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When scientists report false data, does their writing style reflect their deception? In this study, we investigated the linguistic patterns of fraudulent (N  =  24; 170,008 words) and genuine publications (N  =  25; 189,705 words) first-authored by social psychologist Diederik Stapel. The analysis revealed that Stapel's fraudulent papers contained linguistic changes in science-related discourse dimensions, including more terms pertaining to methods, investigation, and certainty than his genuine papers. His writing style also matched patterns in other deceptive language, including fewer adjectives in fraudulent publications relative to genuine publications. Using differences in language dimensions we were able to classify Stapel's publications with above chance accuracy. Beyond these discourse dimensions, Stapel included fewer co-authors when reporting fake data than genuine data, although other evidentiary claims (e.g., number of references and experiments) did not differ across the two article types. This research supports recent findings that language cues vary systematically with deception, and that deception can be revealed in fraudulent scientific discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal motivation is a key factor in the service of foster care, impending both on the welfare of the child and on the satisfaction of the carer. This paper explores the benefits, challenges and dilemmas involved in the job of professional (i.e. state-supported) foster carer in Romania–a country where the issue of child protection has drawn a great deal of international attention over the last thirty years. The principal hypothesis concerns whether the benefits, challenges and dilemmas identified by foster carers are influenced by the factors that led to their taking up this kind of work. Quantitative research was conducted using a questionnaire as the main tool. The paper takes a descriptive, cross-sectional and multifactorial approach. Sampling was carried out by self-selecting method, and the study involved 51 participants. The research project identified a statistically significant variation in the challenges and dilemmas reported by foster carers. Thus, the results of the study show that the majority of the carers indicate a primarily intrinsic motivation for their work. By way of conclusion, it is argued that social workers, operating in collaboration with multidisciplinary teams, can offer carers support in managing more difficult periods in the child–carer relationship, thus enhancing the sustainability of the foster care service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the study "Social Capital and Aggressive Behavior," by Uberto Gatti and Richard E. Tremblay. He questions the use of social capital which appeals to him as problematic because of unclear definition. The author observes that the paper is published in a European journal but most of the literature cited are based on American, Canadian and British studies. He expresses that many elements in the study are unfavorable for providing social capital for family structure, parental characteristics and parents attitude towards delinquency.

Micro-blogging systems have become one of the most important ways for information sharing. Network structure and users’ interactions such as forwarding behaviors have aroused considerable research attention, while mention, as a key feature in micro-blogging platforms which can improve the visibility of a message and direct it to a particular user beyond the underlying social structure, is seldom studied in previous works. In this paper, we empirically study the mention effect in information diffusion, using the dataset from a population-scale social media website. We find that users with high number of followers would receive much more mentions than others. We further investigate the effect of mention in information diffusion by examining the response probability with respect to the number of mentions in a message and observe a saturation at around 5 mentions. Furthermore, we find that the response probability is the highest when a reciprocal followship exists between users, and one is more likely to receive a target user’s response if they have similar social status. To illustrate these findings, we propose the response prediction task and formulate it as a binary classification problem. Extensive evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of discovered factors. Our results have consequences for the understanding of human dynamics on the social network, and potential implications for viral marketing and public opinion monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networking sites (SNS) are used for social and professional interaction with people. SNS popularity has encouraged researchers to analyze the relationship of activities performed on SNS with user behavior. In doing so, the term “user behavior” is rather used ambiguously with different interpretations, which makes it difficult to identify studies on user behavior in relation to SNS. This phenomenon has encouraged this thorough research on the characteristics of user behavior being discussed in the literature. Therefore, in this study, we aim to identify, analyze, and classify the characteristics associated with user behavior to answer the research questions designed to conduct this research. A mapping study (also called scoping study), which is a type of systematic literature review, is employed to identify potential studies from digital databases through a developed protocol. Thematic analysis is carried out for the classification of user behavior. We identified 116 primary studies for full analysis. This study found seven characteristics associated with behavior that have direct influence on SNS use and nine factors that have an indirect effect. All studies were conducted largely under seven areas that set the context of these studies. Findings show that the research on SNS is still in its early stage. The range of topics covered in the analyzed studies is quite expansive, although the depth in terms of number of studies under each topic is quite limited. This study reports that activities performed on SNS are either associated with user behavior or reflect personality characteristics. The findings of this study could be used by practitioners to evaluate their SNS platforms and develop more user-centered applications. These studies can also help organizations to understand better the needs of their employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persuasion is at the core of norm creation, emergence of collective action, and solutions to ‘tragedy of the commons’ problems. In this paper, we show that the directionality of friendship ties affect the extent to which individuals can influence the behavior of each other. Moreover, we find that people are typically poor at perceiving the directionality of their friendship ties and that this can significantly limit their ability to