Social World Research Articles

Multidimensional neural representations of social features during movie viewing.

The social world is dynamic and contextually embedded. Yet, most studies utilize simple stimuli that do not capture the complexity of everyday social episodes. To address this, we implemented a movie viewing paradigm and investigated how the everyday social episodes are processed in the brain. Participants watched one of two movies during an MRI scan. Neural patterns from brain regions involved in social perception, mentalization, action observation, and sensory processing were extracted. Representational similarity analysis results revealed that several labeled social features (including social interaction, mentalization, the actions of others, characters talking about themselves, talking about others, and talking about objects) were represented in superior temporal gyrus (STG) and middle temporal gyrus (MTG). The mentalization feature was also represented throughout the theory of mind network, and characters talking about others engaged the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), suggesting that listeners may spontaneously infer the mental state of those being talked about. In contrast, we did not observe the action representations in frontoparietal regions of the action observation network. The current findings indicate that STG and MTG serve as key regions for social processing, and that listening to characters talk about others elicits spontaneous mental state inference in TPJ during natural movie viewing.

Gaze Orienting in the Social World: An Exploration of the Role Played by Caregiving Vocal and Tactile Behaviors in Infants with Visual Impairment and in Sighted Controls

Infant attention is a cognitive function that underlines sensory–motor integration processes at the interface between the baby and the surrounding physical and socio-relational environment, mainly with the caregivers. The investigation of the role of non-visual inputs (i.e., vocal and tactile) provided by the caregivers in shaping infants’ attention in the context of visual impairment is relevant from both a theoretical and clinical point of view. This study investigated the social attention (i.e., gaze orientation) skills in a group of visually impaired (VI) and age-matched sighted controls (SCs) between 9 and 12 months of age. Moreover, the role of VI severity and maternal vocalizations and touch in shaping the social attention were investigated. Overall, 45 infants and their mothers participated in a video-recorded 4 min interaction procedure, including a play and a still-face episode. The infants’ gaze orientation (i.e., mother-directed, object-directed, or unfocused) and the types of maternal vocalizations and touch (i.e., socio-cognitive, affective) were micro-analytically coded. Maternal vocalizations and touch were found to influence gaze orientation differently in VI infants compared SCs. Moreover, the group comparisons during the play episode showed that controls were predominantly oriented to the mothers, while VI infants were less socially oriented. Visual impairment severity did not emerge as linked with social attention. These findings contribute to our understanding of socio-cognitive developmental trajectories in VI infants and highlight the need for tailored interventions to promote optimal outcomes for VI populations.

If not me then we: Goal tradeoffs in decision-making for the self, ingroup, and outgroup

Navigating the social world requires individuals to balance multiple goals, including the drives to improve one's own outcomes, aid ingroup members, and help or hurt outgroup members. While self-interest and intergroup bias are both well-established motivational phenomena, less is known about how these goals may interact. Here we examine the nature of goal tradeoffs in intergroup decision-making using a novel task in which participants simultaneously make monetary decisions for themselves, an arbitrary ingroup, and the corresponding outgroup. Across four behavioural studies and one eye-tracking study (total N = 704), we find that goals in intergroup contexts are pursued sequentially rather than concurrently, with non-linear upweighting of group-related goals when self-related goals cannot be pursued. Further, we find evidence for stronger self-ingroup than self-outgroup tradeoffs, which manifest in both altered attention to information and altered use of the attended information in decision-making. The results shed light on the cognitive structuring of interrelated goals in intergroup decision-making, furthering our understanding of when and how both intergroup biases and prosocial behaviour may emerge.

Modernism, modernity and contemporality: conceptualizing the modern in Scotland’s modern studies

ABSTRACT This paper offers an analysis of Modern Studies, a school subject unique to Scotland. First taught in the 1960s, Modern Studies was originally conceived as an option for students discontinuing their studies in history and geography. Since then, though, Modern Studies has carved a distinctive curricular niche and has become one of the most popular subjects in Scottish schools. Despite this popularity—or, perhaps, because of it—Modern Studies has not received the same critical analysis as other subjects in the school curriculum. The subject remains one defined by its content (political literacy, social issues, and international relations), rather than by its disciplinary or epistemic underpinnings. This paper uses Toulmin’s (1990) conception of modernity to analyse course documents and examination papers. This analysis suggests that Modern Studies was imbued from the start with three foundational assumptions. First, a positivist ontology that believes certainty about the social world is possible. Second, a belief that Weberian means-end rationality is the most appropriate approach to evaluating and making sense of social relations. Third, a telos which positions liberal capitalism as the inevitable end-state of human affairs. Modern Studies is, therefore, not just ‘modern’ but modernist. The paper explores and develops these critiques with reference to specific examination questions and concludes by proposing a programme for renewing and reinvigorating the subject in an age of epistemic uncertainty and global environmental crises.

