PurposeHelping Autism‐diagnosed teenagers navigate and develop socially is an EU research project in progress. The aim of HANDS is to investigate the potential of persuasive technology as a tool to help young people diagnosed, to whatever degree, as autistic. The HANDS project set out to develop mobile ICT solutions to help young people with autism become more fully integrated into society and the purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the design behind the HANDS toolset.Design/methodology/approachThe topic of (...) credibility is approached from an analytical, as well as an ethical, angle in order to address issues of credibility in relation to designing assistive technological tools. In addition, the authors set out to explore possible ways in which credibility can be evaluated. The paper presents a preliminary method for the evaluation of credibility; but which requires further refinement, as well as empirical support in order to inform us about issues of system credibility. Therefore, the suggested method reflects a working hypothesis which may serve as a springboard for further investigation.FindingsThe authors propose a preliminary method which reveals the necessity of certain preconditions requisite for evaluating the credibility of a system; and, in this way, seek to establish an ethically sound evaluation procedure for analysing credibility, by combining quantitative and qualitative assessments of system credibility.Research limitations/implicationsFurther investigation of the evaluation process is needed to develop a standard for resolving the credibility of a system. Naturally, such a standard would serve not only as a tool for measuring credibility but also as a didactic tool for scaffolding a pedagogic dialogue between teacher and learner. It becomes important, therefore, to undertake the task of developing this standard in collaboration with the teachers in the HANDS project.Originality/valueThe paper discusses credibility issues and ethical concerns with a view to designing mobile solutions for autism‐diagnosed teenagers. The ideas expressed and developed herein are applicable to many assistive, technological tools available to persons with special needs. (shrink)

Like the navigation tools that freed ancient sailors from the need to stay close to the shoreline—eventually affording the discovery of new worlds—Big Data might open us up to new sociological possibilities by freeing us from the shackles of hypothesis testing. But for that to happen we need forensic social science: the careful compilation of evidence from unstructured digital traces as a means to generate new theories.

In the last few decades, there has been a genuine ‘adaptive turn’ in psychiatry, resulting in evolutionary accounts for an increasing number of psychopathologies. In this paper, I explore the advantages and problems with the two main evolutionary approaches to depression, namely the mismatch and persistence accounts . I will argue that while both evolutionary theories of depression might provide some helpful perspectives, the accounts also harbor significant flaws that might question their authority and usefulness as explanations.

The Social Intelligence or Social Brain Hypothesis is an influential theory that aims to explain the evolution of brain size and cognitive complexity among the primates. This has shaped work in both primate behavioural ecology and comparative psychology in deep and far-reaching ways. Yet, it not only perpetuates many of the conceptual confusions that have plagued psychology since its inception, but amplifies them, generating an overly intellectual view of what it means to be a competent and successful (...) social primate. Here, I present an analysis of the Social Intelligence/Brain hypothesis highlighting how its anthropocentric origins have led us to be held captive by a picture of what social life involves and the kind of mind needed to navigate the social landscape. I go on to consider how experimental work in this vein either does not test what it claims to be testing, or introduces impossible problems regarding animal minds that cannot be solved, but only dissolved. What we need, in other words, is the application of “Wittgenstein's razor” and the reinvention of primatology along his enactivist lines. (shrink)

