> But the psycho-social factors are unique to each individual. I have yet to see anyone explain a social event in terms of pscycho-social factors without reaching the same conclusions that he/she would have reached _not_ invoking psycho-social factors. Carrol, Sometimes i think that you like making flat assertions that are ridiculously exaggerated just to provoke debate. What you say here is equivalent to saying that P-S factors have no explanatory power. That is not true. It is hard to deny the importance of sexual psychology in a lot of social phenomena. How can you understand the abortion debate without it? Or the right wing prejudice against welfare? Or indeed the enthusiasm for war both at elite levels and among the general population? For a very nice partly P-S account of the divergence ofa ttitudes among women in the abotion debare, see Kristin Luker on the politics of motherhood. Moreover the first sentence is clearly false if taken in the sense intended. Naturally P-S factors at a very specific level of description are unique to each person. But that does not mean that useful generalizations cannot be drwan. Btw, economic factors are unique to every individual at a fine enough level of description. But that also does not mean that there are no useful generalizations. jks <hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!? <a href="http://rd.yahoo.com/platinum/evt=8162/*http://platinum.yahoo.com/splash.html">Yahoo! Platinum</a> - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, <a href="http://rd.yahoo.com/platinum/evt=8162/*http://platinum.yahoo.com/splash.html">live on your desktop</a>!