After the three families divided up the state of Jin and the Tian family took over Qi, the political situation in the fourth century B.C.E. appeared even more chaotic. Wei conquered Chu's Luyang and Qin's Xihe, Qin defeated Wei at Shimen , and again at Shaoliang , and Wei moved its capital to Daliang. During the mid-Warring States period, Qin became dominant in the west, Qi in the east, Chu in the south, and Wei in the center. Rapid changes (...) occurred one after another; trickery and conflict were rampant. However, the shi , the intelligentsia, actually managed to expand their spheres of existence and activity accordingly in this state of tension between countries, states, and men. A few major states assembled quite a number of literati; and those men of the villages, who had in earlier times merely waited passively for opportunities to fall into their laps, crisscrossed the various feudal states; literati who previously had no cause to use military force became, one by one, the honored guests of the feudal lords. With the breakdown of the previously simple and obvious order, the gradually dismantling of the common body of the ancestral clan of the past, and the increasing complexities of social relationships after the dissolution of blood ties, social order became a matter of concern. Or, to reword this most practical issue: How could this universally chaotic society go from disorder to order? (shrink)

Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large‐scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and (...) negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals. (shrink)

This article considers the problem of how employees and observers of business ethics behaviors often do not know how to safely and effectively engage with business ethics issues and cases. The ameliorative method of social situational business ethics framing was analyzed. Key parts of the related literature from philosophy, sociology, organizational studies, and business ethics are reviewed. A literature gap between general framing theory and business ethics was identified with respect to the need for social situational framing in (...) business ethics at the micro individual, meso organizational, and macro institutional levels. Theoretical propositions for bridging the literature gap and a wide variety of business ethics engagement case examples are developed as illustrations of and support for the propositions. Practical social situational business ethics framing implications for safe and effective business ethics engagement are considered. (shrink)

This article considers the problem of how employees and observers of business ethics behaviors often do not know how to safely and effectively engage with business ethics issues and cases. The ameliorative method of social situational business ethics framing was analyzed. Key parts of the related literature from philosophy, sociology, organizational studies, and business ethics are reviewed. A literature gap between general framing theory and business ethics was identified with respect to the need for social situational framing in (...) business ethics at the micro individual, meso organizational, and macro institutional levels. Theoretical propositions for bridging the literature gap and a wide variety of business ethics engagement case examples are developed as illustrations of and support for the propositions. Practical social situational business ethics framing implications for safe and effective business ethics engagement are considered. (shrink)

This paper presents an algorithm for analyzing social situations within a robot. We contribute a method that allows the robot to use information about the situation to select interactive behaviors. This work is based on interdependence theory, a social psychological theory of interaction and interpersonal situation analysis. Experiments demonstrate the utility of the information provided by the situation analysis algorithm and of the value of this method for guiding robot interaction. We conclude that the (...) class='Hi'>situation analysis algorithm offers a viable, principled, and general approach to explore interactive robotics problems. (shrink)

In this paper, I approach Venturinha’s ideas on contextual epistemology from the perspective of linguistic practices of argumentation. I point to the “thick” descriptions of social situations as a common context in which our epistemic language-games take place. In this way, I explore promising connections of Venturinha’s work to key concepts in recent speech act theory, social ontology and social epistemology.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the social situation of the Roma and poverty more broadly, to highlight the factors underpinning their lack of access to education and hence to jobs from which they derive income insecurity and worsen their living conditions, their poor health and finally, their poor contact with the majority. Theme of Roma poverty and their general social situation is very demanding in terms of finding the solution, since the large rate (...) of Roma population is unable to even minimally participate in social, economic, cultural and political life. I have picked a combined survey interview as a method for the empirical part of the article, by looking at various projects and literature. Scientific objectives of the article is to highlight the fact that in all areas affecting the way of life of Roma, including their discriminiation, the most influental one is the long-term segregation of the learning process, which is essential to their integration into an active lifestyle. I refer to the fact that the condition of education of Roma children depends mainly on the socio-economic enviroment from which they come from and which can be measured by various factors. As on of the factors in the education of the parents alone, other factors could be household equipment, monitoring the overall social, economic and cultural status of Roma pupils. In the conclusion of the article, I want to point out that a large number of research findings demonstrate that the dependence of education outcomes as students from their socio-economic enviroment suggests that the education system is no way meeting the requirements of a fair transfer of learning to all, according to their abilities and is just never obilizing the social equality in education. The Education Act and the related rules do not contain provisions that are aimed directly at Roma pupils. However, the general term "socially disadvantaged" enviroment is being used, that is defined primarly by poverty. However, many disadvantages faced by the Roa in all areas of life, often are not only subject to their financial circumstances. "Given that some portion of barriers stem from the approach of the majority population towards the Roma on the basis of their declared or credited ehtnicity, it is questionable whether the measures are based on the financial circumstances of families enough.". (shrink)

