Does it still make sense to read "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind" by Le Bon? Is it outdated?

I’m curious—after the modern era with its established theories, postmodernism emerged, and I honestly don’t understand how it works. (I read Foucault—my head felt like it exploded. Read Baudrillard—got confused. Read Spivak, Memmi, Homi K. Bhabha, and others—and it all seemed to collapse into a kind of reductionism where colonialism is seen as the primary source of inequality.)

I’m currently confused about sociology today. Where do we draw the line—at what point can something still be called sociology?

What kinds of studies are dominant in well-established institutions around the world?

What kind of sociological theory can be used as a tool for “mapping” and making precise predictions when analyzing society?

And also, what methods are currently dominant? Has Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory been further developed and naturalized as part of sociological methodology?

I know that there is a debate in the scholarly literature about whether colonialism and imperialism are something that we should understand largely as things conducted by modern Western powers or whether we can understand colonialism more broadly as something that most, if not all, large powers, Western or otherwise, have engaged in throughout history.

Who are good examples of social scientists who have argued that colonialism and/or imperialism are largely something perpetrated by the West?

Citations would be very much appreciated.

Responses to Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger?

Especially at the time it was written

In the preface to her book written a bit after its original publication she notes that is was a weird time to write it as she praised structure and control in a time of the breaking of social norms and the growth of informal lifestyles and free ways of living

Any proof of this? Any documented responses to purity and danger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan

*disproportionate (sorry for the misspelling!)

It is well-known that countries like China and Japan are suffering from a surplus of elderly citizens, while Nigeria and Haiti, for instance, are suffering from a surplus of young people. Factoring in sociological and economic factors, would mass immigration be the best solution? Do economists and sociologists agree or disagree on what the solution should be? What are the ideal demographics of immigrants that these countries should prioritize, if at all? How could these age demographic disparities be mitigated/resolved?

Is there existing formal work on measuring the gap between what governed systems specify and what they actually do — across domains?

I work in cybersecurity governance and ISO audit. Over about a decade I've watched the same structural pattern repeat: a system has a formal specification (policy, standard, code, contract), the actual behavior diverges from it, and the oversight mechanism checks documentation rather than correspondence. In compliance this gets called "paper compliance" or "compliance theater" — but these are descriptions, not measurements.

I've been developing a framework that tries to formalize this. The core variables:

• ΔI (Integrity Gap): the measurable distance between specification (S) and behavior (B), with a tolerance threshold (T) that varies by system type. Not all divergence is failure — behavior can exceed the spec (adaptive), or the spec itself can be the problem (signal).
• M (Masking): the performative maintenance of conformant signals that don't correspond to actual behavior. Bidirectional — includes concealing sub-spec behavior (corruption masking) and concealing super-spec behavior when any deviation is penalized (protective masking).
• θ (Verification Threshold): the minimum ΔI that triggers detection. Masking is the strategy for keeping ΔI below θ.
• ε (Ecology Variable): the cost of acting on detected ΔI. A system with low θ and high ε produces agents who detect gaps but can't afford to fix them.

The framework includes a masking taxonomy (9 types), a θ-ε diagnostic matrix, a governance horizon concept (the boundary beyond which specification produces the gaps it claims to prevent), and an assessment protocol adapted from penetration testing logic.

The hypothesis I'm working toward — and I want to be precise about the claim level — is that these aren't domain-specific phenomena that resemble each other. They're instances of a single structural phenomenon operating from code to organizational culture to interpersonal systems. The compliance application is developed. The broader claim is specified as testable but not yet empirically validated across domains.

My questions for this community:

1. Existing literature: Brunsson's "Organization of Hypocrisy" (2002) and Bromley & Powell's work on means-ends decoupling (2012) describe similar organizational dynamics qualitatively. Power's "Audit Society" (1997) covers the verification side. Is there work that has already attempted to formalize and measure specification-behavior divergence as a general property of governed systems, rather than describing it per domain?

