Social change

About: Social change is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 61197 publications have been published within this topic receiving 1797013 citations.

Big and mighty: preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance.

Abstract: Human infants face the formidable challenge of learning the structure of their social environment. Previous research indicates that infants have early-developing representations of intentional agents, and of cooperative social interactions, that help meet that challenge. Here we report five studies with 144 infant participants showing that 10- to 13-month-old, but not 8-month-old, infants recognize when two novel agents have conflicting goals, and that they use the agents’ relative size to predict the outcome of the very first dominance contests between them. These results suggest that preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance and use a cue that covaries with it phylogenetically, and marks it metaphorically across human cultures and languages, to predict which of two agents is likely to prevail in a conflict of goals.

Migration and Cultural Change: A Role for Gender and Social Networks?

Abstract: To incorporate the insights from the literature on gender and migration we focus upon three key concepts that have emerged regarding the role of social networks households and communities for affecting migration processes The three key concepts we interrogate are: “social embeddedness” (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993) “circular and cumulative causation” (Massey 1990) and “relative deprivation” (Stark 1991) We propose considering these three concepts through the lens of a third area of research the sociology of culture and we draw upon ideas about identity formation trust and normative expectations Our empirical examples come primarily from Thailand where we draw upon both secondary and primary data but also from secondary data from Latin America and the Caribbean migrant experiences In our effort to demonstrate that social networks and gender are essential elements for understanding migration and cultural change our discussion refers to international internal permanent and temporary migration We begin our analysis through a brief review of the three developments in the migration field We then conceptualize how these three literatures might be usefully synthesized with each other and relevant work in the sociology of culture In our view culture is an essential component for understanding the meaning given to individuals (gender) their actions (migration) and their relationships (network ties) This in turn influences the way inequality is produced or redressed In the conclusion we discuss how measurement of networks might be improved by these insights and synthesis We also suggest that by synthesizing these literatures we can refine theories of social change and the structuring of inequality in relation to migration processes (excerpt)