American Studies is an academic discipline whose object of study is the United States of America and everything associated with it, and American sociologists largely ignore it. American Studies largely ignores American sociology. What causes this mutual exclusion? An outline of the disciplinary history of American Studies and journal article citation data show that the relationship between soci...

Researchers have remarked and recoiled at the literature confusion regarding the meanings of trust and distrust. The problem involves both the proliferation of narrow intra-disciplinary research definitions of trust and the multiple meanings the word trust possesses in everyday use. To enable trust researchers to more easily compare empirical results, we define a cohesive set of conceptual and ...

Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world). The sociofunctional approach to prejudice, combined with a cultural evolutionary theory of religion‘s effects on cooperation, suggest that anti-atheist prejudice is particularly motivated by distrust. Consistent with this theoretical framework, a broad sample of ...

Due to open and anonymous nature, online social networks are particularly vulnerable to the Sybil attack, in which a malicious user can fabricate many dummy identities to attack the systems. Recently, there is a flurry of interests to leverage social network structure for Sybil defense. However, most of graph-based approaches pay little attention to the distrust information, which is an importa...

Sometimes academic books must not be evaluated only according to their conclusions or arguments, but also for the meanings they carry in themselves. That is, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, sometimes the book is the message. I am specifically thinking about studies regarding the lifeworlds and actions of people who suffer from and struggle against the consequences of social inequality, such as ...

Extensive research has shown that certain interrogation techniques may lead to false confessions. Gudjonsson and MacKeith (1982) argued that the ‘memory distrust syndrome’ could underlie some of these false confessions. The present study examined the relation between memory distrust, false confessions, and several interrogation techniques, by accusing innocent undergraduate students (n 50) of e...

Why do people distrust others in social exchange? To what degree, if at all, is distrust subject to genetic influences, and thus possibly heritable, and to what degree is it nurtured by families and immediate peers who encourage young people to be vigilant and suspicious of others? Answering these questions could provide fundamental clues about the sources of individual differences in the dispo...

The article discusses the educational consequences of collateral nature Kashubian language in relation to Polish. is defined as languages’ mutual intelligibility resulting from their formal proximity and lack political independence community. Based on longterm field research in-depth interviews, analysis touches upon ideologies Kashubia which directly impact process teaching language. These – a...