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

Real‐time individuals' destination prediction is of great significance for real‐time user tracking, service recommendation and other related applications. Traditional technology mainly used statistical methods based on the travel patterns mined from personal history travel data. However, it is not clear how to predict the destinations of individuals with only limited personal historical data. In this paper, taking the public transportation metro systems as example, we design a practical method called practical model with strong interpretability and predictability to predict each passenger's destination. Our main novelties are two aspects: (1) We propose to predict individuals' destination by combining personal and crowd behavior under certain context. (2) An explanatory model combining discrete choice model and neural network model is proposed to predict individuals' stochastic trip's destination, which can be applied to other transportation analysis scenarios about individuals' choice behavior such as travel mode choice or route choice. We validate our method based on extensive experiments, using smart card data collected by automatic fare collection system and weather data in Shenzhen, China. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve better performance than other baselines in terms of prediction accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

In emergency situation, mass panic often causes more causalities than the disaster itself. The crowd emotional model could be used to simulate how crowd behavior in emergency scenarios and be helpful for developing crowd evacuation plans in emergency situations. However, existing crowd emotional models usually set model parameters in an empirical manner and are not validated by real cases. In this paper, a crowd emotional model is proposed to simulate the crowd movement in outdoor emergency situations. First of all, the crowd entropy and the movement difference are proposed to describe the emotional impact of the crowd scene on the agents. The perception of vision and hearing are considered, and the calculation formulas of the agent's emotional intensity and crowd emotional contagion are proposed. By calculating individual trajectories in the real video, the cumulative differences between the movements of the real crowd and the corresponding virtual crowd are analyzed. At last, a multi‐parameter optimization method is implemented by the differential evolution algorithm. To verify the parameters in models, three videos which are generated from three real cases, including explosion attack, shooting incident, and crowd disturbance are selected for experimental verification. The results showed that the proposed model could be a feasible method for optimizing parameters to simulate the emergency scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper discusses crowd control at stadiums in emergency evacuation situations such as fire, bomb threat, and terror incidents. As a comparative reference for this study, the author observed egress/way‐home crowd behavior at eight stadiums by walking with the crowd as a tracer. At some stadiums, the crowd was controlled by closing certain exits, installing temporary fences, and providing staff guidance to relieve congestion and counterflow outside the stadiums. At other stadiums, there was no accumulation, and spectators egressed freely. In case of a fire, flames and smoke can be controlled by fire extinguishment, smoke control, etc.; therefore, the need for urgent evacuation can be relieved to some extent. However, urgent evacuation is needed in emergencies such as a fire in a closed‐roof stadium or indoor premises, or a bomb threat. In such situations, sufficient space for accumulation outside the stadium is required. Therefore, stadiums that let spectators returning home walk freely after normal events are desirable because urgent evacuation can be completed in the same manner. The above aspects should be considered in the whole process of selecting stadium sites, planning circulation in stadiums, and deploying guiding staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

