Private Opinions Research Articles

Attempts at a Marxist Critique of Cancellation

Abstract This paper advances a Marxist critique of the politics of cancellation and raises concerns about the possible development of a cancel culture. Rather than delving into debates on freedom of speech, crucial though they are, this paper focuses on the pragmatics of the political tool – its goals, mechanisms, effects, and the underlying reasoning. From a Marxist perspective, it is essential to analyse cancellation and cancel culture holistically, considering their rationale, the mechanism, the objectives, and the impacts, along with their relationship to the material conditions of society. Such an analysis provides a comprehensive understanding of any historical development and argues that addressing political problems in the long term requires such a holistic approach, including the development of relevant productive forces. If cancellation evolves into a culture, it may give rise to a polity that reinforces market relations. Within the framework of historical materialism, this would be a case of the superstructure supporting the base, turning politics into a matter of private opinions, which is far from ideal. The paper concludes with some practical considerations.

Private Opinion, Public Speech: The Continued Importance of Talk in Victorian Politics

Private Opinion, Public Speech: The Continued Importance of Talk in Victorian Politics

Average Consensus for Expressed and Private Opinions

Average Consensus for Expressed and Private Opinions

Assessing The Impact of Organizational Context on Learning Barrier Formation in Lima’s Private Universities

This research focuses on exploring the relationship between organizational learning barriers and organizational context in Private Universities in Lima, with the primary aim of elucidating how these elements interact and affect the learning dynamics within these institutions. Adopting a correlational cross-sectional non-experimental approach, a specific survey was designed and validated for application in the Peruvian context, gathering responses from 384 collaborators. The findings reveal that the most frequent barriers related to thought-action coherence highlight concerns about authenticity and sincerity in discussions, as well as a significant discrepancy between public and private opinions of workers. On the other hand, in the realm of organizational context, the critical factors identified include employees' perceptions of replaceability, fear of evaluations, deficiencies in communication channels, and the predominance of opinions from those with greater power. The conclusions point to the need to address these barriers to foster a more conducive environment for organizational learning, suggesting that effective knowledge and organizational environment management are fundamental for institutional development and adaptability.

Decolonisation: meaning, sentiments and implications for heritage

ABSTRACT Within the printed and online newspaper media in the UK, notions of ‘decolonisation’ referring to various contexts, such as historical, relating to museums and institutions, cultural decolonisation and in relation to modern independence discussions, can be traced. In this article, we have applied topic modelling and natural language processing methods to carry out a classification of, and sentiment analysis on, newspaper headlines and texts from leading British newspapers covering decolonisation over the past decade. The results show an abrupt change in the meaning of decolonisation starting in the middle of the 2010s with an increased focus on cultural and institutional matters, particularly in right-leaning media. Surprisingly, the editorial slant of broadsheets seemingly only had at best moderate effects on tone, while headlines in right-wing tabloids were significantly more negative. Articles covering cultural aspects of decolonisation were substantially more negative than those applying a more traditional, territorial definition of decolonisation. Given the influence of newspaper media on public and private opinions, we discuss the heritage implications of these findings and suggest avenues for further investigation.

Death at Hajj Qadir al-Koyi

The phenomenon of death has always been a major question and subject of human interest, and therefore man tried in various ways to achieve immortality, and when he knew that he could not accomplish that, he resorted to philosophy and private opinions to comfort him and adapt to that. Of course, some of this is reflected in the context of religions and religious beliefs, and this is perhaps the most obvious kind of a death point of view. Through the importance of death and its impact on human thought, opinion, and action, as well as the fact that Haji Qadri Koyi was a religious man in his time, we conducted this research to show what death is from his point of view. This study attempts to explain what death is and provide different perspectives. And to answer these questions: Is death the end of life? Or is it the beginning of another life? What are the forms of death? Does someone's death end everything? What are the types of death? What was Haji Kadri Koy's view of death as a thinker, poet, and writer, and how did he describe it in his poems? This research, which was conducted using the descriptive analytical method, is divided into two main parts. In the first part, an attempt was made to explain the concept of death and the different views on death. In the second part, which is a practical part, we present examples of poems in which the poet talks about death and presents his views on it. In the end, we came to several conclusions, Haji says, people can continue to live after death because of their actions. Then we listed the sources and wrote a summary of the research in both Arabic and English.

Modelling the creation of friends and foes groups in small real social networks.

