Infanticide is the intentional killing of infants. Now universally illegal, infanticide was a widespread practice throughout human history that was mainly used to dispose of unwanted children. Its main purposes were controlling population growth and saving resources from being spent on weak or disabled offspring. Unwanted infants were normally abandoned to die of exposure, but in some societies they were manually killed.
Psychohistory is an amalgam of psychology, history, and related social sciences and the humanities. It examines the "why" of history, especially the difference between stated intention and actual behavior. Psychobiography, childhood, group dynamics, mechanisms of psychic defense, dreams, and creativity are primary areas of research. It works to combine the insights of psychology, especially psychoanalysis, with the research methodology of the social sciences and humanities to understand the emotional origin of the behavior of individuals, groups and nations, past and present. Work in the field has been done in the areas of childhood, creativity, dreams, family dynamics, overcoming adversity, personality, political and presidential psychobiography. There are major psychohistorical studies of studies of anthropology, art, ethnology, history, politics and political science, and much else.
Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to examine and explain social behavior in terms of evolution. It draws from disciplines including psychology, ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, and population genetics. Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is closely allied to evolutionary anthropology, human behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology.
Early infanticidal childrearing is a term used in the study of psychohistory that refers to infanticide in paleolithic, pre-historical, and historical hunter-gatherer tribes or societies. "Early" means early in history or in the cultural development of a society, not to the age of the child. "Infanticidal" refers to the high incidence of infants killed when compared to modern nations. The model was developed by Lloyd deMause within the framework of psychohistory as part of a seven-stage sequence of childrearing modes that describe the development attitudes towards children in human cultures The word "early" distinguishes the term from late infanticidal childrearing, identified by deMause in the more established, agricultural cultures up to the ancient world.
Environmental determinism is the study of how the physical environment predisposes societies and states towards particular development trajectories. Jared Diamond, Jeffrey Herbst, Ian Morris, and other social scientists sparked a revival of the theory during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This "neo-environmental determinism" school of thought examines how geographic and ecological forces influence state-building, economic development, and institutions. Many scholars underscore that this approach was used to encourage colonialism and eurocentrism, and devalued human agency in non-Western societies, whereas modern figures like Diamond have instead used the approach as an explanation that rejects racism.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond. In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.
In psychology, an attribution bias or attributional bias is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others' behaviors. People constantly make attributions—judgements and assumptions about why people behave in certain ways. However, attributions do not always accurately reflect reality. Rather than operating as objective perceivers, people are prone to perceptual errors that lead to biased interpretations of their social world. Attribution biases are present in everyday life. For example, when a driver cuts someone off, the person who has been cut off is often more likely to attribute blame to the reckless driver's inherent personality traits rather than situational circumstances. Additionally, there are many different types of attribution biases, such as the ultimate attribution error, fundamental attribution error, actor-observer bias, and hostile attribution bias. Each of these biases describes a specific tendency that people exhibit when reasoning about the cause of different behaviors.
Granville Stanley Hall was a pioneering American psychologist and educator. His interests focused on childhood development and evolutionary theory. Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hall as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with Lewis Terman.
The idea of convergence in economics is the hypothesis that poorer economies' per capita incomes will tend to grow at faster rates than richer economies, and in the Solow growth model, economic growth is driven by the accumulation of physical capital until this optimum level of capital per worker, which is the “steady state” is reached, where output, consumption and capital are constant. The model predicts more rapid growth when the level of physical capital per capita is low, something often referred to as “catch up” growth. As a result, all economies should eventually converge in terms of per capita income. Developing countries have the potential to grow at a faster rate than developed countries because diminishing returns are not as strong as in capital-rich countries. Furthermore, poorer countries can replicate the production methods, technologies, and institutions of developed countries.
Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or cultural evolution are theories of sociobiology and cultural evolution that describe how societies and culture change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis). Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form".
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor is a 1995 book by historian and economist David Landes (1924–2013). Landes attempted to explain why some countries and regions experienced near miraculous periods of explosive growth while the rest of the world stagnated. The book compared the long-term economic histories of different regions, specifically Europe, United States, Japan, China, the Arab world, and Latin America. In addition to analyzing economic and cliometric figures, he credited intangible assets, such as culture and enterprise, to explain economic success or failure.
Development theory is a collection of theories about how desirable change in society is best achieved. Such theories draw on a variety of social science disciplines and approaches. In this article, multiple theories are discussed, as are recent developments with regard to these theories. Depending on which theory that is being looked at, there are different explanations to the process of development and their inequalities.
Societal collapse is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, and depopulation. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.
Human overpopulation refers to a human population that is too large to be sustained by its environment in the long term. The idea is usually discussed in the context of world population, though it may also concern regions. Human population growth has in recent centuries become exponential due to changes in technology that reduce mortality. Experts concerned by this trend argue that it results in a level of resource consumption which exceeds the environment's carrying capacity, leading to population overshoot. The subject is often discussed in relation to other population concerns such as demographic push, depopulation, ecological or societal collapse, and human extinction.
In international economics, overdevelopment refers to a way of seeing global inequality and pollution that focuses on the negative consequences of excessive consumption. It exists as the mutually constitutive counterpart to the more commonly known concept of 'underdevelopment'.
In animals, infanticide involves the killing of young offspring by a mature animal of the same species, and is studied in zoology, specifically in the field of ethology. Ovicide is the analogous destruction of eggs. The practice has been observed in many species throughout the animal kingdom, especially primates but including microscopic rotifers, insects, fish, amphibians, birds and mammals. Infanticide can be practiced by both males and females.
Biosocial criminology is an interdisciplinary field that aims to explain crime and antisocial behavior by exploring biocultural factors. While contemporary criminology has been dominated by sociological theories, biosocial criminology also recognizes the potential contributions of fields such as genetics, neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology.
Classical Realism is an international relations theory from the realist school of thought. Realism follows the assumptions that: states are the main actors in the international relations system, there is no supranational international authority, states act in their own self-interest and states want power for self-preservation. Classical realism can be differentiated from the other forms of realism since it places specific emphasis on human nature as the key factor in explaining state behavior and the causes of inter-state conflict. Classical realist theory adopts a pessimistic view of human nature and argues that humans are not inherently benevolent but instead they are self-interested and act out of fear or aggression. Furthermore, it emphasizes that this human nature is reflected by states in international politics due to international anarchy.
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, first published in 2012, is a book by economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. It summarizes and popularizes previous research by the authors and many other scientists. Based on the statements of the new institutional economics, Robinson and Acemoglu see in political and economic institutions — a set of rules and enforcement mechanisms that exist in society — the main reason for differences in the economic and social development of different states, considering, that other factors are secondary.
Female infanticide in India has a history spanning centuries. Poverty, the dowry system, births to unmarried women, deformed infants, famine, lack of support services and maternal illnesses such as postpartum depression are among the causes that have been proposed to explain the phenomenon of female infanticide in India.
