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Online hate is a serious problem affecting a range of minoritised people. Existing theories suggest that poor behaviour online is due to anonymity but fail to explore how such discussions unfold. This is where a discursive and rhetorical psychological approach is appropriate as it offers a micro-level analysis. In this research paper, a discursive/rhetorical approach is applied to an online debate about a controversial refugee policy in the UK containing 586 comments, to address the question: How are arguably hateful arguments, or those challenging hateful arguments, supported and challenged in the context of an internet discussion about a controversial refugee policy? Analysis demonstrated that support for posts is shown to come in the form of additional points to bolster existing ones. Opposition to posts took the form of simple rejections and counterpoints, sometimes taking a three-part structure of (a) simple rejection, (b) counterpoint and (c) upgrade, but also included insults, ridiculing and name calling. Discursive and rhetorical analyses have been shown to have potential to understand online behaviour offering more detail than relying on anonymity to explain controversial and hateful speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a lack of research that focuses on the lived experiences of British Yemeni young people in the UK as they pertain to their learning and development. This paper aims to bridge the gap by exploring the case of Nuha, an 18-year-old British Yemeni young woman, as she navigates the conduct of her everyday life. The paper presents a developed conceptual model and associated methodological approach for exploring Nuha. It does so by first reviewing what might be viewed as dominant approaches to the study of ethnic young people's experiences that advocate a social identity theory. A critique of such thinking is developed that takes issue with much of this writing that has the potential for an essentialised abstracted approach. The paper instead advocates the use of a subjectively focused, practice orientated and yet culturally sensitive approach to exploring human behaviour in the context of the conduct of everyday life. Based on an analytical matrix that is developed from such thinking, I examine Nuha's life experiences using Dreier's theory of a person. In doing so, I recognise the additional importance of personhood in practice that provide a reference point for exploring more deeply the learning and development of Nuha. The research is generated through a case study narrative that is analysed dialectically through theory, recognising how theory is simultaneously driven by the data. The paper concludes with arguments made about the centrality of an extended and developed sense of the conduct of everyday life to get at the nuanced evolving sense of being and doing for British Yemeni young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document discusses the use of computational simulation in crisis and disaster management. It highlights the advantages of simulation models in examining alternative strategies and predicting the effects of changes in real-world systems. The document also acknowledges the challenges in incorporating realistic human behavior, increasing acceptability of simulation models, and creating multi-scale models. The special issue focuses on current real-world problems and includes papers on topics such as epidemics, seismic crises, population sheltering management, and mass evacuation. Two companion papers on airport evacuation and the Syrian refugee crisis are also mentioned. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines the cultural popularity of 'ambient music' playlists on digital streaming platforms as a paradigm of the technical fabrication of atmospheres and the modulation of affect in some of the media environments of contemporary capitalism. Ambient music names a style of non-intrusive, gentle background music designed to assist the listener in relaxing or focussing on work. At the centre of the paper is the argument that ambient music demonstrates how the intimate tonalities of human behaviour are increasingly shaped through media technologies in ways that hold significant implications for how we feel and perceive our senses of being in the world today. Developing this argument, the paper advances two claims. First, drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, that ambient music exemplifies the 'immunological' character of atmospheric envelopment. Second, that ambient music points towards the role of digital technologies capable of supporting new atmospheric envelopments as facilitating what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call 'investments of desire', new conjunctions between flows of information, behaviours, value and affects that are central to the processes of contemporary capitalism. Finally, the paper speculates on ambient music in its relation to the atmospheric conditions of life in contemporary capitalist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) was an important member of Early and Mid-Holocene landscapes and animal communities in Northern Europe. Previous zooarchaeological research has established the alimentary roles of beavers for Mesolithic societies and their importance for fur procurement. In this paper, we develop an integrated biocultural approach to human-beaver interactions, examining the position of humans and beavers in Mesolithic and Early Neolithic multispecies systems. We contextualize beaver landscape agency in hydroactive environments with human behaviour, synthesizing currently available data on mammalian assemblages, ichtyofauna and beaver-related material culture across Northern Europe. This cross-cultural, diachronic analysis reveals previously overlooked facilitations of human behaviour by beaver practices and ecological legacies. We show that long-term trajectories of human-beaver cohabitation differed between northern European regions. While in Southern Scandinavia, human-beaver intersections witnessed major re-organizations during the Mid-Holocene, beavers retained a key role for human societies across Northeastern Europe throughout much of the Holocene and played an important part at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the Dutch wetlands. Divergent pathways are also evidenced by Mesolithic beaver-related material culture, highlighting the cultural keystone status of Castor fiber in higher latitude European landscapes. We argue that this keystone status is grounded in the supply of human hunting, fishing, and gathering affordances by the animals, pointing to the generative commensality between Mesolithic foragers and their beaver neighbours. Taken together, our findings demonstrate the importance of the beaver in the making of Early and Mid-Holocene forager societies in Northern Europe and illustrate the fruitfulness of deploying an integrated multispecies approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the challenges for agent-based modeling is being able to incorporate human behavior. Human behavior is a multifaceted phenomenon, with strategic coalition formation being one form. A hybrid agent-based modeling approach, called ABMSCORE, has been derived to emulate