Although friendship networks have been extensively studied, few models and studies are available to understand the reciprocity of friendship and foes. Here a model is presented to explain the directed friendship and foes network formation observed in experiments of Mexican and Hungarian schools. Within the presented model, each agent has a private opinion and a public one that shares to the group. There are two kinds of interactions between agents. The first kind represent interactions with the neighbors while the other represents the attitude of an agent to the overall public available information. Links between agents evolve as a combination of the public and private information available. Friendship is defined using a fitness function according to the strength of the agent's bonds, clustering coefficient, betweenness centrality and degree. Enmity is defined as very negative links. The model allows us to reproduce the distribution of mentions for friends and foes observed in the experiments, as well as the topology of the directed networks.

CREATIVITY MANAGEMENT WITHIN THE AESTHETICAL SITUATION REGARDING THE IN-REAL OR DIGITAL FORM OF PARTICIPATION IN ARTS: ART RECEIVERS’ PERSPECTIVE

Because digitalisation of the aesthetical experience, a process speeded up by the not-yet-finished COVID-19 pandemic, should be considered in the context of growth or loss of artistry/creativity, this paper aims to assess the influence of the participation form in the aesthetical situation by receivers on the level of artistry/creativity potential loss. Assessment of the quality of participation by the receivers in each of five types of arts (musical arts, performing arts, literary arts, audio-visual arts, visual arts) was done using the same ten criteria for each type of art: satisfaction, pleasure, engagement, the possibility of experiencing catharsis, contact with the artwork itself, contact with the performer itself, comfort of participation, possibilities of shaping the aesthetical experience, own motivation to participate, easiness of participation. The literature review was run using NVivo Pro software. Data analysis (n = 221) was executed using IBM SPSS and Microsoft Excel. Answering the research hypotheses: H1) the digital form of participation in arts determines the level of quality of participation in the aesthetical situation by receivers; H2) the form of participation in art shapes the level of quality of participation in the aesthetical situation by receivers of each type of art differently: in musical arts, performing arts, literary arts and visual arts, in-real participation gives higher quality than digital participation; in audio-visual arts, in-real participation gives lower quality than digital participation. The research results may be helpful for: art creators wanting to choose the optimal way of distributing their artworks; art managers to better understand art receivers’ perspectives and their opinion about participation in arts in real or digitally; art receivers to compare their private opinion about the ways of participation in arts with the general opinion of art receivers.

Convergence analysis of expressed and private opinion dynamics model on signed network

Due to the discrepancy between an individual's expressed opinion and private opinion in many social situations, this paper aims to study the convergence and bipartite consensus of expressed and private opinion (EPO) model on signed directed network G ( W ) without satisfying common strong connectivity. First, by constructing an enlarged network G ( P ) of G ( W ) and studying the properties of CSCCs in G ( P ) , we establish some general convergence criteria for the EPO model. Second, we explore the relationship between the final private opinion, final expressed opinion and initial opinion of an individual and prove that the self-confidence of an individual can influence the gap between his final expressed opinion and group pressure. Third, by structural balance theory, we establish the bipartite consensus criterion of the EPO model. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of our results.

On the Conditions for the Introducing Distance Learning in Russian Universities

Modern computer and Internet technologies make it possible not only to transfer educational materials to digital media, but also to implement in a remote format various teaching methods, diagnostics, individualization of educational interests and trajectories, and much more. In addition, modern technologies in this area allow us to do what was simply impossible within the framework of the conventional education system. But the issue of a reasonable measure of the use of these technologies and the adequate setting and implementation of tasks in this direction requires special work. The article presents the results of this kind of work carried out on the basis of a program-project approach. Although the work was carried out within the framework of the assignment of the FEMU to classical universities for mathematical education, the specifics of universities and mathematical education were not significant. The assignment was to determine the readiness of the mathematical faculties of universities for the systematic use of distance learning through an expert survey of FEMU members. The relevance of the question of the timeliness of the introducing distance learning in a particular situation, on the one hand, and the problematic nature of this issue, due to the lack of proper systemic, logical grounds for its solution, prompted the author to apply his own method, which is conceptually different from the numerous surveys and “experiences” available in literature. The application of this method (“double inversion of position” or, in other words, “double negation”: intent – objections – withdrawal of objections), made it possible to formulate three principal lists. The first contains an explicitly formulated framework in which the introducing distance learning makes sense; the second and third represent the research and development program necessary for the implementation of distance learning. And already on the basis of the first list, related to the current situation, a survey of experts was conducted, which made it possible to formulate the main conclusions on the problem under discussion. The results obtained fix a logical necessity that does not depend on private opinions or specific features of the situation.

