Audience Composition Research Articles

Selective Exposure and New Political Cleavages: Media Use and Ideological Reinforcement Over Time

New political cleavages are reshaping the political landscape in established democracies. The classic left-right ideological dimension that has structured politics for decades is increasingly challenged by a sociocultural value dimension. At the same time, growing opportunities for media choice open for new forms of selective news exposure along political lines. We argue that previous research has too narrowly focused on traditional ideological cleavages, neglecting the increasingly important sociocultural value dimension of politics. Using four waves of panel survey data collected in Sweden during 2020 and 2021, this study analyses ideological selective exposure, audience composition, and reinforcing spirals across a range of mainstream and alternative news outlets. Findings show (1) that the sociocultural value dimension is more important than the socioeconomic dimension for explaining news choices, (2) that it structures news audiences in uniquely distinct ways, and (3) that these relationships are highly stable over time—reflecting patterns of de facto selective exposure and ideological maintenance, rather than reinforcement. These findings bring new insights to research on selective news exposure, political polarization, and changing ideological cleavages in Western democracies.

Audience sensitivity in chimpanzee display pant hoots

Audience effects are key in studies of animal social cognition and are typically investigated during directed social interactions. Male chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, regularly perform aggressive displays in the presence of others, often targeting a specific group member, and combine this agonistic behaviour with acoustic signals. Here, we were interested in whether the production and structure of pant hoots, a long-distance signal, were influenced by audience composition (i.e. presence and absence of specific individuals). We investigated pant hoots produced during displays by adult and subadult males of Budongo Forest, Uganda. We found that males overall called more often when their preferred social partners and females were absent from the party, as well as when more dominant males were present. We then separately analysed the four phases of pant hoots, introduction, build-up, climax and let-down, and found that audience composition and social context could often explain the presence or absence of each phase. In addition, displays were often accompanied by drumming, especially by older males and when male audiences were small. Our study adds to the growing body of literature on audience effects and other social factors and shows their impact on the structure of a sophisticated vocal sequence, which enhances the communicative capacity in a species with limited vocal control.

A place outside the pandemic? An ethnographic study of live music events at St Gallen's cultural venue Palace during the COVID-19 crisis

AbstractThe multiple impacts of COVID-19 on the music-culture industry have been duly discussed in a variety of public discourses, academic and otherwise. However, there is still a dearth of studies that investigate alternative face-to-face practices of live music performance and organisation during the pandemic's significant constraints on social behaviour. The present work aims to fill this gap by offering an anthropological angle on live music practices during COVID-19. It specifically draws on fieldwork that I could carry out in the autumn of 2020 at a live music venue – ‘Palace’ in the Swiss city of St Gallen – owing to a ‘liberal’ handling of the COVID-19 crisis by the St Gallen authorities. This article documents accordingly the challenges and adjustments that Palace had to undergo during pandemic times from the perspectives of producers, musicians and audiences alike. The primary focus here is on exploring changes in the venue's management, programming, audience composition and especially the musical-aesthetic experience of the venue's pandemic-compliant gigs. Finally, the article draws on the musings of my interlocutors as to whether Palace was in their experience a place outside the pandemic, to tackle the larger question of how COVID-19 has affected people's perceptions of live gigs and urban nightlife more generally.

Male chimpanzees communicate to mediate competition and cooperation during feeding

An ongoing debate in animal behaviour research is whether food calls function to cooperatively inform others or provide the caller with competitive advantages. When feeding, chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, produce two types of call: context-specific, close-range ‘rough grunts’ and context-general, long-range ‘pant hoots’. We investigated this dual signalling behaviour by wild male chimpanzees that were either actively joining others or passively being joined in food trees, considering the effects of the audience composition and the type of food encountered. For arriving individuals, we found that pant hoot production was best explained by the absence of socially important individuals (i.e. social bond partners and/or high-ranking males), suggesting that callers were cooperatively informing them about food availability, probably to strengthen social relationships. In contrast, rough grunts were mostly produced by low-ranking individuals, suggesting they were part of competitive interactions to avoid aggression. For individuals already in a tree, we found that both rough grunt and pant hoot production were most common in low-ranking individuals reacting to the arrival of high-ranking males and there was no significant effect of the presence, or absence, of social bond partners. We discuss these patterns and conclude that, when chimpanzees enter a food tree, their vocal behaviour functions to mediate both cooperative and competitive interactions.

