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Published in journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society the study represents the most comprehensive study of polygamy and the institution of marriage.
It found significantly higher levels of rape, kidnapping, murder, assault, robbery and fraud in polygymous cultures found in Asia and Africa.
Prof Henrichs said that these crimes are caused primarily by pools of unmarried men, which result when other men take multiple wives.
He said: "The scarcity of marriageable women in polygamous cultures increases competition among men for the remaining unmarried women.
"The greater competition increases the likelihood men in polygamous communities will resort to criminal behaviour to gain resources and women."
Yale resolution is a product of the peculiarities of American political culture. That political culture values free speech – the right to say anything you want, without regard to others – over responsible, informed or constructive speech. It is also a product of American political culture’s divisive tendency to speak out against others rather than substantively engage with them. And finally, we should recognized that Americans are generally more isolated in their understanding of the rest of the world than most others and recognize that this accounts for their trading on stereotypes founded in events more prevalent decades ago rather than today.
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The unfortunate effect of the resolution outside of Yale, and specifically within Singapore, has been to reinforce the worst stereotypes of American high-handed arrogance and general lack of knowledge of the world beyond America’s borders.
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The wording of the resolution, citing a “history of lack of respect for civil and political rights” suggests that the vitriol is aimed not at contemporary Singapore, but a stereotype of Singapore’s past. Are America or any other country free from such histories? On a grand scale, Singapore would score pretty well against countries that have had systems of slavery, genocide against native populations, political repression (such as McCarthyism), and profit-driven military interventionism, just to name a few things that might make one wary of partnering with an American university that has long been a bastion of that country’s elite establishment.
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You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong...
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature... people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them...
what Benedict Anderson describes, that ”the Bangkok bourgeoisie isn’t far from that of Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Jakarta: timid, selfish, uncultured, consumerist, and without any decent vision of the future of the country”, is a fairly accurate picture, particularly with regards to the upper middle classes in Singapore.
"I take no responsibility for my behavior! I'm an innocent pawn! It's society's fault!"
In the United States, nearly nine in 10 abortions occur in the first trimester, but, until now, little was known about the 10% of women who have abortions at 13 weeks’ gestation or later. According to "Who Has Second-Trimester Abortions in the United States?," by Rachel K. Jones and Lawrence B. Finer of the Guttmacher Institute, certain groups of women are overrepresented among second-trimester abortion patients. These groups include women with lower educational levels, black women and women who have experienced multiple disruptive events in the last year, such as unemployment or separating from a partner.
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Certain groups of women were more likely than others to obtain abortions at 13 weeks or later. For example, teens were more likely than older women to obtain an abortion in the second trimester—accounting for 14% of abortions among teens, compared with 9% among women aged 30 and older. Similarly, the proportion of abortions that occurred in the second trimester was 13% among black women, compared with 9% among non-Hispanic whites; 13% among women who had not graduated from high school, compared with 6% among college graduates; 14% among those using health insurance to pay for the procedure, compared with 8% among those who paid out of pocket; and 15% among those who had experienced three or more disruptive events in the past year, compared with 9% among women experiencing no disruptive events.
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Removing the many existing barriers to early abortion services could reduce the number of second-trimester abortions, particularly among black women and those with less education. For women needing second-trimester procedures, having health insurance or other financial resources to pay for abortion services is especially important. The average abortion patient pays $470 for a first trimester procedure. Many women manage to pay this cost out-of-pocket, including the majority of abortion patients with private health insurance, who may be unaware that the procedure is covered under their plan or may not want the procedure on their insurance records. The cost of abortion increases, often substantially, with each additional week in the second-trimester; for example, the average cost for an abortion at 20 weeks is $1,500. Women who cannot afford to pay these costs out of pocket are then forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. Growing restrictions on public and private insurance coverage for abortion may paradoxically increase the need for second-trimester abortions by further delaying women’s access to services early in pregnancy, while also reducing access to second-trimester abortion services for poor and low-income women who need them.
Martin Bunzl, a philosophy professor at Rutgers University, compared the climate change movement to the civil rights movement. Climate change is often described as a "technical" problem with technical solutions, he said, a portrayal that research has shown is ineffective.
Instead, he said, the key is culture change -- it's about changing what's in people's heads.
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a basic principle in social psychology: that people's attitudes do not translate into action. But most environmental activism remains centered around the assumption that changing behavior starts with changing attitudes and knowledge.
"Social psychologists have now known for four decades that the relationship between people's attitudes and knowledge and behavior is scant at best," said McKenzie-Mohr. Yet campaigns remain heavily focused on brochures, flyers and other means of disseminating information. "I could just as easily call this presentation 'beyond brochures,'" he said.
