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The construction of living systems from the bottom‐up helps to explore the complex processes of life and to understand their working mechanism. Prototissues, constructed using artificial cells as building blocks, mimic life systems at a high‐order tissue level, whilst artificial cells usually mimic living cells at the individual cell level. The 3D biomimetic prototissues demonstrate exceptional performances and collective functions, which reveal the working mechanisms of living tissues and hold promising potential for biomedical applications. This review systematically summarized the research progress of the field of prototissues. The engineering methods for fabricating two types of prototissues are introduced first, followed by the functions of prototissues including collective behaviors and signal communications, as well as their biomedical applications. The challenges and future trends are proposed at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintenance goals have a fundamental albeit understudied role in human motivation. From health to relationships, to personal possessions and the environment, the things people value require regular care. When maintaining a friendship, for instance, one may need to catch‐up regularly, share life updates and offer support, and occasionally make time to meet and spend time together. Distinct from the more commonly studied approach and avoidance goals, maintenance goals focus on sustaining current states over time, a process that has recently begun to attract increasing scholarly attention. This paper explores the construct of maintenance goals; It provides a comprehensive review of key findings and offers a novel perspective on the potential role of maintenance in individual and collective behavior, centering on topics such as well‐being, leadership, and group perceptions across different cultural contexts. By integrating theory with empirical evidence, this review underscores the necessity of incorporating maintenance goals into a broader psychological framework and recognizes their potential to inform interventions aimed at fostering resilience and stability in an ever‐changing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indirect benefits obtained through the reproduction of relatives are fundamental in the formation and maintenance of groups. Here, we examine the hypothesis that females of the temperate paper wasp Polistes dominulus preferentially form groups with close relatives. Genetic relatedness data were obtained for 180 groups of females collected at the early stages of the nesting cycle of a large population of P. dominulus in two sites in southwestern Spain. Average within-group relatedness values ranged from 0.189 to 0.491. Foundresses on early nests were significantly more closely related than females in winter aggregations or in stable groups (just before workers emerged). Within-group relatedness values were independent of group size. The vast majority of worker-producing nests ( c. 85%) had one or more females that were unrelated (or distantly related) to the remaining members of the group. These results provide further support to the hypothesis that indirect fitness benefits alone are unlikely to explain why P. dominulus foundresses form cooperative associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a significant issue to explore the collective behaviors of the delayed complex systems. This paper studies asymptotic collective behaviors of a delayed multi‐particle system with multiple processes while particles interact directionally and locally. Up to now, the studies on dynamic behaviors of multi‐particle systems do not involve limited processing capacity, that is, the information queuing phenomenon is ignored. To this aim, we introduce multiple processes to formulate the evolution of a delayed multi‐particle system. To optimize the delay parameters, we choose the greedy principle to set the processing order. The main idea is to decompose the velocity into each process and use functional differential equation theory and matrix theory to constrain the velocity variation rate while the processing order is fixed. As the new results, in the non‐critical and general situation, when the time delay is less than or equal to the threshold value and the eigenvalue 1 of the average matrix is semi‐simple, we achieve the criterion of flocking and multi‐cluster with exponential convergence rate involving multiple processes. Furthermore, we get the lower bound estimate of the processing capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In social insects, collective behavior is regulated by substances secreted by various glands of different members of society. In this study, we investigate whether salivary glands of the arboreal termite Nasutitermes corniger (Motschulsky) (Isoptera: Termitidae) contain substances that regulate the intensity of foraging behavior. Foraging arenas of N. corniger nests maintained under laboratory conditions received the addition of two filter paper substrates, one impregnated with salivary gland extract from third‐instar small workers (SW3) (treatment) and the other impregnated with distilled water (control). A similar experiment was conducted using salivary gland extract from fourth‐instar large workers (LW4). Occurrences of initial exploration, mass recruitment, and substrate gnawing behaviors, as well as numbers of recruited and gnawing workers, were recorded. There was a higher rate of mass recruitment to treated substrates than to the control (SW3: 80 vs. 25%; LW4: 90 vs. 25%). Gnawing behavior also occurred at higher rates on treated substrates (SW3: 95 vs. 35%; LW4: 100 vs. 45%). The number of workers recruited to and gnawing on treated substrate was significantly higher