Research and Source Documents

Han and Ma propose the Culture–Behavior–Brain (CBB) Loop model, which describes how culture shapes behavior and brain activity, while behavior and neural processes, in turn, reinforce and modify culture. This dynamic feedback model bridges cultural psychology and neuroscience to explain cross-cultural differences in cognition and affect.

Leon Festinger’s A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance proposes that people experience psychological discomfort (dissonance) when they hold conflicting beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors, and will strive to reduce this discomfort by changing one or more of these elements. The theory explains a wide range of human behaviors related to justification, attitude change, and rationalization

In this retrospective, Bowlby, the researcher behind the 1980 book Attachment and Loss, reflects on the evolution of attachment theory, tracing its foundations in empirical observations of maternal separation and its implications for personality development and psychopathology.

Williams analyzes how memes like #LivingWhileBlack, BBQ Becky, and Karen operate as cultural critique in digital spaces, exposing and resisting White surveillance and racial dominance while providing Black communities with tools for expression and agency. She argues that these memes do more than humorously depict everyday racism—they disrupt dominant narratives and highlight systemic racial inequalities online and offline.

Davis et al integrate Identity Theory (IT) and Social Identity Theory (SIT) by conceptualizing collective identity as a form of group/social identity applicable to activist collectives. Using digital data from YouTube comments on veganism videos, the authors show that collective identity aligns with identity feedback processes and bridges IT and SIT concepts.

Davis and Jurgenson refine the theory of context collapse by distinguishing between intentional context collusions and unintentional context collisions in social media environments. They argue that collapsing contexts are shaped by both platform design and user agency, with implications for identity performance, privacy, and social consequences.

Davis proposes a theoretical framework for digital curation, arguing that it is a central mechanism of sociality in the information‑rich online environment. She distinguishes between productive curation (selecting and sharing content) and consumptive curation (sorting and attending to information), showing how these practices are shaped by social networks and technological design.

Custodians of the Internet examines how major social platforms decide what content stays up and what gets removed, revealing that moderation is shaped by opaque policies, economic priorities, cultural norms, and political pressures. The author highlights that these hidden choices, often made by a combination of algorithms and laborers behind the scenes, have profound effects on free expression, public discourse, and social norms.

This study investigates whether the race of a civilian influences the likelihood that police officers use force during 911 dispatches. Using a large dataset linking police use of force to the race of both civilians and dispatching officers, the authors find that Black civilians are more likely to experience force—especially when the responding officer is white.

Davis and Graham analyze how binary rating features (upvotes/downvotes) on Reddit influence users’ emotional expression and engagement, finding that upvotes tend to predict positive sentiment while downvotes predict negative emotion, yet downvoted content often generates higher engagement. The study frames ratings as affordances that function as symbolic markers of community norms, impacting both affect and attention patterns.

This conceptual article revisits the extended self—a foundational idea in consumer research that possessions become …

How Artifacts Afford updates affordance theory by shifting the focus from what technologies afford to how, for whom, and under what circumstances they afford actions, foregrounding the power and politics encoded in sociotechnical artifacts. Davis introduces a mechanisms and conditions framework that offers a precise, critical vocabulary for analyzing how technological features shape social behavior and outcomes.

Judith Donath analyzes how identity is constructed and performed in online spaces, where cues from physical presence are absent and deception can be easier. She explains that virtual communities create unique challenges for trust, reputation, and authenticity due to the flexibility and opacity of identity online.

This article shows that people who score higher in psychological entitlement are more likely to respond with anger when they experience bad luck, even when no one is to blame. This effect is specific to personal experiences and does not extend to imagining others in similar situations.

In Influence, Robert Cialdini outlines the key psychological principles that drive people to say “yes,” explaining how factors like reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity influence persuasion and decision‑making. The expanded edition updates the original work with new research and real‑world examples showing how these persuasion principles operate in contemporary contexts.

danah boyd uses more than a decade of fieldwork and interviews to show that teenagers’ use of social media is nuanced and purposeful, shaped by social needs for identity, community, privacy, and expression. She argues that many adult fears — about addiction, privacy loss, danger, and bullying — are exaggerated or misunderstood and that teens’ networked lives reflect adaptive social behavior, not pathology.

Horton and Wohl introduced the concept of parasocial interaction, describing the one‑sided relationships audiences form with media figures that feel like real interpersonal bonds despite a lack of reciprocal communication. They argue that mass media—especially radio and television—creates an illusion of intimacy that encourages audiences to respond emotionally and socially as if the mediated persona were personally known.

In Music, Language, and the Brain, Aniruddh Patel synthesizes research from cognitive neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and musicology to argue that music and language share deep, structured neural and cognitive mechanisms, while also highlighting important differences in how the brain processes each.

In Musicophilia, neurologist Oliver Sacks explores the complex relationship between music and the human brain, presenting case histories of patients whose neurological conditions reveal how deeply music is intertwined with memory, emotion, identity, and perception. He shows that music can both reveal unexpected neural capacities and reveal the brain’s neuroplasticity, especially in the face of injury or disease.

In Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein argue that people’s choices are often shaped by predictable cognitive biases, and that public policy and private institutions can improve outcomes by “nudging” individuals toward better decisions without restricting freedom of choice. They introduce choice architecture as the design of environments in which people make decisions, showing how small changes can significantly affect behavior in areas like savings, health, and consumer protection.

