Social Contingency Research Articles

Do Children with Autism have Expectancies about the Social Behaviour of Unfamiliar People?

Eight low-functioning and non-verbal children with autism were presented with a modified version of the ‘still face’ paradigm (still face/imitative interaction/still face) performed by a stranger. The children’s reactions illustrate the development of expectancies concerning human social behaviour. While they ignored the stranger and did not show any concern about her odd behaviour during the first still episode, they all focused on the adult during the second still episode. In this episode, they exhibited a mixed social pattern of positive overtures and negative emotional expressions which resembles the still face effect found in normally developing infants. These findings suggest that low-functioning children with autism are able to integrate their previous experience with a partner and detect social contingency, but that they are not able to form a generalized expectancy for social contingency in human beings with whom they have not yet had contact. This may explain why they generally ignore strangers.

Envisioning the Integration of Family and Work: Toward a Kinder, Gentler Workplace

JENNIFER GLASS University of Iowa Unequal Pay for Women in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Thomas E., Michele Acker, and Melvin Manis 1996. Irrepressible Stereotypes. Journal of Experimental Psychology 32:13-38. Padavic Irene A. and Barbara F. Reskin. 1990. Men's Behavior and Women's Interest in Blue-collar Jobs. Problems 37: 613-28. Pettigrew, Thomas F. and Joanne Martin. 1987. Shaping the Organizational Context for Black American Inclusion. Journal of Issues 43:41-78. Pratto, Felicia and John A. Bargh. 1991. Stereotyping Based on Apparently Individuating Information: Trait an Global Components of Sex Stereotypes Under Attention Overload. Journal of Experimental Psychology 27:26q7. Reskin, Barbara F. 1988. Bringing the Men Back In: Sex Differentiation and the Devaluation of Women's Work. Gender &F Society 2:58-81. . 1998. Realities of Affirmative Action in Employment. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. Reskin, Barbara F. and Debra B. McBrier 2000. Why Not Ascription? Organizations' Employment of Male and Female Managers. Forthcoming, American Sociological Review. Salancik, Gerald R. and Jeffrey Pfeffer 1978. Uncertainty, Secrecy, and the Choice of Similar Others. Psychology 41:246-55. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1965. Social Structure and Organizations. Pp. 142-93 in Harldbook of Orgarlizatiorls, edited by James G. March. Chicago: Rand McNally. Tetlock, Phillip E. 1992. The Impact of Accountability on Judgment and Choice: Toward a Contingency Model. Advarlces ir Experimerltal Psychology 25:331-76. Tomaskovic-Devey, Donald. 1993. Gerlder arld Racial Irlequality at Work: Sources arld Corlsequerlces of Job Segregatiorl. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Wilson, George, Ian Sakura-Lemessy, and Jonathan P. West. 1999. Reaching for the Top: Racial Differences in Mobility Paths to Upper-Tier Occupations. Work &f Occupatiorls 26: 165-186. Yzerbyt, Vincent Y., Georges Schadron, JacquesPhilippe Leyens, and Stephan Rocher. 1994. Social Judgeability: Impact of MetaInformational Cues on the Use of Stereotypes. Jourrlal of Persorlality arld Psychology 66:48-55.

Expectancies for social contingency in 2‐month‐olds

In a classic report, Murray and Trevarthen (Emotional regulation of interaction between two‐month‐olds and their mothers. In T. Field & N. Fox (Eds), Social perception in infants (pp. 101–125). Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985) suggested that 6‐ to 12‐week‐olds were sensitive to contingency in maternal stimulation because they became upset during the replay of their mothers’ behavior during an initial period of live interaction over closed circuit TV. However, a number of concerns were raised about the procedure and it was argued that infants may simply have become increasingly fussy over time. To clarify this very important issue, we adopted a three‐condition design (live–replay–live) and modified Murray and Trevarthen’s procedure by inserting a seamless shift from the initially live interaction period to a replay period of good maternal behavior. This was followed by a seamless shift back to a subsequent live interaction. Two‐month‐old smiling and gaze decreased while frowning and mouth closures increased during the replay period relative to the initial live interaction period, replicating Murray and Trevarthen’s results. Fussiness over time did not account for these results because seven of the ten babies increased their positive behaviors and decreased negative behaviors during the second live interaction period, and there was a significant increase in their visual attention to their mothers, thus suggesting a renewed interest in the previously noncontingent partner.

