scholarly journals The polarization within and across individuals: the hierarchical Ising opinion model

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Han L J van der Maas ◽  
Jonas Dalege ◽  
Lourens Waldorp
Keyword(s):  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Statistical Physics ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Opinion Dynamics ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Bounded Confidence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Resistance To Persuasion ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Level

Abstract Polarization of opinions is a societal threat. It involves psychological processes as well as group dynamics, a popular topic in statistical physics. However, the interaction between the within individual dynamics of attitude formation and across person polarization is rarely studied. By modelling individual attitudes as Ising networks of attitude elements, and approximating this behaviour by the cusp singularity, we developed a fundamentally new model of social dynamics. In this hierarchical model, agents behave either discretely or continuously depending on their attention to the issue. At the individual level, the model reproduces the mere thought effect and resistance to persuasion. At the social level, the model implies polarization and the persuasion paradox. We propose a new intervention for escaping polarization in bounded confidence models of opinion dynamics.

scholarly journals Does Money Buy Happiness?

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-78
Author(s):  
Yew-Kwang Ng
Keyword(s):  
Competition Effect ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Low Level ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Level ◽  
Environmental Disruption ◽  
Adaptation Effects

AbstractAfter a relatively low level of survival and comfort, additional consumption does not increase happiness significantly, especially at the social level. At the individual level, people want more due to the relative competition effect which cancels out at the social level. In addition, the adaptation effects and environmental disruption effects also work to limit the contributions of higher consumption and enlarge the gap between expectation and actuality.

The Psychology of (Pseudo)Science: Cognitive, Social, and Cultural Factors

Pseudoscience ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilio J. C. Lobato ◽  
Corinne Zimmerman
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Psychology Of Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social And Cultural Factors ◽  
Social Level

We review findings from the psychology of science that are relevant to understanding or explaining peoples’ tendencies to believe both scientific and pseudoscientific claims. We discuss relevant theoretical frameworks and empirical findings to support the proposal that pseudoscientific beliefs arise in much the same way as other scientific and non-scientific beliefs do. In particular, we focus on (a) cognitive and metacognitive factors at the individual level; (b) trust in testimony and judgments of expertise at the social level; and (c) personal identity and the public’s relationship with the scientific community at a cultural level.

Conceptualizing intragroup and intergroup dynamics within a controlled crowd evacuation

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terra Elzie, ME ◽  
Erika Frydenlund, MS ◽  
Andrew J. Collins, PhD ◽  
R. Michael Robinson, PhD
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Group Behavior ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Crowd Modeling ◽  
The Individual

Social dynamics play a critical role in successful pedestrian evacuations. Crowd modeling research has made progress in capturing the way individual and group dynamics affect evacuations; however, few studies have simultaneously examined how individuals and groups interact with one another during egress. To address this gap, the researchers present a conceptual agent-based model (ABM) designed to study the ways in which autonomous, heterogeneous, decision-making individuals negotiate intragroup and intergroup behavior while exiting a large venue. A key feature of this proposed model is the examination of the dynamics among and between various groupings, where heterogeneity at the individual level dynamically affects group behavior and subsequently group/group interactions. ABM provides a means of representing the important social factors that affect decision making among diverse social groups. Expanding on the 2013 work of Vizzari et al., the researchers focus specifically on social factors and decision making at the individual group and group/group levels to more realistically portray dynamic crowd systems during a pedestrian evacuation. By developing a model with individual, intragroup, and intergroup interactions, the ABM provides a more representative approximation of real-world crowd egress. The simulation will enable more informed planning by disaster managers, emergency planners, and other decision makers. This pedestrian behavioral concept is one piece of a larger simulation model. Future research will build toward an integrated model capturing decision-making interactions between pedestrians and vehicles that affect evacuation outcomes.

NEW DISCUSSIONS CHALLENGE THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETIES

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (07) ◽  
pp. 1250033 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. GARGIULO ◽  
S. HUET
Keyword(s):  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Dynamical Process ◽  
Bounded Confidence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Group Size Distribution ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Group Structures ◽  
Bounded Confidence Model ◽  
Challenge Group

Can the discussions about new issues challenge the organization of a society? That is, the question we tried to answer with a very simple model considering a society where individuals are organized into groups. An individual discuss its opinion on this new issue following the rule of the bounded confidence model implying that an individual influences and is influenced when it is sufficiently open-minded. One of the main ingredients of the model is the groups that both influence the behavior of the individual and characterize the social network topology. Individuals choose the group membership according to their opinion. Starting from an initial homogeneous group size distribution, four different prototypical regimes can be reproduced by the model, depending on the individual open-mindedness: From a high heterogeneity condition, with one or two largely major groups, to an invariant situation of homogeneity. The heterogeneity is explained by the dynamics of individuals. In this paper, we extend the studies of a previous work on the argument, deepening the analysis on the internal structure of the groups and on the dynamical process itself. To do this, we analyze indicators related to the stability of the obtained virtual society. We found that the dynamics of groups is not stable when open-mindedness is small, even if the dynamics of opinions reaches equilibrium. On the other side, for larger values of the open-mindedness, both the opinion and the group dynamics stabilize. Thus, our study shows that the introduction of a new topic of discussion in a society can strongly challenge group structures, both concerning their stability and their size.

