Research on how groups form, change, and relate. Coverage tracks demography, family, race, class, education, and the institutions that shape daily life.
A study of 58,425 adolescents across 21 countries found that unstructured free time, especially unsupervised hours outside the home, was strongly associated with self-reported offending even after accounting for self-control, parenting and morality. Only having delinquent friends showed a stronger overall association.
In Japan’s shrinking cities, decline barely dented life satisfaction — but fully remote work did, buffering residents against a fading local economy. A nationwide study of 5,645 residents reveals what protects well-being when a town empties out.
Trusted everyday figures like hairdressers and neighbours may shift climate behaviour more than celebrities, argues a Nature Climate Change synthesis that sorts the evidence into a four-part framework of messenger, audience, mode and target behaviour.
A Manhattan Institute report totals up the tax revenue from legal sports betting across US states and finds it small, roughly 0.2% of state receipts, often shifted from lotteries, and plausibly outweighed by the public costs of gambling harm.
A survey of more than 500 Japanese gamers found no measurable genre gap by social-withdrawal risk, yet higher-risk players described favouring cooperation, absorbing stories and strategy in their own words.
Brain scans of people reading real disaster headlines revealed a stark split: response to money climbed with the stakes, while response to human lives sagged as the toll rose and flattened almost entirely for deaths in other countries.
Elementary schoolers who owned a personal phone scored lower on reading comprehension than those who didn’t, yet having the phone on the desk during a test changed nothing. Ownership, not moment-to-moment distraction, was what tracked with weaker reading.
Five preregistered experiments with 3,272 US participants found that people with a stake in an issue read genuinely middle-ground positions as belonging to their opponents. The pattern held only where the issue was moralized and the other side felt threatening, and it did not appear when the moderate was described as rejecting both sides rather than accepting both.
Dowry deaths have risen since the protest years — more than 6,500 in 2022 — even as the public mourning faded. In Public Culture, Kriti Kapila traces the silence to the 1955 reform that cut dowry loose from ritual and let it behave like a commodity.
Most US police de-escalation training has never been rigorously tested on actual use of force. Of dozens of programs adopted nationwide, only two show solid evidence of reducing force.
Why do Americans so rarely marry across race and class lines? A new Census-linked study of 31 million people finds residential segregation explains over a third of class-based marriage sorting but less than 5% of racial sorting. Desegregation could boost interclass marriage, while barriers to interracial marriage run far deeper than neighborhoods.
A new UC Berkeley Labor Center analysis profiles California’s 186,000 security guards. Most earn below a living wage, over half the low-wage tier lack employer health insurance, and annual turnover nears 92 percent. Researchers link that churn to weaker safety, citing airport screening data. The workforce is overwhelmingly people of color.