engage in cooperative arrangements. This could lead to failures in establishing compatible norms, acting together, finding compromise solutions, and persuading others to act. We then suggest strategies to overcome this limitation by using two topological characteristics of the perceived friendship network. The findings of this paper have significant consequences for designing interventions that seek to harness social influence for collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes seasonal effects and their potential drivers in charitable giving. We conduct two studies to analyze whether donations to the German Red Cross differ between the Christmas season and summer. In study 1 we find that in the pre-Christmas shopping season prosocial subjects almost donate 50% less compared to prosocials in summer. In study 2 we replicate the low donations in the Christmas season. In an extensive questionnaire we control for several causes of this effect. The data suggest that the higher prosocials’ self-reported stress level, the lower the donations. The higher their relative savings, the lower the giving. Our questionnaire rules out that “donation fatigue” matters. That is, donations do not depend on the number of charitable campaigns subjects are confronted with and their engagement in these activities during Christmas season outside the lab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been decades of research on the usability and educational value of augmented reality. However, less is known about how augmented reality affects social interactions. The current paper presents three studies that test the social psychological effects of augmented reality. Study 1 examined participants’ task performance in the presence of embodied agents and replicated the typical pattern of social facilitation and inhibition. Participants performed a simple task better, but a hard task worse, in the presence of an agent compared to when participants complete the tasks alone. Study 2 examined nonverbal behavior. Participants met an agent sitting in one of two chairs and were asked to choose one of the chairs to sit on. Participants wearing the headset never sat directly on the agent when given the choice of two seats, and while approaching, most of the participants chose the rotation direction to avoid turning their heads away from the agent. A separate group of participants chose a seat after removing the augmented reality headset, and the majority still avoided the seat previously occupied by the agent. Study 3 examined the social costs of using an augmented reality headset with others who are not using a headset. Participants talked in dyads, and augmented reality users reported less social connection to their partner compared to those not using augmented reality. Overall, these studies provide evidence suggesting that task performance, nonverbal behavior, and social connectedness are significantly affected by the presence or absence of virtual content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current literature presents conflicting findings concerning the effect of religiosity on attitudes towards redistribution. This paper attempts to reconcile these findings by arguing that the belief and social behavior dimensions of religiosity affect support for redistribution via different mechanisms, and that these effects are moderated by state welfare generosity. Using multilevel path analysis models on data from the World Values Survey, we show that the effect of the religious belief on attitudes towards redistribution is mediated by competing personal orientations—prosocial values and conservative identification—while the religious social behavior dimension significantly decreases support for redistribution via increased levels of happiness. Lower levels of welfare generosity increase the positive effect of prosocial orientations and weaken the negative effect conservative identification, leading to positive or null indirect effect of religiosity. These findings show the importance of taking into account the multiple dimensions of religiosity and institutional context when studying the relationship between religion and redistribution attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many national (US) and International guidelines for physical activity provide guidance that under-active and sedentary adults can begin by accumulating moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) in bouts as brief as 10 minutes. This guidance fits well with Goal Setting theory in that goals should be realistic and achievable, and is also consistent with Social Cognitive theory since achieving small goals should boost self-efficacy and thus, encourage continued physical activity. In contrast, Behavioral Economics might suggest that fewer, longer bouts would be more conducive to the adoption of physical activity due to the costs incurred with each separate bout of MVPA. This paper examines patterns of MVPA adoption among a sample of under-active adults from the perspective of goal setting theory and behavioral economics to explore specific strategies to help people who are in the early stages of PA activity adoption. Under-active men and women (N = 225; mean age = 46 ± 10; mean BMI = 28 ± 4.48) who enrolled in a PA intervention participated in a single goal setting session at enrollment. Participants were encouraged to set realistic goals and to increase their activity to meet national recommendations (150 minutes/week of moderate to vigorous physical activity [MVPA]) by the 6-month follow up. This process included identifying a specific frequency goal (days/week) and session duration goal (minutes/day). At baseline, participants reported average weekly MVPA of 14.59 min (± 24), which increased to an average of 140.52 (± 143.55) at 6 months. MVPA goals at baseline averaged 33.24 min/day (± 18.08) and 3.85 days/week (± 1.31). Analyses showed that longer session duration goals set at baseline were associated with more weekly minutes of MVPA at 6 months (b = 1.26, SE = 0.58, t = 2.17, p = 0.03). There was no significant association between goals for number of days per week (frequency) or total minutes of weekly MVPA (minutes x frequency) and MVPA at 6 months. Widely promoted guidelines for uptake of physical activity recommend accumulating physical activity in bouts as short as 10 minutes. This recommendation may ultimately hinder the adoption of physical activity among under-active and sedentary individuals. For the purposes of behavioral adoption of MVPA, more ambitious session duration goals appear to result in higher levels of physical activity participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