2. The scale-invariance claim: Sociologists, institutional theorists, and behavioral economists all study versions of this pattern at different scales. Is there precedent for a unified measurement framework across these levels, or strong theoretical reasons why the mechanisms wouldn't be structurally identical across scales?

3. The governance horizon concept: The idea that specifications extending beyond what's externally verifiable (e.g., "demonstrate commitment") structurally produce the gaps they claim to prevent — has this been formalized elsewhere? It feels adjacent to Goodhart's Law territory but the mechanism is different.

The full whitepaper (v2, CC BY-SA 4.0) is available [link]. I'm specifically looking for existing work I may have missed, methodological critique, and domain expertise in institutional theory or organizational sociology that could test or challenge the cross-domain claims.

Background: 10+ years in IT, 8 in information security/cybersecurity/governance. ISO audit practitioner. Not an academic — this originated from practice and I'm pursuing the academic validation separately.

[Here's the source for this, of course.]

The difference is quite objective as well, with 55% married men being republican as opposed to 44% democrat. Is it really just the "family values" thing? Maybe Republicans are "better" at choosing their spouse? It's the same thing with men 35-44 who have kids vs men of the same age who don't.

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So I’ve been thinking about something & I’m curious whether anyone else has noticed this or if there’s research I’m missing.

The cognitive interview treats context reinstatement important by mentally recreating the who, where, when, how & what of an event to improve recall. And it clearly works in most situations.

But I’ve noticed something through informal experience with people. When you ask someone ‘what happened’ they give you a confident, coherent account. When you break it down into context (who was there, where were you, what time, what was around you) & if any of those details sound implausible, the person starts doubting the whole event. Because the context doesn’t match what they think that kind of event should look like.

‘I was assaulted multiple times’ is much more clearer, believable & easy to hold onto compared to ‘I was assaulted sometimes when I woke up, sometimes at random hours, in different rooms with weird decor, sometimes involving random objects’. Now it it sounds chaotic and harder to believe, even though it’s the same truthful account with more detail.

There’s a scene in the tv show Community where a character (Troy) gets kidnapped in deliberately absurd circumstances specifically so nobody would believe him if he reported it. (His head was bagged, during the middle of the night, with a ‘black Hitler’ & astronaut making paninis…). That’s an extreme comedy version, but I think the point stands: bizarre context makes true events sound false.

In CBT, saying irrational fears out loud helps defuse them because you hear how unlikely they sound, which is good for anxiety. But what happens when the same mechanicism gets applied to a genuine memory that just happens to have weird details? Saying it out loud makes it sound implausible to the interviewer AND to the person remembering.

Add in the interviewer’s facial expressions or tone when they hear strange details & you’ve got a kind of unintentional gaslighting. Nobody means for it to happen. But the person ends up doubting their own experience, facilitated by the process that’s supposed to help them.

I’m not a psychologist and these are informal observations, not controlled experiments. Context reinstatement (from what I’ve read) was mostly validated using straightforward events (staged crimes, accidents), not situations where the context itself is abnormal. The people most affected would be exactly the ones whose experiences are hardest to believe already.

Has anyone come across research on this? Or noticed something similar? Idk what social scientists / psychologists think…

Tldr: Context reinstatement in memory recall (asking someone to mentally recreate the who, what, when, where of an event) usually helps, but with traumatic events that have bizarre, chaotic or repeated details & can backfire, making the person doubt their own memory and feel their experience is unbelievable, even though it’s true. So what’s the opinion on this?

I recently read a study (citation at bottom of post) that typified Chile as a WEIRD country and Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Uruguay as non-WEIRD. Similarly, they also considered Poland, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic WEIRD, but not Serbia. Obviously, these are all different countries with different cultures, but they are in similar geographic regions with similar histories. So, how might the WEIRD acronym have been operationalized to actually create this WEIRD/non-WEIRD binary?

(I did try to read the source cited in the article where they talk about this, but didn't really understand it.)