strategic group formation. In this paper, we describe a simulation experiment to compare the ABMSCORE with actual human behavior. The comparison criterion is the respective rates of finding an ideal coalition. In our experimental design, we go to great lengths to ensure the similarity of the scenarios in the two trial types: trials with computerized agents only and trials involving human participants when one of the computerized agents is replaced by an actual human. We did this to limit the number of possible extraneous variables introduced into the experimental system. The scenario considered is the glove game, a standard cooperative game that has been previously used in human experiments. Our results indicate that the ABMSCORE model produces similar rates of finding the ideal coalition as the human players; however, there are some limitations. This research provides evidence for using the ABMSCORE modeling approach to model human strategic coalition formation in agent-based models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls for a rethinking of critical sociology. Representing classical critical sociology, the Bourdieusian paradigm illustrated domination, but its negative foundation removed actors' power, privileging sociological knowledge as capable of identifying (social) transcendental categories of thought. Latour's constructivism challenged this privilege, giving actors the political power of aggregating collectives around their common concerns at the cost of emphasizing domination and critique. We propose a critical approach that evades a transcendental perspective reliant on pure negation, producing a more positive critical sociology founded on processualist phenomenological and pragmatic perspectives, principally Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. Actors and researchers can collectively ruminate on their perspectives and concerns to challenge power structures and transform their worlds. At the center of this is the social-mien, a creative reimagination of habitus. A brief discussion of the protests and scholarship surrounding the Notre-Dame-des-Landes activists' practice of democracy highlights the utility of the approach and serves as a model for future application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Stuart Hall's reading of Louis Althusser's main theoretical works. Since the early 1970s, Hall has undertaken a critical confrontation with Althusser's 'structural Marxism', rescuing those useful concepts to think cultural difference and identity, without failing to criticize his 'superstructuralist' interpretation of Marx. However, what Hall will retain as Althusser's most important contribution is, above all, his theory of ideology. In this context, I follow an idea formulated by Hall that could be read as summarizing the theoretical and political scope of Althusser's contribution to Cultural Studies: 'he enabled me to live in and with difference'. By complicating classical interpretations schemes in the Marxist tradition, Hall's Althusser may be read as a 'thinker of difference' who opens up a whole research program to reconsider class conflicts as traversed (or 'overdetermined') by gender, racial or colonial conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the place of the child in the metaphysics and imaginary of Western colonization, racialization, and decolonization. In the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, children appear not only as victims but also as a problem for which Fanon struggles to account as a theorist of decolonization as much as a psychiatric practitioner. Through a reading of one of the cases, this article interrogates the ways in which colonization attempts to infantilize colonized populations while erasing childhood, and the ways in which decolonization meets colonization by regarding childhood in the end as a misfortune. The work of decolonization, to proceed, thus would demand us to rethink childhood, and in doing so break free of Western metaphysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows that Habermas's modernism and Lyotard's postmodernism are not as antithetical as they are often taken to be. First, we argue that Habermas is not a strong foundationalist concerned with identifying universal rules for language, as postmodern critiques have often interpreted him. Instead, he develops a social pragmatics in which the communicative use of language is the fundamental presupposition of any meaningful interaction. Second, we argue that Lyotard is not a relativist who denies any universal linguistic structure. Instead, he claims that language involves a universal element of dissensus that cannot be subordinated to consensus. Third, we show that neither does Habermas defend a new version of the kind of philosophy of history characteristic of the Enlightenment, nor is Lyotard a historical relativist, but instead they both seek alternatives to these positions. The conclusion calls for more nuance in the interpretation of both perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earthquake simulations at the urban scale usually focus on estimating the damages to the built environment and the consequent losses without fully taking into account human behavior in crisis. Yet, human behavior is a key element for improving crisis disaster management; therefore, it is important to include it in seismic crisis simulations. In this study, an agent-based model for the simulation of pedestrian evacuation during earthquakes at the city scale is developed following an interdisciplinary approach. The model recreates the urban conditions using Geographic Information System (GIS) and a synthetic population, in addition to the earthquake consequences on the urban fabric. Moreover, the model integrates realistic human behaviors calibrated using quantitative survey results. We simulate pedestrian outdoor mobility with the different constraints that affect it such as the topography and the presence of debris. The simulator is applied to the case of Beirut, Lebanon. A what-if approach is adopted to analyze the population's safety in case of earthquakes in Beirut, particularly the open spaces' capacity to provide shelters and the effect of debris and realistic human behaviors on people's safety. The simulation results show that less than 40% of the population is able to arrive at an open space within 15 min after an earthquake. This number is further reduced when some open spaces are locked. Debris and realistic human behaviors significantly delay the arrivals to safe areas and, therefore, should not be neglected in earthquake simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a framework for educating future evaluators and users of evaluation through community-engaged, experiential learning courses and offers practical guidance about how such a class can be structured. This approach is illustrated via a reflective case narrative describing how an introductory, undergraduate class at a mid-size, public university in the northwest partnered with a community agency. In the class, students learned and practiced evaluation principles in the context of a Parents as Teachers home visiting program, actively engaged in course assignments designed to support the program's evaluation needs, and presented