Largely aided by the neurological discovery of so-called “ mirror neurons,” the attention to motor activity during action observation has exploded over the last two decades. The idea that we internally “ mirror ” the actions of others has led to a new strand of implicit simulation theories of action understanding[1][2]. The basic idea of this sort of simulation theory is that we, via an automatic covert activation of our own action representations, can understand the action and possibly the goal (...) and/or intentions of the observed agent. In this way motor “simulation” is seen as the basis for low-level “mind-reading”; i.e. for the ascription of goals and intentional mental states to others. The thought is that one, through mirroring simulations, can get beyond the observable behaviour to the hidden minds of others. I am questioning the idea of an exclusively “mirroring” role of the motor system in social perception, which is tacitly assumed in this sort of simulation theories. Is motor activity during action observation really primarily a simulation, a detailed “echo” of the others action? My point is not that we never simulate what we observe, but rather to question whether such processes are representative of the overall motor contribution to social cognition. More and more studies on the functional properties of mirror neurons and motor facilitation during perception points to a more complex role of the motor system in action perception. Recently, several proposals have been made attempting to reinterpret and critique the function of motor activity in social situations. I shall here briefly touch on a few of these and sketch parts of my own alternative “social affordance” hypothesis of the sensorimotor contribution to social perception. By way of these analyses I highlight how traditional discussions are marred by problematic theoretical assumptions. It seems to me that we need a thorough reinterpretation not just of mirror neurons and mirroring, but also of what we take motor and social cognition to be. In my view the details of the sensorimotor findings underline the need to move beyond the simplistic idea of the motor system as a unitary output system. In terms of social cognition I question the traditional focus on hidden mental states. I suggest that the motor contribution might have more to do with understanding the process of how others choose their actions, navigate the world and relate to others than with simulating specific actual actions or mental states. I conclude that low-level simulation theories, which see the motor role in social perception as passive “mirroring,” are faced with serious empirical challenges, and that the motor system serve a much more proactive and complex cognitive role in social perception and interaction than previously thought. But my claim is also that many empirical tensions have slipped out of focus due to entrenched theoretical assumptions. Narrow theoretical expectations have marked not only the interpretations but the research itself and I propose that we are in dire need of more studies of actual contextual and interactive social perception. (shrink)

Sociability is essential for modern robots to increase their acceptability in human environments. Traditional techniques use manually engineered utility functions inspired by observing pedestrian behaviors to achieve social navigation. However, social aspects of navigation are diverse, changing across different types of environments, societies, and population densities, making it unrealistic to use hand-crafted techniques in each domain. This paper presents a data-driven navigation architecture that uses state-of-the-art neural architectures, namely Conditional Neural Processes, to learn global and (...) local controllers of the mobile robot from observations. Additionally, we leverage a state-of-the-art, deep prediction mechanism to detect situations not similar to the trained ones, where reactive controllers step in to ensure safe navigation. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework can successfully carry out navigation tasks regarding social norms in the data. Further, we showed that our system produces fewer personal-zone violations, causing less discomfort. (shrink)

A growing number of studies have found that large brains may help animals survive by avoiding predation. These studies provide an alternative explanation for existing correlative evidence for one of the dominant hypotheses regarding the evolution of brain size in animals, the social brain hypothesis (SBH). The SBH proposes that social complexity is a major evolutionary driver of large brains. However, if predation both directly selects for large brains and higher levels of sociality, correlations between sociality and (...) brain size may be spurious. We argue that tests of the SBH should take direct effects of predation into account, either by explicitly including them in comparative analyses or by pin‐pointing the brain‐behavior‐fitness pathway through which the SBH operates. Existing data and theory on social behavior can then be used to identify precise candidate mechanisms and formulate new testable predictions. (shrink)

Existing economic models of prosociality have been rather silent in terms of proximate psychological mechanisms. We nevertheless identify the psychologically most informed accounts and offer a critical discussion of their hypotheses for the proximate psychological explanations. Based on convergent evidence from several fields of research, we argue that there nevertheless is a more plausible alternative proximate account available: the social motivation hypothesis. The hypothesis represents a more basic explanation of the appeal of prosocial behavior, which is in (...) terms of anticipated social rewards. We also argue in favor of our own social motivation hypothesis over Robert Sugden’s fellow-feeling account (due originally to Adam Smith). We suggest that social motivation not only stands as a proximate account in its own right but also provides a plausible scaffold for other more sophisticated motivations (e.g., fellow-feelings). We conclude by discussing some possible implications of the social motivation hypothesis on existing modeling practice. (shrink)

January 6th, 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Hisashi Nakao.