Studying Manichaeism in Augustine’s Sermones ad populum: Crypto-Manichaeism and the Audience’s Theology

This article proposes a methodology for the study of Manichaeism in the Sermones ad populum. Sermons provide a unique perspective on Augustine’s thought: they offered him the opportunity to share theological and ethical concerns with a responsive audience. Because his sermons have only recently been (re-)discovered as loci of Augustine’s ideas, and because they constitute a specific genre within his oeuvre, the development of a method for studying them is in order. To illustrate the proposed method, the present contribution examines anti-Manichaean content in the Sermones ad populum by means of two key concepts. The first concept is that of crypto-Manichaeism. Although they do not refute Manichaeism in its totality, the sermons are regularly concerned with specific aspects of Manichaeism, such as those that were relevant to the sermon’s liturgical occasion or those Augustine feared were attractive to his flock. Crypto-Manichaeism refers, on the one hand, to the tendency of Manichaeans to refrain from openly identifying themselves as such. After all, they considered themselves true Christians. Nor was Manichaeism the only movement in late antique Christianity that espoused dualistic beliefs, rejected bodily desires and material wealth, and criticized the Old Testament. Anti-Manichaean argument was therefore more broadly applicable than refutation of Manichaeism stricto sensu. Our attention to crypto-Manichaeism therefore does justice to the pastoral and exhortative function of Augustine’s sermons. A second key concept is the perspective of the audience. The setting of each sermon is unique, the composition of audiences varied, and attendance no doubt fluctuated. Each sermon ought to be considered as its own literary and theological whole, hermeneutically influenced by its concrete Sitz im Leben (i.e., composition of the audience, time and place, liturgical setting, etc.). The audience’s theology can be reconstructed in a bottom-up fashion, with each sermon supplying complementary and cumulative theological information that the audience could have gathered by participating in the liturgy. In this article we apply the proposed methodology to a group of four early anti-Manichaean sermons.

Evolution of “Ethnic” Business in Russia: Comparative Analysis of Entrepreneurship of Migrants from Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan

The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of the entrepreneurial activity of migrants from Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan in Moscow and the Moscow region who have created a business in the period from the 1990s to the mid-2010s. The study was carried out on the analysis of 58 interviews with entrepreneurs and representatives of public organizations and journalists, as well as a survey of entrepreneurs of Kyrgyz origin conducted in 2017-2019. The comparison is based on the analysis of the factors and characteristics such as structural opportunities and limitations; motivation to engage in entrepreneurship; features of the formation of start-up capital, the composition of partners, personnel and consumer audience; types of entrepreneurial strategies; the role of ethnicity and ethnicity, as well as networks based on ties with relatives, fellow countrymen and compatriots. It is concluded that the concept of “middleman minority” is most suitable for describing the ideal type of entrepreneurship of migrants from Azerbaijan, and “ethnic economy” for migrants from Kyrgyzstan. However, the business activity of migrants is not limited to these types. The peculiarities of entrepreneurship of migrants, a variety of specific entrepreneurial strategies are born at the intersection of the mutual influence of migration history, socio-demographic characteristics and various socio-economic, political and local contexts in different historical periods.

Cambodia's orphan dance shows: From cultural salvation to child exploitation?

In Cambodia, orphan dance shows were once popular as a way to preserve endangered art forms and to cultivate children's dignity and well-being. But they came to be seen as exploitative instead, and today are nearly nonexistent. This article examines the confluence of changes that caused this reversal of opinion. The reversal is due to both covert factors such as changes in constructions of childhood, and overt factors such as changes in audience composition. The rise and fall of Cambodian orphan dance shows took place largely within foreign communities, with little local input.

A community context for aggression? Multi-species audience effects on territorial aggression in two species of Paridae.