Relationships between Negotiators: A Neglected Topic in the Study of Negotiation

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christer Jönsson
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Social Process ◽  
International Negotiations ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
Level Of Aggregation ◽  
The Individual

Negotiation can be seen as a dynamic social process. Perspectives emphasizing the social context and dynamics of negotiations have been largely neglected in the negotiation literature. This article addresses the question of why social relations have received such scant attention, reviews the existing literature on negotiation as a social process, and spells out some ingredients of a social contextual approach. Finally, by way of illustration, such an approach is applied to international negotiations. Whereas ideas about social dynamics emanate from a focus on individuals, international negotiations take place at a level of aggregation and representation most remote from the individual level. Yet, even at this macro level, social context matters in negotiations.

scholarly journals Minimal Organizational Requirements for the Ascription of Animal Personality to Social Groups

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilton F. Japyassú ◽  
Lucia C. Neco ◽  
Nei Nunes-Neto
Keyword(s):  
Communication Networks ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Ecological Communities ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
Self Organized ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Level ◽  
Organizational Approach

Recently, psychological phenomena have been expanded to new domains, crisscrossing boundaries of organizational levels, with the emergence of areas such as social personality and ecosystem learning. In this contribution, we analyze the ascription of an individual-based concept (personality) to the social level. Although justified boundary crossings can boost new approaches and applications, the indiscriminate misuse of concepts refrains the growth of scientific areas. The concept of social personality is based mainly on the detection of repeated group differences across a population, in a direct transposition of personality concepts from the individual to the social level. We show that this direct transposition is problematic for avowing the nonsensical ascription of personality even to simple electronic devices. To go beyond a metaphoric use of social personality, we apply the organizational approach to a review of social insect communication networks. Our conceptual analysis shows that socially self-organized systems, such as isolated ant trails and bee’s recruitment groups, are too simple to have social personality. The situation is more nuanced when measuring the collective choice between nest sites or foraging patches: some species show positive and negative feedbacks between two or more self-organized social structures so that these co-dependent structures are inter-related by second-order, social information systems, complying with a formal requirement for having social personality: the social closure of constraints. Other requirements include the decoupling between individual and social dynamics, and the self-regulation of collective decision processes. Social personality results to be sometimes a metaphorical transposition of a psychological concept to a social phenomenon. The application of this organizational approach to cases of learning ecosystems, or evolutionary learning, could help to ground theoretically the ascription of psychological properties to levels of analysis beyond the individual, up to meta-populations or ecological communities.

The embodiment of social capital at individual and communal levels

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (9/10) ◽  
pp. 812-830
Author(s):  
Anson Au
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Social Exchanges ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Directions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Dynamics Of Action

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the study of social capital focused on the level at which it is embodied, cross-comparing two prominent camps that have emerged in the social capital literature: a communal level and an individual level. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews the intersections and departures between communal level and individual level conceptualizations of social capital according to the social dynamics of action within social exchanges that they stimulate, the processes by which social capital is activated/mobilized and the rewards they yield, and their linkages to inequality through network diversity. Findings This paper articulates new directions for future research in social capital: more analytical precision for studying returns to social capital; more efforts to transcend the individual-communal divide; the depreciation of social capital or tie decay; and recognizing the importance of ties whose value does not come from the ability to provide instrumental gain, but just from their very existence. Originality/value Social capital has informed many influential agendas in the social sciences, but the sheer volume of which has largely gone unscoped. This paper reviews this literature to provide an accessible introduction to social capital, organized by social processes foundational to sociology and a novel contribution to the literature by articulating new directions for future research in the area.

scholarly journals Public Economics and Inequality: Uncovering Our Social Nature

2021 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Saez
Keyword(s):  
Public Economics ◽  
Income Support ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Retirement Benefits ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
Advanced Economies ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Level

This paper argues that the social nature of humans, absent from the standard economic model, is crucial for understanding our large modern social states and why concerns about inequality are so pervasive. A social solution arises when a situation is resolved at the group level (rather than the individual level) through cooperation and fair distribution of the resulting surplus. In human societies, childcare and education for the young, retirement benefits for the old, health care for the sick, and income support for those in need are resolved at the social level and through the social state in advanced economies. Social situations are pervasive even outside government and play a significant role in the distribution of pretax market incomes.

scholarly journals Factors Affecting Happiness

2021 ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Yew-Kwang Ng
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Level

AbstractMany factors may affect happiness, including how our needs (including the five levels identified by Maslow) are satisfied. Four important F’s for happiness at the individual level are: faith, form/fitness, family, and friends. At the social level, important factors include environmental quality, equality, social capital (including trust).

scholarly journals Collective rhythm as an emergent property during human social coordination

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arodi Farrera ◽  
Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Interpersonal Coordination ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Social Coordination ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociocultural Processes ◽  
The Individual

The literature on social interactions has shown that participants coordinate not only at the behavioral but also at the physiological and neural levels, and that this coordination gives a temporal structure to the individual and to the social dynamics. However, it has not been fully explored whether such temporal patterns emerge during interpersonal coordination beyond dyads, whether this phenomenon arises from complex cognitive mechanisms or from relatively simple rules of behavior, or the sociocultural processes that underlie this phenomenon. We review the evidence for the existence of group-level rhythmic patterns that result from social interactions and argue that, by imposing a temporal structure at the individual and interaction levels, interpersonal coordination in groups leads to temporal regularities that cannot be predicted from the individual periodicities: a collective rhythm. Moreover, we use this interpretation of the literature to discuss how taking into account the sociocultural niche in which individuals develop can help explain the seemingly divergent results that have been reported on the social influences and consequences of interpersonal coordination. We make recommendations on further research to test these arguments and their relationship to the feeling of belonging and assimilation experienced during group dynamics.

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