McPherson’s Blau space and affiliation ecology model is a powerful tool for analyzing the ecological competition among social entities, such as organizations, along a combination of sociodemographic characteristics of their members. In this paper we introduce the R-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) package Blaunet, an integrated set of tools to calculate, visualize, and analyze the statuses of individuals and social entities in Blau space, parameterized by multiple sociodemographic traits as dimensions. The package is able to calculate the Blau statuses at the nodal, dyadic, and meso levels based on three types of information: sociodemographic characteristics, group affiliations (e.g., membership in groups/organizations), and network ties. To facilitate this, Blaunet has the following five main capabilities, it can: 1) identify a list of possible salient dimensions; 2) calculate, plot, and analyze niches for social entities by measuring the social distance along the salient dimensions between individuals affiliated with them; 3) generate Blau bubbles for individuals, thereby allowing the study of interpersonal influence of similar others even with limited or no network information; 4) capture niche dynamics cross-sectionally by calculating the intensity of exploitation from the carrying capacity and the membership rate; and 5) analyze the niche movement longitudinally by estimating the predicted niche movement equations. We illustrate these capabilities of Blaunet with example datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘irrational’ preference for fairness has attracted increasing attention. Although previous studies have focused on the effects of spitefulness on the evolution of fairness, they did not consider non-monotonic rejections shown in behavioral experiments. In this paper, we introduce a non-monotonic rejection in an evolutionary model of the Ultimatum Game. We propose strategy intervention to study the evolution of fairness in general structured populations. By sequentially adding five strategies into the competition between a fair strategy and a selfish strategy, we arrive at the following conclusions. First, the evolution of fairness is inhibited by altruism, but it is promoted by spitefulness. Second, the non-monotonic rejection helps fairness overcome selfishness. Particularly for group-structured populations, we analytically investigate how fairness, selfishness, altruism, and spitefulness are affected by population size, mutation, and migration in the competition among seven strategies. Our results may provide important insights into understanding the evolutionary origin of fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a social discounting experiment conducted with university students in South Africa. In line with other social discounting task experiments, participants identify target individuals at different degrees of intimacy in their social network and then make 10 choices involving sums of money for themselves or their targets. For an altruism premium to exist, senders’ donations to recipients should be positive, statistically and economically significant, and independent of relationship closeness. We hypothesize that in addition to the altruism premium for kin documented in the literature, there may be other premia for family in general and for partners and friends. We find that, apart from the “kinship” premium, there is a sizeable “intimacy” premium, which together translates into a substantial “family” premium. The study also finds a “friendship premium”, as is documented in various experiments. The closeness of relationships among family and kin, especially close kin, has a significant and large effect on altruism. The results also attest to the importance of the extended family in regards to the “kinship” premium on altruism. These various premiums on altruism emphasise the importance of the supportive role of various social systems. Nevertheless, altruism within families and among close kin might also be enhanced by building more cohesive and stronger families using developmental social welfare programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological and other persuasive mechanisms across diverse contexts are well researched, with many studies of the effectiveness of specific persuasive techniques on distinct types of human behaviour. In the present paper, our specific interest lies in the development of a generalized modular psychometric tool to measure individuals’ susceptibility to persuasion. The scale is constructed using items from previously developed and validated particulate scales established in the domains of social psychology and behavioural economics. In the first study we establish the Susceptibility to Persuasion–II (StP-II) scale, containing 54 items, 10 subscales and further 6 sub-sub scales. In Study 2 we establish the scale’s construct validity and reconfirm its reliability. We present a valid and reliable modular psychometric tool that measures general susceptibility to persuasive techniques. Since its inception, we have successfully implemented the StP-II scale to measure susceptibility to persuasion of IT security officers, the role of psychology of persuasion in cybercrime victims and general persuadability levels of Facebook users; these manuscripts are in preparation. We argue that the StP-II scale shows promise in measuring individual differences in susceptibility to persuasion, and is applicable across diverse contexts such as Internet security and cybercrime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demonstrability—the extent to which group members can recognize a correct solution to a problem—has a significant effect on group performance. However, the interplay between group size, demonstrability and performance is not well understood. This paper addresses these gaps by studying the joint effect of two factors—the difficulty of solving a problem and the difficulty of verifying the correctness of a solution—on the ability of groups of varying sizes to converge to correct solutions. Our empirical investigations use problem instances from different computational complexity classes, NP-Complete (NPC) and PSPACE-complete (PSC), that exhibit similar solution difficulty but differ in verification difficulty. Our study focuses on nominal groups to isolate the effect of problem complexity on performance. We show that NPC problems have higher demonstrability than PSC problems: participants were significantly more likely to recognize correct and incorrect solutions for NPC problems than for PSC problems. We further show that increasing the group size can actually decrease group performance for some problems of low demonstrability. We analytically derive the boundary that distinguishes these problems from others for which group performance monotonically improves with group size. These findings increase our understanding of the mechanisms that underlie group problem-solving processes, and can inform the design of systems and processes that would better facilitate collective decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the South Asian Community in Blackburn, UK, and seeks to gain a better understanding of their requirements for arts and cultural events using primary research to ascertain their specific needs. The paper concludes that at present