Human Social Groups Research Articles

Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda.

Science is among humanity's greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality). Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance. Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups. This perspective helps explain both recent findings on scientific censorship and recent changes to scientific institutions, such as the use of harm-based criteria to evaluate research. We discuss unknowns surrounding the consequences of censorship and provide recommendations for improving transparency and accountability in scientific decision-making to enable the exploration of these unknowns. The benefits of censorship may sometimes outweigh costs. However, until costs and benefits are examined empirically, scholars on opposing sides of ongoing debates are left to quarrel based on competing values, assumptions, and intuitions.

From Buffon to Coleridge: Sociability and Humanity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Comparative Anatomy

This article investigates the redefinition of human and animal sociabilities in the light of comparative anatomy. Linnaeus's classification questioned and redrew the frontiers of humanity, raising new debates on what makes a being human, who or what is entitled to humanity, what corrupts humanity, and why some beings degenerate. Enlightenment anthropology, as a new science accommodating itself to philosophical inquiry, became an ideological battleground on which two representations of man's degeneracy were fought out. Was human depravity the consequences of consumption, luxury, and social needs that increasingly characterised European cultures in the eighteenth century, or was it to be understood as a result of physical degeneration, that is, alienation from the civilised world? The natural man, whether as an imaginary state or embodied in ‘wild' creatures, crystallised the anxiety about degeneration and natural forces acting upon bodies and organisms. To ring-fence humanity and distinguish it from the lower orders of nature, typically human attributes were constructed in comparative anatomy discourses. Reason, language and sociality came to characterise human behaviours while animals were deprived of any ‘social’ faculties. Through analogy, the human social group was often compared to insect communities or animal herds, clusters or shoals, yet these animal or insect assemblages were systematically studied from an anthropocentric perspective. The article weaves seemingly disparate discourses - the writings of the Comte de Buffon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Monboddo, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, William Lawrence and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - into a dialogue and debate that decisively defined the nature of human and animal sociabilities.

ISSUES AND CHALLENGES OF TRIBAL EDUCATION IN NORTH-EAST INDIA

Education is the most essential element for the enhancement of any country. For this, education structure needs to ensure the advantage of education to all people of the nation, removing the disparities irrespective of category, religion, caste, sex and geographical location. If we overlook all over the world, the status of schedule Caste and schedule tribes are backward in compared with the other people. The term tribal came from ‘tribe’ which refers to a class of human social group. According to some studies on tribal education the tribal community especially who live in North Eastern region of India are neglected by others. In every aspect of development, the government policy maker of our country make plan for them, but sorrowfully these communities are unable to make them in the same level with the mainstream of the society. This study tried to find out the drawbacks of this tribe particularly in the aspect of education. The study also clarify the cause behind the backwardness of educational status related to socio-economic condition, academic cause and personal cause of students from primary to higher education stage. From time to time government implemented various plans and schemes for tribal education. This study also tries to give some suggestion for development of tribal education. And finally the findings of the present study would be helpful to tribal education for giving suitable guideline about all-purposes of education. The study deals particularly with the tribes of North East India in regard to education of all three stages and carries out the present status of it.

Role of Social Workers for Education Development at the Local Level in Nepal

Social work has been developed before the 19th century. It provides support through various organizations. The short meaning of social work is work done for society, which is different from personal work. One can support the entire nation through the family members of the larger community. In fact, social work is self-service in various human lives, behaviors, social groups, and functions. It includes sociology, anthropology, practical knowledge, management, population, education, geography, history, law, political science, and psychology. In the name of religion, people are adopting social service or social work in an unknown way. Social service is self-desire, and people do it for soul satisfaction. Social service should be selfless, but today selfish people have entered every field. It cannot be said that theory and practice are different things. Since 72.5% of respondents agree to social work on an individual basis, a group or community is involved in social service to address the social, economic, and psychological aspects of the concerned person or society. Otherwise, it can adversely affect the concerned individual, family, community, or entire society. An individual or an organization improves social services. This is a voluntary service. It leads to the development of society and the country. People do not expect anything in return from the public. It means work is dynamic and unique in helping individuals, families, groups, and communities. The primary goal of social services is to improve the overall well-being of society, especially for the most vulnerable populations.