The social brain hypothesis implies that humans and other primates evolved “modules“ for representing social knowledge. Alternatively, no such cognitive specializations are needed because social knowledge is already present in the world — we can simply monitor the dynamics of social interactions. Given the latter idea, what mechanism could account for coalition formation? We propose that statistical learning can provide a mechanism for fast and implicit learning of social signals. Using human participants, we compared (...) learning of social signals with arbitrary signals. We found that learning of social signals was no better than learning of arbitrary signals. While coupling faces and voices led to parallel learning, the same was true for arbitrary shapes and sounds. However, coupling versus uncoupling social signals with arbitrary signals revealed that faces and voices are treated with perceptual priority. Overall, our data suggest that statistical learning is a viable domain-general mechanism for learning social group structure. Keywords: social brain; embodied cognition; distributed cognition; situated cognition; multisensory; audiovisual speech; crossmodal; multimodal. (shrink)

Most mental disorders affect only a small segment of the population. On the reasonable assumption that minds or brains are prone to occasional malfunction, these disorders do not seem to pose distinctive explanatory problems. Depression, however, because it is so prevalent and costly, poses a conundrum that some try to explain by characterizing it as an adaptation—a trait that exists because it performed fitness-enhancing functions in ancestral populations. Heretofore, proposed evolutionary explanations of depression did not focus on thought processes; instead, (...) they emphasized that it facilitates navigation of adverse social circumstances or promotes immune response to infectious agents. According to a new hypothesis, the “analytical rumination hypothesis” (ARH), however, depression’s crucial adaptive trait is rumination—negative, intrusive thought. ARH holds that, (i) social dilemmas trigger depressed mood; (ii) depressed mood induces changes in body systems that facilitate ruminative analysis aimed at solving dilemmas; and, (iii) depressive rumination is a fitness-enhancing trait that was selected for in evolutionary time. Jointly, (i)~(iii) imply that we should not think of rumination as a disorder; instead, it is a trade-off, an eminently rational one. In the same way that fever solves a problem—coordination of the immune system in response to infection—so too does depressive rumination solve a problem, a social dilemma, albeit at the cost of inducing anhedonia and other maladies. But they argue that the cost is worthwhile, something that should be endured “until the problem is solved.” First, we argue that there are two distinct types of rumination, brooding and pondering; the former is associated with a disposition for depression, not the latter. But only the latter has the problem-solving capabilities that ARH requires. Second, recent brain imaging studies of depression reveal resting state hypoactivity in lateral regions and hyperactivity in paralimbic regions; this asymmetric pattern correlates with heightened levels of brooding, self-focused rumination. In other words, on the personal level, patients are trapped within self, isolated from the external world and suffused with negative affect; on the subpersonal level, this pattern is reflected by an asymmetric pattern of lateral vs. paralimbic resting state activity. Third, we proceed to conjecture that rational responses (e.g., pondering) to social dilemmas are those that strike a balance between internal and external considerations in the process of belief formation. Fourth, because the asymmetric resting state activity blocks those who suffer with depression from accessing and processing potentially positive stimuli from the external world, the capacity for rational, analytic response—hence, problem-solving—is constrained. Fifth, it follows that, although there might be conditions for which suffering should be endured rather than pharmacologically alleviated, depression is not one of those. Indeed, in view of the effects of the asymmetric resting state pattern, it is unlikely that depressive rumination would have been useful even for ancestral populations. (shrink)

Social stimuli grab our attention: we attend to them in an automatic and bottom-up manner, and ascribe them a higher degree of saliency compared to non-social stimuli. However, it has rarely been investigated how variations in attention affect the processing of social stimuli, although the answer could help us uncover details of social cognition processes such as action understanding. In the present study, we examined how changes to bottom-up attention affects neural EEG-responses associated with intentional action (...) processing. We induced an increase in bottom-up attention by using hypnosis. We recorded the electroencephalographic µ-wave suppression of hypnotized participants when presented with intentional actions in first and third person perspective in a video-clip paradigm. Previous studies have shown that the µ-rhythm is selectively suppressed both when executing and observing goal-directed motor actions; hence it can be used as a neural signal for intentional action processing. Our results show that neutral hypnotic trance increases µ-suppression in highly suggestible participants when they observe intentional actions. This suggests that social action processing is enhanced when bottom-up attentional processes are predominant. Our findings support the Social Relevance Hypothesis, according to which social action processing is a bottom-up driven attentional process, and can thus be altered as a function of bottom-up processing devoted to a social stimulus. (shrink)

Is musicality an individual level adaptation? The authors of this target article reject the need for group selection within their model, yet their arguments do not fulfill the conceptual requirements for justifying such a rejection. Further analysis can highlight the explanatory value of embracing multilevel selection theory as a foundational element of the music and social bonding hypothesis.

