Social Sciences

"Spill the Tea, Honey: Gossiping Predicts Well-Being in Same- and Different-Gender Couples" is the name of a new study from UC Riverside psychology researchers that found gossip within couples is associated with greater happiness and better relationships. The paper is published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.... Read more

Signs that an individual might be on the verge of self-harm are often found in their online actions, but can word choices in posts indicate who is at particular risk and when?... Read more

Organizational engagement with social issues is pushing culture wars into corporate America, leading to bickering and suboptimal performance, says Luke N. Hedden, assistant professor at the University of Miami Patti and Allan Herbert Business School.... Read more

A new study co-written by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign expert who studies occupational stress and employee well-being sheds light on the different profiles of intervention behaviors bystanders may exhibit when they witness workplace sexual harassment.... Read more

Digital nomads are everywhere. Working and living wherever they lay their laptops, there may be as many as 40 million people who earn their keep online while they travel the world.... Read more

A person's credit report tells a story about their childhood. New research, released last month by Harvard's Opportunity Insights, shows that a strong predictor of an adult's bill-paying habits—the main determinant of credit scores—is the environment in which they grew up. The study, based on a sample of more than... Read more

Many people know nothing about the mutual fund manager whose investment decisions impact the performance of their IRA and 401(k) accounts. But new research suggests it's well worth one's while to know who's minding your funds—specifically their birth order—due to implications for how your fund performs.... Read more

Large language models (LLMs), advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models trained to analyze and generate texts in different human languages, have become increasingly widespread over the past few years. Since the release of the conversational platform ChatGPT, which relies on different versions of an LLM called GPT, these models have become... Read more

The global distribution of wealth is currently the subject of controversial debate. Against this backdrop, social sciences, humanities, and economics are intensively investigating how social hierarchies arise in human communities and where these processes originate. A widely held theory to date is that the introduction of agriculture in Europe at... Read more

Teenagers can seem to have their phones glued to their hands—yet they won't answer them when they ring. This scenario, which is all too familiar to many parents, can seem absurd and frustrating, or even alarming to some.... Read more

Whether in Belgium, Poland, or Ukraine, when asked about their nation's role under Nazi occupation, many Europeans today primarily see their own population as victims—or as heroes. This is the key finding of a cross-national study led by Dr. Fiona Kazarovytska from the Department of Social and Legal Psychology at... Read more

As artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT become part of our everyday lives, from providing general information to helping with homework, one legal expert is raising a red flag: Are these tools quietly narrowing the way we see the world?... Read more

If you've interacted with an artificial intelligence chatbot, you've likely realized that all AI models are biased. They were trained on enormous corpuses of unruly data and refined through human instructions and testing. Bias can seep in anywhere. Yet how a system's biases can affect users is less clear.... Read more

Conversations about climate change often point to catastrophes like the melting of the polar ice caps or forest fires in California. But for people who live far away from these destructive events, the global urgency of these problems may not resonate.... Read more

Metaphors are a fundamental aspect of human language and cognition, allowing us to understand complex concepts and relationships by mapping them onto more familiar and concrete domains. However, the nature of metaphors and how they work is still not well understood.... Read more