meta-evaluative findings and recommendations for future evaluation work to the community partner to conclude the semester. This community-engaged approach to teaching evaluation anchors student learning in an applied context, promotes social engagement, and enables students to contribute to knowledge about effective human action, as outlined in the American Evaluation Association's Mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buyers in online markets pay higher prices to sellers who promise a high-quality product in auctions of used goods, even though they cannot assess quality until after the sale. The principal argument offered in prior work is that reputation systems render sellers' 'cheap talk' credible by allowing buyers to publicly rate sellers' past honesty and sellers to build a reputation for being honest. We test this argument using both observational data from online auctions on eBay and an internet experiment. Strikingly, in both studies we find that unverifiable promises are trusted by buyers regardless of seller reputation or the presence of a reputation system, and sellers mostly refuse to take advantage. We conclude that the prevailing conception of markets in economic sociology as made possible by opportunism-curtailing institutions is "undersocialized": Reputation systems may be used to identify more reliable providers of a product, but that they would be needed to prevent otherwise rampant deceit relies on a cynical assumption about human behavior that is empirically untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic theory propagates a model of the human being commonly known as homoeconomicus; an individual with a rational orientation directed towards maximizing his/her preferences. However, our everyday lives involve many altruistic acts. These can range from small gestures of kindness such as holding a door open for another person, to heroic feats such as risking one's life to save a child from drowning. During our lives we also meet certain people that instantly induce our kindness. Our nicety in these moments is not based on a pursuit to optimize our material desires. Rather, we allow our feelings and intuitions to guide the course of our actions. How do we reconcile these experiences against the economic conception of human nature as inherently selfish? Addressing this contradiction, the paper will deconstruct the economic view and repositioning it as the product of an epistemological stance that distorts our view of altruism. An alternative model on altruism will then be developed by merging anthropological theories on value with insights from cultural psychology and grounded cognition. Through this process, a passage will be shown from static and universalizing perspective towards an emergent and dynamic theory on altruism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected not only the health of populations but also their everyday social practices, transformed by orienting to risks of contagion and to health prevention discourses. This paper emanates from a project investigating the impact of Covid-19 on human sociality and more particularly the situated and embodied organization of social interactions. It discusses how Covid-19 impacts the design of ordinary actions in social interaction, how this is made publicly accountable by the participants orienting to the pandemic in formatting their actions and in responding to the actions of others. Adopting an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, the analyses focus on a particular social activity: paying. The organization of payments in shops and services has been affected by the pandemic, not only by official regulations, favoring some modes of payment over others, but also in how sellers and customers situatedly adapt their practices to imperatives of prevention. On the basis of a rich corpus of video-recorded data, which spans from the pandemic's prodromes to and after its peak, we show how money transfer is methodically achieved – imposed, negotiated, and readjusted – while variously taking into account possible risks of contagion. Thus, we show not only how pandemics affect social interaction, and how prevention is incarnated in social actions, but also how, in turn, situated solutions implemented by people during the pandemic reveal fundamental features of human action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Escalation is a key characteristic of many consumption behaviors that has not received theoretical attention. This paper aims to propose both a definition and a theoretical treatment of escalation in consumption. We define escalation as a subject's attempt to obtain "more" or engage in consumption behaviors that are "more intense" on a measurable, quantitative or qualitative, objective or subjective, scale (more difficult ski slopes, stronger drugs, harder sex, better restaurants etc.), even if the subject preferred less intense consumption behaviors in the past. Further, this evolution in behavior also occurs if the budget constraint does not change. We will find endogenous and exogenous theoretical microfoundations for escalation in models of hedonic adaptation, desire for novelty, acquisition of consumption skills, rising aspirations, positional effects, and envy. However, we will also discuss the possibility that the tendency to escalate is a specific innate behavior inherent to human nature. Finally, we will propose a preliminary theoretical formalization of such behavior and indicate the possible implications of taking escalation into adequate consideration. JEL codes: B52, D11, D90, D91, I31 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to present regret, an emotion to which sociologists so far have paid little attention, as having great sociological significance. First, it reviews recent research in social psychology and economics which cast anticipated regret as playing a major role in human decision-making. Second, it suggests a regret-based interpretation of the sunk-cost fallacy. Such an interpretation points to the need of a specifically sociological perspective on regret, calling attention to the cultural and institutional framings of regret-arousing events. The article further argues that secular changes in the types of regret imposed on individuals are paralleled by the spread of various forms of coping with it and that anticipated regret is responsible for both commitment to a chosen life-course and for sudden changes in it. The article ends with discussing the relationship between instrumental and moral regret, as well as the general implications of regret as a phenomenon for sociological understanding of rationality and human action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intervenes in the debate on populism and democratic reform. Assuming that neither progressive populist counter-projects nor reforms broadening participation or deepening deliberation provide an immediate and realistic solution to the problematic political condition, the article engages with John Dewey's work and presents a democratic praxis focused on problem solving as the most promising remedy to the populist challenge. The analysis shows that Dewey conceptualizes human action as inherently focused on problem solving, which allows him to think democracy as an