r/AskSocialScience

I’ve pondered if there is a framework for non White person to be socially white construct but have a cultural white identity.

There has to be at least some right? I know people love to say that “reality has a left wing bias “and all that but is it legit batting 1.000?

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.

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?

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?

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,

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

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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:

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we increasingly add representations of those outcomes:

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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?

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?

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.

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?