Social Sciences

Before buying a product, booking a hotel or streaming a movie, many people check online reviews. But not every glowing recommendation or one-star takedown reflects a genuine customer experience.... Read more

A new Viewpoint in the journal BioScience argues that gender-based and sexual violence (GBSV) in ecological fieldwork should be understood not as a series of isolated incidents but as a structural problem rooted in how field research is organized, with broad consequences for the knowledge such research produces.... Read more

New research from James Cook University has found that women experiencing domestic violence are often forced to choose between their own safety and the safety of their pets, with limited pet-inclusive crisis support contributing to additional trauma and distress.... Read more

Sometimes you can be too good at your job. Take streaming services, like Spotify or Netflix. With engagement as their main goal, their recommendation algorithms typically identify the content a user engaged with most in the recent past and efficiently suggest more of the same. Content and genres that received... Read more

The cost of playing community sports in Australia is far higher than previously understood, with a new national study led by Federation University finding families spend an average of $4,567 per child each year to keep their children playing sports.... Read more

When people apologize, they do more than acknowledge a mistake. They also reveal how they understand responsibility, ethics, social and moral norms, and their relationship with others. These things all differ widely between cultural contexts.... Read more

Public debate surrounding transgender and gender-diverse (trans) people often centers on one fundamental question: What makes someone trans?... Read more

The United States Constitution protects the free exercise of religion, meaning that religious exemptions can sometimes be granted if a law infringes on someone's sincerely held religious beliefs. But how do people decide whether someone else's religious exemption requests are legitimate? New research suggests that political ideology can play a... Read more

On the surface, posting online reviews looks like a win-win activity. It helps both businesses we like and people who might frequent them. But although posting reviews can benefit others, it can also put us all at risk, according to new research from the McCombs School of Business at The... Read more

The physical, cognitive and emotional loads of running a household should be recognized when examining the health of a couple's relationship, new research has found. A University of Queensland study examined the "tri-load" of household labor—physical (traditional chores such as washing, cleaning and cooking); cognitive (planning shopping lists, scheduling appointments);... Read more

What kind of society would you rather live in: an equal one where everyone is just about getting by? Or an unequal one where most people are doing substantially better, but a small group consistently falls behind? Now imagine having to choose that society before you were even born, but... Read more

Children in the postmedieval Dutch workforce worked so hard that their spines became worn and deformed, with some children affected before they even had a chance to lose their baby teeth, a new study published in the International Journal of Paleopathology finds.... Read more

There have been multiple high-profile alleged incidents of sexual violence against women and girls in news headlines this month. Some involve teenage boys.... Read more

Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) has dominated the cultural landscape. Uptake across various sectors, including law enforcement, quickly followed, usually with minimal foresight and little to no guardrails, like effective policies or laws, to govern AI use.... Read more

The catastrophic flood in Nepal and Tibet is a devastating reminder that disasters rarely occur in isolation.... Read more