Civic duty is often defined as the responsibilities, obligations, or tasks that each citizen owes to their nation or society, typically implied by the social contract between a government and its citizens (Dalton, 2014). In democratic societies, civic duties include a range of activities of participatory citizenship, where the citizens themselves are essential for maintaining […]
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In sociology, agency is a term used to refer to a person’s capacity for free will, freedom of choice, and independent action. Agency is contrasted to structure, where agency represents our ability to impose our will on the world and determine our own destiny, while social structure represents the many constraints placed on us by
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A hierarchy is a ranking system in which entities (people, data points, etc.) are ranked according to relative importance, status, authority, or another factor. There are multiple different types of hierarchies, encapsulating biological taxonomies, data hierarchies, corporate ranks, military ranks, and so on. One of the most central types of hierarchy is a social hierarchy,
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A social hierarchy is a ranking system that organizes society so that some people have greater social status than others. There are many types of social hierarchies, including caste systems, social class hierarchies, gender hierarchies, and so on (I’ll explore a ton of them if you scroll down!) However, different societies have different approaches to
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A false dichotomy is a logical fallacy that presents only two options or sides when in reality there are more possibilities. Although the two extremes appear to be mutually exclusive, a more careful analysis reveals that there are also a range of other options that could be considered. The term false dichotomy can apply to
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Pseudo-psychology refers to theories or practices that claim to be scientific and based on psychological principles, but lack empirical evidence or theoretical basis accepted by the mainstream psychology community. A pseudo-psychology paradigm often contains statements and beliefs, or advocates certain practices, while claiming to have a scientific basis. However, those statements do not have a
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Convergence refers to how data from different sensory modalities are combined to form a perception. Many perceptual processes actually require input from one or more senses. Different areas of the brain receive the data and then synthesize the information that eventually results in a perceptual phenomenon. This process is sometimes referred to as multisensory integration
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Context cues are aspects of the environment that facilitate accessing and retrieving information in memory. Social psychology research has demonstrated that recalling episodic or semantic information improves when there is a match between contextual cues at encoding and retrieval. That is, if the contextual cues when learning something are the same as when trying to
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Context clues are key pieces of information that help a reader understand the meaning of a word without requiring them to look it up in a dictionary (Baumann, Edwards, Boland, Olejnik, & Kame’enui, 2003). A context clue is typically found within the sentence that you are reading. If a sentence contains an unfamiliar word, there’s
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In sociology, socialization is the process through which individuals learn and internalize the norms, values, beliefs, and behaviors of their society. The process of socialization begins in childhood, when we internalize the beliefs, values, and mindsets of our parents, siblings, and culture. But it can also continues throughout our lives as we’re exposed to wide
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