The aggregate relationship between homicide and alcohol availability is well established across a number of national and sub-national settings in North America, Europe and some parts of Asia. However, results linking youth homicide and alcohol availability at the retail level are largely absent from the literature, especially at the city level and across longer time periods. In a multivariate, pooled time series and cross-section study, youth homicide offending rates for two age groups, 13-17 and 18-24, were analysed for the 91 largest cities in the USA between 1984 and 2006. Data for social and economic characteristics, drug use, street gang activity and gun availability were also used as time series measures. Data on the availability of alcohol for each city were gathered from the US Census of Economic Activity, which is conducted every 5 years. These data were used to construct an annual time series for the density of retail alcohol outlets in each city. Results indicated that net of other variables, several of which had significant impacts on youth homicide, the density of alcohol outlets had a significant positive effect on youth homicide for those aged 13-17 and 18-24. Such positive effects have been found for adults in national and neighbourhood level studies, but this is the first study to report such evidence for teenagers and young adults. An important policy implication of these findings is that the reduction of the density of retail alcohol outlets in a city may be an effective tool for violent crime reduction among such youth.

These findings suggest that if the city were to make the voluntary ban on single serve container sales mandatory, violence in the surrounding areas would decline, all other things being equal. This study provides a much more grounded and specific justification for enacting such policy changes and once again shows the utility of alcohol policy for the reduction of crime and violence.

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Sociological theories of morality have grown in prevalence over the last decade and a half. These theories often focus on developing single concepts such as identity, reputation or emotion, or they provide sweeping historical accounts. Such theories often also take the construct of empathy for granted, as an inevitable consequence of morality. Here, I present a mechanistic theory of empathy which operates at multiple levels of analysis. The approach offered can help frame particular topics in the sociology of morality, though it is also robust enough to analyse historical change. Specifically, the theory presented here is composed of sets of situational, structural and societal mechanisms. Each set is discussed, as well as their relation to one another, before turning to an explication of how the present theory relates to a selective sampling of prominent theories in the contemporary sociology of morality.

Introduction From an evolutionary standpoint, social networks have been critical in the biological and cultural development of human beings (Pinker, 2010; Hrdy, 2011; Price & Johnson, 2011). Cooperative hunting and food sharing, alloparenting of kin and nonkin, reliance on others during times of sickness or during periods of pregnancy and potential tribal warfare are all staples of the sort of foraging existence within which the human mind evolved (Tooby & Cosmides, 2015). The ultimate punishment meted out by foraging groups is social abandonment, which is certain to result in death (Boehm, 2012), and today in modern societies, socially isolated people experience greater subjective pain and higher rates of mortality (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004; Lieberman, 2013; Holt-Lunstad, Smith, Baker, Harris & Stephenson, 2015). Fundamentally, then, humans are a social species, relying on social capital, or the support emanating from social networks, to survive. Secondarily, from a cultural standpoint, the material security hypothesis suggests that in societies that are unstable or impoverished, people will tend to seek out dense, homogeneous social networks that help to meet needs for food, shelter and protection (Hruschka et al., 2014). Regarding religiosity, this indicates that material insecurity will tend to motivate people to embed themselves into dense, homogeneous religious communities in order to seek safety and material support (Norris & Inglehart, 2011; Barber, 2011). On the other hand, the expansion of impartial and well-funded social welfare institutions will reduce material insecurity and, thus, commitment

Statistical models attempting to predict who will disaffiliate from religions have typically accounted for less than 15% of the variation in religious affiliations, suggesting that we have only a partial understanding of this vital social process. Using agent-based simulations in three "artificial societies" (one predominantly religious; one predominantly secular; and one in between), we demonstrate that worldview pluralism within one's neighborhood and family social networks can be a significant predictor of religious (dis)affiliation but in pluralistic societies worldview diversity is less important and, instead, people move toward worldview neutrality. Our results suggest that there may be two phases in religious disaffiliation: (1) the early adopters initially disaffiliate regardless of social support, and subsequently (2) disaffiliation spreads as support for it within local social networks widens and it appears more acceptable. An important next step is for sociologists to confirm or correct the theoretical findings of this model using real-world socialnetwork data, which will require overcoming the measurement difficulties involved in estimating each individual's degree of local network pluralism.

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