than the number of workers recruited to and gnawing on control substrate. The higher rates of worker recruitment, as well as the higher numbers of recruited and gnawing workers, show that salivary glands of last‐instar workers contain substances with arresting and/or phagostimulating pheromonal actions or substances that release compounds with these properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective behavior sometimes requires forming a particular formation or reaching a certain velocity to accomplish a specific task, such as bird migration. In this paper, we investigate the collective migration model, which consists of two parts: Cucker–Smale type interaction and target velocity. Each agent has a strategy to allocate limited energy to group interaction and velocity tracking. In this case, if the system achieves monocluster flocking then the final velocity is equal to target velocity. When the strategy is invariant, we show that 1/2 is a critical threshold which is consistent with the classical Cucker–Smale model. When the strategy is time varying, we provide a time‐varying strategy named threshold strategy to ensure that for any initial state the system achieves monocluster flocking and the final velocity reaches target velocity. In addition, the case of multiple target velocities is considered. According to the theory of bicluster flocking, we obtain a sufficient framework to guarantee that the system achieves bicluster flocking and two groups would reach their target velocities, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general particle dynamics (GPD), which is based on the kernel approximation method and Navier–Stokes equation, was developed from smoothed‐particle hydrodynamics to simulate the fracture behaviors by using the collective of damage variable to describe the damage evolution behaviors. In this paper, an advanced GPD with a nonlocal foundation is proposed for better description of the solid mechanics. The nonlocal vector calculus and microscopic constitutive model are employed to derive the governing equations in the proposed theory. The novel GPD with a nonlocal core is a generalization, which permits the inclusion of the microscopic constitutive model and the multi‐scale modeling compared with the previous GPD. To accomplish this generalization, the relationship between GPD and the previous kernel‐based theory is established. The novel GPD is superior in the fracture problems and multi‐scale modeling. Some numerical experiments are launched to verify the ability of the novel GPD. Highlights: Advanced GPD with nonlocal foundation for is proposed for better description of the solid mechanics.The governing equations are re‐derived by nonlocal vector calculus and micro‐bond model.The advanced GPD is good at handling with multi‐scale problem and fracture problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The real‐time simulation of human crowds has many applications. In a typical crowd simulation, each person ('agent') in the crowd moves towards a goal while adhering to local constraints. Many algorithms exist for specific local 'steering' tasks such as collision avoidance or group behavior. However, these do not easily extend to completely new types of behavior, such as circling around another agent or hiding behind an obstacle. They also tend to focus purely on an agent's velocity without explicitly controlling its orientation. This paper presents a novel sketch‐based method for modelling and simulating many steering behaviors for agents in a crowd. Central to this is the concept of an interaction field (IF): a vector field that describes the velocities or orientations that agents should use around a given 'source' agent or obstacle. An IF can also change dynamically according to parameters, such as the walking speed of the source agent. IFs can be easily combined with other aspects of crowd simulation, such as collision avoidance. Using an implementation of IFs in a real‐time crowd simulation framework, we demonstrate the capabilities of IFs in various scenarios. This includes game‐like scenarios where the crowd responds to a user‐controlled avatar. We also present an interactive tool that computes an IF based on input sketches. This IF editor lets users intuitively and quickly design new types of behavior, without the need for programming extra behavioral rules. We thoroughly evaluate the efficacy of the IF editor through a user study, which demonstrates that our method enables non‐expert users to easily enrich any agent‐based crowd simulation with new agent interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that mass mobilization has analytically important stages is underappreciated in the literature. This paper proposes an approach that decomposes mass mobilization into three main phenomena: origins, protest and outcome. Each stage is characterized by unique factors and mechanisms. Accordingly, the research questions pertaining to each stage are dealt with by multiple levels of analysis and alternative explanations, allowing theory testing and theory development. The paper highlights separate causal mechanisms that operate in the emergence of grievances and protest motivation during the origins stage; mechanisms involving different forms of pressure, organization, psychological processes, and external forces during the protest stage; and mechanisms pertaining to key players and strategies that determine outcomes of mass mobilization. We illustrate that certain factors and mechanisms which are key in one stage have little or no causal relevance in the other stages. Other factors and mechanisms may also dramatically change in content, meaning or configuration between the stages. This theoretical approach facilitates the integration of a large and diverse body of scholarship into