Social contingency and optimal social structures

Social contingency and optimal social structures

Religious Behaviors as Strategies for Organizing Groups of People: A Social Contingency Analysis

A social contingency analysis of religion is presented, arguing that individual religious behaviors are principally maintained by the many powerful benefits of participating in social groups rather than by any immediate or obvious consequences of the religious behaviors. Six common strategies are outlined that can shape the behaviors of large groups of people. More specifically, religious behavior is shaped and maintained by making already-existing contingencies contingent upon low-probability, but socially beneficial, group behaviors. Many specific examples of religious themes are then analyzed in terms of these common strategies for social shaping, including taboos, rituals, totems, personal religious crises, and symbolic expression. For example, a common view is that people are anxious about life, death, and the unknown, and that the direct function of religious behaviors is to provide escape from such anxiety. Such an explanation is instead reversed-that any such anxiety is utilized or created by groups through having escape contingent upon members performing less probable behaviors that nonetheless provide important benefits to most individual group members. These generalized beneficial outcomes, rather than escape from anxiety, maintain the religious behaviors and this fits with observations that religions typically act to increase anxiety rather than to reduce it. An implication of this theory is that there is no difference in principle between religious and nonreligious social control, and it is demonstrated that the same social strategies are utilized in both contexts, although religion has been the more historically important form of social control.

3- to 5-month olds prefer social contingency over eye contact

3- to 5-month olds prefer social contingency over eye contact

Infants' sensitivity to familiar imperfect contigencies in social interaction

Four- and five-month-old infants participated in face-to-face interactions with their mothers and with strangers. The contingent responsiveness for vocalizations and smiles was assessed for each partner in both interactions. For vocalizations and for smiles, infants were more responsive to strangers whose level of contingent responsiveness to them was similar to that of their mothers and they were less responsive to strangers who were either more contingent or less contingent to them than their mothers. Results are supportive of the hypothesis that infants develop sensitivities to the particular imperfect social contingency present in their parental interactions and, as a consequences, they are most responsive to others who interact with levels of contingency similar to those with which they are familiar.

A marginal return?—The problematic in Zhang Chengzhi's reinvention of ethnic identity

Amidst frantic economic and social changes in China today, Zhang Chengzhi, like most other humanists, must redefine the humanist role and reconfigure his individual identity accordingly. What he does is to rediscover his ethnic identity as a Muslim Chinese, which rehearses a problematic shared by other humanists: self‐reinvention must be contested and negotiated via social contingency and acculturation; one cannot renew a cultural entity without recourse to ‘the other‘—an allegorical subject, a suppressed ethnicity or a transcendental self. Zhang overcomes the void of a disoriented self by first recounting the muted history of Jahriyya Muslims (in his book History of the Soul) from the narrative stance of ‘a defamiliarized self and then engaging the primordial with the circumstantial in his effort to evoke the obscured awareness of his ethnic root. In his next book The Heroes’ Paths in Wilderness, Zhang recaptures key moments of his recuperation from the disoriented self through his psychoanalytic diagnosis of Lu Xun, his mirror image. The dialogic probing at the other in fact locates himself in the paradox between the historicity of the ethnic identity and the spirituality of a transcendent self. But his ambiguity toward a self/other reversal leaves us in question about his readiness to continue this fluid, open‐ended interaction and his ability to avert possible pitfalls of ethnocentrism.