Dynamics of Expressed and Private Opinion Evolution Over Issue Sequences

The cognitive inertia of sociology, similar to the inertia of physics, plays a significant role on the opinions formulation. In a general way, each individual possesses both a private and an expressed opinion in social networks. In this article, we propose a novel model with expressed and private opinions over issue sequences to capture cognitive inertia. The persistent disagreement and consensus for opinion dynamics over issue sequences are studied by the network structure and the social power evolutions. Moreover, we consider the opinion evolutions over issue sequences with bounded confidence. It is shown that the private opinions and the expressed opinions can also achieve consensus. By our proposed issue-sequence-based opinion dynamics model, the social phenomenon of cognitive freezing can be reproduced. The simulation analysis reveals that the convergence rates for the discrepancy of individuals are inversely proportional to the social powers of individuals, and the number of issue sequences for opinions achieving consensus is inversely proportional to the confidence thresholds and directly proportional to the number of individuals.

Opinion formation analysis for Expressed and Private Opinions (EPOs) models: Reasoning private opinions from behaviors in group decision-making systems

In group decision-making, the expressed opinion of a social individual may be inconsistent with or even opposite to his/her own private opinion or inner thought. Expressed and private opinions (EPOs) models were then developed to study decision-making mechanisms with private opinions. However, most of the existing EPOs models assumed that the individual private opinion is often fixed, or updated by his/her own private opinion and neighbors’ expressed opinions, ignoring the behavior characteristics of social individuals. In this paper, a novel EPOs model is built under a more realistic scenario where the individual private opinions are updated by reasoning the neighbors’ private opinions from their behaviors while the expressed opinions are subject to social pressure. Meanwhile, we investigate the group opinion formation under the proposed EPOs model over a Leader–Influencer–Follower hierarchical network. The evolution process under the proposed EPOs model shows that, on the one hand, when the social pressure is monotonically increasing, group expressed opinions often reach consensus, and the consensus reaching time is closely related to the pressure increase rate. On the other hand, group private opinions and behaviors of the individuals show polarization. The simulation results reveal the sociological phenomena of “the golden mean” and “inconsistent words and deeds”, respectively.

The Communicative Potential of Internet Commentary at the System of Public Relations (Macedonian-Albanian case)

An Internet comment, being, in fact, a private opinion left under a post, with a certain set of similar statements, may reflect a trend in issues and topics of concern to society. In this article, based on the analysis of the comments of users of the social network, an assumption is made about the reflection in them of a threat to the integrity of society. The Macedonian social media space was chosen as a case for monitoring, the subject of interest was Internet comments on representatives of the Albanian ethnic minority of the Republic of North Macedonia. The relationship between representatives of two ethnic groups (Albanians and Macedonians) has a conflict background and conflict potential. Based on the results of the analysis of the corpus of verbal data, the author formulated assumptions about the role of Internet commentary in reflecting the mood of society and its potency as one of the conditions in the development of the Albanian-Macedonian conflict, which is currently in a latent phase. On the one hand, comments left on social networks have a significant destructive potential within the framework of the described case; on the other hand, they have constructive potency, since the space of social networks becomes a kind of substitute in relation to the physical space and makes it possible to keep a possible conflict at the level of rejection in Internet comments, not allowing it to "get out outside."

Объективное знание и «открытое общество» К. Поппера в современном информационном поле

The works of Karl Popper, exploring new approaches to the consideration of theories of knowledge, the formation of objective knowledge, the creation of an open society and the justification of its advantages, not only remain relevant today, but, along with his critical works, are of particular importance in the modern world of a globalized information space. His ideas can and should find practical application in the areas of acquisition, analysis and further formation of knowledge in the field of science and at the level of ordinary network users and consumers of media content. The purpose of this work is to review and study the approaches identified by K. Popper, which can have a positive impact on the formation of public and private opinions in the current huge flow of information and its availability. Today, every user of social networks and other communication channels is a potential distributor of information and messages based on their own opinion. The significance of this work may lie in finding and identifying ways to apply the theories of the philosopher and scientist K. Popper to form more qualified opinions, avoid errors and inaccuracies in public statements, and more fruitfully consume content. The exegesis of K. Popper's methods in the area of modern communication environment can be considered as a new side of studying the problem, and can be applied in the scientific community, among professional journalists, content makers and the general public.