This book, first published in 1991, offers an integrative approach to the study of formal models in the social and behavioural sciences. The theory presented here unifies both the representation of the social environment and the equilibrium concept. The theory requires that all alternatives that are available to the players be specified in an explicit and detailed manner, and this specification is defined as a social 'situation'. A situation, therefore, not only consists of the alternatives (...) currently available to the players, but also includes the set of opportunities that might be induced by the players from their current environment. The theory requires that all recommended alternatives be both internally and externally stable; the recommendation cannot be self-defeating and, at the same time, should account for alternatives that were not recommended. In addition to unifying the representation and the solution concept, the theory also extends the social environments accommodated by current game theory. (shrink)

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is therefore commonly thought that elements of culture evolve through natural selection. However, natural selection was proposed to explain how change accumulates despite lack of inheritance of acquired traits, as occurs with template-mediated replication. It cannot accommodate a process with significant retention of acquired or horizontally (e.g. socially) transmitted (...) traits. Moreover, elements of culture cannot be treated as discrete lineages because they constantly interact and influence one another. It is proposed that what evolves through culture is the mind; ideas and artifacts are merely reflections of its current evolved state. Interacting minds transform (in part) through through a non-Darwinian autopoietic process similar to that by which early life evolved, involving not survival of the fittest but actualization of their potential. (shrink)

Most of our interactions with others occur within the framework of recurring social situations, and the language choices we make are intimately tied to situational features. Although the interdependence between language and social situations has been well recognized at least since G. H. Mead developed his symbolic interactionist theory, psychologists have been reluctant to devote much interest to this domain until recently. Yet it is arguable that a detailed understanding of the subtle links between situational features and language (...) use must lie at the heart of any genuinely social psychology. This volume contains original contributions from psychologists, linguists and philosophers from the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, and Australia who share an interest in the social-psychological aspects of language. Their work represents one of the first concentrated attempts to chart the possibilities of this exciting field. It is perhaps in order to say a few words about the origins of this book. The need for a volume integrating research on language and social situations first emerged during the 2nd International Conference of Language and Social Psychology at Bristol University in 1983, at which I was convening a symposium with a similar title at the request of the organizers, Peter Robinson and Howard Giles. When they first approached me with this idea in 1982, I gladly accepted, since my own research on cognitive representations of social episodes seemed eminently relevant to a symposium on language and social situations. (shrink)

This paper re-examines the welfare economics of risk. It singles out a class of criteria, the “expected equally-distributed equivalent”, as the unique class which avoids serious drawbacks of existing approaches. Such criteria behave like ex-post criteria when the final statistical distribution of wellbeing is known ex ante, and like ex-ante criteria when risk generates no inequality. The paper also provides a new result on the tension between inequality aversion and respect of individual ex ante preferences, in the vein of Harsanyi’s (...) aggregation theorem. (shrink)

The notion that emotional expressions regulate social life by providing information is gaining popularity. Prior research on the effects of emotional expressions on observers’ inferential processes has focused mostly on inferences regarding the personality traits of the expresser, such as dominance and affiliation. We extend this line of research by exploring the possibility that emotional expressions shape observers’ construal of social situations. Across three vignette studies, an interaction partner's expressions of anger, compared to expressions of happiness or disappointment, (...) led observers to construe hypothetical situations as less cooperative, both in dyads and groups. These effects occurred even when factual information regarding the cooperativeness or competitiveness of the situation was provided, attesting to the power of emotional expressions in shaping the construal of social situations. Results are discussed in relation to appraisal theory, reverse appraisals, emotions as social information theory, and the emergence of cooperation in groups and cultures. (shrink)

This is a paperback edition of a major contribution to the field, first published in hard covers in 1977. The book outlines a general theory of rational behaviour consisting of individual decision theory, ethics, and game theory as its main branches. Decision theory deals with a rational pursuit of individual utility; ethics with a rational pursuit of the common interests of society; and game theory with an interaction of two or more rational individuals, each pursuing his own interests in a (...) rational manner. (shrink)

In this study, three individual descriptions of anxiety as experienced in social situations were analyzed so that a general structure representing social anxiety could potentially be obtained. The descriptions analyzed produced results that not only overlapped with already existing literature from various perspectives on the topic, but also highlighted certain key factors that have largely been unaccounted for by prior studies. By utilizing the Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology , these factors were brought to light in more depth (...) and clarity than if the same phenomenon were studied using a third person approach. Specifically, six constituents of social anxiety were revealed; including factors related to inter-subjectivity, the relationship between fear and anxiety, and the relationship between desire and self-lack. (shrink)

The integration of theory and empirical research in analytical social science has always been a core topic of Analyse & Kritik. This paper focuses on how analytical theory and empirical research have moved closer to each other in sociology, using rational choice theory and game-theoretic models as well as empirical research on problematic social situations (social dilemmas, collective action problems, etc.) as an example. We try to highlight the use of complementary research designs (surveys, vignette studies, lab (...) experiments) for testing the same hypotheses. We also try to show that empirical research indicates the need for the development of more complex theoretical models. (shrink)