The Social World of the Abbey of Cava, c.1020–1300, by Graham Loud

<i>The Social World of the Abbey of Cava, c.1020–1300</i>, by Graham Loud

Imagined otherness fuels blatant dehumanization of outgroups

Dehumanization of others has been attributed to institutional processes that spread dehumanizing norms and narratives, as well as to individuals’ denial of mind to others. We propose that blatant dehumanization also arises when people actively contemplate others’ minds. We introduce the construct of imagined otherness—perceiving that a prototypical member of a social group construes an important facet of the social world in ways that diverge from the way most humans understand it—and argue that such attributions catalyze blatant dehumanization beyond the effects of general perceived difference and group identification. Measuring perceived schematic difference relative to the concept of America, we examine how this measure relates to the tendency of U.S. Republicans and Democrats to blatantly dehumanize members of the other political party. We report the results of two pre-registered studies—one correlational (N = 771) and one experimental (N = 398)—that together lend support for our theory. We discuss implications of these findings for research on social boundaries, political polarization, and the measurement of meaning.

Critical peace education and critical hope: co-researching with middle school students in India to imagine possibilities for social change

ABSTRACT An existing culture of conflict tends to shape practices within schools, which often maintain and in turn, contribute towards perpetuating stratifications at the societal level. Through this study, the author seeks to challenge this culture of conflict by creating a pedagogical space and facilitating possibilities of collective thinking, relationality, and action, with a focus on nurturing a culture of peace. With a goal of gaining insight into how middle school students from two school sites in New Delhi, India, are embodying and interacting with notions of peace and conflict as they make meaning of their social worlds, the author conducts a youth participatory action research (YPAR), which is complemented with semi-structured interviews. A total number of 12 participants collectively engage in a YPAR process across 13 virtual sessions, which were held on a bi-weekly basis. Guided by a critical peace education and critical hope framework, the author examines a ‘moment’, which reveals complexities around how pedagogies of critical hope can engage young people in affective, ethical, and political sensibilities to imagine possibilities for social change.

Exploring identity: A Critical Discourse Analysis on “Nepali Women in Politics Success and Challenges”

The research paper explores the idea placed in the article “Nepali Women in Politics: Success and Challenges” by Bishnu Raj Upreti, Drishti Upreti and Yamuna Ghale published in the ‘Journal of International Women’s Studies’ on April 2020 from the perspectives of CDA, a relatively recent approach to analyzing discourse. The paper provides the definitions and overview of some CDA models mainly of Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, T.A. Van Dijk and so on. Language, ideology and discourse are inseparable notions as we talk about media, translation and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). We get information from many sources which we use to interpret the world. Personal interactions with others provide us the insight with their knowledge and experience, cultural conventions and practices in their social world. On the other hand, television, radio, newspaper and magazines, the internet and many other sources with their different values provide us information. Language is the main mood through which most of the sources give information and most of these sources can be interpreted and analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The paper will discuss how the discourse used by the three authors in the article shows women’s struggle for equality in Nepal for the establishment of their identity in the society by exposing themselves in politics.

Toward an Expressivist View of Women's Autonomy

Feminists have disagreed about whether women can choose gendered subordination autonomously. Less attention has been paid, however, to the socio-ontological questions that underlie this debate. This article introduces novel cases of ‘thwarted autonomy,’ in which women pursue autonomy but in ways that reinforce gendered subordination, in order to challenge dominant proceduralist and substantivist views, as well as motivate an expressivist view of the social self as a promising foundation for an account of autonomy. On this view, which draws on the Hegelian tradition, agents must embody their desires and values in the social world to achieve self-understanding. Social meanings and norms therefore mediate the form an agent’s expressive activity takes, and the sense of self she develops. An expressivist view, I argue, allows us to reinterpret women’s outward acquiescence to gendered subordination as an attempt to express autonomy in an oppressive social context. It also points towards a robustly social conception of autonomy to aid in the diagnosis and redress of patriarchal oppression.

Is it personal or is it social? The interaction of knowledge domain and statistical evidence in U.S. and Chinese preschoolers' social generalizations.