Disassembling the actant: A valediction to actor-network theory

On 9 October 2022, Bruno Latour died. His death was widely and deeply mourned. He is a great loss to sociology. This article takes Latour’s death as cue to make an initial posthumous assessment of his work. It argues that, with Latour’s death, sociology is at a cross-roads which in some ways reprises the Tarde-Durkheim debate. When Tarde died in 1904, the Durkheimian school became dominant. After Latour’s death, this article considers whether that history might now been reversed with a subsidence of the Durkheimian tradition. The article argues it should not. While recognising Latour’s ingenious creativity and his massive contribution to sociology, the article rejects Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Despite the many strengths of ANT and the extraordinary influence it has exerted, the article dissects the actant to claim that ANT is a flawed project. It argues in order to avoid accusations of determinism, the status of the actant was always ambiguous in ANT. As a result, although Latour consistently denied the power of human social groups, his analyses eventually relied upon surreptitious appeals to them. The neo-Durkheimian currents which are evident in contemporary sociology should re-assert themselves.

Function, Style, and Standardization: Is the Proximal or Distal End of a Middle Stone Age Point More Variable?

ABSTRACT Middle Stone Age (MSA) point styles may reflect the development of regional identities of human social groups. MSA people likely used these points for various functions including as weapon tips. Recent work in cultural evolution suggests that functional aspects of technology tend to be more standardized and subject to negative selective pressures, while stylistic aspects are highly visible and tend to be more variable. This study examines the patterns of segmented (proximal vs. distal) standardization for unretouched MSA points from six archaeological assemblages using landmark-based geometric morphometrics to quantify shape variation. Contrary to expectations, our results show that the proximal end has greater shape variation than the distal end. Segregating within point variation provides clues to past function and style patterns in the MSA. This approach also opens new avenues for exploring ethnographic and recent archaeological projectile points.

Fractal structure of human and primate social networks optimizes information flow

Primate and human social groups exhibit a fractal structure that has a very limited range of preferred layer sizes, with groups of 5, 15, 50 and (in humans) 150 and 500 predominating. In non-human primates, this same fractal distribution is also observed in the distribution of species mean group sizes and in the internal network structure of their groups. Here we demonstrate that this preferential numbering arises because of the critical nature of dynamic self-organization within complex social networks. We calculate the size dependence of the scaling properties of complex social network models and argue that this aggregate behaviour exhibits a form of collective intelligence. Direct calculation establishes that the complexity of social networks as measured by their scaling behaviour is non-monotonic, peaking globally around 150 with a secondary peak at 500 and tertiary peaks at 5, 15 and 50. This provides a theory-based rationale for the fractal layering of primate and human social groups.

All human social groups are human, but some are more human than others: A comprehensive investigation of the implicit association of “Human” to US racial/ethnic groups

All human groups are equally human, but are they automatically represented as such? Harnessing data from 61,377 participants across 13 experiments (six primary and seven supplemental), a sharp dissociation between implicit and explicit measures emerged. Despite explicitly affirming the equal humanity of all racial/ethnic groups, White participants consistently associated Human (relative to Animal) more with White than Black, Hispanic, and Asian groups on Implicit Association Tests (IATs; experiments 1-4). This effect emerged across diverse representations of Animal that varied in valence (pets, farm animals, wild animals, and vermin; experiments 1-2). Non-White participants showed no such Human=Own Group bias (e.g., Black participants on a White-Black/Human-Animal IAT). However, when the test included two outgroups (e.g., Asian participants on a White-Black/Human-Animal IAT), non-White participants displayed Human=White associations. The overall effect was largely invariant across demographic variations in age, religion, and education but did vary by political ideology and gender, with self-identified conservatives and men displaying stronger Human=White associations (experiment 3). Using a variance decomposition method, experiment 4 showed that the Human=White effect cannot be attributed to valence alone; the semantic meaning of Human and Animal accounted for a unique proportion of variance. Similarly, the effect persisted even when Human was contrasted with positive attributes (e.g., God, Gods, and Dessert; experiment 5a). Experiments 5a-b clarified the primacy of Human=White rather than Animal=Black associations. Together, these experiments document a factually erroneous but robust Human=Own Group implicit stereotype among US White participants (and globally), with suggestive evidence of its presence in other socially dominant groups.

