Society

War in Ukraine is transforming the country's criminal landscape, causing economic and social damage, finds research led by Dr. Taras Fedirko for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).... Read more

Mike returned home to Philadelphia after a 15-year prison sentence and suffered an emotional breakdown.... Read more

Imagine waking up to the news that a deadly new strain of flu has emerged in your city. Health officials are downplaying it, but social media is flooded with contradictory claims from "medical experts" debating its origin and severity.... Read more

The age of artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed our interactions, but threatens human dignity on a worldwide scale, according to a study led by Charles Darwin University (CDU).... Read more

Increased transparency from countries about how they use AI to manage migration is needed to boost trust and strengthen the rule of law, a new study says.... Read more

Optimism that AI will make human jobs easier is lowest in the developed world, especially in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Australia.... Read more

Tariffs—taxes placed on imported goods—are one of the oldest tools in the United States' economic policy arsenal, dating back to the 18th century. Recently they've returned to the spotlight in a big way. From steel and solar panels to shoes and semiconductors, tariffs have been used to confront economic rivals,... Read more

After Brexit, London slowed down investments in Europe. While Europe continues to focus on the United Kingdom. A recent study in Research Policy, co-authored by Vincenzo Butticè, Annalisa Croce and Andrea Odille Bosio from the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, and Simone Signore and... Read more

Billionaires, oligarchs, and other members of the uber-rich, known as "elites," are notorious for the use of offshore financial systems to conceal their assets and mask their identities. Understanding the transnational offshore finance networks that they utilize has long been a challenge given the secrecy involved.... Read more

Immigrants in the United States earn 10.6% less than similarly educated U.S.-born workers, largely because they are concentrated in lower-paying industries, occupations and companies, according to a major new study published in Nature, co-authored by a University of Massachusetts Amherst sociologist who studies equal opportunity in employment.... Read more

Taliban leaders have chosen to maintain a delicate balancing act in their relationships with other local violent jihadi groups since taking power in Afghanistan, new research shows.... Read more

We're just a few months into US president Donald Trump's second term but his rule has already been repeatedly compared to tyranny.... Read more

The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to the far-reaching social implications of emerging infectious diseases, bringing to mind similarly impactful events like the Black Plague in early modern Europe or the Spanish Flu after World War I. However, how emerging epidemics shape the development of political mistrust and instability has... Read more

Many former leaders of the world's nine nuclear-armed nations were impaired by health conditions while in office, raising concerns over their decision-making abilities while they had access to nuclear weapon launch codes, a study from the University of Otago, New Zealand, has found.... Read more

As gun sales in the United States continue to soar, researchers at Georgia State University have uncovered insights into what drives Americans to buy firearms. A new study published in PNAS Nexus journal reveals the complex interaction among media coverage, social media activity and firearm purchases.... Read more

The world experienced more than 60 armed conflicts in 2024, a "historically high" number according to scholars in the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. Consequently, the risks faced by multinational companies (MNCs) operating in conflict-torn regions, especially the Middle East and North Africa, have significantly intensified.... Read more

Consuming news on social media is often associated with "doom scrolling," where people spend excessive time online consuming negative news. However, researchers have found that this same behavior, when leveraged effectively, can help foster a well-informed society.... Read more

In research published in Social Science Quarterly, the study's investigator expected that migrants living in cities where local voting rights are extended to non-citizens would be more likely to engage in protests compared with those in restrictive contexts. However, the findings revealed the opposite: migrant protests seem to flourish not... Read more

Are opinions on controversial political issues as divided as many people perceive them to be? Researchers from the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen, the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) in Vienna and the University of California Merced have addressed this question in a new social science study.... Read more

During his recent public spat with Donald Trump, Elon Musk tweeted a poll asking if a new political party would better represent the 80% of voters in the middle. Hundreds of thousands of people responded and more than 80% answered "yes."... Read more

Illegally manufactured fentanyl kills a significant number of people in the United States and Canada every year. Since the emergence of modern heroin markets in the late 1960s, controlling supply has been associated with important reductions in opioid use and harms in several cases worldwide. But these efforts depend on... Read more

Picture this: A person is so outraged by a company's actions that instead of writing a complaint, they write a check to a charity that stands in direct opposition. Their donation isn't just about doing good. It's about making a point.... Read more

Youth volunteering encourages young men from politically disengaged homes to vote for the first time by raising their interest in civic life, new analysis shows.... Read more

A new study reveals that civil servants, like citizens, do not uniformly recognize and oppose political attacks on liberal democracy. How they view such attacks and respond depends heavily on their social and political affiliation. Civil servants who recognize politicians' actions as undermining democratic norms are more likely to withdraw—by... Read more

Across much of Europe, the engines of economic growth are sputtering. In its latest global outlook, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) sharply downgraded its forecasts for the UK and Europe, warning that the continent faces persistent economic bumps in the road.... Read more