associated activity to articulate and solve problems through public inquiry. Drawing on the critique that powerful groups prevent democratic problem solving activities, I develop his argument that a problem-centred democratic project must attach itself to 'wants and interests that are actually operating'. Against this backdrop, the pragmatic way forward to the repression of populist authoritarianism lies in the expansion of democratic problem solving, which, I conclude, can be realized by interweaving intelligent action into the habits of democratic parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arocha (2021) discusses the "replication crisis," arguing for models that allow a greater complexity in the relationship between variables and processes. In this comment, we identify a more fundamental issue: the impossibility of eliminating interpretation issues with operational definitions and increased rigor in the measurements of variables and processes. Interpretation is at the core of (a) human action and (b) scientific endeavor. First, considering Vygotsky, we argue that all higher mental processes are sign mediated, influencing psychological research with humans. Second, that the understanding of research results also involves sign mediation and, therefore, it is nonneutral. We suggest two alternative approaches. There needs to be an increase in research that delivers a detailed description of psychological phenomena. Additionally, it is necessary to increase the elucidation of contextual-embeddedness research. Taking into account the two levels of meaning will underline psychology as a scientific discipline of complex phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representing causal social science knowledge in models is difficult: much of the best knowledge is qualitative and ambiguously conditional, unlike the knowledge in ‘‘physics models.’’ This paper describes a stream of RAND research that began with qualitative models providing a structured depiction of casual factors creating effects. That has subsequently been extended to an unusual kind of uncertainty sensitive computational modeling that enables exploratory reasoning and analysis. We illustrate the approach with applications to counterterrorism, detection of terrorists, and nuclear crises. We believe that the approach will complement other approaches that can reflect social science phenomena [see other papers in this special issue of JDMS] and that the approach has broad potential within and beyond the national security domain. We also believe that it has the potential to inform empirical work—encouraging a transition from the step-by-step empirical testing of simple discrete hypotheses to the testing and refinement of more comprehensive causal models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of the social contract resonates in many societies as a framework to conceptualise state–society relations, and as a normative ideal which strives to improve them. Policy-makers, development organisations, politicians, social scientists (including anthropologists), and our interlocutors all live with contractarian logics. While generations of political philosophers have debated the concept and its usefulness, the term has also travelled beyond academia into the wider world, shaping expectations, experiences, and imagined futures of state–society relations. An anthropology of the social contract explores ethnographically how this pervasive concept, laden with assumptions about human nature, political organisation, government, and notions such as freedom, consensus and legitimacy, impacts state–society relations in different settings. In this way, the social contract itself – its many emic instantiations, and its political effects – becomes the object of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a paper updating the paper I wrote on this topic for BSERT in issue 1 volume 1 in 1980. The original paper set out the causes of failure in building design as being due to various issues such as an inadequate brief, lack of data, poor communication, inadequate analysis or synthesis, quirks of human behaviour which could all contribute. Systematic appraisal – now referred to as post-occupancy evaluation – of buildings in use provides feedback which helps us to understand why theory and practice do not always agree and also gives evidence for improved building economics. It concluded that we have to involve users more in the design of buildings, and for the next generations, we need a much broader based education of building designers. This paper continues the theme by considering the latest methods of measurement and assessment which provide feedback data for sustainability but focusing more on health and wellbeing rating assessments.Practical application: Our professions need more interaction across sectors and to foster a transdisciplinary approach. This means more communication with other professional kinsmen from the health and wellbeing sectors in order to make valuable interventions in the building design process. This paper updates the 1980 paper from the first edition of BSER&T that sets out the causes of failure in building design as being due to various issues such as an inadequate brief, lack of data, poor communication, inadequate analysis or synthesis, quirks of human behaviour which could all contribute. The paper determines that the need for feedback in order to improve building performance and provide data to develop existing guidelines, codes and standards is as valid now as it was in 1980 but the way we do this has changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing a racialized gendered lens, we explore the perceptions of status threat and victimhood among a sample of White Americans following the 2016 presidential election. Specifically, we draw upon such theoretical and empirical work to frame our analyses of the associations between perceptions of a white "victim" ideology and anti-Black Lives Matter (BLM) sentiments and how such associations may be conditioned by support for Trump and holding patriarchal gender normative beliefs. We propose that the BLM movement may be perceived as a "threat" to many White Americans. Furthermore, we believe Whites' anti-BLM sentiments will be enhanced by support for Trump, given his racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and oppressive tendencies. Moreover, we believe that these associations will differ based on gender and beliefs in patriarchal gender norms, as White men and women are likely to feel status threat in varied ways. Mix support for our propositions and complex gendered differences are revealed. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Forrester and Laura Cameron, Freud in Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, 812 pages, ISBN: 9780521861908 In a way having oneself psychoanalysed is like eating from the tree of knowledge. Forrester and Cameron suggest that in using his own dreams as "an occasion for criticizing Freud", Wittgenstein developed a deeper and more profound engagement with Freud than was common amongst other philosophers of the time (p. 337). The key lesson of their discussion is that reading Wittgenstein without the reference to Freud lends "therapy" a kind of corrective or curative sense, one that is at odds with Wittgenstein's own vision. Accordingly, Cavell posits a similarity between Freud's view of analysis and that of Wittgenstein, on the grounds that Wittgenstein also 'seeks to remove something (a temptation, a picture, an illusion of making sense) that meets with resistance' ([3]: 294). [Extracted from the article]