Children make inferences about the social world by observing human actions. However, human actions can be ambiguous: They can be sources of information about personal, idiosyncratic characteristics of individuals or socially shared knowledge. In two cross-cultural studies (N = 420; Mage = 4.05 years, SD = 0.77, 47% female), we ask if U.S. and Chinese children's inferences about whether an action is personal or social vary by domain, statistical evidence, and culture. We did this with a generalization method: Preschoolers learn about one agent's actions and then are asked what they think a new agent will do. Low rates of generalization suggest children inferred something unique to an individual, while high rates suggest that children inferred that the action represented socially shared knowledge. In a mixed between- and within-participant design, children observed agents demonstrate sequences of statistically random (or nonrandom, between participants) actions that were verbally framed as relevant to a particular domain (agent's personal preferences, labels, object functions, or game rules). We found that children's social generalizations about actions were on a continuum: with linguistic conventions (e.g., labels) being the most social, preferences being the most personal, and nonlinguistic conventions (i.e., object functions, game rules) falling somewhere in between. Furthermore, the influence of statistical evidence and cultural variation varied for each domain. These findings highlight how children combine knowledge and evidence to infer social meaning from actions and have implications for rational constructivist accounts of cultural learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Seashells and sound waves: modelling soundscapes in Chacoan great-house communities

Humans inhabit rich social and physical worlds and archaeology is increasingly engaging with the multi-sensory experience of life in the past. In this article, the authors model the soundscapes of five Chacoan communities on the Colorado Plateau, where habitation sites cluster around monumental great houses. The work demonstrates that the audible range of a conch-shell trumpet blown from atop these great houses consistently maps the distribution of associated habitation sites. Staying within the audible reach of great houses may have helped maintain the social cohesion of communities in the past which, the authors argue, also has implications for the management of archaeological landscapes in the modern world.

Studying ‘Religion’ Critically and the Decolonial Turn: Lessons for Critical Terrorism Studies

Abstract Being ‘critical’ when studying religion, whilst it does not have to be limited to studying religion’s discursive (and colonial) employments only, it certainly has to begin with it, if we aim to contribute to much-needed decolonial efforts across the social science disciplines. Critically studying religion, as I argue in this article, means starting with a normative and moral responsibility and aspiration towards a more just, equal, and progressive social world that grapples with the coloniality, and structures of white supremacy we are all embedded in. In this article I will reflect on the contributions of Critical Religion (CR) especially to fields like (Critical) Terrorism Studies and related disciplines which regularly discuss ‘religion’ and religiously-inspired violence but never actually acknowledge ‘religion’s’ colonial and gendered implications, definitional instability, or Euro- and Christian-centric invention. The work Critical Religion does in uncovering and excavating the modern-colonial origins of the term ‘religion’, I argue, is essential in realising and contributing to the decolonial turn we are currently experiencing and which disciplines like (Critical) Terrorism Studies can only benefit from.

Possibilities of Free Will in Different Physical, Social, and Technological Worlds: An Introduction to a Thematic Issue.

In this introduction to a thematic issue dealing with free will, some possibilities of free will in different physical, social, and technological worlds, as well as discussions of the possibilities are considered. What are the possibilities and limitations of free will in various other worlds differing from our world? What are the possibilities and limitations of free will in different species, both in our world and in other hypothetical worlds, including future species, naturally evolving, and artificially modified? What are the possibilities and limitations of free will related to the development of AI? How can the diversity of free will levels in an agent be related to possible levels (depth) of its self-knowledge? What can agents differing in levels of self-knowledge know and think about the issue of free will? How do different societies (social worlds) support and inhibit different manifestations of free will in different areas? What is the role of hard neurodeterminism and "mindless neuroscience" in general neuroscience? What are ethical aspects of the questions, including the initial one: "If a neuroscientist denies free will, how can they write a text of voluntary informed consent and propose to sign it?".

Culturing the body in the context of the neolithisation of the southern Levant

The body is a site of lived experience as people engage their social, cultural, and physical worlds through their bodies. As a product of both nature and culture, it can be modified to fulfil, challenge, or rebel against ideals and expectations. While not all the ways in which humans modify their bodies leave traces in the archaeological record, the use of personal ornaments is well documented. In this paper, we focus on the practice of body modification through personal adornment in the context of the neolithisation of the southern Levant. We argue that shifting subsistence strategies, settlement patterns, and social relationships (including relationships with ancestors) necessitated new ways of being in the world that were manifested in and through material culture including personal ornaments. In the Neolithic, living bodies did not need to be present for an individual to have a social “life” and personal ornaments as heirlooms likely played a fundamental and complementary role in “presencing” a person who would otherwise be absent.

학교폭력 소재 웹툰의 ‘다른 신체 되기'와 계급주의 -&lt;외모지상주의&gt;와 &lt;인생존망&gt;을 중심으로-

This study examines the characteristics of “bodily transformation” depicted in webtoons themed around school violence, focusing on Park Tae-jun’s webtoon “Lookism” and the collaborative work “Survival Guide” by Park Tae-jun and Jeon Sun-woo. This theme involves powerless victims overturning their relationships with cruel perpetrators by obtaining supernatural bodies through chance encounters. However, despite this theme, the webtoons do not challenge the premise that the hierarchical order within the classroom is established and maintained by a group of class-conscious guardians who faithfully fulfill their roles. Characters do not share their miraculous achievements with others or attempt to change the injustices of their social world. Through these webtoons, the limitations of adolescent portrayals are observed, characterized by the absence of imagination regarding life outside school in the webtoons and the entrenchment of narrative grammar where violent problem solving, perpetrators becoming victims, and victims recovering all revolve around violence.

