Empathy concerns enhance prosociality and modulate frontal theta oscillatory activity in young adults

Decision making is a process that can be strongly affected by social factors. Profuse evidence has shown how people deviate from traditional rational-choice predictions under different levels of social interactions. The emergence of prosocial decision making, defined as any action that is addressed to benefit another individual even at the expense of personal benefits, has been reported as an important example of such social influence. Furthermore, brain evidence has shown the involvement of structures such the prefrontal cortex, anterior insula and midcingulate cortex during decision settings in which a decision maker interacts with others under physical pain or distress or while being observed by others. Using a slightly modified version of the dictator game, we tested the hypothesis that the inclusion of another person into the decision setting increases prosocial decisions in young adults and that this increase is higher when the other person is associated with others in need. At the brain level, we hypothesized that the increase in prosocial decisions correlates with frontal theta activity as a marker of empathy saliency. The results showed that the inclusion of another person into the decision setting increased prosocial behavior only when this presence was associated with someone in need and that this was associated with an increase in frontocentral theta-oscillatory activity. These results suggest that the presence of someone in need enhances both empathy concerns and norm compliance, raising the participants’ prosocial decision making.

Human Rights and Corporate Reinsurance: From Ensuring Rights to Insuring Risks

With the aimof grounding the analysis of private transnational human rights governance, the article examines how a European reinsurance company links its human rights policy to its core business of underwriting risks in the case of Belo Monte, a large hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon. Based on the current international regulatory framework, the global political economy of reinsurance is becoming a constitutive element of human rights governance. Conceptualising underwriting as a social practice, we observe how human rights norms are translated into the corporate form of risks. This process goes beyond questions of norm compliance and involves practices of valuation and boundary-drawing based on the underwriter’s competences and background knowledgeabout reinsurance markets, value chains and corporate hierarchies. We conclude with a critique of private governance as an institutional pillar of the human rights system that rests on business rationales rather than lending institutional power to rights-holders.

The 2020 Research on Problematic Information on the COVID19 Pandemic. A Systematic Literature Review

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major turning point in scholarly attention to information-related problems, including the infodemic and fake news. The paper presents a systematic and comprehensive literature review on multidisciplinary research into problematic information around COVID-19 published in 2020, with a view to identifying the main trends from a disciplinary, methodological, and substantive perspective. We collected 862 records in English from three leading scientific databases (Scopus, Web of Science, and EBSCOhost) by searching, in the title and abstract, a set of keywords related to COVID-19 and information problems. After removing the duplicates and documents other than scientific papers published in scientific journals (such as magazine articles and letters), the three authors screened the records to retain the empirical articles which dealt more than just incidentally with the topic, ending up with 378 papers. The three coders analyzed the results and applied a number of pre-defined categories related to the disciplinary, methodological, and substantive characteristics of the papers. Analysis of frequencies and computational methods, including social network analysis and text mining, were used to analyze the data. The corpus of 378 papers published in 2020 on problematic COVID-19 information revealed considerable contributions from Medicine and Social Sciences and a disciplinarily and geographically interconnected field. Quantitative methods and especially surveys stand out as the most popular approaches, with a considerable number of more discursive papers offering expert views on pandemic-related informational problems. The main trends from a substantive perspective were conspiracy theories and their impact on norm compliance, and the attention to informational problems defined though the concept of infodemic.

Compliance to School Classroom Norms and Perceived School Climate among Senior High School Students in a Private University in Manila,Philippines

This quantitative study aimedto determine the correlation between senior high school Grade 12 students’ perception of school climate and compliance with school classroom normsin a private university in Manila, Philippines. A sample of 249 Grade 12 respondents who were randomly selected answered the online self-administered questionnaire composed of modified scales to explore the two variables, with Cronbach tests exhibiting an acceptable level of internal consistency (perceptions school climate = 0.88, compliance of classroom norms = 0.86). The study found apositive perceptionof school cli-mate (M= 4.19, SD = 0.40)and a very high level of classroom norm compliance (M= 3.40, SD = 0.32) among the respondents. The Pearson R test revealed a significant moderate positive correlation between their perception of school climateand their level of school classroom norm compliance and (r = 0.554, p< 0.001). This implies that their compliance or adherence to school classroom norms increases as their perception of school climate positively increases.

Why do we wear masks? Legitimacy, trust and norm compliance during pandemic

Health regulations curbing the spread of the Kovid-19 virus have brought a number of restrictions into our social life, from wearing masks and maintaining physical distance, to the complete abolition of important segments of social life. In doing so, the government has responded to the key risks of a pandemic: the health of individuals and the ability of health systems to care for large numbers of patients. At the very beginning of the pandemic, two notions took shape in the public: that young people are at lower risk than the elderly and the sick, and that they adhere less to epidemiological measures. Using a dana obtained through the survey at a sample of students at the Faculty of Law in Belgrade, I tried to establish the extent to which they comply with the regulations and which factors influence it the most. The results show that a relatively small percentage of respondents regularly comply with health regulations and that most of them are in the ambivalence zone. Compliance with the measures is influenced by the following factors: belief that the measures are justified and effective, that is, agreement with the content of the norms; trust in institutions, and especially trust in experts and doctors; as well as regular media consumption and trust in their objectivity. Social control, that is, moral and legal condemnation for non-compliance with measures, did not prove to be significant. These findings show that in crisis such as this, clear and transparent communication, and the behavior of actors and institutions that instills trust, can ensure voluntary compliance with legal measures.