I defend the case for an evolutionary theory of schizophrenia and the social brain, arguing that such an exercise necessitates a broader methodology than that familiar to neuroscience. I propose a reworked evolutionary genetic model of schizophrenia, drawing on insights from commentators, buttressing my claim that psychosis is a costly consequence of sophisticated social cognition in humans. Expanded models of social brain anatomy and the spectrum of psychopathologies are presented in terms of upper and lower social (...) brain and top-down and bottom-up processes. Finally, I argue that cerebral asymmetry evolved as an emergent property of primary intrahemispheric reorganisation in hominoids. (shrink)

Much current work in the social sciences seeks to understand the effects of trust and social capital on economic and political outcomes. However, the sources of trust remain unclear. In this article, the authors articulate a basic theory of the relationship between institutions and trust. The authors apply this theory to industrial districts, geographically concentrated areas of small firm production, which involve extensive cooperation in the production process. Changes in power relations affect patterns of production;the authors suggest that (...) they also have knock-on consequences for trust and cooperation among actors. (shrink)

The study of church growth has historically been divided into two strands of research: the Church Growth Movement and the Social Science approach. This article argues that Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis represents a legitimate and fruitful third strand in the study of church growth, sharing features of both previous strands but identical with neither. We argue that five predictions derived from the Social Brain Hypothesis are accurately borne out in the empirical and practical church growth (...) literature: that larger congregations lead to lower active engagement from members; that single-leader congregations are limited to around 150 members; that congregations of 150 are further stratified into smaller functioning groups; that congregations expanding beyond 150 members undergo internal tensions and are forced to reorganise; and that congregations larger than 150 will require structural sub-divisions to retain active member involvement. While these assertions are reflected in the church growth literature and articulate the common sense assumptions of church growth experts, the Social Brain Hypothesis offers a coherent theoretical framework which unifies these observations and thereby represents a distinctive contribution to church growth studies. (shrink)

David Pietraszewski's theory of social groups offers a developmentally plausible account of how we reason about group membership, as it delineates clear boundaries to the hypothesis space that children must navigate. Merits notwithstanding, the account remains silent with respect to the arbitration problem: It does not explain how children can appropriately select among competing frames when interpreting social interactions.

Exemplars have the power to help people navigate various levels of moral struggle, from the relatively straightforward problem of lacking motivation to the much deeper problem of failing to see the moral realities that surround us. But there are also serious moral risks in the appeal to exemplars: we romanticize them, we make use of them in authoritarian ways, and we tend to forget how our choice of exemplars is conditioned by oppressive cultural formations. I argue that we need to (...) develop a social model of exemplarity, attuned to social contexts of our exemplars themselves as well as the social processes of constructing and appealing to exemplars. More particularly, I argue that we need to develop space for thinking about exemplary groups, not just exemplary individuals, in order to develop the strengths and avoid the weaknesses in exemplarist moral theories. (shrink)

Social media offers an attractive site for Big Data research. Access to big social media data, however, is controlled by companies that privilege corporate, governmental, and private research firms. Additionally, Institutional Review Boards’ regulative practices and slow adaptation to emerging ethical dilemmas in online contexts creates challenges for Big Data researchers. We examine these challenges in the context of a feminist qualitative Big Data analysis of the hashtag event #WhyIStayed. We argue power, context, and subjugated knowledges must each (...) be central considerations in conducting Big Data social media research. In doing so, this paper offers a feminist practice of holistic reflexivity in order to help social media researchers navigate and negotiate this terrain. (shrink)