A Framework for Online Hate Speech Detection on Code-mixed Hindi-English Text and Hindi Text in Devanagari

Social Media has been growing and has provided the world with a platform to opine, debate, display, and discuss like never before. It has a major influence in research areas that analyze human behavior and social groups, and the phenomenon of social interactions is even being used in areas such as Internet of Things. This constant stream of data connecting individuals and organizations across the globe has had a tremendous impact on the functioning of society and even has the power to sway elections. Despite having numerous benefits, social media has certain issues such as the prevalence of fake news, which has also led to the rise of the hate speech phenomenon. Due to lax security throughout these social media platforms, these issues continue to exist without any repercussions. This leads to cyberbullying, defamation, and presents grave security concerns. Even though some work has been done independently on native scripts, hate speech detection, and code-mixed data, there exists a lack of academic work and research in the area of detecting hate speech in transliterated code-mixed data and in-text containing native language scripts. Research in this field is inhibited greatly due to the multiple variations in grammar and spelling and in general a lack of availability of annotated datasets, especially when it comes to native languages. This article comes up with a method to automate hate speech detection in code-mixed and native language text. The article presents an architecture containing a Tabnet classifier-based model trained on features extracted using MuRIL from transliterated code-mixed textual data. The article also shows that the same model works well on features extracted from text in Devanagari despite being trained on transliterated data.

Communication style drives emergent leadership attribution in virtual teams.

Leader selection plays a key role in how human social groups are formed and maintained. Leadership is either assigned through formal processes within an organization, or emerges informally through interactions with other group members-particularly in novel contexts. COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of virtual meetings and more flexible team structures. However our understanding of how assigned leadership influences subsequent leadership emergence in virtual settings is limited. Here we examine the relationship between assigned leadership within an existing organization and subsequent emergent leadership attributions as members engage in virtual interactions. To do so, we created and implemented a novel virtual group decision-making task designed to support quantification of a more comprehensive set of communication style elements, such as speech dynamics and facial expressions, as well as task behaviors. Sixteen members of a real world organization engaged four repeated rounds of a group decision making task with new team members each time. We found participants made novel attributions of emergent leadership rather than relying solely on existing assigned leadership. While assigned leadership did influence leadership attributions, communication style, including amount of speech but also variability in facial expressions, played a larger role. The behavior of these novel emergent leaders was also more consistent with expectations of leadership behavior: they spoke earlier, more often, and focused more on the correct decision than did assigned leaders. These findings suggest that, even within existing social networks, virtual contexts promote flexible group structures that depend more on communication style and task performance than assigned leadership.

Dual-Population Social Group Optimization Algorithm Based on Human Social Group Behavior Law

Inspired by the behavior law of human social groups, a new swarm intelligence algorithm named the dual-population social group optimization (DPSGO) algorithm is proposed in this article. Based on the primitive social group optimization (SGO) algorithm, dual-population grouping technology, reverse learning technology, immigration migration technology, and Gaussian mutation are introduced to further simulate the behavior law of actual human social groups. Experimental results and performance comparison show that the DPSGO algorithm has a better searchability and convergence rate. In addition, aiming at the socially hot issue of aviation safety, the simulation and experimental results show that the temperature measurement error can be reduced to less than 7.5 °C by using the DPSGO algorithm combined with reflected radiation correction to process the aeroengine multispectral radiation temperature measurement data. This article is of great significance to the design and optimization of swarm intelligence algorithms by using the behavior law of human social groups and provides valuable guidance for enhancing the safety monitoring of aeroengines.

Krytyka funkcji wyborów w państwach demokratycznych na przykładzie dyskursu we współczesnym polskim ruchu anarchistycznym i jego intelektualnych inspiracji

Parliamentary democracy is a political system based on elections, which are held periodically and have specific functions. The most important of these are: the power-building function, the legitimising function and the representative function. However, there are social movements that negate these functions. One of them is the anarchist movement. Anarchists believe that parliamentary democracy and the state limit the freedom of human beings and social groups. That is why they are opposed to general elections. In their opinion, parliamentary democracy should be replaced by stateless societies based on direct and participatory democracy.

Common belief multi-agent reinforcement learning based on variational recurrent models

The tacit cooperation among human teams benefits from the fact that consensus can be reached on a task through common belief. Similar to human social groups, agents in distributed learning systems can also rely on common belief to achieve cooperation under the condition of limited communication. In this paper, we show the role of common belief among agents in completing cooperative tasks, by proposing the Common Belief Multi-Agent (CBMA) reinforcement learning method. CBMA is a novel value-based method that infers the belief between agents with a variational model and models the environment with a variational recurrent neural network. We validate CBMA on two grid-world games as well as the StarCraft II micromanagement benchmark. Experimental results show that the learned common belief by CBMA can improve performance in both discrete and continuous state settings.

