social control
Americannoun
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Sociology. the enforcement of conformity by society upon its members, either by law or by social pressure.
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the influence of any element in social life working to maintain the pattern of such life.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
“Power dynamics, social control; the actual themes the films are exploring seem very simple and universal to me,” he says, “but the ways in which he’s exploring them are always askew.”
From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 5, 2026
Government planners see AI as both an economic tool and an instrument of social control.
From MarketWatch • Nov. 6, 2025
The discovery of such social control of queen specialization may reshape our understanding of the functioning of insect societies and their division of labor.
From Science Daily • Mar. 26, 2024
The women we worked with saw prison food as another form of social control.
From Salon • Apr. 19, 2023
Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.
From "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