the needs of this potential market are insufficiently understood and therefore not catered for within the local authority's event programme. Furthermore, there are many differences identified within this community and, therefore, they cannot be treated as one homogenous subgroup. These differences within the community and similarities with sub-groups outside of the community suggest that any simplistic segmentation based on ethnicity alone is likely to be ineffective. The characteristics which appear to affect event preferences relate to language, age, gender, and economic situation and cannot be generalized merely from country of origin or religious belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances theories of social learning through an empirical examination of how social networks change over time. Social networks are important for learning because they constrain individuals’ access to information about the behaviors and cognitions of other people. Using data on a large social network of mobile device users over a one-month time period, we test three hypotheses: 1) attraction homophily causes individuals to form ties on the basis of attribute similarity, 2) aversion homophily causes individuals to delete existing ties on the basis of attribute dissimilarity, and 3) social influence causes individuals to adopt the attributes of others they share direct ties with. Statistical models offer varied degrees of support for all three hypotheses and show that these mechanisms are more complex than assumed in prior work. Although homophily is normally thought of as a process of attraction, people also avoid relationships with others who are different. These mechanisms have distinct effects on network structure. While social influence does help explain behavior, people tend to follow global trends more than they follow their friends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperation amongst resource users holds the key to overcoming the social dilemma that characterizes community-based common-pool resource management. But is cooperation alone enough to achieve sustainable resource use? The short answer is no. Developing management strategies in a complex social-ecological environment also requires ecological knowledge and approaches to deal with perceived environmental uncertainty. Recent behavioral experimental research indicates variation in the degree to which a group of users can identify a sustainable exploitation level. In this paper, we identify social-ecological micro-foundations that facilitate cooperative sustainable common-pool resource use. We do so by using an agent-based model (ABM) that is informed by behavioral common-pool resource experiments. In these experiments, groups that cooperate do not necessarily manage the resource sustainably, but also over- or underexploit. By reproducing the patterns of the behavioral experiments in a qualitative way, the ABM represents a social-ecological explanation for the experimental observations. We find that the ecological knowledge of each group member cannot sufficiently explain the relationship between cooperation and sustainable resource use. Instead, the development of a sustainable exploitation level depends on the distribution of ecological knowledge among the group members, their influence on each other’s knowledge, and the environmental uncertainty the individuals perceive. The study provides insights about critical social-ecological micro-foundations underpinning collective action and sustainable resource management. These insights may inform policy-making, but also point to future research needs regarding the mechanisms of social learning, the development of shared management strategies and the interplay of social and ecological uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urgency of climate change mitigation calls for a profound shift in personal behavior. This paper investigates psycho-social correlates of extra mitigation behavior in response to climate change, while also testing for potential (unobserved) heterogeneity in European citizens' decision-making. A person's extra mitigation behavior in response to climate change is conceptualized—and differentiated from common mitigation behavior—as some people's broader and greater levels of behavioral engagement (compared to others) across specific self-reported mitigation actions and behavioral domains. Regression analyses highlight the importance of environmental psychographics (i.e., attitudes, motivations, and knowledge about climate change) and socio-demographics (especially country-level variables) in understanding extra mitigation behavior. By looking at the data through the lens of segmentation, significant heterogeneity is uncovered in the associations of attitudes and knowledge about climate change—but not in motivational or socio-demographic links—with extra mitigation behavior in response to climate change, across two groups of environmentally active respondents. The study has implications for promoting more ambitious behavioral responses to climate change, both at the individual level and across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the understanding of and motivation behind individual trading behavior is an important puzzle in finance, little is known about the connection between an investor's portfolio structure and her trading behavior in practice. In this paper, we investigate the relation between what stocks investors hold, and what stocks they buy, and show that investors with similar portfolio structures to a great extent trade in a similar way. With data from the central register of shareholdings in Sweden, we model the market in a similarity network, by considering investors as nodes, connected with links representing portfolio similarity. From the network, we find investor groups that not only identify different investment strategies, but also represent individual investors trading in a similar way. These findings suggest that the stock portfolios of investors hold meaningful information, which could be used to earn a better understanding of stock market dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers contribute to the scientific peer review system by providing reviews, and “withdraw” from it by submitting manuscripts that are subsequently reviewed. So far as we are aware, there has been no quantification of the balance of individual's contributions and withdrawals. We compared the number of reviews provided by individual researchers (i.e., their contribution) to the number required by their submissions (i.e. their withdrawals) in a large and anonymised database provided by the British Ecological Society. The database covered the Journal of Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology, Journal of Applied Ecology, and Functional Ecology from 2003–2010. The majority of researchers (64%) did not have balanced contributions and withdrawals. Depending on assumptions, 12% to 44% contributed more than twice as much as required; 20% to 