Territorial aggression in birds is widely observed and is commonly linked to sex, age, body size, physiology, seasonal cues, food resource, urbanization, and a variety of social contexts including conspecific audience effects. However, little is known about the heterospecific audience effects on territorial aggression.Here, we address an emerging idea that heterospecific audience effects may be pervasive influences in the social lives of free‐living birds. We tested the hypothesis that the composition, number, and relative body size of heterospecific audiences observing an aggressive contest will influence the response probability and intensity of aggression displayed.We subjected two Paridae species, tufted titmouse (TUTI, Baeolophus bicolor) and Carolina chickadee (CACH, Poecile carolinensis), to playbacks of aggressive calls during a breeding season in north‐central Florida. At widely spaced playback sites (N = 134) in woodland habitats, we characterized the makeup of heterospecific audiences, aggression type (intra vs. interspecific territoriality), local population density, and various environmental factors (tree density, wind speed, and noise level) that are likely to influence territorial aggression.We found that the presence of heterospecific audiences increased TUTI aggression levels and that both parids were more likely to respond to playback stimuli when their audiences had higher heterospecific diversity (more heterospecific individuals and species). We also found TUTI were more likely to respond when CACH were present but not vice versa.In conclusion, we found evidence that heterospecific audiences significantly influenced the metrics of territorial aggression of free‐living animals and we suggest that the definition of audience effects on the behavior of free‐living animals be expanded to incorporate heterospecific audiences.

Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London by Musa Gurnis

Reviewed by: Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London by Musa Gurnis Chloe Kathleen Preedy MIXED FAITH AND SHARED FEELING: THEATER IN POST-REFORMATION LONDON. By Musa Gurnis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018; pp. 272. In Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London, Musa Gurnis offers a fascinating reevaluation of how dramatists writing for the commercial English theatre responded to the divisions within and plurality of post-Reformation Christianity. This subject has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years, but Gurnis’s monograph represents a unique and valuable contribution to the field. Whereas existing studies often draw binary distinctions between “Catholic” and “Protestant” authors or works, Gurnis argues for a more nuanced appreciation of the early modern theatre’s confessional range. Noting the polyvalency of contemporary English Christian identity, at a time when “subcultures of puritans, church papists, Laudians, recusants, ardent conformists, and converts” battled for the “soul” of the authorised Church (2), Gurnis explores the implications for a theatre whose playwrights, players, and paying customers came from across this confessional spectrum. On the one hand, Gurnis suggests, the fact that many early modern plays are the product of collaboration between two or more dramatists, as well as the “public” nature of the commercial playhouses, complicates the extent to which any one play might express a singular religious position. Thus these works were produced by and intended for consumption by “mixed-faith groups” of theatre professionals and playgoers (2). On the other hand, plays that featured characters of various faiths might in turn disrupt the “everyday religious orientations” of individuals by prompting them to engage imaginatively with unfamiliar confessional positions (3). Gurnis’s study evaluates the implications for post-Reformation drama’s depiction of spiritual themes and experiences, offering an informative, thought-provoking, and persuasive new perspective on this important topic. This book’s refreshing alertness to the collaborative practices of the commercial theatre and the diverse socio-religious composition of its audiences is mediated through a strong cultural materialist emphasis on theatre’s “active” relationship to and influence on the wider world (5). Specifically, Gurnis emphasizes the post-Reformation theatre’s capacity to reflect and refract existing confessional affiliations and understandings. The first two chapters contain some of the book’s richest material, as Gurnis uses archival sources to explore contemporary audience composition and the ways in which actual playgoers responded to religious elements in early modern drama. In a compelling refutation of the common assumption that most or all post-Reformation playgoers were conforming Church of England Protestants (7), chapter 1 examines the faiths of those who are known to have attended performances at the commercial playhouses. Through their range and diversity, the case studies in this section persuasively demonstrate the “de facto pluralism of the post-Reformation religious scene” (10), while Gurnis further concludes that, regardless of their own faith, these playgoers might temporarily engage with the confessional positions expressed by dramatic characters in ways that allowed for a fluid interplay between the staged play’s fictional religious culture and that of the post-Reformation [End Page 254] England in which the dramatic work was produced and experienced. Chapter 2 expands thoughtfully on this distinction between actual belief and the imaginative play that, Gurnis suggests, theatre enables. This argument is informed by recent work by Allison Hobgood, Steven Mullaney, and others on the affective dimensions of early modern playgoing, which contemporaries credited with a potentially transformative effect on the emotions of those involved. Gurnis illuminates this model’s prospective religious significance by examining recorded audience reactions to plays such as Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches, and by considering the relevance of Anglo-Spanish politics to Thomas Dekker’s Noble Spanish Soldier and the collaborative drama The Spanish Gypsy, usually attributed to Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, John Ford, and Dekker. Despite the challenges associated with assessing early audience reactions, the wealth of supporting material assembled by Gurnis enables her to compare the responses of individual play-goers to any surviving evidence about their faith, demonstrating that audience members’ reactions to performances “were not always aligned with— or the outcome of—their individual beliefs” (38). Gurnis’s...