Research has shown that spending too much time indoors and disengagement from outdoor environmental stimuli may have detrimental health effects. These negative effects are even more serious in hospitals, where patients are highly stressed and have to spend most of their time indoors. Studies show that, in these situations, patients prefer to have a window with a desirable view. Although the desire for having a room with a view among hospital patients is well established, not all views are equally desirable. The parameters which make a view "desirable" are not well understood. This paper presents results of a large-scale human factors research study using patients' qualitative assessments on thousands of "view" photos (n = 2000), in order to provide a reliable foundation for developing a robust rating system to accurately quantify the desirability quality of views in healthcare settings. The results show that "distant" and "nature-dominant" views were, by far, the most desirable. Additionally, the results showed that while "water features" was also viewed desirable, views of moving cars and industrial settings were viewed most negatively. Moreover, the study revealed that natural views are not "always" more pleasant than urban views, and the positive reaction is mostly the result of aesthetic quality of the view content. Practical application : This study provides empirical confirmation that validates previous studies regarding the association of view content and building occupants' preference, specifically within healthcare settings. It also provides a reliable foundation for developing a robust rating system to accurately classify and quantify the quality of views in healthcare settings. Furthermore, the findings of this study can be used by designers to better incorporate the needs of healthcare design community and those who aim to consider view in the design stages of new built spaces or retrofit of existing spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the article "Group Psychotherapy with Immigrants from Turkey," by Raymond Battegay and Ali Tarik Yilmaz, published in the June 1, 1997 issue of "Group Analysis: The Journal of Group Analytic Psychotherapy." The authors refer to studies that corroborate the fact that more than a third of Turkish immigrants develop massive depressive and psychosomatic symptoms in the first eighteen months after their arrival in Western Europe. The important factors that were ignored or not fully developed by the authors are discussed.

Early data from several countries regarding the gendered implications of COVID-19 suggest that men are more likely to die as an effect of infection. This has been explained by biological factors but also by behavioral and life-style issues characteristic mostly for men. What has not been widely discussed, however, is the analysis of the relationships between men's responses to the crisis, their (lack of) care activities, and certain models of masculinity that persist in many societies. In this paper, I use a three dimensional model of care – a) self-care, b) care for others, and c) care for one's society – in order to analyze how certain masculine behaviors, rooted in socially constructed gender performances, resonate with the COVID-19 pandemic. The data used in this paper are of secondary character and will serve to analyze the most common responses of men within the three dimensions of care mentioned above. The theoretical framework utilizes the notion of caring masculinity supported by an emerging theory of protective masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With point of departure in a phenomenological analysis of the body as it is described and conceptualized in the diagnosis of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, this paper argues that the diagnosed behavior associated with bodily movement exposes an often-neglected expressive aspect of the body. Beyond the pre-reflective dimension of the experiential body, it is argued that the expressive dimension of the body is associated with movement as a utopian or an incorporeal aspect immanent to the body. In this perspective, the phenomenological notion of the body is critically connected to a fundamental question of the materiality of sensation, which calls for a rethinking of the Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder-diagnosed body that gives privilege to the aesthetic and expressive aspects of sensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gambler’s probing of luck in games of chance cannot be reduced to rational calculation. The art of gambling flourishes at the margins of societies and undermines the correlation of effort and entitlement. This paper interprets the peculiar thrill of gambling in modern times by drawing on social systems theory and critical theory. It argues that gambling is a specific mode of agency that consists in a playful engagement with risk and contingency. The gambler reveals a highly aroused and yet passive consciousness. Success in gambling depends on the art of proper timing as well as a preconscious awareness of fortune. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent agents provide simulations a means to add lifelike behavior in place of manned entities. When implemented, typically a single intelligent agent model (or approach to defining decision making), such as rule-based, behavior trees, neural networks, etc., is selected. This choice introduces restrictions into what behaviors agents can manifest, and can require significant testing in edge cases. This paper presents the incorporation and application of the Unified Behavior Framework (UBF) into the Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration, and Modeling environment. The UBF provides the flexibility to implement any and all behavior-based systems, allowing the developer to rapidly assemble a decision making agent that leverages multiple paradigms or approaches. The UBF achieves this by leveraging several key software engineering principles: modular design, scalability through reduced code complexity, simplified development and testing through abstraction, and the promotion of code reuse. The use of UBF to define intelligent agents within a 2v2 Integrated Air Defense System is demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how ‘policing’, in its widest sense, seeks to maintain public safety and security in the places where people gather to view events. The paper begins by clarifying its setting in public assembly facilities and conceiving of ‘policing’ as ‘almost anything done by anyone who controls other people’ (Waddington, 2007). The paper goes on to show how the long history of disasters and disorder in such facilities means that they have to be ‘policed’ and outlines the various bodies involved in ‘policing’ them. The paper then discusses the concepts of ‘safety’ and ‘security’. ‘Safety’ starts with structural design and maintenance to prevent fire or collapse. It