a structured analysis of mass mobilization that allows for both a detailed case study as well as comparison of stages across mass protests. The analysis of stages and causal mechanisms is illustrated across cases of democratization, revolution, and protest within democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper studies sign consensus, a collective behavior of multiagent systems, when both cooperative and antagonistic interactions coexist among agents. By sign consensus, it means that the states of all agents will eventually achieve the same sign but may with different magnitudes. Compared with some recent works on sign‐consensus problems, where only fixed graphs are considered and the graph adjacency matrix needs to be eventually positive, this paper allows the graph to be switching over time. Control laws are proposed and analyzed with respect to three classes of switching graphs. Examples illustrate the efficacy of the control algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer modeling promotes mechanistic reasoning when learners build and analyze models of complex systems to explore causal mechanisms and use models to generate patterns. StarLogo Nova (SLN), an agent‐based modeling (ABM) environment, enables novice programmers to model a system's individual components and investigate its emergent, collective behavior. Through case analysis of teachers using SLN, we demonstrate how ABM advances thinking about mechanisms generating phenomenon. Teachers who used simulation combined with the decoding of SLN models utilized mechanistic reasoning to make sense of how and why complex phenomenon emerged. Practitioner Notes: What is already known about this topic Mechanisms, or causal explanatory processes, are critical in science. Mechanistic reasoning is concerned with why a phenomenon occurs.Traditionally in science classrooms, teachers incorporate pre‐packaged simulations that limit the ability to understand mechanisms within the simulations.Agent‐based modeling empowers learners to model at the micro‐level to understand how macro‐level phenomenon emerge in complex systems. What this paper adds StarLogo Nova, an agent‐based modeling environment, has features that support mechanistic reasoning.Using simulation combined with decoding of models in StarLogo Nova promotes mechanistic explanations of why phenomenon occurs.Teachers are able to scaffold student interactions in StarLogo Nova to support students' mechanistic reasoning. Implications for practice and/or policy When using computer simulations in instruction, incorporate decoding of models to engage students in uncovering why a phenomenon occurs.In professional development programs on scientific modeling, it is important for educators to learn how decoding contributes to students' understanding of mechanisms in models and experience modeling as a scientific practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first of three papers the current philosophical, sociological and ecological approaches to 'community' were considered from a psychoanalytic perspective. This second paper aims to arrive at a set of principles that will underpin a psychoanalytic concept of communities. Those principles include: psychoanalytic understandings of groups; the unconscious of the collective; the subjectivity and inter-subjectivity of individuals and collectives; the symbolic function of an abstract concept; and the processes involved in making sense, such as mentalization and symbolization. The emerging psychoanalytic framework conceptualizes communities in terms of their collective psychological tasks, such as the maintenance of shared identification and boundaries, their responses to trauma and the work of mourning, rather than by their geographical or sociological characteristics. This new approach to the concept of community also highlights the utility of distinguishing the nature of groups by their respective, collective psychological tasks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps by virtue of its theoretical slipperiness, collective identity is often hailed as an important feature of social movements for the role it plays in unifying activists and organizations, and so helping them to develop shared concerns and engage in collective action. However, this paper argues that collective identity is the result of group rather than movement level processes, and although it can unite activists within a single movement organization, it is not always beneficial for the broader social movement. Although movements consist of networks of activists and organizations that have a broad shared concern, differing collective identities within the movement can actually be quite divisive. Based on case studies of three organizations in the environmental movement, this paper shows that activists who are most committed to an organization with an encompassing collective identity develop a strong sense of solidarity with other activists similarly committed to that organization. The resultant solidarity leads to the construction of a ‘we–them’ dichotomy between organizations within the same movement, increasing the chances of hostility between organizations and factions within the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes a model designed to support the development of children's group skills by explicitly scaffolding reflection on collaboration and providing feedback using the children's self-assessment of these skills. The model incorporates existing training schemes, including procedural prompting, assigning roles, modeling exchanges, and giving feedback. This paper then reports a study that compared 9 and 10-year-old children who used a computer-based implementation of this model (n = 26) with children who did not use the system (n = 25). The study found: a trend