52% contributed less than half as much as required. Balance, or lack thereof, varied little in relation to the number of years a researcher had been active (reviewing or submitting). Researchers who contributed less than required did not lack the opportunity to review. Researchers who submitted more were more likely to accept invitations to review. These finding suggest overall that peer review of the four analysed journals is not in crisis, but only due to the favourable balance of over- and under-contributing researchers. These findings are limited to the four journals analysed, and therefore cannot include researcher's other peer review activities, which if included might change the proportions reported. Relatively low effort was required to assemble, check, and analyse the data. Broader analyses of individual researcher's peer review activities would contribute to greater quality, efficiency, and fairness in the peer review system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we conduct a study about differences between female and male discursive strategies when posting in the microblogging service Twitter, with a particular focus on the hashtag designation process during political debate. The fact that men and women use language in distinct ways, reverberating practices linked to their expected roles in the social groups, is a linguistic phenomenon known to happen in several cultures and that can now be studied on the Web and on online social networks in a large scale enabled by computing power. Here, for instance, after analyzing tweets with political content posted during Brazilian presidential campaign,we found out that male Twitter users, when expressing their attitude toward a given candidate, are more prone to use imperative verbal forms in hashtags, while female users tend to employ declarative forms. This difference can be interpreted as a sign of distinct approaches in relation to other network members: for example, if political hashtags are seen as strategies of persuasion in Twitter, imperative tags could be understood as more overt ways of persuading and declarative tags as more indirect ones. Our findings help to understand human gendered behavior in social networks and contribute to research on the new fields of computer-enabled Internet linguistics and social computing, besides being useful for several computational tasks such as developing tag recommendation systems based on users' collective preferences and tailoring targeted advertising strategies, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women experiencing greater childhood adversity exhibit faster reproductive trajectories. One possible psychological mechanism underlying this phenomenon is an increased interest in infants. Interest in infants is thought to be an adaptation important for successful rearing as it motivates the acquisition of caretaking skills. We investigated the relationships between childhood adversity, intended reproductive timing and interest in infants in a sample of English adolescent girls. Specifically we sought to investigate the relationship between 1) childhood adversity and intended reproductive timing; 2) childhood adversity and interest in infants; and 3) intended reproductive timing and interest in infants. Additionally we explored different methods of measuring interest in infants using self-reported fondness for babies, a forced choice adult versus infant paper-based preference task and a novel computer based attention task using adult and infant stimuli. In total 357 girls aged nine to 14 years participated in the study, which took place in schools. Participants completed the two interest in infants tasks before moving on to a childhood adversity questionnaire. Girls with more childhood adversity reported earlier ideal ages at parenthood. We found some evidence that, contrary to our predictions, girls with less childhood adversity were more interested in infants. There was no relationship between intended reproductive timing and interest in infants. The different measurements for interest in infants were only weakly related, if at all, highlighting the complexity of measuring this construct. Our findings suggest that rather than interest in infants being a mechanism for the effect of childhood adversity on early reproductive timing it might instead be an indicator of future reproductive strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) has been identified as a reliable predictor of men’s behavior, with researchers focusing on evolutionary selection pressures as the underlying mechanism explaining these relationships. In this paper, we complement this approach and examine the extent to which social processes also determine the extent to which men’s fWHR serves as a behavioral cue. Specifically, we propose that observers’ treatment of target men based on the targets’ fWHR subsequently affects behavior, leading the targets to behave in ways that are consistent with the observers’ expectations (i.e., a self-fulfilling prophecy). Results from four studies demonstrate that individuals behave more selfishly when interacting with men with greater fWHRs, and this selfish behavior, in turn, elicits selfish behavior in others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effect of social relations and gender-based conflicts on the uptake of HIV testing in the South and Central provinces of Zambia. We conducted a community-based cross-sectional study of 1716 randomly selected individuals. Associations were examined using mixed-effect multivariable logistic regression. A total of 264 men (64%) and 268 women (56%) had never tested for HIV. The strongest determinants for not being tested were disruptive couple relationships (OR = 2.48 95% CI = 1.00–6.19); tolerance to gender-based violence (OR = 2.10 95% CI = 1.05–4.32) and fear of social rejection (OR = 1.48 95% CI = 1.23–1.80). In the Zambian context, unequal power relationships within the couple and the community seem to play a pivotal role in the decision to test which until now have been largely underestimated. Policies, programs and interventions to rapidly increase HIV testing need to urgently address gender-power inequity in relationships and prevent gender-based violence to reduce the negative impact on the lives of couples and families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a novel laboratory experiment to document the pressure to share income within social networks in Africa. We find that the redistributive pressure exerted via the possibility of receiving a claim increases altruism, while the possibility of hiding from such claim reduces it. Our results indicate that sharing norms are crucial drivers of giving to other members of the network. We also find that pressure to share has a detrimental effect on the undertaking of profitable but risky investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews research on the role of anger in conflict. We distinguish between intrapersonal and interpersonal effects of anger, the former referring