Milgram’s Obedience to Authority reports on a series of experiments demonstrating that ordinary people will follow orders from an authority figure—even when those orders conflict with their personal conscience—revealing powerful influences of social context and authority structures on behavior. The work shows that obedience can occur across diverse individuals when situational pressures and legitimate authority cues are present.

Bender and colleagues critique the trend toward larger and larger large language models (LLMs), arguing that scaling up these models amplifies serious harms—environmental, ethical, and social—without solving core problems of linguistic understanding or accountability. They call for more responsible research practices, including careful dataset curation, evaluation of societal impact, AI Ethics, and consideration of alternatives to ever‑larger models.

This study by Peter Wason introduced the “Wason Selection Task” and demonstrated how people often fail to falsify hypotheses when engaged in logical reasoning. It revealed a cognitive bias toward confirmation rather than falsification, contributing foundational insight into reasoning errors and cognitive heuristics.

Brown and Levinson’s Politeness develops a model of face‑saving communication that explains how speakers across cultures use linguistic strategies to mitigate social conflict and maintain mutual respect. Central to the theory is the idea that all individuals have a desire to protect both their own and others’ “face,” leading to varied politeness strategies depending on social context and power relations.

This open‑label follow‑up of an initial feasibility study found that two doses of psilocybin administered with psychological support produced rapid, large, and sustained reductions in depressive symptoms among patients with treatment‑resistant depression, with effects lasting up to six months. The treatment was generally well tolerated, suggesting psilocybin‑assisted therapy may be a promising new approach for individuals who have not responded to conventional antidepressants.

Social Identity and Intergroup Relations compiles seminal work on how individuals’ self‑concepts are derived from their group memberships, and how these social identities shape perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors toward in‑groups and out‑groups. The book lays the foundational framework for understanding prejudice, discrimination, group conflict, and intergroup dynamics in terms of cognitive, motivational, and contextual processes.

Baym argues that social media are not a neutral social good but part of a socio‑technical and economic system in which communication practices are commodified, with platforms harvesting social interaction as data for profit. She critiques how the term “social media” obscures issues of ownership, power, and inequality, and calls for approaches to media that support societal well‑being rather than monetizing users’ sociality.

Clancy and Davis critique the use of the term WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) in human subjects research, arguing that its common application obscures the role of whiteness as a dominant structuring force in scientific sampling and interpretation. They call for greater reflexivity and more inclusive methodological approaches that foreground diverse identities and perspectives in biological anthropology.

French and Raven’s model identifies five (later expanded to six) fundamental bases of social power that explain how individuals influence others: reward, coercive, legitimate, referent, expert, and informational power. These power bases describe different sources of influence ranging from formal authority to personal persuasion and expertise.

Goff and colleagues show that Black boys are perceived as older, less innocent, and more culpable than their White peers—perceptions linked to harsher disciplinary and policing decisions. This research demonstrates a form of racialized dehumanization that contributes to real‑world disparities in treatment and punishment.

Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble argues that personalization algorithms on platforms like Google and Facebook selectively curate what we see online based on our data, creating “filter bubbles” that limit exposure to diverse information and reinforce existing beliefs. This invisible tailoring of content shapes individual worldviews, can foster intellectual isolation, and has broader implications for society, democracy, and public discourse.

Sunstein explores how deliberation among like-minded individuals tends to amplify their preexisting views, a phenomenon he terms group polarization. He proposes that this effect is not just a quirk of psychology but a reliable pattern with implications for law, politics, and public discourse.

John Suler defines and analyzes the online disinhibition effect, where people behave with less restraint in online environments than they would face-to-face. He distinguishes between benign disinhibition (e.g., greater self-disclosure) and toxic disinhibition (e.g., flaming, rude behavior), and identifies six psychological factors that contribute to this phenomenon.

Patricia Wallace’s The Psychology of the Internet provides a comprehensive research‑based overview of how online environments shape human behavior, emotions, and social interaction across contexts such as impression formation, group dynamics, aggression, attraction, altruism, privacy, gaming, development, and gender. The book integrates classic and contemporary psychological research to explain why people behave differently online and how those behaviors both reflect and inform social life on the Internet.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind explores the psychological bases of moral reasoning, arguing that people’s moral judgments are driven more by intuitive, emotional processes than by deliberate reasoning, and that ideological divisions stem from differences in moral foundations. He proposes that understanding moral psychology can help explain political and cultural polarization.

A foundational exploration of how humans rely on cognitive shortcuts (representativeness, availability, and anchoring) to simplify probability judgments, often resulting in systematic and predictable biases.

Daniel Levitin explores the neuroscience and psychology of music, explaining how the brain perceives, processes, remembers, and emotionally responds to musical sound. The book synthesizes research across cognitive neuroscience, perception, and music theory to reveal why music is a universal human phenomenon and how it shapes our cognition and emotion.

Davis examines how individuals negotiate identity in a networked era marked by digital social technologies, highlighting the challenge of maintaining a coherent balance between idealized and authentic self‑presentations. She identifies conditions such as the fluidity between digital and physical contexts, expectations of accuracy, and overlapping social networks that shape contemporary identity processes.

Twitter and Tear Gas analyzes how digital technologies and social media have transformed protest movements, giving activists unprecedented ability to mobilize large numbers quickly while also exposing critical weaknesses in sustaining long‑term organization and strategy. Tufekci argues that networked online movements possess powerful strengths but are fragile in the face of institutional counter‑measures and lack the deeper capacities of traditional movements.