When business organisations become involved in contributing to and resolving social issues, they enter areas traditionally seen as the purview of governments. In doing so, they begin to take on the expectations and responsibilities of government; they become politicised. This politicisation is a product of business’s success and power and appears largely unavoidable. Adopting Matten & Crane’s (2005a) extended view of corporate citizenship, business organisations’ responsibilities extend to the administration of citizens’ social, civil and political rights. We term (...) these areas where business organisations take over the administration of citizenship rights as the social governance gap. Drawing upon the agenda of Margolis and Walsh (2003), we seek to enhance the understanding of how business navigates its responsibilities within the social governance gap, including its function as a significant actor influencing societal development and wellbeing. We do this through an exploration of Rio Tinto’s involvement in the WA Future Fund. This paper forms part of an introductory scoping case study of the Rio Tinto WA Future fund and its function as one of Rio Tinto’s diverse responses to community development issues in Western Australia. (shrink)

‘‘COGNITIVE ECOLOGY’’ is a fruitful model for Shakespearian studies, early modern literary and cultural history, and theatrical history more widely. Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments. Along with the anthropologist Edwin Hutchins,1 we use the term ‘‘cognitive ecology’’ to integrate a number of recent approaches to cultural cognition: we believe these approaches offer productive lines of engagement (...) with early modern literary and historical studies.2 The framework arises out of our work in extended mind and distributed cognition.3 The extended mind hypothesis arose from a post-connectionist philosophy of cognitive science. This approach was articulated in Andy Clark’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, and further developed by Susan Hurley and Mark Rowlands, among others.4 The distributed cognition approach arose independently, from work in cognitive anthropology, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), the sociology of education and work, and science studies. The principles of distributed cognition were articulated in Hutchins’s ethnography of navigation, Cogni- tion in the Wild,5 and developed by theorists such as David Kirsh and Lucy Suchman.6 These models share an anti-individualist approach to cognition. In all these views, mental activities spread or smear across the boundaries of skull and skin to include parts of the social and material world. In remembering, decision making, and acting, whether individually or in small groups, our complex and structured activities involve many distinctive dimensions: neural, affective, kines-. (shrink)

This study compares 20 subjects, in each of three different settings, with serious psychotic disorder who hear voices, and compares their voice-hearing experience. We find that while there is much that is similar, there are notable differences in the kinds of voices that people seem to experience. In a California sample, people were more likely to describe their voices as intrusive unreal thoughts; in the South Indian sample, they were more likely to describe them as providing useful guidance; and in (...) our West African sample, they were more likely to describe them as morally good and causally powerful. What we think we may be observing is that people who fall ill with serious psychotic disorder pay selective attention to a constant stream of many different auditory and quasi-auditory events because of different “cultural invitations”—variations in ways of thinking about minds, persons, spirits and so forth. Such a process is consistent with processes described in the cognitive psychology and psychiatric anthropology literature, but not yet described or understood with respect to cultural variations in auditory hallucinations. We call this process “social kindling.”. (shrink)

BackgroundBiobanks are considered to be key infrastructures for research development and have generated a lot of debate about their ethical, legal and social implications. While the focus has been on human genomic research, rapid advances in human microbiome research further complicate the debate.DiscussionWe draw on two cystic fibrosis biobanks in Toronto, Canada, to illustrate our points. The biobanks have been established to facilitate sample and data sharing for research into the link between disease progression and microbial dynamics in the (...) lungs of pediatric and adult patients. We begin by providing an overview of some of the ELSI associated with human microbiome research, particularly on the implications for the broader society. We then discuss ethical considerations regarding the identifiability of samples biobanked for human microbiome research, and examine the issue of return of results and incidental findings. We argue that, for the purposes of research ethics oversight, human microbiome research samples should be treated with the same privacy considerations as human tissues samples. We also suggest that returning individual microbiome-related findings could provide a powerful clinical tool for care management, but highlight the need for a more grounded understanding of contextual factors that may be unique to human microbiome research.ConclusionsWe revisit the ELSI of biobanking and consider the impact that human microbiome research might have. Our discussion focuses on identifiability of human microbiome research samples, and return of research results and incidental findings for clinical management. (shrink)