This paper studies large‐population dynamic games involving a linear‐quadratic‐Gaussian (LQG) system with an exponential cost functional. The parameter in the cost functional can describe an investor's risk attitude. In the game, there are a major agent and a population of N$$ N $$ minor agents where N$$ N $$ is very large. The agents in the games are coupled via both their individual stochastic dynamics and their individual cost functions. The mean field methodology yields a set of decentralized controls, which are shown to be an ϵ$$ \epsilon $$‐Nash equilibrium for a finite N$$ N $$ population system where ϵ=O1N$$ \epsilon =O\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}\right) $$. Numerical results are established to illustrate the impact of the population's collective behaviors and the consistency of the mean field estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Many models have been developed in recent years to describe pedestrian group behavior. Most prior research on group behavior focuses mainly on small groups and does not provide a general approach for grouping pedestrians with respect to different group sizes. They also analyze pedestrian group dynamics in normal circumstances. However, people's reactions who are aware of an emergency are not the same as how they respond to normal or usual situations. The central focus of this paper is to study pedestrian group behavior during evacuation. To accomplish these objectives, a new model is proposed with some extensions of a social force model in its emergency context. The new extensions are intended to simulate the single leader‐centered and group‐centered crowd behavior in emergencies. Besides small pedestrian groups, larger ones are also considered, and extensions are added in this direction. The model is calibrated using the results of an existing experimental study. Then, the model is verified by testing for the occurrence of certain emergent patterns. The results indicate that the proposed model can capture these trends. Additionally, the model is validated by comparing the simulation results with experimental results available in the literature. Also, several different evacuation scenarios are used to evaluate the proposed model. The simulation results show that leader‐centered behavior performs better than group‐centered behavior with respect to the evacuation time for small groups. The number of leaders also affects the evacuation time. Moreover, an increase in the number of leaders positively influences the effect of the width of the door on evacuation time, but the size of this effect depends on the number of leaders. Finally, group‐centered behavior results in less evacuation time than leader‐centered behavior in the presence of multiple exits, and leader‐centered (also called single leader‐centered in this study) behavior causes a more unbalanced use of the exits than group‐centered behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Panic buying emerged as a significant phenomenon during the COVID‐19 pandemic. This study draws on the scarcity principle, crowd psychology and contagion theory to investigate the antecedents and consequences of panic buying. The antecedents included in this study are government measures, media and peer influence and the fear of missing out. The consequences are founded on a sense of security and guilt. Retailer intervention is included as a moderator to the proposed main effects. Data were collected from 341 consumers who engaged in panic buying and were residents of the United States and Australia during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Structural equation modelling was employed to test the proposed model. The results show that the proposed antecedents (except fear of missing out) were significantly related to panic buying, which in turn had a significant influence on panic buyers' psychological outcomes. The moderating effects of retailer intervention varied across different product categories. Discussion and implications of these findings are provided for policy makers, customers and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

This paper focuses on simulating agents transporting passive objects in a virtual environment with pedestrians. The agents adopt the pushing manipulation patterns to transport the passive objects. We propose techniques to achieve two kinds of cooperation. First, the agents transport the passive objects to the goal positions. During the transportation process, the agents may adjust their formation to transport the passive objects effectively. Second, the agents avoid collision with each other and passive objects in an unfreezing manner. Experiment results show that our technique avoids the freezing problem while the agents are transporting multiple objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper explores the emergence of organization from individuals' interactions in a collective. Its focus is on small collectives like teams. Organization is explained as an outcome of both self-organization and design. Self-organization requires stretching environments and also commitment of individuals to the interests of the collective. As interactions produce organization individuals are constituted as autonomous and non-autonomous roles participating in processes of constitution and production. The interest in these processes is that they help understanding the embodiment of knowledge to produce organizations with desirable properties. This understanding triggers a reflection about research and design. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper emphasizes the contribution of 'borrowed experience' to strategy reformulation. The industry group is described as a particularly important arena in which niche-related problems and solutions are identified and tested. Industry-wide mistakes in environmental interpretation and strategic response provide interesting evidence of the importance of this contribution to organizational decision making. An industry oriented view of strategy reformulation requires two kinds of research which are rarely conducted today. We need to know more about the pool of strategic concepts which a group of organizations holds in common at any given time. Spender's study of fork-lift truck rental companies is reviewed as an example of this kind of work. A second kind of needed research involves changes in strategic concepts over time. A study of the perceived import threat to the appliance industry from 1950-1975 is summarized as an example of this second kind of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Copyright of Methods in Ecology & Evolution is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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

