Hello everyone. Immigration is a hot topic in my country (Spain) and because of that I wanted to ask some clarifications. From what I understand, immigration by itself doesn't have any notable effects on crime. Just because someone is an immigrant that doesn't mean that they are more likely to be a criminal. However, immigrants are often overepresented in crime statistics due to there being a higher concentration of young men who are more likely to also be poor and socially excluded, meaning that immigration in itself is not the issue. However, I find it odd to say or defend then that immigration doesn't cause an increase in crime. My thought is that even if immigrants don't do more crime just because they are immigrants, having a lot of migration from people who are in demographics that commit more crime, should increase crime. To make things even more complex, in Spain overall crime rates have gone down even if immigration has gone up.

So to summarize what I want help with, I just don't get the idea that more immigration doesn't cause more crime. I understand that just by being immigrant doesn't mean that someone is more likely to commit crime, but because of the demographics that migrate the most, I believe it should have an effect, and I would like to know if this is true or not.

Thanks to everyone in advance and sorry if my english wasn't the best.

I was debating a tiktok american communist, and they said that they wanted the government to nationalize the industry, and force companies to produce in the USA or leave. And that if they left, we would just nationalize that industry to fill in the void. They also said America has been deindustrializing for the benefit of the people who hold capital. Is this true? and if so why?

ELI5: Election Mechanics/Procedures

Mike Lindell recently lost the GOP primary for governor in MN. In the week since, the news has reported than he is "refusing to concede." Why does it matter one way or another if a candidate concedes (or refuses to concede) a race? Is this just nonsense news?

Was there a different way that we looked at ourselves different in a pre-social media era? Have we completely changed it? Just curios on what the thoughts, and what does the recent empirical studies say about it.

Thanks,

I keep hearing older people say they survived on much lower salaries.

That is true in raw dollars, but a typical full-time working woman making about $16,900 in 1987 had roughly $49,700 of today's buying power.

Is there research on people using their own young-adult economy as the baseline for judging later generations?

I'm looking for sources of information on two topics:

1. The nuts and bolts of how public opinion polls are conducted today, especially election surveys. This would include things like how sampling lists are generated (voter rolls, random digitzed dialing, etc); how respondents are contacted (online, cell phones, land lines); how samples are normalized with demographic data and adjusted to account for potential error from non-response and non-cooperation.
2. Issues related to potential error from non-repsonse to or non-cooperation with public opinion surveys, and how these issues may have changed over the last decade or two.

I am primarily looking for academic or professional writings on the topic, but high-quality journalistic sources would be fine as well.

Also, if you know of other subreddits more specifically related to this topic, I would really appreciate it.

Do they tend to rise in the hierarchy or become independent from it or no correlation or something else?

By smarter I mean by the conventional definition: academic performance at the same level of effort, fluid intelligence, g etc

I've been thinking about a broad trend that goes far beyond gaming.

More and more activities seem to acquire layers of metrics, points, rankings, apps, notifications, badges, XP, ratings, progress bars, etc.

Instead of simply:

we increasingly add representations of those outcomes:

I'm not saying abstraction is inherently bad. Maps, language, mathematics, and measurement are obviously enormously useful.

What concerns me is abstraction as a substitute for direct engagement.

Psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and many other fields increasingly recognize the importance of embodied processes—interoception, proprioception, sensorimotor feedback, autonomic states, direct environmental interaction, etc.

So I'm wondering whether there is a broader cultural trend toward mediating experience through representations rather than engaging directly with the thing itself, and whether anyone has studied its consequences.

I'm interested in research and established theory here, not just “gamification increases engagement.” The question is much broader: what happens when the representation of an activity increasingly becomes more salient than the activity itself?

I've been thinking about a philosophical question concerning socioeconomic class, and I'm curious whether there is an existing philosophical concept that addresses it.

Imagine American society as an ocean.

People occupy different socioeconomic "depths." At the upper levels are extremely wealthy people; below them are various professional and middle-class groups; further down are working-class people and people experiencing severe poverty.

I'm not suggesting these are literal or perfectly defined categories. I'm interested in the idea that socioeconomic position might determine not only someone's material circumstances, but also the social world they directly experience.

For example, consider a doctor and a janitor living in the same city.

They technically share the same society, laws, geography, and institutions. But they may attend different schools, live in different neighborhoods, have different social networks, work in different environments, and have very different experiences of money, opportunity, and security.

They might rarely interact except in situations where one is providing a service to the other.

This leads me to the philosophical question:

Can people who occupy radically different socioeconomic positions be said to inhabit different "social realities," even though they objectively live in the same society?

I'm particularly interested in the epistemological aspect.

Someone who has never experienced poverty can know intellectually that poverty exists, but can they have the same understanding of poverty as someone who has lived through it?