In recent years, social cognition approaches to human evolution and Material Engagement Theory have offered new theoretical resources to advance our understanding of the prehistoric hominin mind. To date, however, these two approaches have developed largely in isolation from one another. I argue that there is a gap between social- and material-centred approaches, and that this is precisely the sociomateriality of the appearance of ancestral hominin bodies, which evolved under selective pressure to develop increasingly complex, cooperative sociality. To (...) get this sociomaterial body in focus, I develop an esthesiological framework, appropriated from Merleau-Ponty (2003), for interpreting the expressive body in an evolutionary and comparative context. The guiding hypothesis of esthesiology is that before being rationality (social or material), “humanity is another corporeity” (Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p. 208). Esthesiology studies the appearance of the body and its sense organs as an intertwining locus of a sensing power (the ability to see, to touch, etc.) and a sensible character (the visible, touchable body). It is this dual-aspect character of the body that facilitates the most basic affective and sensorimotor modes of sociality. Examining these features from a comparative perspective, we find that the human body is distinctively suited to prosocial communication and cooperation: a more cooperative eye, an exposed and communicative skin. I thus propose a cooperative body hypothesis, by analogy with the cooperative eye hypothesis (Tomasello et al., 2007). Esthesiology provides a framework for integrating and interpreting a wide range of otherwise disconnected facts concerning human and nonhuman animal bodies, forms of life, cognition, and evolution, thereby bridging the gap between social cognition and material engagement perspectives. In doing so, however, it not only solves problems and proposes new directions of investigation, but also demands theoretical revisions from each. (shrink)

Humans are uncontroversially better than other species at learning from their peers. A key example of this is imitation, the ability to reproduce both the means and ends of others’ behaviours. Imitation is critical to the acquisition of a number of uniquely human cultural and cognitive traits. However, while authors largely agree on the importance of imitation, they disagree about the origins of imitation in humans. Some argue that imitation is an adaptation, connected to the ‘Mirror Neuron System’ that evolved (...) to facilitate action understanding and the learning of social behaviours. Others argue that imitation is a cultural practice learned in childhood, and that there is no evidence that it evolved genetically. We offer a third alternative that is consistent with both data that the human brain is optimised for imitation, and consistent with its being substantially learned. We hypothesise that at some point in human history humans underwent natural selection for two imitation-relevant abilities – specifically, (i) the tendency to be more attentive to our peers, and (ii) fine motor skill in the manual and oro-facial domains. These changes enabled us to excel at both learning to imitate, and learning by imitating. (shrink)

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of 'lenses' and 'tensions' to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what (...) epistemic and procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the 'mess' of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)

There is widespread recognition at universities that a proper understanding of science is needed for all undergraduates. Good jobs are increasingly found in fields related to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine, and science now enters almost all aspects of our daily lives. For these reasons, scientific literacy and an understanding of scientific methodology are a foundational part of any undergraduate education. Recipes for Science provides an accessible introduction to the main concepts and methods of scientific reasoning. With the help of (...) an array of contemporary and historical examples, definitions, visual aids, and exercises for active learning, the textbook helps to increase students’ scientific literacy. The first part of the book covers the definitive features of science: naturalism, experimentation, modeling, and the merits and shortcomings of both activities. The second part covers the main forms of inference in science: deductive, inductive, abductive, probabilistic, statistical, and causal. The book concludes with a discussion of explanation, theorizing and theory-change, and the relationship between science and society. The textbook is designed to be adaptable to a wide variety of different kinds of courses. In any of these different uses, the book helps students better navigate our scientific, 21st-century world, and it lays the foundation for more advanced undergraduate coursework in a wide variety of liberal arts and science courses. Selling Points Helps students develop scientific literacy—an essential aspect of _any_ undergraduate education in the 21 st century, including a broad understanding of scientific reasoning, methods, and concepts Written for all beginning college students: preparing science majors for more focused work in particular science; introducing the humanities’ investigations of science; and helping non-science majors become more sophisticated consumers of scientific information Provides an abundance of both contemporary and historical examples Covers reasoning strategies and norms applicable in all fields of physical, life, and social sciences, _as well as_ strategies and norms distinctive of specific sciences Includes visual aids to clarify and illustrate ideas Provides text boxes with related topics and helpful definitions of key terms, and includes a final Glossary with all key terms Includes Exercises for Active Learning at the end of each chapter, which will ensure full student engagement and mastery of the information include earlier in the chapter Provides annotated ‘For Further Reading’ sections at the end of each chapter, guiding students to the best primary and secondary sources available Offers a Companion Website, with: For Students: direct links to many of the primary sources discussed in the text, student self-check assessments, a bank of exam questions, and ideas for extended out-of-class projects For Instructors: a password-protected Teacher’s Manual, which provides student exam questions with answers, extensive lecture notes, classroom-ready Power Point presentations, and sample syllabi Extensive Curricular Development materials, helping any instructor who needs to create a Scientific Reasoning Course, ex nihilo. (shrink)

