Sebastian Schnettler

• Ph.D., Yale '10
• Professor (Full) at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg

After a long neglect of biosocial and evolutionary approaches to human behavior and sociality in sociology during much of the twentieth century, in recent years sociologists have started to re-engage with these topics in a variety of promising ways. It is our aim with this collection of about twenty peer-reviewed articles to exhibit the variety of...

This introduction to the special issue explores the increasing integration of biosocial and evolutionary approaches within sociology, highlighting the diverse ways in which these perspectives are incorporated into sociological research. In the past, sociology had reservations against or even rejected biological and evolutionary explanations of huma...

This study critically evaluates and empirically tests the Trivers–Willard (TW) hypothesis, which proposes a relationship between parental socioeconomic status and sex: Parents with higher status are expected to be more likely to have male offspring and to preferentially invest in male offspring, whereas parents with lower status are expected to be...

Introduction: Along with European integration and the harmonisation of living conditions, improvements in health have been observed over the past decades. However, sociospatial inequalities within and across member states still exist today. While drivers of these health inequalities have been widely researched on a national and regional scale, cro...

We examine whether complex cross-household structures of post-separation families are associated with higher risk-taking behavior in adolescence (substance use, bullying, early sexual onset) and whether the proportion, and thus statistical normality, of complex family types in a certain country is a potential moderator of this association. Drawing...

Einreichung von Beitragsvorschlägen bis 15. April 2021!

There is widespread concern in both the popular and academic literature that a surplus of men in a population intensifies mating competition between men, particularly unpartnered men, resulting in increased violence towards both men and women. Recent contributions challenge this perspective and argue that male mating competition and levels of viole...

Die Signifikanz des hier zu besprechenden Artikels ist im Kontext der sogenannten » Small-World Forschung « und Forschung zu komplexen Netzwerken zu bewerten. Ausgehend von der Anekdote zweier Fremder, die sich irgendwo in der Welt treffen und überrascht feststellen, dass sie eine gemeinsame Bekannte haben – » It’s a small world! « – fragte man sic...

Im Fokus des Kapitels liegen die politischen, ökonomischen und gesamtgesellschaftlichen Wechselwirkungen zwischen Bevölkerungsentwicklung und Arbeitsmarkt. Zunächst geben die Autoren einen Überblick über demografische Entwicklungen in Deutschland und Europa in den letzten Jahrzehnten, um Arbeitsmarktentwicklungen in die gesamtdemografische Lage ein...

Building on previous cross-sectional research that shows childless individuals tend to have smaller networks and receive less support than parents in later life, we compare the dynamics of network size and support patterns for these two groups during the second half of their lives, that is, starting at age 40. We expect that childless older adults...

Vor dem Hintergrund des demographischen Ungleichgewichts von Männern und Frauen in Asien beschäftigen sich diverse Autoren mit möglichen Konsequenzen eines Frauen- oder Männermangels, unter anderem auf die Gewaltinzidenz in den betroffenen Gesellschaften oder Regionen. Allerdings präsentieren sich die bisherigen theoretischen Ansätze wie auch die e...

Available to download at : https://goo.gl/uFxrwq This study examines if there exists a positive association between socioeconomic status and the proportion of male births in humans, as proposed by Trivers and Willard in 1973, using individual-level data drawn from the complete population of Sweden. We examine more than 3,000,000 births between 196...

Given increases in childlessness, we ask if and how the permanently childless substitute for adult children in their later-life support networks. Previous research finds that they are disadvantaged on several network and support indicators. Yet, the role of different substitution mechanisms remains unclear. We examine two substitution mechanisms: s...

The economic stress hypothesis (ESH) predicts decreases in the sex ratio at birth (SRB) following economic decline. However, as many factors influence the SRB, this hypothesis is difficult to test empirically. Thus, researchers make use of quasi-experiments such as German reunification: The economy in East, but not in West Germany, underwent a rapi...

Based on evolutionary reasoning, Trivers & Willard (1973) predicted status-biased sex composition and parental investment with son-preferencing effects in higher, and daughter-preferencing effects in lower status groups. Previous research shows mixed results. This study uses event-history methods and Swedish register data to study one possible mech...

This paper offers a structured overview of 50 years of small-world research. Initially formulated by Pool and Kochen in the mid-1950s, the small-world concept can be divided into six research foci, based on three dimensions (structural, process-related, psychological), and two process-related themes (diffusion, search). Building on this analytical...

Small-world studies were introduced by Milgram and others in the 1960s and 1970s. These studies, and a majority of variants conducted by others, display a number of methodological weaknesses that bias their results. While no explicit methodological standard exists for these studies, here I derive a number of best-practice criteria for small-world s...

On the Forbes 400: Based on evolutionary theory, Trivers & Willard (TW) predicted the existence of mechanisms that lead parents with high levels of resources to bias offspring sex composition to favor sons and parents with low levels of resources to favor daughters. This hypothesis has been tested in samples of wealthy individuals but with mixed re...

Small-world research started about fifty years ago with an idea about a social phenomenon: that any two randomly chosen individuals in a country, or in the world even, could be connected with each other via a relatively short chain of acquaintances. But since its formation, this idea has evolved and – despite research almost dying off in the 1980s...

Small-world research started about fifty years ago with an idea about a social phenomenon: that any two randomly chosen individuals in a country, or in the world even, could be connected with each other via a relatively short chain of acquaintances. But since its formation, this idea has evolved and – despite research almost dying off in the 1980s...

We investigate adolescent risk behaviour regarding substance use in stepfamilies as compared to single-and two-parent families, using data from the " Health Behaviour in School-aged Children " study (HBSC), a World Health Organization (WHO) cross-national and cross-sectional survey administered to adolescents aged 11, 13, and 15 years. Given the po...

Consistent with inclusive fitness theory, evolutionary biologists predict that individuals care more for their biological than their social children and hence that biological children assess the relationships to their parents better than stepchildren. To test this assumption, we use data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Healt...

"Die 'Small World' (SW)-Forschung ist den meisten unter dem Begriff 'six degress of separation' bekannt. Sie beschäftigt sich mit Netzwerken, die sowohl eine hohe Clusterung der Akteure als auch relativ kurze Verbindungspfade zwischen zwei beliebigen Akteuren im Netzwerk aufweisen. Sie kann grob in zwei Phasen eingeteilt werden: experimentelle Stud...