In three experiments we studied lay observers’ attributions of responsibility for an antisocial act (homicide). We systematically varied both the degree to which the action was coerced by external circumstances and the degree to which the actor endorsed and accepted ownership of the act, a psychological state that philosophers have termed ‘identification’. Our findings with respect to identification were highly consistent. The more an actor was identified with an action, the more likely observers were to assign responsibility to the actor, (...) even when the action was performed under constraints so powerful that no other behavioral option was available. Our findings indicate that social cognition involving assignment of responsibility for an action is a more complex process than previous research has indicated. It would appear that laypersons’ judgments of moral responsibility may, in some circumstances, accord with philosophical views in which freedom and determinism are regarded to be compatible. (shrink)

My discussion is concerned with how symbolic power constitutively structures our very identities in relation to one another and at the bodily level of lived experience. Although many accounts of the self and of subjectivity as socially situated have difficulties in their explanations of agency, Zaners work suggests a basis upon which the selfs independence from others can be understood. His phenomenology of embodied subjectivity explains how the emerging self presupposes presence with others. At the same time, however, co-presence also (...) reveals the selfs distinct perspective and capacity for circumstantial possibilizing, that is to say, actualizing another possible than the actual. My aim is to examine critically the intersections between Zaners phenomenology and other theoretical accounts of the socially situated self. I also show how Zaners work contributes to these discussions a way of understanding the possibility of agency that is rooted in embodied experience. (shrink)

In recent years, it has been argued more than once that situations determine our conduct to a much greater extent than our character does. This argument rests on the findings of social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram, who have popularized the idea that we can all be brought to harm innocent others. An increasing number of philosophers and ethicists make use of such findings, and some of them have argued that this so-called situationist challenge fatally undermines virtue ethics. As (...) virtue ethics is currently the most popular underpinning for ethics education in the military, it is important to know to what extent the claim situationists make is correct. Fortunately, a closer look indicates that an interactionist perspective, with our character and the situation interplaying, is more accurate than the situationist perspective. (shrink)

We examined whether the N400 Event-Related Potential component would be modulated by dispositional affect during sentence processing. In this study, 33 participants read sentences manipulated by direct object type and object determiner type. We were particularly interested in sentences of the form: The connoisseur tasted thewineon the tour vs. The connoisseur tasted the #roof… We expected that processing incongruent direct objects vs. congruent objects would elicit N400 effects. Previous ERP language experiments have shown that participants in positive and negative moods (...) were differentially sensitive to semantic anomaly, resulting in different N400 effects. Presently, we ask whether individual dispositional affect scores would modulate N400 effects as shown previously. Namely, previous results showed larger N400 effects associated with happy moods and attenuated amplitudes associated with sad moods. Results revealed significant N400 effects, driven by the #roof vs. the wine, where larger amplitude differences were found for individuals showing smaller negative affect scores, thus partially replicating previous findings. We discuss our results in terms of theories of local inhibition, such that low NA promotes stronger lexico-semantic links in sentences. Finally, our results support accounts of language processing that include social and biological characteristics of individuals during real-time sentence comprehension. (shrink)

This article synthesizes the current theoretical attempts to understand human-machine interactions and introduces seven premises to understand our emerging dynamics with increasingly competent, pervasive, and instantly accessible algorithms. The hope that these seven premises can build toward a social theory of human-AI cocreation. The focus on human-AI cocreation is intended to emphasize two factors. First, is the fact that our machine learning systems are socialized. Second, is the coevolving nature of human mind and AI systems as smart devices form (...) an indispensable part of our cognitive scaffolds, thus, shaping how we perceive the world and ourselves. The seven premises include: primacy of social structures; human’s desire for freedom and autonomy; AI systems will form inseparable parts of our cognitive/affective scaffolds and can change our self-understanding; philosophy and humanistic foundations on human flourishing as a guide to human-AI interaction; mindsponge information-filtering process; acculturative process of how values change and emerge from human-AI interaction; overlapping Venn diagram of the human-human, human-nature, and human-machine interactions. This article concludes with a discussion on human agency in our entanglements with socialized machines and the illusoriness of the Cartesian agent view of the mind. (shrink)

This piece is Chapter Two of Jessie Taft's 1913 doctoral dissertation The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness.

Proponents of situated affectivity hold that “tools for feeling” are just as characteristic of the human condition as are “tools for thinking” or tools for carpentry. An agent’s affective life, they argue, is dependent upon both physical characteristics of the agent and the agent’s reciprocal relationship to an appropriately structured natural, technological, or social environment. One important achievement has been the distinction between two fundamentally different ways in which affectivity might be intertwined with the environment: the “user-resource-model” and the (...) “mind-invasion-model.” The twofold purpose of this paper is to complement the debate about situated affectivity in general and about “mind invasion” in particular by, firstly, connecting it to situationist research in social psychology and, secondly, broadening the perspective to not only accommodate decidedly detrimental “invasions” but also potentially beneficial forms of “mind shaping” that include the manipulation of an agent’s experiential life and behaviour through the moulding of both the agent’s environment and the agent’s body. (shrink)