Critical Musicology and the Problem of Mediation

Critical musicology continues to encounter hostility within academy, yet there can be no doubt that emergence of this subdiscipline has brought about a sea change in scholarship. Whether or not one agrees with scholars such as Rose Subotnik, Lawrence Kramer, and Susan McClary, social contingency of autonomous is no longer seriously questioned; rather, debate has shifted to how this social contingency is to be interrogated. Each of these scholars has focused on different aspects of question: Subotnik has explored ties of musical logic to post-Enlightenment critiques of reason, Kramer has emphasized importance of hermeneutics and contingency of postmodern knowledge, while McClary has offered feminist critiques of Western canon based on assumptions of music's underlying semiotic structure. (1) These scholars have been ambitious, productive, and ultimately successful in their pursuit of a new agenda for musicology. Despite these impressive achievements, project of critical musicology continues to carry serious risks. The reliance upon metaphor always leaves these scholars vulnerable to charge of substituting a narrative programme for substantive analysis, and because critical musicologists acknowledge that their scholarship is positioned, they have been accused of failing to demonstrate veracity of their claims and of thus willfully imposing a social interpretation on autonomous music. While it is tempting to dismiss these criticisms as simply carping of reactionaries, to do so would be a mistake. Scholars such as Charles Rosen and Pieter van den Toorn may be unsympathetic to project of critical musicology, but that stance alone does not disqualify their objections. (2) If they have not been convinced by arguments of critical musicologists, perhaps it is because arguments are insufficiently grounded, relationship between autonomous and society inadequately developed. Indeed, critical musicology is in danger of undermining itself through a lack of attention to problem of mediation--the concrete links between and society on levels of production and reception. How are scholars to account for complex mediations between musical text and social world of politics and economics? One strategy has been to interrogate social contingency of musical form, assailing autonomous at its root. Social interpretation is developed by relating separate domains cognitively through extended use of analogy, with consequence that and society ultimately remain separate, related only through imagination of critic and reader. Yet, mere assertions of social contingency are ultimately unpersuasive, even when these assertions are argued powerfully through use of metaphor. Empirical evidence must be provided to substantiate these interpretive claims, demonstrating concrete connections between musical work and its social context. Another strategy has been to investigate as a social practice, If meaning is created, how is it created, by whom, and through what means? How does creation of musical meaning connect to acquisition of power? How do these activities connect further on level of class? This approach is very promising, yet it is insufficient simply to raise these questions in absence of a coherent theoretical framework. As ethnomusicologists have known all along, problem of mediation cannot be solved by simply juxtaposing the sociology of music against the sociology of musical life; interrelationships between two spheres are too complex to permit such an obvious reduction. To be sure, if autonomous bears social significance, this must be demonstrated through musical analysis; however, such analysis may prove to be little more than passionate rhetoric if problem of mediation is ignored. Ironically, though critical musicologists have been faulted for being too sociological, I will argue that they have not been sociological enough. …

Mathematical models for coordinated interpersonal timing in mother-infant interactions in the first year of life.

Two mathematical models of social contingency are examined in terms of their development over the first year of life. The interactions of 53 mothers and their infants were recorded at 6 weeks, 4 months, and 12 months. The infants' gazes at 6 weeks, the mothers' vocal behavior at 6 weeks, and the vocal behavior of the mother and infant at 4 and 12 months were automatically coded in terms of four states. The conditional dependence model and the response effects model were computed for each interaction at each age, and the coefficients of the models were examined as a function of age. The relative success of the models as estimates of moment-to-moment contingency as well as their variations with age are discussed.

Social contingency: Divergent measures?

Social contingency: Divergent measures?

Relations between social contingency in mother-child interaction and 2-year-olds' social competence.

This study examined relations between social contingency in mother-child interaction and low-income 2-year-olds' social competence, using a cross-sectional design (N = 47). Measures of social contingency included time spent in joint attention and dyadic turn-taking behaviors following maternal bids. Measures of child social competence included emotional self-regulation during a delay- of-gratification task and empathic responsiveness toward an experimenter feigning injury. Social contingency was related to children's use of self-regulatory strategies, but not to empathic responsiveness. Child negative emotionality and gender contributed to explanations of children's self-regulatory strategy use. More emotionally negative children spent less time using self-distraction; girls used less self-distraction and more comfort-seeking during delay than did boys. However, time spent in joint attention made an additional independent contribution over and above child factors.

Relations between social contingency in mother-child interaction and 2-year-olds' social competence.

Relations between social contingency in mother-child interaction and 2-year-olds' social competence.

Self-awareness and other-awareness. II: Mirror self-recognition, social contingency awareness, and synchronic imitation.

Self-awareness and other-awareness. II: Mirror self-recognition, social contingency awareness, and synchronic imitation.

Self-awareness and other-awareness. II: Mirror self-recognition, social contingency awareness, and synchronic imitation.

During the second year of life, children's social-cognitive competence shows a dramatic increase. They begin (a) to recognize themselves in mirrors (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979), (b) to react self-consciously when in the center of others' attention (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989), (c) to react with empathic behavior to victims of distress (Zahn-Waxier, RadkeYarrow, & King, 1979), (d) to communicate with peers preverbally through the synchronic imitation of each other's activity (Nadel-Brulfert & Baudonniere, 1982), and (e) to cooperate with peers (Brownell&Carriger, 1990). We (Asendorpf & Baudonniere, 1993) have attempted to integrate these findings within a social-cognitive framework. The five rapidly developing abilities are instances of two particular kinds of cognition: self-awareness (self-recognition ability) and other-awareness (self-consciousness, empathy, communication through synchronic imitation, and cooperation). We have proposed that these two kinds of cognition develop in close synchrony during the second year because both types of cognition are based on one common cognitive capacity: the capacity for secondary representation.