for improved recall of material studied, that the children believed the computer assessment of group skills used was correct, and finally, the time spent reflecting on their group behavior increased when the children thought they were being observed by the system. The implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how workers in Germany's automotive industry developed power in the process of a transnational carve out - namely the carve-out of the rubber and plastics department of the German automotive supplier ZF Friedrichshafen AG to the Chinese based Zhuzhou Times New Material Technology Co., Ltd. in 2013. The worker's actions were successful because they used their production network knowledge and decided against a strategy of pure co-operative co-determination but implemented a strategy of resistance. They concentrated their resistance on the weak points within the value creation processes of the automotive production network. On the basis of this, the authors argue that production network knowledge can be used to develop collective power within organisations. The study is based on qualitative interviews with ZF observing participation of workers events and a press analyses on the particular acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the sociology of moral panic, this paper argues that the media will shift from alarming to reassuring coverage when a `hot crisis' portends a possible grass root panic. To determine whether this moderation effect follows from dread-inspiring events that are developing in unpredictable and potentially threatening ways, the paper compares newspaper and magazine coverage of emerging diseases with their coverage of Ebola Zaire. The results reveal that the mutation-contagion package, with its frightful account of emerging diseases, was quickly abandoned and subverted during the Ebola epidemic. In its place, the media fashion a containment package that uses a strategy of 'othering' to allay the fear. The conclusion discusses the flexibility in the tool kits used by the media to frame events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mobilization of trade union members to participate in the activities of their union is a complex process of persuading and activating. Curiously, the literature on union participation has paid little attention to this process. In this paper an expectancy-value theory of willingness to participate in action is presented. Central to this theory is the assumption that the willingness to participate in an activity or action of a trade union is a function of the perceived costs and benefits for participants of involvement in that activity or action. In the light of this theory two kinds of mobilization are distinguished: consensus mobilization and action mobilization. The theory was applied in studying three mobilizatlon campaigns of a Dutch trade union: (a) a campaign concerning an imminent conflict about a planned reorganization, and (b) two campaigns over the annual negotiations for a collective labour agreement. This paper describes the developed theory and uses results from the three studies to test and illustrate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proceeding from the assumption (discussed in an earlier paper) that regional cooperation can have important developmental functions as regards mobilization of own resources, social integration, redistribution, and societal participation, the paper sets out to examine community characteristics which influence differential interest and involvement in such cooperation. Three major dimensions are explored in this connection: general regional propensity, reflecting spatial constraints (in terms of proximity and ecological interdependence) and socio-cultural predispositions (in terms of the centrality of autonomy as a value, and of openness as against rigidity in interacting with out groups); actual regional utility as measured against the potential developmental functions of the region, reflecting the extent to which a community possesses a proper "cooperative mass" (in terms of size and wealth in various spheres), and whether functional alternatives to regional cooperation are available to it; and acceptability, as defined by compatibility with potential partners. The theoretical profiles of regional commitment, which crystallize from these dimensions, are then observed. And finally, the conceptual scheme is applied to the empirical data of the Israeli study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents additional thoughts about collective behavior with reference to two papers on the Kent State University incident which papers were written as applications of theory of collective behavior. The author developed this theory to establish general analytic relations among a set of variables that he had discovered to be important in the genesis of hundreds of episodes of collective behavior. One of the most original and strongest aspects of the theory was its emphasis on the behavior of agents of social control as determinants of the timing, content, direction, and outcomes of episodes of collective behavior. The author stressed social-structural aspects, but he underplayed the importance of psychological mechanisms in the dynamics of episodes of collective behavior. In this article, the author developed a few new thoughts about the psychological and organizational characteristics of collective behavior in reading the two papers. These thoughts are developed under three headings, strategies to fix blame and assign illegitimacy in episodes of conflict; the relations among different agents of social control as these influence the development of an episode; and shifts in the definition of the situation, and the implication of these shifts for the application of the value-added model.