Every design choice that social media platforms make nudges users toward certain actions, values and emotional states.... Read more

In some parts of Russia, schoolgirls who become pregnant are being paid more than 100,000 rubles (nearly £900) for giving birth and raising their babies.... Read more

In recent weeks, the US State Department implemented a policy requiring all university, technical training, or exchange program visa applicants to disclose their social media handles used over the past five years. The policy also requires these applicants to set their profiles to public.... Read more

Eyewitness misidentifications have long been a source of wrongful convictions, casting doubt on the reliability of memory in the courtroom. But UC San Diego psychologist John Wixted says the story doesn't end there. His research shows that if memory is tested the right way—early, carefully, and only once—it can be... Read more

On March 25, 2025, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University, Rümeysa Öztürk, was walking in a Boston suburb when she was detained by plain-clothed federal agents. A video of the encounter went viral, sparking fear and outrage in the United States and beyond.... Read more

A new report from the University of East Anglia has raised concerns about the state of democracy around the world during 2024's "Super Cycle" of elections.... Read more

Artificial intelligence may be marketed as society's great equalizer—transforming businesses, streamlining work and making life easier for all—but for many marginalized Americans, AI doesn't feel like a promise.... Read more

Something dangerous is happening to the U.S. economy, and it's not inflation or trade wars. Chaotic deregulation and the selective enforcement of laws have upended markets and investor confidence. At one point, the threat of tariffs and resulting chaos evaporated US$4 trillion in value in the U.S. stock market. This... Read more

Based on pronouncements in 2024, you might think now is the time to see U.S. citizens streaming out of the country. Months before the 2024 presidential election, Americans were saying they would leave should candidate Donald Trump win the election. Gallup polling in 2024 found that 21% of Americans wanted... Read more

Cities around the world pursue urban renewal under the banner of resilience and diversity. The idea is simple: if neighborhoods include socially and economically diverse residents, it will lead to stronger social cohesion, greater trust, and mutual support among the community. One common approach is to mix residents from different... Read more

A new study from King's Business School and the University of Edinburgh has found that aligning corporate identity with political ideology can help businesses resonate with certain stakeholders—but may also restrict strategic flexibility and create internal tensions.... Read more

In the wake of the largest series of U.S. tariff hikes since 1930, a new study from Michigan State University explores how this economic shock is reshaping global supply chains and offers a framework to help researchers and policymakers make sense of the chaos. The study was recently published in... Read more

Americans disapprove of the Trump administration's policies targeting science and medicine by a margin of more than 2 to 1, according to a survey by Rutgers and other universities.... Read more

New research, which has reviewed major U.K. political parties' past manifestos, finds they all lack the boldness needed to tackle the structural roots of inequality and significantly raise people out of poverty.... Read more

Every year thousands of people globally are wrongly accused of witchcraft, often with fatal consequences yet, says new research, legislation designed to stamp out the barbaric practices is rarely used.... Read more

American democracy runs on trust, and that trust is cracking.... Read more

For years now, U.S. police departments have employed officers who are trained to be experts in detecting "drugged driving." The problem is, however, that the methods those officers use are not based on science, according to a new editorial in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (JSAD).... Read more

Green transport initiatives such as bicycle lanes or creating spaces for electric vehicle charging points have become heated political battlegrounds in the United Kingdom, and British people respond to such proposals broadly in line with their political party preference and political orientation, new research from the University of Bath shows.... Read more

It's well known that governing parties often lose voters over time—the so-called cost of governing. But a new study from Frederik Hjorth, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, documents a lesser-known but potentially crucial side effect of being in government: politicians begin to speak less simply... Read more

Elected officials, political analysts, and nonprofit organizations have for years spotlighted the spread of online election information in Western democracies—largely with a focus on media platforms popular in these nations, such as X and Facebook.... Read more

New Jerseyans continue to give a somewhat split assessment on the direction of the Garden State, and pocketbook issues top the list of residents' biggest concerns, according to the latest Rutgers-Eagleton Poll.... Read more

People on TikTok tend to follow accounts that align with their own political beliefs, meaning the platform is creating political echo chambers among its users. These findings, from a study my collaborators, Yanlin Li and Homero Gil de Zúñiga, and I published in the academic journal New Media & Society,... Read more

For decades, Americans' trust in one another has been on the decline, according to the most recent General Social Survey.... Read more

In an international study, participants' attitudes toward certain social groups—namely, politicians and Black people—were more strongly related to their attitudes towards the men than the women of each group, suggesting that men are the "default" for attitudes towards these groups.... Read more

A UK study of data on more than 30,000 crimes sheds new light on crime after dark, suggesting that the overall risk of crime rises when darkness falls, but that risk varies depending on type of crime and geographical area. Jim Uttley of the University of Sheffield, UK, and colleagues... Read more