to the impact of parties’ feelings of anger on their own behavior and the latter referring to the impact of one parties’ anger on the other’s behavior. We further compare the effects of anger across a variety of conflict settings, including negotiation, ultimatum bargaining, prisoner’s dilemma, resource dilemma, and coalition formation. At the intrapersonal level, anger is associated with competition in all conflict settings. In contrast, the interpersonal effects of anger differ across situations, with anger sometimes eliciting cooperation, sometimes eliciting competition, and sometimes having no effect. Based on the research reviewed, we conclude that the interpersonal effects of anger in conflict are determined by the level of interdependence of the parties, their information processing tendencies, and the justifiability of the anger expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines students' management of academic writing tasks, with a particular focus on how a Japanese second language (L2) student writer of English integrates source text information into her written text. The data was gathered over one university semester through a triangulation of data collection procedures, namely interviews, journal studies and collection of written materials such as lecture notes, drafts and subject outlines. To date, there has been little research on this aspect of student writing, despite the integral importance of citation in demonstrating the originality of and/or justification for a writer's argument and consequently in deter- mining a reader's assessment as to the effectiveness of an academic paper. By drawing upon the frameworks developed by Campbell (1987, 1990), Hyland (2000) and Stein (1990a), this study examines citation behaviour and task representation by investigating the cognitive processes and written products of one student. More specifically, this study investigates the processes and the concomitant difficulties that the L2 student experienced when integrating source text information and representing a task to herself while composing. In this way, this paper can better inform us of students' actions, perceptions and attitudes when undertaking reading-to-write tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses and synthesizes the cumulative results of a new “neighborhood-effects” literature that examines social processes related to problem behaviors and health-related outcomes. Our review identified over 40 relevant studies published in peer-reviewed journals from the mid-1990s to 2001, the take-off point for an increasing level of interest in neighborhood effects. Moving beyond traditional characteristics such as concentrated poverty, we evaluate the salience of social-interactional and institutional mechanisms hypothesized to account for neighborhood-level variations in a variety of phenomena (e.g., delinquency, violence, depression, high-risk behavior), especially among adolescents. We highlight neighborhood ties, social control, mutual trust, institutional resources, disorder, and routine activity patterns. We also discuss a set of thorny methodological problems that plague the study of neighborhood effects, with special attention to selection bias. We conclude with promising strategies and directions for future research, including experimental designs, taking spatial and temporal dynamics seriously, systematic observational approaches, and benchmark data on neighborhood social processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The degree of altruistic behavior among strangers is an evolutionary puzzle. A prominent explanation is the evolutionary legacy hypothesis according to which an evolved reciprocity-based psychology affects behavior even when reciprocity is impossible, i.e., altruistic behavior in such instances is maladaptive. Empirical support for this explanation comes from laboratory experiments showing that surveillance cues, e.g., photographs of watching eyes, increase altruistic behavior. A competing interpretation for this evidence, however, is that the cues signal the experimenter’s expectations and participants, aware of being monitored, intentionally behave more altruistically to boost their reputation. Here we report the first results from a field experiment on the topic in which participants are unaware they are being monitored and reciprocity is precluded. The experiment investigates the impact of surveillance cues on a textbook example of altruistic behavior—hand hygiene prior to treating a ‘patient’. We find no evidence surveillance cues affect hand hygiene, despite using different measures of hand-hygiene quality and cues that have been previously shown to be effective. We argue that surveillance cues may have an effect only when participants have reasons to believe they are actually monitored. Thus they cannot support claims altruistic behavior between strangers is maladaptive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laboratory experiments offer an opportunity to isolate human behaviors with a level of precision that is often difficult to obtain using other (survey-based) methods. Yet, experimental tasks are often stripped of any social context, implying that inferences may not directly map to real world contexts. We randomly allocate 632 individuals (grouped randomly into 316 dyads) from small villages in Sierra Leone to four versions of the ultimatum game. In addition to the classic ultimatum game, where both the sender and receiver are anonymous, we reveal the identity of the sender, the receiver or both. This design allows us to explore how fairness behavior is affected by social context in a natural setting where players are drawn from populations that are well-acquainted. We find that average offers increase when the receiver’s identity is revealed, suggesting that anonymous ultimatum games underestimate expected fair offers. This study suggest that researchers wishing to relate laboratory behavior to contexts in which the participants are well-acquainted should consider revealing the identities of the players during game play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grant and Holmes (1981) present an investigation of the effects of stereotypic beliefs about Chinese and Irishmen on judgments of individuals. On the basis of their analysis of their data, they conclude that social stereotypes strongly influence judgments of individuals even when case information is available. As they emphasize, this conclusion runs counter to the results of a series of experiments by Locksley and her colleagues (Locksley, Borgida, Brekke, and Hepburn, 1980; Locksley, Hepburn, and Ortiz, /982), which demonstrate that the presence of case information significantly and substantially reduces effects of stereotypes on judgments of individuals. The contention of the present paper is that this apparent difference in results is not real. It is established that the design of Grant and Holmes's study does not permit evaluation of the argument advanced by Locksley