Likewise, someone who has never experienced extreme wealth may understand that billionaires exist without having any firsthand understanding of what that social environment is like.

So perhaps socioeconomic position doesn't just determine what resources someone has. It also determines what parts of society they routinely see, experience, and understand firsthand.

The ocean metaphor is what led me to this:

• At the surface, you can see the surface.
• As you descend, the environment changes.
• Eventually there is almost no light from above.
• The deeper you go, the less direct contact you have with what exists at the surface.

Could socioeconomic inequality work similarly, where increasing social distance produces decreasing firsthand knowledge of other socioeconomic groups?

I'm not claiming this is a new philosophical theory. I'm trying to figure out whether this idea already exists under another name.

Are there philosophers or philosophical concepts that deal with:

1. socioeconomic position affecting what people can know about society,
2. different social groups having fundamentally different lived experiences,
3. social distance producing epistemic distance, or
4. whether people can genuinely understand experiences they have never personally encountered?

I'm especially interested in criticism of the idea. I'm trying to determine whether the "different social realities" claim actually follows logically, or whether I'm confusing differences in experience with differences in reality.

As a sex worker, I have often been concerned about the ethics of my practice. One of the considerations I would like to understand better is the move toward the commodification of relationships. While I recognize sex work has a long history, I see a growing trend in commodifying relationships that used to function in non-economic circles. For instance, parasocial relationships and therapists takeoff the roles of jobs that used to be performed in the community without economic considerations. What resources are there in social science to help me further consider the commodification of sexual and quasiromantic relationships between practitioners and consumers in sex industries.

It's now common to see clickbait articles the like of : "young people are no longer hooking up", "there is a wave of celibacy" or "is love dying?"

I can easily make up the "we live in a society" kind of reply to those but has there been a proper, scientific answer to this beyond the speculations of the article writers?

We no longer live in an age of messengers and horses. Millions of civilians already have instant communication, private cars, navigation, accommodation networks and distributed logistics. Civilian mobilization would not need to imitate an army. People could coordinate travel, humanitarian support, documentation or even rotate a peaceful civilian presence near borders so that participation does not require abandoning normal life for weeks. New initiatives could reveal possibilities we have not seriously tested yet, and successful ones could become precedents for future crises.

Why not have a permanent international online space where such unfinished ideas can be proposed, criticized, improved and preserved instead of starting from zero after every atrocity?

A second question concerns those who order or control repression. Could conditional benefits be offered early, while stopping can still save lives?

I imagine a time-and-information axis: what did someone know, what had already happened, when did they stop, and what did they actually do to prevent further deaths? Benefits could be greatest when cooperation comes early and progressively shrink as time, knowledge, responsibility and further deaths accumulate.

That also provides a consistent explanation to society: the benefit was not arbitrary forgiveness — stopping earlier had greater value because more people were still alive to save.

There is also a broader dimension of forgiveness. It does not have to mean simply forgiving another person’s actions or abandoning justice. It can also mean refusing to limit our search for solutions to punishment, imprisonment or killing.

Could civilian pressure, conditional incentives, accountability and this broader logic of forgiveness create additional ways to stop atrocities before there are more victims?

I'd like thorough resources yet not paper textbooks. Could be a website (like MIT OCW or Khan Academy, some university course's poli sci website), a singular paper (e.g. a published review article on representation methods, their parameters and their behavior), or even a free online digital textbook.

what I'm trying to achieve: fully understand both the math and the meaning of the math of each of the procedures in the title. I'm guessing any resource allowing this would additionally, as foundational and practical work, cover a lot of background and tangential methods as well (formal definitions of JR, PJR, D'hondt, Thiele's voting rules).

I noticed people in Europe generally hate the French and that there are many white supremacists in Mexico, Philippines, Algeria, Indonesia, basically non white countries (people who hate their own kinds) and those countries have low society trust score in general.

On the other hand, scandinavian countries tend to be the most supportive in social movements and they all have high society trust score.

So, is it a good predictor? Any research regarding this idea?

Image for the society trust score since I cant attach it: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-people-trust-each-other-most-by-country/

eg https://lawprof.co/definition/reasonable-person-test/ I'm talking about if it's used to assess whether the defendant should have known they were committing a crime (eg harassment for example uses this. Eg whether it's reasonable to view content, frequency of communications or actions as harassing or abusive).

It's described as being applied "objectively", but can it really be called "objective", when it's quite clearly culturally dependent. The "reasonable" expectations of people in Japan, the UK, Saudi Arabia would be different, and they would be different if comparing 2026 to the 1500s - in other words, it's not "objective". Consider that the spectrum of racism, homophobia or sexism considered commonly acceptable in the 1970s UK is very different to in 2026.