Analysis of the Development Trajectory of Marxs Historical Philosophy

In his early years, Marx, inspired by Hegel, believed that history is a process of dynamic evolution. Therefore, he also paid attention to the replacement of social forms and the differences in social forms among different ethnic groups. While Hegel believed that the driving force of historical progress lies in spirit, Marx focused more on the role of material in it. Thus, in his theories of social forms and world history, Marx emphasized the historical progress brought about by changes in the mode of production. Based on this, Marx expounded his views on the evolution of social forms and the development status and prospects of world history. He consistently held a equality political inclination and continued to pay attention to the oppression suffered by backward nations. This paper summarizes Marxs social form theory, world history theory, and his related discussions on backward nations in his historical philosophy. It outlines the global perspective from the internal social evolution of nations to the coordinated development of the world, and then to Marxs humanitarian care for backward nations.

The Challenge of Gender Diversity for Case-Based Instruction in Entrepreneurship Education

The purpose of this study was to address case-based instruction in entrepreneurship education from multiple instructors’ perspectives and describe their experiences with this approach as it relates to gender diversity. This study answers the call for more substantive research focused on issues related to entrepreneurship education, including an examination of specific teaching methods and an in-depth exploration of gender and entrepreneurship education. The findings suggest the role that case-based instruction can play in efforts to advance gender equality as part of the diversity imperative in education. Instructors considered gender diversity in case selection but found it to be a challenge. Moreover, the descriptions of the entrepreneurs and their venture behaviors in the cases were gendered, which might have resulted in unintended discriminatory gender lessons. While none of the women were portrayed in a specifically negative light, underlying assumptions about gender roles infused the cases. While the instructors considered gender diversity in case selection, they did not necessarily consider gender stereotypes, which is problematic because gender stereotypes are cognitive schemas that influence the ways in which individuals make sense of their social world and may discourage some women’s aspirations to become business owners.

Imagination vs. routines: festive time, weekly time, and the predictive brain.

This paper examines the relationship between societal structures shaped by traditions, norms, laws, and customs, and creative expressions in arts and media through the lens of the predictive coding framework in cognitive science. The article proposes that both dimensions of culture can be viewed as adaptations designed to enhance and train the brain's predictive abilities in the social domain. Traditions, norms, laws, and customs foster shared predictions and expectations among individuals, thereby reducing uncertainty in social environments. On the other hand, arts and media expose us to simulated experiences that explore alternative social realities, allowing the predictive machinery of the brain to hone its skills through exposure to a wider array of potentially relevant social circumstances and scenarios. We first review key principles of predictive coding and active inference, and then explore the rationale of cultural traditions and artistic culture in this perspective. Finally, we draw parallels between institutionalized normative habits that stabilize social worlds and creative and imaginative acts that temporarily subvert established conventions to inject variability.

“Knowing these stories”

In this article, I explore the ways participants in underground dance music (UDM) scenes learn about the political, historical, and social context of their leisure pursuit, such as its queer-of-colour roots, gender dynamics, and economic structures. Semi-structured interviews and information horizon mapping with three Toronto UDM scene members revealed that the online and physical spaces of UDM served as information grounds for the participants’ initial serendipitous discovery of social context information, which led to further intentional seeking in books, libraries, and beyond. Established UDM information sources and normative expectations shaped the participants’ information behaviour, leading them to infer the political stances of DJs and other scene participants based on musical taste and identity. Finally, social context information shapes the participants' experiences of UDM, affecting their sense of community, safety, and belonging. The serious leisure perspective has thus far focused on information behaviours related to the pursuit of the hobby itself, such as, in the present context, finding events or learning to DJ. This study opens up a new direction by considering how social context information flows through and shapes the social world of the hobby. As rising mainstream awareness of structural oppressions leads to more people and communities considering how these oppressions manifest in every aspect of their lives, this perspective will be germane to information behaviour studies in several contexts.

The Human Spectrum: A Critique of “Neurodiversity”

This paper represents a sociological approach to autism spectrum disorder that critiques the terms neurodiverse and it obverse, neurotypical, because they promote a cognitive approach that mystifies what is actual and real about human activity in everyday life. It is in dynamic interactional practices rather than putative cognitive states that human diversity is manifest or observable. The empirical part of the paper, following Bleuler, defines and examines “autistic talk” as a turning away from the ordinary social world or commonsense “reality,” and engaging self‐oriented practices and orientations. However, the range of participants who produce such talk is not confined to those on the putative autism spectrum. Rather, that range encompasses the entire human span. If so, then a question is raised about what autism is as a “condition,” which term individualizes social difficulties rather than appreciating that they are always about diverse social actions‐in‐interaction.