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tensions’ to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what (...) epistemic and procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the ‘mess’ of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)

Building on the emerging literature on the ethics of social enterprises (SEs), this paper advances the underexplored role of frontline workers (FLWs) as embedded agents at the interface between communities and SEs. Specifically, we uncover the subjectivity of FLWs as they navigate moral ambiguities while performing their professional roles, dealing with rules and regulations within the organizational hierarchy and living as members of local communities. Based on an inductive case study of a microfinance organization in Cameroon, we find that (...) FLWs engage in three rationalization strategies: cautious disengaging, safeguarding self-interest, and justifying relevance. Our findings offer a better understanding of the ethics of SEs by unpacking the subjectivity of FLWs. We highlight a bottom-up account of caring SEs, identify a boundary condition to subjectivity, and present a nuanced view of FLWs in embedded organizations. We also discuss the practical implications for SEs to improve their compassion and cater for the mental wellbeing of FLWs. (shrink)

The complexity of social data has been a barrier which sociology has seemingly been unable to surmount. Consequently sociology, like other social sciences, has tended to divide itself into groups advocating different emphases in approach, concerning themselves respectively with the “quantitative” or “qualitative” aspects of social data. These two camps may be seen to diverge along distinct lines, the former approaching material from what is conceived to be a “scientific” frame of reference, posing problems which—it is hoped—will (...) be “explained” by the mathematical arrangement of materials; whereas the latter constructs questions the answer to which will make for “understanding”—ordinarily of behavior—through verbal symbolizations. Explanation usually is accomplished through the achievement of a formula—if couched in mathematical terms it is viewed as the highest order—and this group views the achievement of “understanding” a useless procedure, for—since “understanding” is not mathematically exposited—it is necessarily incapable of being validated. On the other hand, he of the group desirous to understand behavior, finds the problems posed by the “positivist” irrelevant to the larger problems in which his interest lies, and unenlightening for all of the devious steps taken to arrive at a solution; more in the manner than in the spirit of science. (shrink)

Davies, M. and Stone, T. (eds.)Folk Psychology Davies, M. and Stone, T. (eds.)Mental Stimulation.

The role of the ‘ideal’ in political philosophy is currently much discussed. These debates cast useful light on Mill's self-designation as ‘under the general designation of Socialist’. Considering Mill's assessment of potential property-relations on the grounds of their desirability, feasibility and ‘accessibility’ (disambiguated as ‘immediate-availability’, ‘eventual-availability’ and ‘conceivable-availability’) shows us not only how desirable and feasible he thought ‘utopian’ socialist schemes were, but which options we should implement. This, coupled with Mill's belief that a socialist ideal should guide social (...) reforms (as the North Star guides mariners), reveals much more clearly the extent of his socialist commitments (even if he thought political economists would be concerned with forms of individual property for some time to come). Moreover, this framework for assessments of ‘ideal’ institutions makes a useful contribution to an ongoing contemporary debate. (shrink)

Many challenges to economic and social well-being require close collaboration between business, government, and civil-society actors. In this context, the involvement of multiple companies rather than a single company may enhance such cross-sector social partnerships’ outcomes. However, extant literature cautions about the tensions arising from companies’ competitive interests and the detrimental effects on the CSSP’s social outcome. Similarly, studies analyzing simultaneous collaboration and competition suggest shielding off competitive elements from the collaboration. Based on insights into two multi-company (...) CSSPs, we conversely find that government and NGO partnership managers deliberately leveraged competition through the CSSP design. They used similar segmentation mechanisms to enhance CSSP contributions, but differed in the way they integrated collaborative and competitive elements, leading to sustained corporate commitment in one CSSP and unmet promises in the other. These insights expose the paradoxical nature of coopetition at the interface of social and economic goals, and advance current research by indicating competition’s positive effects and the respective partnership design implications. On this basis, our study helps reveal and better understand sustainability-related tensions and opportunities at the inter-organizational level. (shrink)