Трансформация гендерной доминанты в российском телеконтенте 2000-х–2010-х гг. (на примере детективных сериалов)

The article covers the gender issues of modern Russian television content on the example of a serial segment of Russian broadcast over the past 20 years. This aspect predetermines the relevance of the proposed research. The work focuses on the series that tend toward the most mass and popular forms of solving aesthetic problems—melodrama, comedy, and detective. The examples of the series, involved in the analysis, suggest that the gender dominance, characteristic of the previous stage of TV broadcasting development in Russia, has transformed significantly. This trend is indicated by the increasing importance of female characters in Russian detective series of the 2000s and 2010s. Notably, the process is instantiated by both quantitative and qualitative markers, including in terms of appeal to different historical periods which are reflected in the plots. At the same time, producers, including production teams of broadcasters, make active use of foreign experience, creating domestic versions of popular detective series filmed in other countries. Such circumstances of on-air content production can be explained by a combination of both objective (social, psychological) factors and subjective reasons (potential audience composition). Such aspects, taken together, generate complexes of plot and personified viewers’ expectations from watching the series. This situation forces the filmmakers and originators of new TV series to budge from traditional formats and creative techniques and take the factor of gender dominance into consideration. The latter, according to the author of the article, contributes to the transformation of the structure and content of the narrative of serial screen products that were standard for the previous stage of Russian TV broadcasting development. It can be stated that in modern television, the shares and roles of male and female characters in the plot constructions are “equalizing”. This, in turn, predetermines the thematic and genre variability of series, reflecting the orientation of Russian serial filmmakers on expanding the potential TV audience.

George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager by Lucie Sutherland

Reviewed by: George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager by Lucie Sutherland Sarah Chambré Lucie Sutherland. George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xiii+297 pp., $84.99 (hardback). Examining theater history and cultural practice, Lucie Sutherland provides in this work of forensic scholarship a many-faceted portrayal of George Alexander, one of the last great figures to occupy the role of actor-manager, which dominated and shaped the English stage from Richard Burbage's tenure of Shakespeare's Globe (1599-1613) through David Garrick's creation of the Garrick Theatre (1747-76) and continued with an array of famous names until the early decades of the twentieth century. Like his predecessors and peers, Alexander combined the roles of principal actor, producer, and financial director as actor-manager of the fashionable St. James's Theatre from 1890 until his death in 1918. Sutherland's detailed analysis of the financial and practical aspects of this management arrangement underpins a nuanced portrayal of Alexander's championing of new English drama with a constant assessment of its appeal to his diverse audience, segregated by class and ticket price. This book describes how Alexander's commitment to contemporary texts, nurturing of a new audience, and manipulation of their tastes by the creation of a St. James's brand was tempered by conservatism. This was partly innate, partly due to censorship but mostly the result of a cautious guardianship of his brand, defined with a careful and highly attuned eye to the fashionable occupants of the stalls and dress circle. Sutherland delineates the elements that contributed to this management style and challenges the image of Alexander as a rigid autocrat with particular attention to his collaboration with actors and playwrights. His emerging style and openness to serious new drama was shifted significantly by the events of 1895, of which Henry James's short lived drama Guy Domville (1895) was only one. Sutherland details the financial imperatives and the portfolio approach to Alexander's risk management. Increasingly, the actor-manager interspersed new works with revivals, safe romances, and market-tested offerings such as acknowledged authors or works that had premiered elsewhere. The need for long runs and this conservatively managed collaboration, exemplified by but not exclusive to Alexander, led by the [End Page E-8] time of the opening years of the twentieth century to a bifurcated marketplace—as the critic Dennis Kennedy describes it: "avant-garde suspicion of popular success eventually split [the market place] into two parts: the larger part got the audience but little lasting attention. The smaller part the critical and historical acclaim" (146). In many respects, the representative history so well reconstructed here mirrors the shifts in literary book publishing over the same period. In this history, James arguably placed himself in the wrong market for his work, although the successes of pioneers Oscar Wilde and Arthur Wing Pinero in the early 1890s might have seemed to augur otherwise. Sutherland's book is not primarily about James's play, which was only a brief episode in Alexander's career. He is quoted as reminiscing in 1909 about Guy Domville that "I was, and always shall be, proud, in spite of that particular audience's adverse verdict. It had a fair run, which satisfied me, for it attracted to the St James's that whole of intellectual London's audiences available for any theatre" (45). The author accepts the standard critical viewpoint that the construed failure was due to "the limited dramatic possibilities of James's text." The detailed scholarship contained in this book is nevertheless very useful for Jamesians interested in a re-evaluation of the play and consideration of its limited run in the context of Alexander's practice. The creation of the St. James's brand relied on elaborately realistic and spectacular staging, which entailed high fixed costs for a production, and success was thus reliant on long runs to create profit. The stratified audience composition meant that a play must have broad appeal, something that Guy Domville failed to offer. Sutherland demonstrates that rehearsal time was limited and that Alexander focused on choreography and mise-en-scène rather than dialogue...

