Social Science

Intergenerational Trauma: How a history of pain brings biological costs

2023, Biology, Psychology, Social Science • June 12, 2023

Source: Nicolas Raymond, CC BY 2.0 A few years ago, the world was celebrating the end of a decade and preparing to welcome the new ‘roaring 20s’. But just a few months later, the world had shut down in efforts to curb the widespread transmission of the novel coronavirus. Now, a little more than three …

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Non-Violence: a Strategy

2022, Social Science • September 1, 2022

Figure: Assurance Game Payoffs. (Source: Author) It is puzzling that an unpopular authoritarian regime, e.g., North Korea, is able to rule for a long time despite being way outnumbered by its opponents (Human Rights Watch, 2017). This paradox can be explained by thinking of rebellion as a collective action problem. While it is best for …

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Better Zoning Through Inter-city Cooperation

2022, Social Science • July 31, 2022

Figure: High Density Housing (Source: Geograph Britain and Ireland, Author: ad acta) Housing for the poor and efforts to mitigate climate change are important sociological and humanitarian concerns that, normatively speaking, ought to be addressed immediately. Unfortunately, California’s efforts in this direction have suffered a setback (Dougherty, 2020). To combat the housing crisis, two years …

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When the Going gets Tough, the Close start Nearing: Networks and External Stress

2022, Social Science • June 30, 2022

Figure: A Social Network (Wikimedia Commons, Author Zigomitros Athanasios – Thor4bp) What is common between our social circles, the internet, and food webs? They can be modeled as a bunch of interconnected nodes—a network. As simple as the definition of a network sounds, this diagram of nodes connected with edges contains more information than meets …

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A Field in Focus: Loneliness and Well-Being Research

2022, Medicine, Social Science • June 30, 2022

Figure: An image of a woman wearing a mask, isolated in her home during the pandemic quarantine. (Source: Google Photos, Author: Justin Paget Getty) Prevalent social isolation during COVID-19 lead to widespread psychological distress in the population, including the experience of loneliness, which has become increasingly recognized as a major public health issue in recent …

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Mind Missing Out? Fear of Missing Out and the Brain

2022, Neuroscience, Social Science • March 31, 2022

Figure: A person scrolling through news articles on their smartphone. FoMO has been largely studied in the context of social media and smartphone usage (Source: Wikimedia Commons, Japanexperterna.se). Fear of missing out, or FoMO, is a feeling of apprehension that others are having positive or rewarding experiences where one is not present (Przybylski et al., …

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Trust: The Essence of Good Policy Implementation

2022, Medicine, Social Science • March 15, 2022

Figure 1 President Tsai Ing-wen inspects the Central Epidemic Command Center on April 2, 2020 (Source: Flickr, 總統府) (A previous version of this article that describes the situation in the pre-Omicron wave can be found here) Recently, an article in The Lancet medical journal article measured the biological, economic, demographic, and socio-political correlates of COVID-19 …

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How the Bystander Effect on Security Robots can Hamper Law Enforcement

2022, Computer Science, Social Science • February 4, 2022

BigDog robots being tested under the supervision of a Boston Dynamics team member. BigDog is a quadruped robot created in 2005 by Harvard University Concord Field station and the Jet propulsion Laboratory. The Robots are created to assist in Military combat and crime expedition in environments prone to terrorism. The nature of these environments may …

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COVID-19 and its Implications for Adolescent Mental Health

2021, Medicine, Social Science • December 9, 2021

Covid 19 and Isolation (Source: created by author) Abstract The coronavirus pandemic has affected the lives of people across the globe in multiple dimensions, from health to work to social relationships. This review explores the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of adolescents. Even before the pandemic, the adolescent population was experiencing mental health …

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Are We Addicted to Social Media?

2021, Medicine, Social Science • November 28, 2021

Cover Image: In the current age, social media has become a main platform for human interaction. We have to think deeply about whether it contributes to  a better world. (Source: Pixabay, jmexclusives) On the 28th of October, Mark Zuckerberg revealed Facebook’s new name: Meta. Some heralded this move as the dawn of an effort to …

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