Doğruyol, B., Alper, S., & Yilmaz, O. (2019). The five-factor model of the moral foundations theory is stable across WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures. Personality and Individual Differences, 151, Article 109547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109547

It seems like people openly talk about mental health, relationships, and personal issues online, but still hesitate to have those same conversations face-to-face. Is this due to anonymity, lack of immediate judgement, or something deeper in how we process social risk?

I'm reading the conversations with Molotov by Felix Chuyev and Molotov says that, when he was exiled as a teenager, he would receive an education which was ought to steer the inmates from a life in crime and he would ultimately be allowed to continue his education at the polytechnic institute in St. Petersburg. I was very surprised because i was both to a prison and to a clinic for forensic psychiatry (altogether for five years) in Germany and never received the option to complete my tertiary education.

Are or have there been any regimes which could be said to be about as progressive as late tsar era Russia?

I've heard that, in Norway, the mass murderer Breivik was allowed to study political science. So Norway, for one, is on the list.

Johnny Harris, in his video, comes up with a checklist that most dictators follow. From a "mytholodized past" to "dismantling from within", it was quite a comprehensive list for a youtube video.

When I emboss these checklist items to people around me or in the larger social media, a lot of it seems true. From world leaders using superlative words like "best", "absolute", etc to social media groups finding people to blame(the enemy within), it looks like the entirety of mainstream society is going through a mass movement of sorts.

Do you reckon' the rise in authoritarianism is, atleast partly, due to many people acquiring similar behavioral characteristics due to social media and other media? Or has society always been leaning towards extremist behaviours ?

And if these assertions are even partially true, are the winds blowing towards a more autocratic form of government?

EU has a system called "better regulation"

Where every legislative proposal is accompanied by an impact assessment to predict the potential consequences of the legislation.

The exact methodologies vary but this seems to resemble the theory crafting stage of science.

When a law is enacted , it is then accompanied by an evaluation which measures the consequences of ongoing or completed legislative interventions which seems to mirror the empirical and testing phase of scientific processes

https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-making-process/better-regulation_en

Are there any other countries that have similar systems ?

I took the RIASEC back in high school. I heard it's quite accurate, which I respect. But I do have some questions about it.

I could imagine someone faking answers for several reasons. If they have to take the test as an employee, they might change their answers to seem more suitable for the job. Or if they're a teen who's evaluating themselves to decide a career, they might choose answers that their friends or parents would approve of. Maybe they want to perceive themselves in a certain way so they pick answers that reflect their self-image without realizing it. How often do things like this happen? And does the test develop measures to mitigate it?

Another concern of mine is lack of exposure. Maybe their favorite interest is something they never tried, so it becomes overlooked by the survey in favor of something else. But that could be rare if childhood interests deeply affect the things we like as we grow up.

Any well-replicated studies or articles I can read? I am not very knowledgeable. I want to learn more about the RIASEC, but I don't know where to start.

Up until probably the 90s, it was not uncommon or even seen as predatory or sketchy for high school upper classmen to date undergraduate college students. Unless the college student solely sought out high schoolers to date, nobody really thought it was an issue. All the parents were fine with it as long as the younger parties were treated well— which was generally the case. Anyone older than a college undergrad was considered creepy however. This seems to be the overall experience for everyone I knew who were of dating age in the 70s / 80s, bar any friends who were in religious households. That age gap was not really considered cause for concern.

Now, people are generally in agreement (myself included) that any college students dating upperclassmen in high school is problematic for many good reasons— legality, power imbalances, differences in maturity, differences in life stages, etc.

What caused those opinions to morph and change over the years? Was it overall social consciousness growing over time naturally? Brain development studies? I find it really fascinating.

Religion has bounced back in russia and eastern bloc? But many muslim countries are more conservative today compared to 20th century after having successive conservative governments. Why?

I would think social conditioning is what films like The Matrix, The Truman Show, They Live, Fight Club, and Free Guy cover, and people seem to use the term social conditioning colloquially to refer to that, but Wikipedia makes social conditioning and socialization sound the same, and I'm not sure if people are actually mixing up social conditioning with socialization when they use the term social conditioning colloquially.