This paper introduces a new crowd formation transform approach to achieve visually pleasing group formation transition and control. Its core idea is to transform crowd formation shapes with a least effort pair assignment using the Kuhn-Munkres algorithm, discover clusters of agent subgroups using affinity propagation and Delaunay triangulation algorithms and apply subgroup-based social force model (SFM) to the agent subgroups to achieve alignment, cohesion and collision avoidance. Meanwhile, mutual information of the dynamic crowd is used to guide agents' movement at runtime. This approach combines both macroscopic (involving least effort position assignment and clustering) and microscopic (involving SFM) controls of the crowd transformation to maximally maintain subgroups' local stability and dynamic collective behaviour, while minimizing the overall effort (i.e. travelling distance) of the agents during the transformation. Through simulation experiments and comparisons, we demonstrate that this approach is efficient and effective to generate visually pleasing and smooth transformations and outperform several existing crowd simulation approaches including reciprocal velocity avoidances, optimal reciprocal collision avoidance and OpenSteer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY This paper addresses the distributed observer-based consensus problem of second-order multi-agent systems via sampled data. Firstly, for the case of fixed topology, a velocity-independent distributed control law is proposed by designing a distributed observer to estimate the unavailable velocity, then a sufficient and necessary condition of consensus on design parameters and sampling period is obtained by using the matrix analysis method. Secondly, for the case of stochastically switching topology, a sufficient and necessary condition of mean square consensus is also proposed and proven, and an algorithm is provided to design the parameters in the consensus protocol. Two simulation examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed consensus algorithms. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into enacted personality provides a novel perspective on the tendency for extraverted individuals to experience high levels of positive affect. Several studies now show that behaving in an extraverted way - thereby enacting an extraverted 'personality state' - is sufficient for elevating levels of positive affect. A question that remains, however, is why extraverted behavior has this robust impact on affective experience. In this paper, I consider several potential explanatory mechanisms for this phenomenon, including reward- and goal-related processes, as well as physical/bodily processes underpinning affective experience. Future research addressing these explanations may facilitate greater understanding of this intriguing phenomenon, along with its potential theoretical and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B EuroVis 2020 b B Eurographics / IEEE VGTC Conference on Visualization 2020 b Norrköping, Sweden May 25 - 29, 2020 GLO:BNX/01jun20:cgf14006-gra-0001.jpg PHOTO (COLOR): . gl EUROGRAPHICS The European Associationfor Computer Graphics IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee B Conference Chairs b Anders Ynnerman, Linköping University, Sweden Matthew Cooper, Linköping University, Sweden Ingrid Hotz, Linköping University, Sweden Patric Ljung, Linköping University, Sweden B Full Papers Chairs b Ivan Viola, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia Michael Gleicher, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA Tatiana Landesberger von Antburg, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany B STARs Chairs b Noeska Smit, University of Bergen, Norway Steffen Oeltze-Jafra, University of Magdeburg, Germany Bei Wang, University of Utah, USA B Short Papers Chairs b Andreas Kerren, Linnaeus University, Sweden Christoph Garth, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany G. Elisabeta Marai, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA B Posters Chairs b Jan Byska, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic Stefan Jänicke, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark B Industrial Chairs b Anders Carlsson, Visual Sweden, Sweden Matthew Cooper, Linköping University, Sweden Preface EuroVis 2020, the Eurographics / IEEE VGTC Conference on Visualization was scheduled to be held in Norrköping, Sweden from May 25-29th, 2020. Topics include visualization techniques for spatial data, such as volumetric, tensor, and vector field datasets, and for non-spatial data, such as graphs, text, and high-dimensional datasets. EuroVis also covers the theory of visualization, hardware acceleration, large datasets, perception, interaction, user studies, information visualization, visual analytics, and many application areas of visualization. [Extracted from the article]

This paper criticises the conclusions and the unanswered questions in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s official report on the evacuation of the World Trade Center in New York City, United States, on 11 September 2001. It reviews the extent to which the report disregards several conventional statistical methods and comments on the NIST's refusal to share the machine-readable data file with the scientific community for replication and further analysis. Problems lie in the sampling methods employed, the treatment of missing data, the use of ordinary least squares (OLS) with binary dependent variables, the failure to document the scalability of the scales used, the lack of tests to check for constant error variance, and the absence of overall fit tests of the model. There are also conceptual and theoretical issues, such as the absence in the report of considerations of the influence of group-level processes and their impact on the collective behaviour of evacuating collectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much debate about the use of certain public order policing tactics in Britain in response to the disorder seen in recent years. This paper explored the use of an indiscriminate public order tactic that has received comparatively less attention, that of crowd dispersal techniques. More specifically, the use of police charges (either by mounted police or on foot) and subsequent collective flight was investigated. An interview study was conducted with 20 participants who experienced such charges at protests in English cities. Thematic analysis of the data found that although participants reported fear and initial crowd scattering, these instinctive responses were quickly replaced by more socialised reactions, such as co-operation with others and an increased sense of collective unity. Furthermore, participants reported greater determination to resist what were considered as illegitimate attacks by the police. This increased collective unity was explained in terms of a shared sense of experience that was similar to that found in previous crowd behaviour research. It was concluded that rather than fragmenting crowds, the tactic of crowd dispersal can unite previously heterogeneous groups to resist further police charges and so may be counter-productive as a public order policing strategy. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key question in advancing sustainability outcomes is how to devise a system of incentive structures that can improve capacity to guide interactions towards more sustainable trajectories. This paper examines incentives and associated rules from a structural perspective, highlighting social dynamics and workplace realities that shape actual practice. Understanding and using these hidden forces will be necessary, if policy is to successfully shape local and organisational processes in order to advance desired social outcomes. The social landscape model illustrated provides a framework to consider the effect of structural and social influences. Managed suitably, there is potential for positive shifts with suitable social triggers. This is a leadership challenge, and the necessary steps to achieving sustainability outcomes are identified as symbolic and procedural, shaped by local context and ultimately determined by agency that stimulates consciousness and uses hidden social forces to pull collective behaviour in the desired directions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While walking through a crowd, a pedestrian experiences a large number of interactions with his neighbors. The nature of these interactions is varied, and it has been observed that macroscopic phenomena emerge from the combination of these local interactions. Crowd models have hitherto considered collision avoidance as the unique type of interactions between individuals, few have considered walking in groups. By contrast, our paper focuses on interactions due to the following behaviors of pedestrians. Following is frequently observed when people walk in corridors or when they queue. Typical macroscopic stop-and-go waves emerge under such traffic conditions. Our contributions are, first, an experimental study on following behaviors, second, a numerical model for simulating such interactions, and third, its calibration, evaluation and applications. Through an experimental approach, we elaborate and calibrate a model from microscopic analysis of real kinematics data collected during experiments. We carefully evaluate our model both at the microscopic and the macroscopic levels. We also demonstrate our approach on applications where following interactions are prominent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowd behaviour in emergencies has previously been explained in terms of either 'mass panic' or strength of pre-existing social bonds. The present paper reports results from a study comparing high-versus low-identification emergency mass emergency survivors to test the interlinked claims (I) that shared identity in an emergency crowd enhances expressions of solidarity and reduces 'panic' behaviour and (2) that such a shared identity can arise from the shared experience of the emergency itself. Qualitative and descriptive quantitative analyses were carried out on interviews with 21 survivors of II emergencies. The analysis broadly supports these two claims. The study therefore points to the usefulness of a new approach to mass emergency behaviour, based on self- categorization theory (SCT). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Although the relationship between collective efficacy and group performance has been frequently investigated, a few studies have investigated the development of collective efficacy. Aim. This paper proposes some determinants of collective efficacy in small university groups. Group level hypotheses and research questions relating collective efficacy to collective cognition activities, task interdependence, self-efficacy for group work, and collective orientation were posited. Sample. The sample comprised 145 university students in 40 work-groups. Method. A two-phase longitudinal design was employed in the context of university student groups. All groups were required to perform interdependent academic tasks. Aggregated variables were used after testing for within-group agreement. Results. The results of multiple regression analysis provided some evidence that the more group members perceived themselves to be interdependent in the early stages of group work and assigned their tasks interdependently during group processes, the more likely they were to develop high collective efficacy in the final stages of group work. Collective efficacy was also related to the group average of self-efficacy for group work especially when task interdependence was perceived to be high. Conclusions. The results suggest that forming groups with capable university students in group work, strengthening university students' perceptions of themselves as interdependent in the early stages of academic group work and assigning interdependent group tasks during group work may contribute to the development of high collective efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The school is a primary context for social interaction, cultivation of interpersonal skills, formation of peer groups, self-expression, and development of self. Several studies have demonstrated that the social context of the school has important implications for determining the likelihood that an adolescent will follow a prosocial path through adolescence as opposed to becoming involved in delinquent behavior. Methods: Using a data set of 4,216 youth in 32 middle schools and junior high schools across the United States, this paper examines the effect of a student’s own level of school attachment as well as the contextual level of school attachment (the normative level of school attachment in a school) on 5 alcohol-related measures: recent use of alcohol, intention to use alcohol, normative beliefs about peer use of alcohol, attitudes toward alcohol use, and aspirations consistent with alcohol use. Results: This study demonstrates that regardless of a student’s own level of school attachment, students who attend schools where the pupils overall tend to be well attached to school are less likely to use alcohol. In addition, they also have lower intentions to use alcohol, perceive that fewer of their peers at school use alcohol, and more strongly hold aspirations that