Social Sciences

What will retirement look like for you? Will you buy that 40-foot sailboat and sail between your summer home in Maine and your winter home in the Caribbean? Or will you plan for three daughters’ weddings, older parents, and other unexpected but unavoidable costs? One scenario pits you as being solidly independent; the other looks pretty interdependent. How consumers make such choices and set goals is the focus of an article in the September 2005 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

Believers in Brazil can choose from a wide variety of religions. The main reason for this rich selection lies in the country’s colonial history and its current socio-economic development. This is the key message of a project recently concluded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF in order to analyze why Brazil of all countries experiences such a big run on faith.

Millions of Europeans were under the spell of the elections for the new Pope, but the truth is that religions are losing

When faced with a challenging situation, a bicultural person may decide how to respond based on the cultural mindset that is active at the time, researchers have concluded.

College students in Hong Kong, for example, who were prompted ahead of time with icons of Chinese culture were more likely to cooperate with friends than were students who had been cued with American cultural icons, according to Ying-yi Hong of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Hong and

Some of us can hold our tongues better than others but even the best of us will blurt out the truth when we’re tired, stressed or distracted, according to a new research report.

“The dinner party guest who puts his foot in his mouth could lack a crucial mental ability that stops the rest of us from blurting out our true feelings,” according to a report in the July issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society.

But while most peopl

Mainstream financial service providers should help their rejected borrowers improve credit ratings and avoid sinking deeper into debt, by collaborating with high-interest lenders, many of which they own, argues a new report sponsored by the ESRC.

Better liaison and advice might prevent shocking cases such as that of the Meadows family of Southport, who hit the headlines last October after a loan of £5,750 shot up to a staggering debt of £380,000, says a study at Keele University l

Since September 2000, when the UN-initiated Millennium Declaration was signed, States have to work towards reducing poverty and encouraging world economic growth in the coming decades (1). In discussions embarked on to respond to these objectives, the questions of population and urban growth take a predominant place. Urbanization, which is a key indicator of current globalization in the world, serves increasingly to predict other trends studied at global scale, like poverty, energy consumption,