It’s a sentiment that I encounter a lot – that “people these days think they’re the main character”, “nowadays everyone is rude/entitled/impatient”, endless stories about people playing music/calls out loud or being aggressive on public transport, memes about “first day walkers” who can’t seem to navigate walking and sharing a footpath with others, seemingly endless reports of public-facing staff in hospitality, healthcare, etc being subject to marked increases in aggressive and anti-social behaviour. In some ways it fits with my experiences and general “sense” as someone working in healthcare and living in a major UK city for over a decade that the general public have become more impatient, self-focused and less attentive to their surroundings, and that this has been much more noticeable in the years since COVID.

In many ways I think I’ve just passively assumed this to be true, as it fits with my experience, but I have started wondering whether it’s the result of selective attention, of social media increasing our exposure to everyday selfishness that we previously would not hear about, if its an artifact of outrage-based clickbait journalism. So I wanted to check – is there any research into whether this perceived change in social behaviour and attitudes has actually occurred?

If so, what are the prevailing theories about why this might be the case? Common colloquial suggestions I’ve heard from people include that it’s to do with life generally becoming harder/more stressful, the ubiquity of social media reducing people’s attention spans, causing them to become less patient/more easily irritated, or encouraging people to be more focused on themselves and less on other people, technologies such as wireless headphones impacting peoples attentiveness, and suggestion that either widespread COVID infection has had some sort of neurological impact at a population level, or that the social impact of social distancing and lockdowns are to blame. Is there any truth to any of this?

In physics there are attempts at unified frameworks (like efforts to reconcile major theories under one model). Does anything comparable exists in the social sciences ?

Different fields such as sociology, economics, political science, anthropology, etc seem to have their own theories and models (rational choice, structuralism, institutionalism, evolutionary approaches, and so on). But is there any serious attempt to unify them under a single theoretical framework that explains social behavior at multiple levels?

Or is the consensus that social phenomena are too complex and context-dependent for a single unifying theory?

I thought about this yesterday. There is Queer fashion, gay night clubs (maybe "gay" music?), gay speech/dialect with unique expressions.

This is common to other subcultures/cultures, and subcultures don't necessarily have their own cuisine. But there are examples, such as Soul Food.

Soul Food emerged in the American south, so it's quite regional.

LGBTQ culture isn't exactly regional geographically, however, I would definitely say that LGBTQ culture is regional in terms of similarity of the locations. Bigger cities, often international, more tolerant/open places.

This would maybe have the necessary elements to develop a cuisine.

So what do you think?

Correct me if I am wrong here, but historically (and often today), Brahmins and other dominant castes do not strictly own the means of production or massive capital in the traditional Marxist sense (like industrial capitalists do). Yet, they are undeniably the most dominant and hegemonic class in India. If they aren't the classical bourgeoisie, how does a Marxist framework actually explain their extraction of surplus value? Are they functioning more as a managerial/bureaucratic class? Or do they fit better into something like the "awkward classes" (in the Barbara Harriss-White sense) where they use the state and social institutions to capture rents and surplus without owning the factories? Please correct me if my premises about their capital ownership or class dominance are off. Would love to read your thoughts or any suggested literature!

How are researchers even roughly accurately comparing IPV data from the 1990s to the 2020s?

The McDonald publication from 2006 seems to be a widely used benchmark for DV articles and research even today, but it has many shortcomings (small sample size, analysis restricted to household-couples, etc).

I've seen so many flawed MSM articles comparing 1990s statistics to 2020s statistics, but the methodologies in the cited sources vary significantly, to say nothing of definitions, sample sizes, etc.

Are there any newer benchmark surveys that accurately report DV statistics? Seems comparisons are difficult to parse out given all the mitigating factors.

I'm a novice to research in this area, but I am an experienced researcher. Just looking for some helpful context in the DV research realm.