manages capacities, ingress and egress in complex space. It also deals with aspects of human behaviours, emergencies and evacuations. ‘Security’, on the other hand, addresses the prevention and detection of crime, the terrorist threat and the maintenance of public tranquillity. The paper seeks to differentiate the terms ‘safety’ and ‘security’ with reference to four alternative models. Two forms of the integrated whole in which ‘security’ is conceived as a subset of ‘safety’, or vice versa, are outlined and commended as best practice. However, the historical practice and current policy reasons why ‘safety’ and ‘security’ have been treated as either separate or overlapping concepts are also explored. The discussion refers to various facility disasters to illustrate the serious consequences when policing policy and practice overlooks ‘safety’ or allows ‘security’ and ‘safety’ to get out of balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today aging of society is becoming increasingly important. Many people want to live at home as long as possible. Very often this leads to accidents at home, which are unnoticed for a long time and therefore cause severe complications. We propose a cyber-physical system consisting of sensors for motion, light, temperature, and so on, which monitors the behavior of elderly people but is non-invasive in the sense that the persons are not observed by a camera and must not wear certain sensors on their body. Unusual behavior or accidents are registered in-time by a change point detection algorithm based on Markov chains, which does not store any data with the exception of the last datum, so that also the integrity of the elderly people is preserved. For verification of this algorithm, a cyber-physical test environment has been programmed which allows to simulate human common and uncommon behavior in house during day and night. This simulation environment is based on behavior trees and decision theory. The verification results suggest that the implemented cyber-physical system for change point and anomaly detection could be successfully used in the real environment of elderly people to give them help in-time when an accident occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fil rouge goes through Habermas's decade long research. It is the idea that Reason and rationality permeate human societies and may lead human action towards emancipation, if aptly elaborated through the filter of theoretical reflection. Theory must pick up on this rational core and turn the intrinsic rational potential inherent to modern societies into a self-consciously pursued 'project of enlightenment'. This introduction to the special issue 'Habermas, Democracy, and the Public Sphere: Theory and Practice' shows how Habermas's work in different scientific domains contributes to the construction of the 'project of modernity' from the many angles that such a complex project requires. The public sphere is, in Habermas's theory, the societal domain in which communicative interactions have a chance to make Reason come to bear on human societies and lead them on the path to social and political emancipation. The contributions to this special issue focus therefore on the public sphere and illustrate the evolution of the concept in Habermas's work and its relation to democracy at national and supranational level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalism reaches beyond economic policy and material conditions and reformulates the subject and psychological life and therefore is best understood as an attitude toward science, knowledge making, and subjectivity. In a neoliberal climate, markets give us truth and individuals are encouraged to be self-concerned agents rather than members of a polis. Thus, at the very moment that neoliberal policies transfer responsibility to individuals, there is a simultaneous increase in surveillance in order to reinstall certain patterns of human behavior. Mental health research and practice risk becoming commodities dedicated to enforcing this logic. In this article, we explore medical neoliberalism in some of its recent manifestations: global mental health interventions, routine depression screening, and the monitoring of social media to assess mental health. We also consider the ways in which popular reforms in the mental health field are founded on neoliberal assumptions and may be abetting these ideological aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although freedom has been of grave concern to people for centuries, it has surprisingly not been a central topic in psychology. The goal of this article is to begin constructing a theoretical framework for addressing freedom issues in terms of free action, which is generally defined as doing as one sees fit without coercion or constraint. Insofar as free action is a form of human action, it is first necessary to conceptualize action. The paper begins by conceptualizing action from a systems perspective in terms of interrelated individual, social, and cultural processes. Next, free action is conceptualized as a form of action that involves particular ways of structuring individual, social, and cultural processes. The article ends with some implications of this conceptualization of free action for continued theory building and research on the psychology of free action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychology and psychiatry are in a constant search for an adequate model of affective disorders. Psychology has classified depression as a mood disorder, but a growing literature links mental disorders with socioculturally relevant ways in which people experience and express distress. With this study, we link depression with proverbs as omnipresent narrative structures and mini-theories that help people interpret reality and categorize personal experience. Proverbs are omnipresent narrative structures that describe, explain, and prescribe human behavior. Hence, we offer a paremiological approach to better understand the minds of the depressed. Our tenet is that proverbs may also reflect people's mental states and attitudes by conveying different levels of optimism versus pessimism. We evidence empirically that proverbs convey optimistic and pessimistic attitudes and, thus, have the capacity to capture peoples' mental states. Moreover, we show that this capacity is limited for people with high depressiveness. Finally, we discuss how proverbial thinking links collective experience and wisdom imprinted in proverbs with an individual's mental states, which has important research and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital trace data from giant platforms are gaining ground in the study of human behavior. This trend accompanies contestations regarding representativeness, privacy, access, and commercial origin. Complementing existing discussions and focusing on knowledge production, we draw attention to the different measurement regimes within passively captured behavioral logs from industries. Taking an institutional perspective on measurement as a management technology, we compare platforms with third-party audience measurement firms. Whereas the latter measure to provide "currency" for a multi-sided advertising market, the former measure internally for their own