... Read more

In the United States, immigration status has long created hierarchies within our society, where some can participate fully in public life, while others are excluded. These divisions have serious consequences for our communities, including when it comes to public health.... Read more

When Robert Smith met his future girlfriend in 2010, he wanted to take things slowly. For Smith, no relationship had been easy in the years since he was diagnosed with the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. People often became afraid when they learned his status, even running away when he... Read more

Earlier this year, the latest U.S. Latino GDP Report revealed that the direct economic output of the country's Latino population exceeded $4 trillion for the first time. Now, new findings from researchers at UCLA and California Lutheran University show that a quarter of that came from Latinos in one state:... Read more

President Donald Trump intends to unveil an Artificial Intelligence Action Plan aimed at keeping the United States at the forefront of AI development. Toward that end, the president is expected to sign three new executive orders addressing data center development, financial resources, and perceived political bias.... Read more

The last year has highlighted a political divide between young men and women. Data from elections in several countries shows that women aged 18–29 are becoming significantly more liberal, while young men are leaning more conservative. And a recent 30-country study found generation Z more divided than other generations on... Read more

A new study from the University of Georgia found that even unenforced, or "toothless," compulsory voting laws can increase voter turnout. The research is published in the journal Electoral Studies.... Read more

When women political candidates deviate from expectations or the views of their party, they are judged far more harshly than men by voters, reveals a new study in Politics & Gender.... Read more

President Donald Trump has threatened to levy higher tariffs on more than two dozen countries and on various products in the past few months. China in particular has been a target of the administration's trade wars, aimed at preventing its dominance in areas such as artificial intelligence, although the U.S.... Read more