Forget the audience: tadpoles release similar disturbance cues regardless of kinship or familiarity

Group-living prey rely on social information such as alarm signals and other social cues to avoid predation. By definition, "signals" imply that a message is voluntarily directed at receivers (i.e., the audience), whereas "cues" are released incidentally regardless of the audience composition. Thus, audience effects can be used to differentiate between signals and cues when communication is difficult to observe or quantify. In at least two fish species, chemical disturbance cues are released during a predator attack to signal to familiar audiences about predation risk. Here, we examined whether audience composition affects disturbance cue release in wood frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) tadpoles to better understand the function of disturbance cues across aquatic prey. Groups of tadpoles underwent simulated predator attacks to obtain disturbance cues. The groups were either familiar and related, unfamiliar and related, familiar and unrelated, or unfamiliar and unrelated. To assess the relative potency of each cue, we used a behavioral bioassay design involving activity changes in independent tadpole receivers (unfamiliar and unrelated to the donors). If tadpoles use disturbance cues to signal related and/or familiar individuals, we predicted increased fright responses in receivers to cues obtained from those groups. However, we detected no effect of audience composition, indicating that tadpoles release similar disturbance cues regardless of audience kinship or familiarity. Nevertheless, disturbance cues evoked a consistent antipredator response in receivers indicating that these chemicals still act as reliable risk cues. Further comparative studies using audience effects are necessary to understand how disturbance cues have evolved across aquatic prey. Significance statement When aquatic prey encounter predators and are frightened, they release chemicals known as "disturbance cues" into the water. These chemicals alert other prey nearby of potential danger. For example, wood frog tadpoles release disturbance cues when they are being chased by a predator. Tadpoles that smell the disturbance cues of other tadpoles are less likely to be eaten by predators. Since wood frog tadpoles are often found in shallow ponds filled with both familiar siblings as well as other tadpoles that are unfamiliar and unrelated, we wondered if tadpoles would produce more disturbance cues when familiar or related tadpoles were nearby. Here, we show that no matter who the audience members are, familiar siblings or not, tadpoles release disturbance cues that cause similar fright. This suggests that disturbance cues are not released differently depending on the audience in this species.

Bringing a Master Narrative to Its Knees: The Power of Historical Data on Theatre Patrons

Abstract For the ‘Rotterdam Project’, a large amount of historical data on patrons of Rotterdam’s main theatres during the ‘long’ 19th century (1773–1914) was collected, digitally registered and statistically analysed. The data was gathered from the theatre archives of the city of Rotterdam and included data on such specifics as ticket sales, repertoire and featured performers. The database holds prosopography information on over 16,000 patrons and almost 15,000 registered ticket sales to these patrons. This dataset (https://doi.org/10.21943/auas.7381127) can be used to make comparisons to the datasets of similarly sized cities in other countries during the same period and for broader research on 19th-century cultural history. So far, the data has been mainly applied to empirically test the master narrative of theatre historiography on the social composition of theatre audiences. The analyses based on the data show that this narrative must, for the most part, be rejected.