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To bridge the gap between attitudes and action, people must first address the barriers that stand in the way of action, McKenzie-Mohr said.
Barriers include not knowing what actions to take, not understanding the benefits or having mistaken information -- for example, research has shown that the top reason parents do not want their kids to bike or walk to school is because they fear abductions, even though the number of abductions per year in Canada is often in the single digits, McKenzie-Mohr said.
Several sessions at the conference discussed bridging this gap between beliefs and actions. That will affect individual behavior, such as turning off the lights, not driving a car or eating less meat.
The conference was attended by some 400 people from utilities, national nonprofit organizations, community groups, consulting firms and other businesses, and both the federal government and local governments, according to a participant list.
Speakers tended to agree that changing people's attitudes remains a problem.
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religion, true or not, is useful for the solidarity and moral consensus of society. The problem is that this utility depends on at least some people actually believing that there is the supernatural reality that religion affirms. The utility ceases when nobody believes this anymore.
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German philosophers, no matter where located on the ideological spectrum, vie with each other in producing texts which are comprehensible only to a small group of initiates.
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Edward Gibbon, in chapter 2 of his famous history of the decline of the Roman Empire, has this to say: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful”. When you cross the philosopher with the magistrate, you get Habermas.
As sociologists are fond of pointing out, common sense isn’t anything like a scientific theory of the world. Rather it is a hodge-podge of accumulated advice, experiences, aphorisms, norms, received wisdom, inherited beliefs, and introspection that is neither coherent nor even internally self-consistent. Birds of a feather flock together, but opposites also attract. Two minds are better than one, except when too many cooks spoil the broth. Does absence make the heart grow fonder, or is out of sight out of mind? At what point does try, try again turn into flogging a dead horse? And if experience is the best teacher, when should one also maintain a beginner’s mind?
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Sociology, of course, has its own conflicted history with common sense. For almost as long as it has existed, that is, sociology has had to confront the criticism that it has “discovered” little that an intelligent person couldn’t have figured out on his or her own.
Why is it, for example, that most social groups, from friendship circles to workplaces, are so homogenous in terms of race, education level, and even gender? Why do some things become popular and not others? How much does the media influence society? Is more choice better or worse? Do taxes stimulate the economy?
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The problem with common sense is not that it isn’t sensible, but that what is sensible turns out to depend on lots of other features of the situation. And in general, it’s impossible to know which of these many potential features are relevant until after the fact (a fundamental problem that philosophers and cognitive scientists call the “frame problem”).
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Delhi University has a digital archive of its off-copyright books. Browsing through it, I came across Academic Man: A Study in the Sociology of a Profession (1942) by Logan Wilson. Here's Wilson about the need for such a book-length study:
... [O]n the basis of present sociological literature the future historian would have less difficulty in ascertaining the social behavior of the railroader, or the professional thief than he would have that of contemporary university professor.
A quick search tells me that this book is a classic in sociology, and that Wilson is one of the people credited with coining the phrase "Publish or Perish."
Religion doesn't necessarily lead to happiness. In countries where there are relatively few religious people, and in which living conditions are generally good, religion doesn't improve well being and religious people may actually be less happy.
And what makes people religious is not their direct experience, but rather the society that they live in.
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Although your own personal circumstances do affect your beliefs a little, what's far more important is the society you live in. In difficult societies everyone - rich and poor alike - are more religious. That's reminiscent of a study I blogged a couple of weeks ago, showing that the inequality actually increases the religiosity of the rich.
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But does religion actually make people happier? Well, on average it does. After controlling for circumstances, religious people have better 'well-being' (covering positive and negative feelings, and overall life evaluation).
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There is an obvious tension between our self-evident diversity and a highly normative concern with or idealization of appearance. While Amy Winehouse turned her overly normative critical apparatus on herself, Breivik applied his with monstrous consequences on just about anyone other than himself (as has been pointed out, unlike so-called “spree killers,” Breivik never had any notion of seeking his own destruction). One was a self-hater, the other would appear to be more a delusional self-lover. But both seem to have been suffering from hypernomia.
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The sociological perspective defines eroticism as the pornography of the dominant social class. In this view, eroticism has aristocratic associations, while pornography is a lower-class activity. Thus, pornography but not eroticism may represent a threat to the status quo. Yet, as numerous entries demonstrate, the eroticism of ‘high literature’ is just as capable of subversion as more popular forms of writing about sex.
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The gender of the author is another spurious yardstick, by which the pornography/eroticism distinction is sometimes measured. In this perspective, men produce pornography while women ‘write the erotic’. This argument falters when confronted with anonymity, or the extensive use of pseudonyms. Moreover, some authors employ strategies to make believe that the narrator is male or female, creating confusion as to the author’s sex or gender.