and her colleagues, thus precluding comparisons between the two sets of data. Moreover, reanalyses of the Grant and Holmes data demonstrate that their subjects relied more heavily on case information than on social category information to make target judgments, and did not adjust the weight they assigned to case information as a function of social category information. Both of these effects are consistent with the line of reasoning developed by Locksley and her colleagues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although social psychology has increasingly influenced counseling psychology, the impact that counseling psychology has had or could have on social psychology is less well developed. This paper considers factors that have limited counseling's influence on social psychology. In addition, contributions that counseling can make to social psychology are presented. It is argued that both disciplines have evolved to investigate the behavior of "normal" individuals in social contexts. It is concluded that there is much to be gained by both specialties in a fuller and more comprehensive integration and understanding of the findings and methods of the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a microsociological study of a group of people who have undergone a threat experience. Within the combined theoretical frameworks of symbolic interactionism and phenomenology, the event is seen as a "reality shock" for its participants, involving cognitive crises in group and individual definitions of the situation. The after period is one in which procedures toward making the threat experience meaningful on both group and individual levels are instituted within group networks. These procedures on a group level involve the construction of a "real" event by the objectification of time and experience and through the emergence and attribution of post-hoc norms. Strategies toward the maintenance and continuity of identity include reconstruction of the threat situation, of other participants' behavior, of post-hoc norms, or of individual behavior, and the negotiation of identity on these various bases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past explanations of violence have characteristically paid more attention to the issues of social conditions and psychocultural stimuli than to the issue of timing. Timing is the focus of this paper in which a differential equation model of the temporal diffusion of violence is developed. This model is derived from behavioral generalizations which indicate that aggression is both instigated and inhibited via direct and vicarious learning. The parameters of the model provide measures of the instigation and inhibition processes that take place throughout an outbreak. Twenty-five data sets representing a wide variety of collective outbreaks of violence are used to test the empirical fit and to evaluate the credibility of the assumptions of the model. The model describes the overtime distribution of incidents quite accurately and the assumptions and implications of the derivation appear to be consistent with the cultural conditions surrounding the outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author arranges some of the major treatments of alienation within a coherent framework. He introduces a distinction between disassociation (certain specified objective conditions) and alienation (a specified experience) and articulates the relationship between these two by presenting a series of intervening psychological issues. A typology of human association is presented, and it is argued that especially two types of disassociation (i.e., marginality and subordination) and, to some extent, another (i.e., privilege) may be productive of alienation These conditions are considered at the cultural, social, and psychological levels of analysis. Variables connecting these conditions and alienation include the perception of the condition, evaluation, integration, blame, and response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to what is often assumed, order is not the strongest context for encouraging normative behavior. The strongest context effect on normative behavior comes from cues that clearly convey other people’s respect for norms. Ironically, this show of respect necessitates some contrasting disrespect that is being restored. Using civic virtues (such as helping behavior) as a prototype of normative behavior, the three field experiments described in this paper reveal the impact of normative cues on civic virtues. Results show that the strongest effect on making people follow prosocial norms in public places emanates from seeing order being restored, rather than just order being present. The robust and surprisingly large effects show that observing other people’s respect for one particular norm (as evidenced in their restoring physical order) makes it more likely that the onlooker follows other norms as well. This implies that prosocial behavior has the highest chance of spreading when people observe order being restored. There are clear policy implications: create low cost “normative respect cues” wherever it is desirable to increase conformity to norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing empirical research exploring the impact of threat appeals on driver behavior has reported inconsistent findings. In an effort to provide an up-to-date synthesis of the experimental findings, meta-analytic techniques were employed to examine the impact of threat-based messages on fear arousal and on lab-based indices of driving behavior. Experimental studies (k = 13, N = 3044), conducted between 1990 and 2011, were included in the analyses. The aims of the current analysis were (a) to examine whether or not the experimental manipulations had a significant impact on evoked fear, (b) to examine the impact of threat appeals on three distinct indices of driving, and (c) to identify moderators and mediators of the relationship between fear and driving outcomes. Large effects emerged for the level of fear evoked, with experimental groups reporting increased fear arousal in comparison to control groups (r = .64, n = 619, p<.01). The effect of threat appeals on driving outcomes, however, was not significant (r = .03, p = .17). This analysis of the experimental literature indicates that threat appeals can lead to increased fear arousal, but do not appear to have the desired impact on driving behavior. We discuss these findings in the context of threat-based road safety campaigns and future directions for experimental research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on an investigation of students’ experiences of learning, using a framework that focuses on the concepts of alienation and engagement. Thirty-six third year chemical engineering students were interviewed about their learning experiences. Alienation is defined here as the absence of a relationship that students might desire or expect to experience. Using this focus, six possible ‘relationships’ were identified: to one's studies; to the broader university life; to home; to the career; to one's classmates; and to the lecturer. In each category a range of both alienated and engaged experiences were identified. With regard to the latter two categories, important de-alienating strategies were noted, and in particular the role that lecturers can play in facilitating these strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education is enhanced when students are able to be active, rather than passive, learners (McKeachie, 2002). Fortunately, social psychologists have a rich history of creating and publishing classroom demonstrations that allow for such active learning. Unfortunately, these demonstrations have been published in diverse journals, teaching manuals, and edited volumes that are not always readily available. The purpose of this article is to review demonstrations and exercises that have been developed for teaching students about social influence. Using an annotated bibliography format, we review more than five dozen techniques that assist instructors in demonstrating such social influence principles as cognitive dissonance, conformity, obedience, deindividuation, propaganda, framing, persuasion, advertising, social norms, and the self‐fulfilling prophecy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Simmel, Blau, and Coser, we assume that people are segmentally drawn into a web of institutional affiliations and involvements. The major objective of this paper is to describe the interconnections among people's commitments to various institutions. Specifically, we focus upon how commitments to particular institutions either transcend an institutional realm and effect other institutional commitments or are compartmentalized (i.e., inconsequential). Data are obtained from a probability sample of connecticut adults drawn in 1981 and reinterviewed in 1982. The results of varied analyses are consistent in suggesting that people's commitments to economic, educational and political institutions are interconnected. They are also important antecedents of a more general and diffuse sense of alienation. People's familial and religious commitments, by contrast, appear to be consequential neither in relation to other institutional commitments nor as antecedents of alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have generally contended that high-status members of a group are less likely to incur sanctions for deviant behavior than are low-status group members. Traditional explanations for this phenomenon do not adequately specify the processes which underly such differential treatment, nor can they account for the less frequent instances in which high-status individuals are actually more harshly sanctioned. This paper focuses on the perceptual work facing the potential sanctioner, and uses attribution theory as a framework for understanding the specific areas of advantage enjoyed by high-status group members. An examination of each stage in the attribution process allan's a reconceptualization of the sanctioning process as dynamic, and context-bound. Thus, using the same theory, we also specify the conditions under which we would expect the potential sanctioner to levy more harsh sanctions against the high-status deviant. Finally, factors which increase the likelihood of bias or distortion in the attribution process are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is pervasive in our lives, influencing social interaction including human courtship. To connect with potential partners via CMC, modern relationship-seekers must master faster and shorter methods of communicating self-disclosure and affect. Although CMC can lack crucial sensory information in this context, emojis may provide useful aid. Across two studies, we assessed attitudes toward and frequency of emoji use, and whether signaling affect via emoji use relates to more romantic and sexual opportunities. Our findings suggest that emoji use with potential partners is associated with maintaining connection beyond the first date, and more romantic and sexual interactions over the previous year. This research provides evidence that emojis convey important affective information to potential partners, and are potentially associated with more successful intimate connection. Implications for multiple theoretical models and methodologies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploiting nation-wide data from the Danish National Birth Cohort, we show that children’s emotional and behavioral problems measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) are closely related to their performance in standardized academic tests for reading and mathematics in sixth grade. The relationship is remarkably linear across the entire distribution for both the total difficulties score and subscale scores of the SDQ; higher scores on the SDQ (more problems) are related to worse performance in academic tests. We assess the similarity across respondent type; parent (child age 7 and 11), teacher (child age 11) and self-reported scores (child age 11), and find that teacher and parent reported scores have very similar slopes in the SDQ–test score relationship, while the child reported SDQ in relation to the academic test performance has a flatter slope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most aspects of our lives are governed by large, highly developed institutions that integrate several governance tasks under one authority structure. But theorists differ as to the mechanisms that drive the development of such concentrated governance systems from rudimentary beginnings. Is the emergence of integrated governance schemes a symptom of consolidation of authority by small status groups? Or does integration occur because a complex institution has more potential responses to a complex environment? Here we examine the emergence of complex governance regimes in 5,000 sovereign, resource-constrained, self-governing online communities, ranging in scale from one to thousands of users. Each community begins with no community members and no governance infrastructure. As communities grow, they are subject to selection pressures that keep better managed servers better populated. We identify predictors of community success and test the hypothesis that governance complexity can enhance community fitness. We find that what predicts success depends on size: changes in complexity predict increased success with larger population servers. Specifically, governance rules in a large successful community are more numerous and broader in scope. They also tend to rely more on rules that concentrate power in administrators, and on rules that manage bad behavior and limited server resources. Overall, this work is consistent with theories that formal integrated governance systems emerge to organize collective responses to interdependent resource management problems, especially as factors such as population size exacerbate those problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]