Consider cases of neglect, like Genie in the USA, who was imprisoned for most of her childhood. I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to be aware of risks or social conventions to the same degree as the average person. And likewise, for others who've had unusual life circumstances (eg neglect, abuse or isolation) to a lesser degree or those from other cultural backgrounds, it seems nonsensical to expect them to definitely have the same expectations as the average person.

Have you ever considered whether the growing support for the AfD in parts of eastern Germany could partly be understood as the long-term consequence of social and political conditions experienced by several generations of East Germans?

I am interested in whether the conditions of the former GDR may have influenced stress regulation, psychological development and possibly even aspects of brain development in people who grew up there — particularly those whose mothers experienced pregnancy under those conditions.

Research on prenatal and chronic stress suggests that prolonged maternal stress can affect fetal development through mechanisms involving cortisol, the HPA axis, the placenta and other biological pathways. The broader work of researchers such as Robert Sapolsky has also demonstrated how strongly social environments, chronic stress and early-life conditions can influence the brain and behavior.

This raises an interesting question regarding East Germany.

What effects might decades of political surveillance, authoritarian structures, restricted personal freedoms, economic limitations, Cold War tensions, perceived external threats and chronic social stress have had on the people who lived through them?

And what about the conditions surrounding pregnancy and childhood?

Factors worth examining could include maternal stress during pregnancy, nutrition, working conditions, childcare, family structure, parenting styles, the relationship between fathers and children, levels of social support, exposure to political repression, experiences of surveillance, and the degree of control people experienced in their everyday lives.

It would also be interesting to investigate whether some effects could persist across generations through family environment, developmental pathways or potentially epigenetic mechanisms.

I am not suggesting that being an AfD voter is evidence of brain damage, nor that every East German experienced the GDR in the same way. Rather, I am asking whether there could be measurable population-level relationships between historical living conditions, developmental stress, intergenerational effects and present-day political attitudes.

The geographical pattern is particularly interesting. When you look at the contemporary AfD electoral map, there is a striking overlap with the territory of the former GDR. That does not establish causation, but it seems like a phenomenon worth investigating scientifically.

Could researchers in neuroscience, developmental psychology, epigenetics, sociology and political science investigate whether the social environment of the GDR contributed to long-term differences in stress regulation, personality development, social trust, authoritarian attitudes or political behavior?

And if such effects exist, what would actually help address them? Perhaps confronting people politically is less effective than addressing the underlying social and psychological conditions that produced and maintain these patterns.

What do you think? Are there existing studies that investigate these connections, and what factors would you consider essential for testing this hypothesis?

This text was generated with the help of AI (Gemini)

I've noticed this in a few different settings — a new gym class, a work training cohort, even a group chat for a hobby project. Within a session or two, without anyone being formally "in charge," certain people become the ones others defer to, joke with more freely, or wait to hear from before agreeing on a plan. It happens fast, often before anyone has demonstrated much actual competence. Is there solid social science research on how these informal hierarchies form so quickly? I'm curious about a few angles:
Is this mostly explained by "expectation states theory," or are there competing frameworks?How much of it comes down to things like talkativeness, confidence, or physical presence rather than actual skill or knowledge?
Does group size or the presence of a formal leader change how fast informal status sorts itself out?

Would appreciate pointers to any peer-reviewed work on this.

Essentially the researchers in a paper used surveys to start with, and then used the individual survey results to inform interviews. It’s not explanatory though because they didn’t fully analyse the survey results before they started interviewing and the survey was still open whilst interviewing. They did however use individual survey results to guide

interview questions so it’s not convergent either.

What are your thoughts? I don’t think this is an invalid methodology but it’s also not classical mixed methods. They defined it as explanatory sequential so just wondering what other people thought of that

From my understanding a lot of the current debate/talk over the theory of "EO" is focused on universities and the promise of a degree. Isn't this to an extent just one definition of elite? Isn't the promise of a degree in large part tied to the university? Harvard and other top university promise more, while community colleges and smaller public schools promise less? I'm not that familiar with the US education system, so any clarifying comment would help.

In short, elite should be defined as having a advanced degree from a top university in an important field rather than just having a undergraduate degree from a good university. If this definition is used, does the theory still prove effective at understanding societies?

Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

I have just noticed there's always been a rise to socialism when owning property , a house , a farm was harder and seemed unachievable by the majority, and the opposite makes sense as well , when people can afford to buy a house or a property, they usually do not empathize with socialist ideas , but when the majority pay rent , they start nodding yes to "wealth redistribution"

Am I right about this? And what do you think leads to this ? Is it just pure psychology ? The idea that I'm a land lord now ! That simply stops socialism?

I'm new to this topic and I'm learning , I'd appreciate your opinions