A response to my critics

Variously described as opaque, extremely and a little dubious, bizarre, insulting, unclear, loose and vague, weakly developed, deceptively innocuous, a little puzzling, rather banal, lacking in novelty and revelation, subject to the deterministic heresy, prone to unsupported claims, eclectic, confusing, arbitrary, and having my contingency cake and eating it, it is worth emphasizing how much I am indebted to the literature to which many of my critics have contributed and continue to contribute so invaluably. Consequently, we have much in common, and this should not be overshadowed by the substantive differences, and lapses in clarity and interpretation, that might seem to divide us. In this response, I wish both to acknowledge and rebut the criticisms aimed at 'Towards a political economy of food'. Specifically, a food system approach is perceived as invaluable, if not beyond reproach, certainly as against the orthodox approaches based upon more or less formal models of supply and demand; it includes an emphasis on structures, tendencies and historical and social contingency; food is distinguished but not determined by its unique organic, biological or natural significance (the human species is a conscious, purposeful animal); the reproduction and transformation of the food system potentially occurs integrally along the range of its activities, as analytically addressed, for example, by the notions of appropriationism and substitutionism; the global, the cultural and the state are crucial. Murdoch and Watts appear to take our systems of provision approach to consumption, and to food in particular, as excluding cultural determinants and effects from the food system. This is wrong. In this context, it is important to recognize that our work has been driven by the wish to identify and explain socioeconomic patterns of food consumption (for Great Britain from data taken from the National Food Survey, and to which an office full of computer printouts testifies). Consequently, along with consumer food activists,' we have analytically followed the journey through the food system in the opposite direction from most of my critics, who have traced a path out of the political economy of agriculture, emerging with a blink into the dazzling and unaccustomed glare of consumption.2

Social Time Patterns, Contingency and Gender Relations

The general sense that we suffer from a `lack of time' seems to be indicative of modern culture. It also seems that, rather paradoxically, this lack of time is actually being offset by an increase in the time at our disposal: witness recent increases in leisure time (that is, time not spent in paid employment). This paper proposes to examine the contradictory effects of this development and to discuss the types of experiences which become possible once one has time to spare, i.e.: contingent experiences. There are two main questions to be considered here. First, is the perception of modern time patterns gender-specific? Second, do these different perceptions cause `time collisions' in gender relations?

Neuroendocrine reactivity, internalizing behavior problems, and control-related cognitions in clinic-referred children and adolescents.

Literature on neuroendocrine-behavior relations suggests that cortisol reactivity to social challenge may be associated with children's internalizing problem behavior. To explore this possibility, and the role of control-related beliefs, we studied 102 7-17-year-old clinic-referred children. Measures of problem behavior, depression and anxiety, and control-related beliefs were collected, and Ss' saliva was sampled before and after a parent-child conflict task. Neuroendocrine activation (i.e., cortisol increase) in response to the interaction task was associated with Ss' (a) social withdrawal, social anxiety, and social problems; (b) socially inhibited behavior during the task; and (c) low levels of perceived social contingency and high levels of external attributions for personal successes and failures. Our findings are among the first to link children's behavioral response to social challenge, neuroendocrine activation, cognitions, and psychopathology.

Neuroendocrine reactivity, internalizing behavior problems, and control-related cognitions in clinic-referred children and adolescents.

Literature on neuroendocrine-behavior relations suggests that cortisol reactivity to social challenge may be associated with children's internalizing problem behavior. To explore this possibility, and the role of control-related beliefs, we studied 102 7-17-year-old clinic-referred children. Measures of problem behavior, depression and anxiety, and control-related beliefs were collected, and Ss' saliva was sampled before and after a parent-child conflict task. Neuroendocrine activation (i.e., cortisol increase) in response to the interaction task was associated with Ss' (a) social withdrawal, social anxiety, and social problems; (b) socially inhibited behavior during the task; and (c) low levels of perceived social contingency and high levels of external attributions for personal successes and failures. Our findings are among the first to link children's behavioral response to social challenge, neuroendocrine activation, cognitions, and psychopathology.

Narrative and the Constitutional Discourse: Towards a Communicative Ethic in South Africa

Abstract South African lawyers have started showing interest in the role that myth can play in the legitimation of a new legal order. Narratives are essential in order to move from the morality of the closed group to the morality of more inclusive social entities, may assist us in the demythologisation of traditional ties, and help us develop the breadth of understanding and empathy needed to establish a more encompassing morality. In the Western world, increasing rationalisation has resulted in the progressive erosion of ethical unity, and has failed to deliver the freedom promised by it. The solution does not lie in a return to natural law, but rather in the acknowledgement that our beliefs and conceptualisations are socially constructed. Legitimacy can only be grounded in communicative action. The acceptance of the social contingency of our beliefs can make us more receptive to views that differ from our own, and help us find more creative legal solutions. We need to move beyond the dichotomy between m...