administrative purposes (i.e. prescribing behavior through design). We demonstrate the platform giants' two-fold enclosure of first the user ecology and subsequently the previously open market for user attention. With platform trace data serving as a lifeline for scholarly research, platform episteme extends itself to enclose knowledge production. We conclude by suggesting ways in which academic quantitative social sciences may resist these platform enclosures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music streaming services provide people with access to vast libraries of music, but also encourage certain patterns of consumption. In this article, I use Spotify as a case and investigate the action potentials for exploring and archiving music. The personal role of music implies we may expect the 'will to archive' to be prevalent even if these archives are not based on individual ownership. First, an analysis of Spotify suggests that the machine agency of Spotify pushes people towards exploring music, whereas archiving features are material and depend on human action. Spotify is hence skewed towards prompting users to explore rather than archive music. Next, an analysis of 23 focus-group interviews suggests that users value opportunities to explore music, yet their practices are equally directed towards archiving music. Theoretically, this article delineates how objects with machine agency are different from material objects in terms of affordances. The action potentials of material objects are symmetrically constituted by what the objects provide relative to an active being. The action potentials of objects with machine agency interfere with this symmetry: the machine is designed to act on behalf of the human being, making certain affordances more perceivable than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reframes our understanding of French structural anthropology by considering the work of André Leroi-Gourhan alongside that of Claude Lévi-Strauss. These two anthropologists worked at opposite poles of the discipline, Lévi-Strauss studying cultural objects, like myths and kinship relations; Leroi-Gourhan looking at material artifacts, such as stone tools, bones, arrowheads, and cave paintings. In spite of their difference in focus, these thinkers shared a similar approach to the interpretation of their sources: Each individual object was meaningful only as part of a larger whole. For Lévi-Strauss, structuralism was designed to unlock features of the human mind; for Leroi-Gourhan, to uncover the material processes that underlay human life. Again, in spite of their difference in orientation, both structuralisms produced similar theories of human society. Whether 'primitive' or 'advanced', all societies functioned the same way: Their institutions worked harmoniously, beyond the intentions of any individual actors, to preserve the stability of the group. This eliminated the basis for thinking one society was superior to another. Finally, the article argues that both Lévi-Strauss and Leroi-Gourhan believed that structural anthropology could found a 'new humanism', and thereby rescue modernity from moral degeneration. This 'new humanism' could not only produce a universal description of human nature, but also help rethink French colonialism, broker new geopolitical alliances, and prevent the erasure of world cultures. Structural anthropology thus imagined a tight relationship between its social-scientific work and its political-moral mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evolution’s ability to find innovative phenotypes is an important ingredient in the emergence of complexity in nature. A key factor in this capability is evolvability, or the propensity towards phenotypic variation. Numerous explanations for the origins of evolvability have been proposed, often differing in the role that they attribute to adaptive processes. To provide a new perspective on these explanations, experiments in this paper simulate evolution in gene regulatory networks, revealing that the type of evolvability in question significantly impacts the dynamics that follow. In particular, while adaptive processes result in evolvable individuals, processes that are either neutral or that explicitly encourage divergence result in evolvable populations. Furthermore, evolvability at the population level proves the most critical factor in the production of evolutionary innovations, suggesting that nonadaptive mechanisms are the most promising avenue for investigating and understanding evolvability. These results reconcile a large body of work across biology and inform attempts to reproduce evolvability in artificial settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper discusses some issues of the debate on happiness in economics. In particular it deals with the relationship between happiness and sociality. In fact, in contemporary ‘economics and happiness’ literature there is a new interest in interpersonal relationships thanks to the huge empirical evidence that genuine sociality is one of the heaviest components of self-reported happiness. At the same time, mainstream economics is badly equipped for studying genuine sociality, because it treats interpersonal interactions as elements to be taken into account in terms of externalities. The intuition originating the paper is the conviction that if research on happiness aims at taking into account non-instrumental interpersonal relations, i.e. ‘relational goods’, scholars will profit by a reconsideration or retrieving of the Aristotelian tradition of happiness as eudaimonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his article 'Origins of the Problem of Health-related Behaviours: A Genealogical Study', David Armstrong claims that the idea about' changeable behaviour is a relatively recent phenomenon'. In this paper it is argued that this conclusion is not valid. One concern is whether his sources sufficiently document the ideas. Another concern is whether David Armstrong overlooked the focus on health-promoting and health-damaging behaviours by including an insufficient number of words or terms in his search criteria. In this paper it is demonstrated that health-related behaviours have been a concern for doctors throughout history. It is not new as David Armstrong and proponents of the New Public Health claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I am trying to present a view whereby development is seen as cultural and transpersonal `tracks of development' within which individuals have to find their direction. Three different approaches to the analysis of life-tracks are indicated. There are crucial decision points in a person's development, and a person's decision-making process at these points is analyzed from the point of view of his or her perception of his or her `opportunity situation'—what are the alternatives that are psychologically plausible and available for him or her? (Hundeide, 2003b). This raises the question of positioning and acquiring the critical access skills that give entrance to different life-careers. A major point in this paper is that skills and competencies are contextually contained within what I have described as `lifestyle packages'. Certain identity- and style-markings may be important access skills