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All of these genetic links to common issues are fundamentally the same in how they work — they involve many genes that don’t determine our fate but rather impact how we react to our environment. The potential benefits to understanding this relationship are immense, and much progress is being made. As scientists learn more about how these intricate relationships work, they will hopefully be able to develop personalized treatments for people struggling from a variety of ailments. Until then, genetic sequencing for the public will have to wait — the relatively little information we have so far would likely only lead to faulty conclusions, made in an attempt to form that simple, big picture we always expect from science.
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A recent article in The New York Times reported that over 100 studies show a relationship between genes and criminality but that the environment plays a key role in the effects of this relationship:
“Kevin Beaver, an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said genetics may account for, say, half of a person’s aggressive behavior, but that 50 percent comprises hundreds or thousands of genes that express themselves differently depending on the environment.
He has tried to measure which circumstances — having delinquent friends, living in a disadvantaged neighborhood — influence whether a predisposition to violence surfaces. After studying twins and siblings, he came up with an astonishing result: In boys not exposed to the risk factors, genetics played no role in any of their violent behavior. The positive environment had prevented the genetic switches — to use Mr. Pinker’s word — that affect aggression from being turned on. In boys with eight or more risk factors, however, genes explained 80 percent of their violence. Their switches had been flipped.”
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In fact, environment plays the same crucial role for criminality as it does for obesity and depression.
In an interview I did for a story in The Michigan Daily on depression research, Dr. Margit Burmeister, a professor of human genetics and a researcher in the Molecular and Biological Neuroscience Institute at the University of Michigan, explained the dangers the public oversimplifying the link between genetics and depression:
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It was not perhaps the most obvious way of getting a bad back, arthritis and a dodgy foot seen to. But if you're unemployed in North Carolina with no health insurance, there is no obvious way.
So on 9 June James Verone left his Gastonia home, took a ride to a bank and carried out a robbery. Well, sort of.
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Before his peculiarly modest robbery, Verone, 59, sent a letter to the Gaston Gazette. "When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me for one dollar. I am of sound mind but not so much sound body."
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He invited the paper to send a reporter to interview him in Gaston county jail, where he is now in custody facing charges of stealing from a person (for just $1 the prosecutors didn't think they could hold up a bank robbery charge).
James Verone calmly walked into an RBC bank in North Carolina and committed his first crime in his 59 years on this planet. Verone handed the teller a note that read "This is a bank robbery. Please only give me one dollar," took the dollar from the terrified clerk, and sat down on a couch in the bank's lobby.
"'I'll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police," Verone told the bank teller. And wait he did. Police arrived moments later and apprehended him, hauling him off to the jail cell he so desperately wanted to enter.
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James Verone walked into that bank and committed a felony because going to jail was the only way he could receive the health care he needed to survive.
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He was laid off from his 17-year job and, with unemployment hardly a survivable wage, took the first job that came his way. He developed a growth on his chest - the sort of medical condition that could be life-threatening - and earned two ruptured disks in his back, along with problems with his left foot.
After depleting his life savings and realizing he had, literally, nowhere else to turn, Verone committed the crime, hoping he could get the medical care that he so desperately needs.
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the suicide paradox – is that suicide rates rise as does a country’s standard of living. To some, this makes suicide (gulp) a luxury good.
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Unlike homicide, which is considered a fracturing of our social contract, suicide is considered a shameful problem whose victims — and solutions – are rarely the focus of wide debate.
Andrew J. Hoffman, the Holcim professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan, has spent the last year or so applying his tools as a social scientist to researching the cultural and social underpinnings of the backlash against climate change science.
He wrote of the need for such work earlier this year for Strategic Organization, a journal produced by Sage, a British academic publisher.
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Q.
The debate over climate science has involved very complex physical models and rarefied areas of scientific knowledge. What role do you think social scientists have to play, given the complexity of the actual physical science?
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A.
We have to think about the process by which something, an idea, develops scientific consensus and a second process by which is developed a social and political consensus. The first part is the domain of data and models and physical science. The second is very much a social and political process. And that brings to the fore a whole host of value-based, worldview-based, cognitive and cultural dimensions that need to be addressed.
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Towards a Social Theory of Climate Change
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Lever-Tracy confronted sociologists head on about their worrisome silence on the issue. Why have sociologists failed to address the greatest and most overwhelming challenge facing modern society? Why have the figureheads of the discipline, such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, so far refused to apply their seminal notions of structuration and the risk society to the issue?
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Earlier, we re-published an important contribution by Ulrich Beck, the world-renowned German sociologist and a Breakthrough Senior Fellow. More recently, Current Sociology published a powerful response by Reiner Grundmann of Aston University and Nico Stehr of Zeppelin University.
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