Asynchronous Expressed and Private Opinion Dynamics on Influence Networks

In this paper, we consider an asynchronous discrete-time opinion dynamics model for a social influence network, which consists of a population of interacting individuals, each holding a private and expressed opinion. At each time instant, a single individual activates and updates both her expressed and private opinions simultaneously. While an individual's new private opinion is shaped by her private opinion, the expressed opinions of her neighbors and attachment to an existing prejudice, her expressed opinion is instead a trade-off between her true private opinion and a “public opinion”, representing the current norm or standard opinion from the perspective of the individual. We show that the expressed and private opinions of all individuals converge to the same value exponentially fast when no individual holds an existing prejudice, with the lower bound on the convergence speed based on a general assumption on the network topology. If there are individuals who hold an existing prejudice, then the final opinions of every individual lie between the minimum and maximum value of those constant prejudices. Our results are also extended to consider the case where two or more individuals activate and update their opinions at each time instant. Simulations are provided to illustrate the results.

“Ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology”: On Habermas’ reflections and hypotheses on a further structural transformation of the political public sphere

“Ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology”: On Habermas’ reflections and hypotheses on a further structural transformation of the political public sphere

Research progress of natural silk fibroin and the application for drug delivery in chemotherapies.

Silk fibroin has been widely used in biological fields due to its biocompatibility, mechanical properties, biodegradability, and safety. Recently, silk fibroin as a drug carrier was developed rapidly and achieved remarkable progress in cancer treatment. The silk fibroin-based delivery system could effectively kill tumor cells without significant side effects and drug resistance. However, few studies have been reported on silk fibroin delivery systems for antitumor therapy. The advancement of silk fibroin-based drug delivery systems research and its applications in cancer therapy are highlighted in this study. The properties, applications, private opinions, and future prospects of silk fibroin carriers are discussed to understand better the development of anti-cancer drug delivery systems, which may also contribute to advancing silk fibroin innovation.

Mechanisms for the implementation of the strategy for the development of rural areas

In the article, the authors explore design practices that ensure the development of rural areas in a strategic perspective. Based on a comparative analysis, the main mechanisms were identified that contribute to the formation of projects and effective implementation, taking into account the opinion of the population and the requirements of the authorities. Using the example of several industries, the author comes to the conclusion that involving the population, taking into account private opinions and initiatives, as well as maintaining effective communication at all levels of government, including the horizontal level, provides opportunities for impulse development of rural areas.

Rationalizing systematic discrepancies between election outcomes and opinion polls

The Bradley effect concerns the discrepancy between opinion polls and actual election outcomes that emerges when candidates do not exhibit mainstream ideological, sexual or racial features. This effect was first observed during the 1982 election for the Governor of California that resulted in a significant loss for the black Democratic candidate, Tom Bradley, despite him being ahead in polls. It has been argued that poll respondents tend to mask their true political preference and favour of what is generally considered more socially acceptable. We propose an exactly solvable statistical mechanical model, which allows for a quantitative exploration of this phenomenon. The model includes three main ingredients: (i) the tendency of individuals to align their real preference to the declared (public) opinions of others, (ii) a term accounting for an individual integrity factor, which induces voters to be consistent between their public and private opinions, and (iii) a self-monitoring component, which tunes the strength by which an individual is affected by and wishes to publicly conform to social norms. We observe the emergence of order in a wide range of parameters of the model and discuss the effect of noise on the correlation between hidden and public preference. Finally, we present an application of this model to the prediction of election outcomes.

The effects of social feedback on private opinions. Empirical evidence from the laboratory.

The question of how people change their opinions through social interactions has been on the agenda of social scientific research for many decades. Now that the Internet has led to an ever greater interconnectedness and new forms of exchange that seem to go hand in hand with increasing political polarization, it is once again gaining in relevance. Most recently, the field of opinion dynamics has been complemented by social feedback theory, which explains opinion polarization phenomena by means of a reinforcement learning mechanism. According to the assumptions, individuals not only evaluate the opinion alternatives available to them based on the social feedback received as a result of expressing an opinion within a certain social environment. Rather, they also internalize the expected and thus rewarded opinion to the point where it becomes their actual private opinion. In order to put the implications of social feedback theory to a test, we conducted a randomized controlled laboratory experiment. The study combined preceding and follow-up opinion measurements via online surveys with a laboratory treatment. Social feedback was found to have longer-term effects on private opinions, even when received in an anonymous and sanction free setting. Interestingly and contrary to our expectations, however, it was the mixture of supportive and rejective social feedback that resulted in the strongest influence. In addition, we observed a high degree of opinion volatility, highlighting the need for further research to help identify additional internal and external factors that might influence whether and how social feedback affects private opinions.