ABSTRACT To date, the American Psychological Association Ethical Standards and Code of Conduct does not include direct guidance about how psychologists should navigate social media. Given the variety of roles psychologists can choose to engage on social media, it is imperative that guidelines are established. These guidelines should consider the multidimensionality that exists as psychologists may choose to present on social media through a personal presence, a business presence, and/or even an influencer/content creator presence. Specific ethical considerations (...) and recommendations are provided. (shrink)

As a continuation of this author’s previous cosmological neuroscience papers on the hypothesized Soul of Multiverse and its possible laws, the present work examined the social aspects of four of these laws. The following key aspects were recognized: (1) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Coexistence in Diversity can let our mind respect not only the endless diversity of human beings but also the cohesive force of space-time in which all are connected. This may help realizing the superiority of (...) cooperation for shared goals over competition for gaining by harming others. (2) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Truth in Complexity can ready our mind to confront the problems of societies with the understanding that these problems are much more complex than generally thought. This may help initiating the needed intellectual renaissance of the 21st century. (3) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Divine - Evil Asymmetry can make our mind appreciate the slight yet sufficient supremacy of divine over evil. This may help restoring faith in the eventual creation of a just society, where social justice is defined as an administrative mechanism providing the right conditions for every human being to accomplish his or her Conscience-led Mission throughout life, while allowing each of these accomplishments to be reciprocated with the gratitude it induced in the involved social systems, small or large, to let equal opportunities in life coexist with due diversity in welcomed, not abused, social recognitions. And (4) knowing about the cosmic Law of Lives to Transcend can empower our mind to build on these advances. This may help moving evolution towards the human species worthy of its origin and destination. (shrink)

Joint activities are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, but they differ substantially in their underlying psychological states. Humans attribute and share mental states with others in the so‐called shared intentionality. Our hypothesis is that our closest nonhuman living relatives also attribute some psychological mechanisms such as perceptions and goals to others, but, unlike humans, they are not necessarily intrinsically motivated to share those psychological states. Furthermore, it is postulated that shared intentionality is responsible for the appearance of a suite (...) of behaviors, including joint attention, declarative communication, imitative learning, and teaching, that are the basis of cultural learning and the social norms and traditions present in every human culture. (shrink)

This essay recovers Jane Addams's practice of constituent storytelling as a resource for contemporary social-change-nonprofit professional practice and activism. Whereas feminist theorizing is rich with resources for theorizing about constituent storytelling, Addams, as both a publicly engaged philosopher and a social-change-nonprofit professional, is uniquely situated to provide practical ways forward for social-change practitioners navigating the lived complexities of speaking for others in light of spatial stratification, subordinating structures, and epistemic exclusion. As a hybrid activist-scholar situated across diverse (...) spaces, Addams serves as a bridge between feminist theorizing about speaking for others, and practices of it among social-change-nonprofit professionals and activists. I show that Addams reveals new ways of thinking about the practice of constituent storytelling for social-change-nonprofit professionals. Namely, in this lived context, speaking for others entails speaking for them through one's own story. Responsible constituent storytelling names oneself as a speaker, owns one's own social standpoint in this rhetorical naming practice, and orients the story through one's own journey—a journey inevitably riddled with failures and faulty assumptions—toward democratic neighborship with the Other across difference. (shrink)

Becoming a crime victim is often associated with the development of psychological distress symptoms. In turn, these symptoms have been found to be related to a decrease in perceived social support by the victim. From a uses and gratifications point of view, the increase in distress and the decrease in perceived social support could well affect a victim’s television use. Furthermore, the compensation hypothesis proposes that people with little social contact use mass media to compensate for (...) social isolation. It could therefore be hypothesized that increased use of television for reasons of companionship is related to higher levels of psychological distress and lower levels of perceived social support. The present study used a structural equation model to test this hypothesis. The sample consisted of 212 Flemish victims of crime. The results confirm the proposed relationships and hypotheses. Directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)