The Relationship Between Employee's Status Perception and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: A Psychological Path of Work Vitality.

PurposeStudies have shown that status-based rankings exist within almost every human social group and influence most aspects of organizational life. However, few studies have discussed the relationship between employees’ status and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Based on social cognitive theory, this paper explores the relationship between employees’ status perception and two types of OCBs: challenging and affiliative, as well as the mechanism underlying this relationship by introducing work vitality as the mediator and dominance motivation as the moderator.MethodsWe collected the empirical data from different enterprises located in major cities in China following a two-stage sampling procedure. The final sample consists of 330 employees. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was used to test the hypothesis.ResultsEmployee status perception is positively related to work vitality (b = 0.103, p = 0.027), challenging OCBs (b = 0.160, p < 0.001) and affiliative OCBs (b = 0.105, p = 0.006). Work vitality mediates the relationship between employee status perception and challenging OCBs with 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals [0.004, 0.063], and it also mediates the relationship between employee status perception and affiliative OCBs with 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals [0.004, 0.049]. The interaction of status perception and dominance motivation is significantly related to work vitality (b = 0.121, p = 0.041). Specifically, when dominance motivation is at low level, the effect of status perception on work vitality is −0.008 (non-significant); when dominance motivation is high level, the effect is 0.175 (p = 0.005).ConclusionThe result suggests that employees’ perceptions of status are positively and significantly related to their challenging and affiliative OCBs, and employee’s work vitality mediates this relationship. It further indicates that dominance motivation moderates the relation between status perception and work vitality. Specifically, the positive relationship between employee status perception and work vitality is stronger when an employee has high dominance motivation than low dominance motivation.

Group polarisation among location-based game players: an analysis of use and attitudes towards game slang

PurposeThis study investigates how game design, which divides players into static teams, can reinforce group polarisation. The authors study this phenomenon from the perspective of social identity in the context of team-based location-based games, with a focus on game slang.Design/methodology/approachThe authors performed an exploratory data analysis on an original dataset of n = 242,852 messages from five communication channels to find differences in game slang adoption between three teams in the location-based augmented reality game Pokémon GO. A divisive word “jym” (i.e. a Finnish slang derivative of the word “gym”) was discovered, and players' attitudes towards the word were further probed with a survey (n = 185). Finally, selected participants (n = 25) were interviewed in person to discover any underlying reasons for the observed polarised attitudes.FindingsThe players' teams were correlated with attitudes towards “jym”. Face-to-face interviews revealed association of the word to a particular player subgroup and it being used with improper grammar as reasons for the observed negative attitudes. Conflict over (virtual) territorial resources reinforced the polarisation.Practical implicationsGame design with static teams and inter-team conflict influences players' social and linguistic identity, which subsequently may result in divisive stratification among otherwise cooperative or friendly player-base.Originality/valueThe presented multi-method study connecting linguistic and social stratification is a novel approach to gaining insight on human social interactions, polarisation and group behaviour in the context of location-based games.

"Human status criteria: Sex differences and similarities across 14 nations": Correction to Buss et al. (2020).

Reports an error in "Human status criteria: Sex differences and similarities across 14 nations" by David M. Buss, Patrick K. Durkee, Todd K. Shackelford, Brian F. Bowdle, David P. Schmitt, Gary L. Brase, Jae C. Choe and Irina Trofimova (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, May 28, 2020, np). In the article, the third sentence in the Content level subsection in the Status Criteria More Central to Women section of the Results should appear instead as Fidelity, chastity/purity, and long-term mating success increase women's status more than men's. A coding error in Figure 7 for Dishonoring Family appeared. The corrected Figure 7 now appears. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2020-35662-001). Social status is a central and universal feature of our highly social species. Reproductively relevant resources, including food, territory, mating opportunities, powerful coalitional alliances, and group-provided health care, flow to those high in status and trickle only slowly to those low in status. Despite its importance and centrality to human social group living, the scientific understanding of status contains a large gap in knowledge-the precise criteria by which individuals are accorded high or low status in the eyes of their group members. It is not known whether there exist universal status criteria, nor the degree to which status criteria vary across cultures. Also unknown is whether status criteria are sex differentiated, and the degree of cross-cultural variability and consistency of sex-differentiated status criteria. The current article investigates status criteria across 14 countries (N = 2,751). Results provide the first systematic documentation of potentially universal and sex-differentiated status criteria. Discussion outlines important next steps in understanding the psychology of status. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Core design principles for nurturing organization-level selection