are inconsistent with alcohol use. Conclusions: Our findings, along with the findings of related studies, provide support for the hypothesis that improvement of school climate may result in less substance use among students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of collective behaviour among England football fans attending the European football championships in Portugal (Euro2004). Given this category's violent reputation, a key goal was to explore the processes underlying their apparent shift away from conflict in match cities. Drawing from the elaborated social identity model of crowd behaviour (ESIM) data were obtained using semi-structured observations and interviews before, during and after the tournament. Qualitative analysis centres first on three key incidents in match cities where the potential for violence was undermined either by ‘self-policing’ among England fans, or by appropriately targeted police intervention. These are contrasted with two ‘riots’ involving England fans that occurred in Algarve during the tournament. A phenomenological analysis of England fans' accounts suggests that the contexts created by different forms of policing helped bring to the fore different understandings of what constituted proper and possible behaviour among England fans, and that these changes in identity content underpinned shifts toward and away from collective conflict. The implications of this analysis for the ESIM, understanding public order policing, social change and social conflict are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the small body of research which looks at how people labelled as having learning disabilities view this social identity is considered. The author argues that this research has implications for our assumptions about self-advocacy groups for people with learning disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationships between self-identified crowd membership, attributional characteristics, and perceptions of parental style among students in their first year of high school (N = 893). The aim was to assess the extent to which group identity is reflected in self-reported characteristics. Most students self-identified either as studious, athletes, populars, rebels, or normals (N = 669) and also completed measures of perceptions of parental styles and attributional style. Consistent differences were observed between self-identified studious and rebel teenagers. One-way ANOVAS revealed significant group differences on mother's authoritativeness, father's authoritativeness, positive attributional style, and negative attributional style. These results are discussed with reference to the interplay between group influences and individual characteristics. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to self-categorization theory (SCT), incidents of crowd violence can be understood as discrete forms of social action, limited by the crowd's social identity. Through an analysis of the riot at Woodstock 1999, this paper explores the uses and limitations of SCT in order to reach a more complex psychology of crowd behavior, particularly those instances that appear unmotivated, irrational, and destructive. Psychological and sociological literature are synthesized to explore the role of communication in establishing social norms within the crowd. Several modifications to current crowd psychology are proposed, including a false consensus effect of motivation and the mediation of personal and social identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A questionnaire survey (n = 90) and an interview study (n = 63) of anti-roads activities suggest links between participation and generalization. First, level of activism predicted whether others were perceived as encouraged to act environmentally. Second, participants' failure to stop construction of the road did not prevent them from developing related feelings of efficacy. Participants' perceptions of out-groups were also examined. Participants were least hostile to those they defined as sharing their interests and capable of subjective change; they were most hostile to those seen as betraying the environmental cause. Practically, these findings suggest the importance of collective participation. Theoretically, the paper argues that efficacy theory be developed to acknowledge that identity can be collective as well as individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparing moral panic with the potential catastrophes of the risk society, Sheldon Ungar contends that new sites of social anxiety emerging around nuclear, medical, environmental and chemical threats have thrown into relief many of the questions motivating moral panic research agendas. He argues that shifting sites of social anxiety necessitate a rethinking of theoretical, methodological and conceptual issues related to processes of social control, claims making and general perceptions of public safety. This paper charts an alternative trajectory, asserting that analytic priority rests not with an understanding of the implications of changing but converging sites of social anxiety. Concentrating on the converging sites of social anxiety in late modernity, the analysis forecasts a proliferation of moral panics as an exaggerated symptom of the heightened sense of uncertainty purported to accompany the ascendency of the risk society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses some of the necessary conditions of collective moral responsibility. In doing so, it is assumed that collectives are at least of two kinds: aggregates and conglomerates. The former are random groups of persons, whereas the latter are organized, tend to have decision-making structure, etc. Of course, a collective is an aggregate or conglomerate to one degree or another, and there are collectives that do not fall easily into either of the aggregate or conglomerate categories. What are conditions of collective moral responsibility? Furthermore, do any collectives satisfy these conditions? To answer this, first, a plausible analysis of the nature of collective moral responsibility prior to figuring out which collectives qualify as morally responsible agents. Consider the principle of Collective Moral Liability. It states that it is justified for one to ascribe to a collective moral liability with respect to an outcome or a state if affairs to the extent that: the responsible collective is either an intentional, voluntary or epistemic agent concerning that outcome; the casually contributory conduct was in some way faulty; if the harmful outcome was truly the fault of the collective, the required causal connection exists between the faulty aspect of its conduct and the outcome.