Sensitive Sharing on Social Media: Exploring Willingness to Disclose PrEP Usage Among Adolescent Males Who Have Sex With Males

Self-presentation, the process by which people disclose information about themselves to others, is fundamental to online interaction and research on communication technology. Technology often mediates the self-presentation process by obscuring who is in the audience via constrained cues and opaque feed algorithms that govern the visibility of social media content. This can make it risky to disclose sensitive or potentially stigmatizing information about oneself, because it could fall into the wrong hands or be seen by an unsupportive audience. Still, there are times when it is socially beneficial to disclose sensitive information, such as LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and others) people expressing their identities or disclosing HIV status. Decisions about sensitive disclosure, moreover, can be even more complicated in today’s social media landscape with many platforms and audiences in play, particularly for younger users who often use many platforms. We lack a good understanding, however, of how people make these decisions. This article addresses questions about sensitive disclosure on social media through a survey study of adolescent men who have sex with men and their willingness to disclose on social media the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), an HIV prevention medication. Results suggest that perceived platform audience composition and platform features such as ephemerality play into disclosure decisions, as well as the perceived normativity of PrEP use among peers.

When Social Fails: Quasi-experiments on the Effect of Utilizing Digitized Social Relations on Content Generation

Digitized social relations (DSR) refer to the real-life social relations that are digitized into online formats. Although DSR are increasingly utilized by online content-sharing platforms, the economic value extracted from their utilization and the underlying mechanisms of their impacts are not clear, causing various concerns and challenges for practitioners. To address this research gap, this study empirically examines the effect of featuring content from contacts (FCFC), a utilization of DSR that shows and tops reviews to users who follow the reviewer through DSR. We propose that such a utilization raises privacy concerns for reviewers and leads to context collapse, which can decrease reviewer participation. It also triggers reviewers’ motivation for self-presentation, resulting in increased positivity bias in content generation. To test our hypotheses, we conduct empirical analyses of two serial design changes of a leading online review platform. The results from the FCFC design change confirm our hypotheses, showing that the FCFC-affected reviewers write fewer reviews, give higher ratings, and select more expensive merchants to review. The review volume decreases even more for reviewers who are privacy sensitive and for reviewers whose DSR followers are from heterogeneous social contexts, suggesting privacy concerns and context collapse as two mechanisms through which FCFC exerts an impact. The effects and the mechanisms are further validated by the results of analysis of a refinement design change, which shows that, once reviewers are provided with more controls over privacy and audience composition, the behavioral trends caused by FCFC discontinue. The findings add to the research streams of anonymity, self-presentation, and context collapse as well as provide important guidance for practitioners in regard to DSR-enabled feature designs.

Predictability and variability of association patterns in sooty mangabeys

In many group-living animal species, interactions take place in changing social environments, increasing the information processing necessary to optimize social decision-making. Communities with different levels of spatial and temporal cohesion should differ in the predictability of association patterns. While the focus in this context has been on primate species with high fission-fusion dynamics, little is known about the variability of association patterns in species with large groups and high temporal cohesion, where group size and the environment create unstable subgroups. Here, we use sooty mangabeys as a model species to test predictability on two levels: on the subgroup level and on the dyadic level. Our results show that the entirety of group members surrounding an individual is close to random in sooty mangabeys; making it unlikely that individuals can predict the exact composition of bystanders for any interaction. At the same time, we found predictable dyadic associations based on assortative mixing by age, kinship, reproductive state in females, and dominance rank; potentially providing individuals with the ability to partially predict which dyads can be usually found together. These results indicate that animals living in large cohesive groups face different challenges from those with high fission-fusion dynamics, by having to adapt to fast-changing social contexts, while unable to predict who will be close-by in future interactions. At the same time, entropy measures on their own are unable to capture the predictability of association patterns in these groups.Significance statementWhile the challenges created by high fission-fusion dynamics in animal social systems and their impact on the evolution of cognitive abilities are relatively well understood, many species live in large groups without clear spatio-temporal subgrouping. Nonetheless, they show remarkable abilities in considering their immediate social environment when making social decisions. Measures of entropy of association patterns have recently been proposed to measure social complexity across species. Here, we evaluate suggested entropy measures in sooty mangabeys. The high entropy of their association patterns would indicate that subgroup composition is largely random, not allowing individuals to prepare for future social environments. However, the existence of strong assortativity on the dyadic level indicates that individuals can still partially predict who will be around whom, even if the overall audience composition might be unclear. Entropy alone, therefore, captures social complexity incompletely, especially in species facing fast-changing social environments.