Dynamic relationships between individuals and groups have been a focus for evolutionary theorists and modelers for decades. Among evolutionists, selfish gene theory promotes reductionist approaches while multilevel selection theory encourages a context-sensitive approach that appreciates that individuals and groups can both matter. Among economists, a comparable contrast is found wherein the reductionist shareholder primacy theory most associated with Nobel laureate Milton Friedman is very different from the context-sensitive focus on managing common resources that Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom pioneered. In this article, we examine whether the core design principles that Ostrom advanced can cultivate selection at supra-individual levels across different domains. We show that Ostrom’s design principles that were forged in the context of managing natural resources are associated with positive outcomes for human social groups across a variety of functional domains.

The Influence of Robot Number on Robot Group Perception—A Call for Action

Research on robot groups has often applied psychological principles underlying group processes between humans to interactions with and between robots. However, such research has failed to test empirically whether these principles indeed apply to the robot context. For instance, the notion of a social group may be interpreted differently when facing human versus robot groups. Basic research on this issue is missing. Therefore, the present experiment aimed at integrating social psychological theorizing and research on robot groups by utilizing the principles of group entitativity. We examined the effect of robot number and similarity on the perception of these robots as a (social) group. To do so, participants saw pictures of one to ten robots, appearing low or high in similarity. Results showed that the aspects eliciting the perception of a social “group” in humans seem to differ from the factors evoking robot group perception. According to our findings, at least three robots seem necessary for the perception of a robot “group” to emerge. Social psychological research, however, has proposed that two persons suffice to elicit the notion of a human social group. Basic research is needed to substantiate assumptions drawn from social psychological theorizing before translating it into human-robot context.

RETRACTED: Declines in Religiosity Predict Increases in Violent Crime—but Not Among Countries With Relatively High Average IQ

Many scholars have argued that religion reduces violent behavior within human social groups. Here, we tested whether intelligence moderates this relationship. We hypothesized that religion would have greater utility for regulating violent behavior among societies with relatively lower average IQs than among societies with relatively more cognitively gifted citizens. Two studies supported this hypothesis. Study 1, a longitudinal analysis from 1945 to 2010 (with up to 176 countries and 1,046 observations), demonstrated that declines in religiosity were associated with increases in homicide rates-but only in countries with relatively low average IQs. Study 2, a multiverse analysis (171 models) using modern data (97-195 countries) and various controls, consistently confirmed that lower rates of religiosity were more strongly associated with higher homicide rates in countries with lower average IQ. These findings raise questions about how secularization might differentially affect groups of different mean cognitive ability.

The Interdependent Coexistence of the Rational Civilizations: The Mental Origin of Civilizations

The paper purposes that the three major civilizations are territorial rational civilization originated from the tribes before the Axial Age, discrete Western rational civilization originated from the mega empires in Middle East and Greece during the Axial Age, and the connective Eastern rational civilization originated from the mega empires in India and China during the Axial Age. Territorial rational civilization with territorial worldview for ingroup and outgroup individuals produces territorial nationalist democracy based on rule of boundary to deal with ingroup and outgroup individuals. Discrete Western rational civilization with discrete worldview for discrete and independent individuals produces discrete liberty-equality democracy based on rule of law to deal with discrete individuals. Connective Eastern rational civilization with connective worldview for connective and related individuals produces connective common wellbeing democracy based on rule of relation to deal with connective individuals. The current highly international interdependence produces the purposed internationalized interdependent community which allows the interdependent coexistence of the three rational civilizations by establishing the promotion of rational civilizations, the basic rules of relation and law, the potential civilizational and the regional defense boundaries, and the cooperation in international relations. The mental origin of the rational civilization consists of the social brain for instinctive intragroup relations and worldviews to form the original human social group, the mental immune system for instinctive mental therapy, theory of imaginary mind for imaginary religious and political entities with their own minds to form cohesive large social groups, and the thinking brain for rule to form rational civilization.