Objective: The paper uses the timing of evacuation behavior of occupants of the World Trade Center at the time of the explosion of February 26, 1993, to test predictions from Emergent Norm Theory. Method: It uses ordinary least square multiple regression analysis to examine data from a survey done in the first week in May 1993 of 415 people who worked at the World Trade Center Results: The theory's predictions regarding the additive effects of size of group and preexisting social relationships on the timing of evacuation are supported. However the findings document important and unexpected interaction effects of these two variables on the effects of perceived threat, resources, and Cooperativeness on the timing of evacuation. Conclusion: The results augment the theory by showing the continued importance of enduring social relationships as determinants of collective behavior Enduring social relationships are not Only useful to differentiate collective behavior from institutionalized behavior but also specify the dynamics attending the occurrence of collective behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the causal and explanatory role assigned to intrapersonal (or P-) variables in the recent sociological literature on collective behavior. In Part I emphasis is on the use—or nonuse—of P-variables as factors mediating between collective behavior episodes and their antecedent social and situational determinants. It is suggested that P-variables have been (1) excluded on methodological grounds in favor of more directly observable and/or manipulable behavior, (2) analyzed as dependent variables, defined by and contingent on antecedent social and situational considerations, or (3) introduced as independent variables and therefore significantly figuring in any explanatory account of collective behavior. Part II deals with the conceptually deeper issue concerning the terminology and metaphors employed in the literature regarding collective behavior and its causal antecedents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model of the mobilization of people into movements that is compatible with a resource mobilization perspective on social movement organizations as the unit of analysis, but substitutes a cognitive social psychology based on attribution theory and the sociology of knowledge for the incentive model typically used in this perspective. We focus on the problem, neglected by resource mobilization theorists, of explaining the translation of objective social relationships into subjectively experienced, collectively defined grievances. On a macro level, our model gives independent causal weight to ideology without discounting the role that resources also play in defining group goals. On a social psychological level, we identify three distinct organizational strategies—conversion, coalition, and direct action—for mobilizing persons as participants and examine some cognitive and organizational consequences of each strategy. We conclude that incorporation of a more adequate social psychology of individual participation is not only compatible with the organizational focus and emphasis on rationality of the resource mobilization perspective, but can provide important insights into problems both social movement theorists and social movement organizers see as significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional crowd theory decontextualizes crowd incidents and explains behaviour entirely in terms of processes internal to the crowd itself. This ignores the fact that such incidents are characteristically intergroup encounters and draws attention away from the role of groups such as the police in the development of events. This paper begins to rectify this omission through an analysis of interviews with 26 Public Order trained police concerning crowds in general and the Poll Tax ‘riot’ of 31 March 1990 in particular. The analysis shows that, despite a perception of crowd composition as heterogeneous, officers perceive crowd dynamics as involving an anti-social minority seeking to exploit the mindlessness of ordinary people in the mass. Consequently, all crowds are seen as potentially dangerous and, in situations of actual conflict, all crowd members are seen as equally dangerous. In addition, police tactics for dealing with disorder make it very difficult to distinguish between individuals or subgroups in the crowd. This convergence of ideological and practical factors leads to the police treating crowds in disorder as an homogeneous whole. It is argued that such action can often play an important role in escalating (if not initiating) collective conflict and is also a key component of social change in crowd contexts. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents authors personal thoughts on the pursuit of sociological problems. The author intends to retrace his steps along one path of his intellectual career--the path that links two books, titled, "Social Change in the Industrial Revolution," and "Theory of Collective Behavior," and a number of recent articles and papers on sociological theory and psychological theory. The main emphasis in the article was on the need for a determinate synthesis of the several classes of variables that are essential for the explanation of collective behavior such as cultural, social, psychological, ecological and other variables. In attempting to sort out the major influences on his choice of sociological problems, he resorts to a device that he find congenial and helpful: to arrange these influences in a series extending from very general, predisposing influences which have steered his intellectual interests to the very specific, immediate influences that have determined a particular strategy of analysis in working on a sociological problem.

This paper demonstrates the potential interest for the sociological understanding of medicine and health as social institutions of the qualitative study of collective behaviour. it takes, as a case study, the transformation of a widely-circulating contemporary legend, `The Missing Kidney' into a rumour in Nottingham, and elsewhere in the United Kingdom, in 1992. Possible methodological approaches and interpretations are considered, making particular use of the work of the French sociologist, Edgar Morin, and the `mass society' tradition of social theory. it is argued that neither provides an adequate understanding of the phenomenon and that medical sociologists should look to the Chicago tradition of work on collective behaviour, represented by Park and Blumer for inspiration. Using this, it is suggested that the Missing Kidney offers useful insights into lay thinking about professional work and its strategies for the informal social control of medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]