Feeling Left Out: Underserved Audiences in Science Communication

Science communication only reaches certain segments of society. Various underserved audiences are detached from it and feel left out, which is a challenge for democratic societies that build on informed participation in deliberative processes. While only recently researchers and practitioners have addressed the question on the detailed composition of the not reached groups, even less is known about the emotional impact on underserved audiences: feelings and emotions can play an important role in how science communication is received, and “feeling left out” can be an important aspect of exclusion. In this exploratory study, we provide insights from interviews and focus groups with three different underserved audiences in Germany. We found that on the one hand, material exclusion factors such as available infrastructure or financial means as well as specifically attributable factors such as language skills, are influencing the audience composition of science communication. On the other hand, emotional exclusion factors such as fear, habitual distance, and self- as well as outside-perception also play an important role. Therefore, simply addressing material aspects can only be part of establishing more inclusive science communication practices. Rather, being aware of emotions and feelings can serve as a point of leverage for science communication in reaching out to underserved audiences.

The impact of the economic availability of food in Russia on consumption patterns and health of the nation

Currently, Russia is implementing the project “Demography”, which involves the formation of motivation of people to a healthy lifestyle, including a healthy diet. In the article the author reveals the problem of the lack of quality and vital for health products in the daily diet of the majority of the population due to the lack of opportunities to purchase them. Falling incomes and purchasing power of the population shifts the food vector to the consumption of products rich in vegetable fats and sugars or processed products made from inexpensive imported products. High prices for quality products remain the main factor determining the structure of consumption and health of the nation. In this regard, enterprises should start from the regional characteristics both in terms of income levels and dietary habits, and age composition of the target audience, because of the quality of food depends on maintaining the health and longevity of the population and the gene pool of future generations. It is necessary to take measures to promote a healthy diet, create “separate shelves” with natural products, reduce cheating on products, ranging from excise duties to logical costs. Issues of production of environmentally friendly products come to the fore today. In this regard, modern technologies in agriculture are in great demand today, allowing to increase the purity of products.

Welcome to the Peoples of the Mountains and the Sea: Evaluating an Inaugural Indigenous Cultural Festival

Welcome to the Peoples of the Mountains and the Sea: Evaluating an Inaugural Indigenous Cultural Festival

A novel alarm signal in aquatic prey: Familiar minnows coordinate group defences against predators through chemical disturbance cues.

Animal signalling systems outside the realm of human perception remain largely understudied. These systems consist of four main components: a signalling context, a voluntary signal, receiver responses and resulting fitness benefits to both the signaller and receiver(s). It is often most difficult to determine incidental cues from voluntary signals. One example is chemical disturbance cues released by aquatic prey during predator encounters that may serve to alert conspecifics of nearby risk and initiate tighter shoaling. We aimed to test whether disturbance cues are released incidentally (i.e. as a cue) or are produced voluntarily depending on a specific signalling context such as the audience surrounding the individual, and thus constitute a signal. We hypothesized that if receivers use disturbance cues to communicate risk among themselves, they would produce more (or more potent) disturbance cues when present in a group of conspecifics rather than when they are isolated (presence/absence of an audience) and use disturbance cues more when present alongside familiar rather than unfamiliar conspecifics (audience composition effect). We placed fathead minnows (Pimephales promelas) in groups with familiar fish, unfamiliar fish or as isolated individuals with no audience present, and then simulated a predator chase to evoke disturbance cues. We used bioassays with independent receivers to assess whether the disturbance cues produced differed depending on the signallers' audience. We found evidence of voluntary signalling, as minnows responded to disturbance cues from groups of fish with tighter shoaling while disturbance cues from isolated minnows did not evoke a significant shoaling response (presence/absence audience effect). Receivers also increased shoaling, freezing and dashing more in response to disturbance cues from familiar groups compared to disturbance cues from unfamiliar groups or isolated minnows (audience composition effect). Together, these findings support our hypothesis that disturbance cues are used as an antipredator signal to initiate coordinated group defences among familiar conspecifics involving shoaling, freezing and dashing. This study represents the strongest evidence to date that chemicals released by aquatic prey upon disturbance by predators serve as voluntary signals rather than simply cues that prey have evolved to detect when assessing their risk of predation.