This paper offers a unifying conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between climate change and “within-country inequalities,” referred here collectively as “social inequality.” Available evidence indicates that this relationship is characterized by a vicious cycle, whereby initial inequality causes the disadvantaged groups to suffer disproportionately from the adverse effects o...

When people behave immorally according to their own standards, they feel bad. Rational people may therefore engage in less of an immoral activity than would he in their material self-interest. Despite this fact, I show that increasing people’s distaste for being immoral can increase the level of immoral activities. This can happen because of the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance:...

Language change results from the differential propagation of linguistic variants distributed among the linguistic repertoires of communicatively interacting individuals in a given community. From this it follows that language change is socially-mediated in two important ways. First, since language change is a social-epidemiological process that takes place by propagating some aspect of communic...

Among the Karo of Indonesia, the frequency of matrilateral cross-cousin (impal) marriage has declined in recent decades. We conducted a vignette experiment to assess the contributions of a handful of factors in shaping this pattern. Surprisingly, we found that cosocialization of a hypothetical woman with her impal led to increased judgments of marriage likelihood and decreased feelings of disgu...