The purpose of this paper is to critically explore the communities of practice approach to managing knowledge and its use among management academics and practitioners in recent years. In so doing, the aim is to identify the limits of the approach in the field of knowledge management. The paper begins with a brief description of the communities of practice approach. This is followed by a review of critiques of the approach evident in the management literature. A number of further challenges are then elaborated. The limits of communities of practice are subsequently discussed and brief conclusions drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theme of this paper is the relationship between emotion, management and organization, specifically, how emotions are transformed by rationalizations, and vice versa. It is argued that managers' tendency to rationalize emotion creates additional emotional dynamics, and that these provide opportunities for organizing reflection. This idea also points to a limitation of approaches that are concerned with how emotions can be managed through emotional intelligence. The study took place during a turbulent period in the history of a company, while it was being taken over. Managers in Hyder plc, formerly the largest stock market listed corporation in Wales, UK, carried a tension into their work roles. This was created from particular emotions (pain and shame) and their rationalizations of, or detachment from, these emotions (self-interest and disinterest). Such tension was a necessary part of maintaining their managerial role under difficult and emotionally charged circumstances. The study also showed how fears about personal position undermined the ability of managers to enact their authority and to act collectively within the organization. The conclusion discusses the relationship between collective emotional dynamics (political relatedness) and the organization of reflection, as well as providing questions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

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

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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

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

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

Zöller et al. (Ethology, 2020) criticize our original publication (Wikelski et al., Ethology, 126(9), 2020, 931) for obvious reasons: we only observed the behavior of one group of farm animals before, during and after one earthquake series in one area of the world. It is clear that no earthquake predictions are possible, and should not be attempted, from this data set. However, what we show is that there is important information within this animal collective pertaining to potential future local forecasting of earthquakes when combined with traditional data sources. We maintain that combining Zöller et al.'s (2020) modeling tools with the adequate use of our data can stimulate novel ways of earthquake forecasting. Future studies should combine both approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics such as cognition in science and technology, and collective behavior.

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

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

In this paper, we consider a collective tracking problem of a multi-agent system which has a varying-velocity leader and evolves on balanced information topologies. First, we propose a coordination-variable-based control strategy for every agent to track the leader whose state may not be measured. Moreover, from a collective behavior perspective, a new decomposition method is utilized to decompose the resulting closed-loop system into two subsystems, and a novel measure also is introduced to characterize collective tracking performance of the system. Finally, we prove that the proposed control strategy can not only estimate the tracking errors but also increase the introduced measure to improve collective tracking performance even under the case of balanced information topologies. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

Human crowd is a fascinating social phenomenon in nature. This paper presents our work on designing behavior model for virtual humans in a crowd simulation under normal-life and emergency situations. Our model adopts an agent-based approach and employs a layered framework to reflect the natural pattern of human-like decision making process, which generally involves a person's awareness of the situation and consequent changes on the internal attributes. The social group and crowd-related behaviors are modeled according to the findings and theories observed from social psychology (e.g., social attachment theory). By integrating our model into an agent execution process, each individual agent can response differently to the perceived environment and make realistic behavioral decisions based on various physiological, emotional, and social group attributes. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, a case study has been conducted, which shows that realistic human behaviors can be generated at both individual and group level. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to build theory on peak performance at the group level. Peak performance transcends ordinary performance and is associated with a subjective experience in which one loses a sense of time and space as well as feels great joy and bliss. We chose to study this phenomenon at the group level through a methodology of participant observation in an orchestra. We found that groups can be transformed by their own performance in a reflexive process in which virtuosity, or individual peak performance, becomes collective. We offer a propositional model of collective virtuosity in organizations, and offer directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

This paper presents a set of theoretical propositions regarding knowledge sharing in China and Russia. We argue that there are important national cultural similarities and differences between the two countries that result in certain similarities and differences in individual knowledge-sharing behaviour in Chinese and Russian organizations. We claim that vertical collectivism and particularistic social relations in China and Russia lead to intensive social relations among organizational members, which facilitate knowledge sharing between in-group members in organizations in both countries. We also maintain that differences in the essence of collectivism as well as in the extent of collectivism in the two cultural contexts lead to different intensities of knowledge sharing in Chinese and Russian organizations. Finally, we discuss theoretical and management implications of this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]