or criteria for getting entrance into certain communities, which again invite and direct the novice into certain life-tracks—which may be more or less irreversible. This point is further explored with regard to creating a basis for understanding the attraction of new Nazi movements to marginalized unsuccessful youngsters, with regard to life careers in a slum community, and with regard to intervention, in the sense of how marginalized youngsters in a situation of school failure, unemployment and delinquency can be `untracked' into more positive life-tracks or careers. The conditions for development and personal change are briefly discussed at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the process of the emergence of new social representation among abusive men vis-à-vis their own behavior. The discussion focuses on a group of 65 men who were sent to a closed hostel (Beit Noam) for intensive therapy for habitual violence. The paper argues that there was no possibility of the existence of such a representation at the beginning of therapy because there was no relevant group to create the discourse necessary for the structuring of social representations. The creation of the group and the ensuing discourse helped the men construct a social representation of their own violence. Such a representation enabled them to complete therapy successfully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to introduce the idea of an Open Source theory of human behavior; a theory emerging out of the capabilities and possibilities offered to humans through activities on the Internet. The Internet offers new types of connections and links between distributed human thinking that can transcend traditional boundaries and hierarchies. Open Source activities began in limited hacker/programming communities, the most famous of which is the Linux development project. These communities began to develop activity trajectories and ethical perspectives that stretched beyond programming—including the importance of sharing information early and often and inviting participants to be co-owners in the developing project. Open Source theory has the potential to play a role in our understanding of the evolution of the human mind as a separate, uniquely human phenomenon, acting as a counterweight to the more biologically oriented explanations offered by much of evolutionary psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As lighting researchers we can learn from our colleagues in the humanities who have progressed qualitative research methods to a high level of rigour. We should consider using qualitative research methods more. Such methods allow exploration of complex issues involving human views and behaviour, and help researchers address difficult to answer questions that otherwise go unanswered. Good quality qualitative research can provide rich explanations of what went on in a given situation. Validity and reliability are considered differently with this type of research methodology. This paper attempts to identify when qualitative research is appropriate, what questions it can answer in lighting research, how it is done, list the features and provide a simple brief example of a post occupancy evaluation case study. It is argued that qualitative research can be used with quantitative research; before quantitative research to inform it or afterwards to explain it; but it can also be extremely informative in itself and act as a catalyst for change to readers who can see the outcomes in a context that applies to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When is the baseline for Anthropocene? The first indications of human impact on earth closely relate to early human behavior and use of resources. First agricultural societies modified the landscape with the aim of generating their own resources to satisfy the needs of an increasing population. This new system was the result of years of learning and continuous interaction with landscape. Hunter-gatherer societies had shown a vast knowledge of their surrounding environment, which allowed them to exploit and optimize the available resources. But, had these societies the capacity to modify the landscape in such a way that can be traced up until today? How far back in time can we go to find the first evidence of human impact on earth? In this paper, we will try to analyze early human behavior and the possible impact of their activities on the landscape. We will use the paleoanthropological site of Olduvai Gorge (northern Tanzania) as a case study to suggest that the baseline for Anthropocene, taking the term as human impact on earth through cognitive-behavioral strategies, can be moved back to the time when early hominins visited Olduvai. Olduvai Gorge is perfectly suited for this study since the latest scientific research and publications have yielded a detailed knowledge of the vegetation, the landscape, and of the wildlife that lived in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address the problem of shaping deformable plastic materials using non-prehensile actions. Shaping plastic objects is challenging, because they are difficult to model and to track visually. We study this problem, by using kinetic sand, a plastic toy material that mimics the physical properties of wet sand. Inspired by a pilot study where humans shape kinetic sand, we define two types of actions: pushing the material from the sides and tapping from above. The chosen actions are executed with a robotic arm using image-based visual servoing. From the current and desired view of the material, we define states based on visual features such as the outer contour shape and the pixel luminosity values. These are mapped to actions, which are repeated iteratively to reduce the image error until convergence is reached. For pushing, we propose three methods for mapping the visual state to an action. These include heuristic methods and a neural network, trained from human actions. We show that it is possible to obtain simple shapes with the kinetic sand, without explicitly modeling the material. Our approach is limited in the types of shapes it can achieve. A richer set of action types and multi-step reasoning is needed to achieve more sophisticated shapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ubiquity of digital devices and the increasing intensity of users' interactions with them create vast amounts of digital trace data. Companies use these data to optimize their services or products, but these data are also of interest to researchers studying human behavior. As most of these data are owned by private companies and their collection requires adherence to their terms of service, research with digital trace data often entails some form of public-private partnership. Private companies and academic researchers each have their own interests, some of which are shared, while others may conflict. In this article, we explore different types of private-public partnerships for research with digital trace data. Based on general considerations and particular experiences from a research project with linked digital trace data, we propose strategies for identifying and productively negotiating both shared and conflicting interests in these relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]