One common interpretation of the Hobbesian state of nature views itas a social dilemma, a natural extension of the well-knownprisoner''s dilemma to a group context. Kavka (1986)challenges this interpretation, suggesting that the appropriate wayto view the state of nature is as a quasi social dilemma. Iargue that Hobbes''s remarks on the rationality of keeping covenantsin the state of nature indicate that the quasi social dilemma doesnot accurately represent the state of nature. One possiblesolution, I suggest, views the state of (...) nature as a social dilemmabetween groups rather than individuals. Although thiscleanly represents the strategic problem faced in the state ofnature, it also means we should take intergroup dynamics intoaccount when putting forth a solution. I argue that Hobbes''ssolution of commonwealth by institution – the favored solution forHobbesian social contract theories – will not work in the state ofnature viewed this way. (shrink)

In this article we present an engineering approach for the integration of social group dynamics in the behavior modeling of multiagent systems. To this end, a toolbox was created that brings together several theories from the social sciences, each focusing on different aspects of group dynamics. Due to its modular approach, the toolbox can either be used as a central control component of an application or it can be employed temporarily to rapidly test the feasibility of (...) the incorporated theories for a given application domain. This is exemplified by applying the toolbox to different applications. (shrink)

Pietraszewski's model allows understanding group dynamics through the lens of evolved coalitionary psychology. This framework is particularly relevant to understanding group dynamics on social media platforms, where coalitions based on salience of group identity are prominent and generate unique frictions. We offer testable hypotheses derived from the model that may help to shed light on social media behavior.

While the effect of top executives' social networks on their compensations has received substantial scholarly attention, little effort has been made to integrate segmented views to offer more complete understanding of this effect. In this paper, we propose an integrative two-stage model by taking both economic and socio-political views into account. We theorise that some characteristics of top executive's outside social ties are positively related to firm performance, and those relationships are conditioned by external and internal strategic contexts, such as (...) environmental uncertainty, strategic relevance, and tie strength. We also theorise that firm performance leads to executives' compensations, but this linkage is moderated by the socio-political dynamics among executives (within-group dynamics) as well as between executives and a board of directors (between-group dynamics) inside the firm. Based on our integrative framework, this paper provides the comprehensive understanding of how executives' compensations are determined and highlights the importance of executive's social ties and their implications. (shrink)

The notion of a community of inquiry has been treated by many of its proponents as being an exemplar of democracy in action. We argue that the assumptions underlying this view present some practical and theoretical difficulties, particularly in relation to distribution of power among the members of a community of inquiry. We identify two presuppositions in relation to distribution of power that require attention in developing an educational model that is committed to deliberative democracy: (1) openness to inquiry and (...) readiness to reason, and (2) mutual respect of students and teachers towards one another. Our contention is that these presuppositions, presented as preconditions necessary to the creation of a community of inquiry, are not without ideological commitments and dependent upon the ability of participants to share power. Using group dynamic theories and the ideas of Hannah Arendt, we argue that behaviours commonly interpreted as obstacles to dialogue or reflective inquiry could provide opportunities for growth. (shrink)

In the multi-agent setting, it is relevant to model group dynamics of agents, and logic has proved a good tool to do so. We propose an epistemic logic, L-DINF-E, that allows one to formalize what are the beliefs formed by a group of agents, where several groups exist and agents can pass from a group to another one. We introduce a new modality which allows an agent to reason about the beliefs of other agents. This allows (...) us to model aspects of the “Theory of Mind”, understood as the set of social-cognitive skills involving the ability to attribute and reason about mental states, desires, beliefs, and knowledge of agents. In this paper, we present the logic L-DINF-E and illustrate how it can be used to solve “false-belief tasks”, i.e., tests in which an agent should understand that some other agent may develop, under some circumstances, false beliefs. (shrink)

Vaesen infers unique properties of mind from the appearance of specific cultural innovation – a correlation without causal direction. Shifts in habitat, population density, and group dynamics are the only independently verifiable incentives for changes in cultural practices. The transition from Acheulean to Late Stone Age technologies requires that we consider how population and social dynamics affect cultural innovation and mental function.

Folk-sociology is a set of intuitive assumptions that organize our spontaneous theories about society, including the notion that social groups are agent-like. Pietraszewski's model may explain this folk-sociological assumption in an elegant way. However, large-scale group dynamics include features that seem to escape agent-like descriptions. Therefore, one may want to find out whether the “event-grammar” proposed here can account for these features.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the postulation of irreducible, distributed cognitive systems is necessary for the successful explanatory practice of cognitive science and sociology. Towards this end, and with an eye specifically on the phenomenon of distributed cognition, the debate over reductionism versus emergence is examined from the perspective of Dynamical Systems Theory. The motivation for this novel approach is threefold. Firstly, DST is particularly popular amongst cognitive scientists who work on modelling collective behaviors. Secondly, DST (...) can deliver two distinct arguments in support of the claim that the presence of mutual interactions between group members necessitates the postulation of the corresponding group entity. Thirdly, DST can also provide a succinct understanding of the way group entities exert downward causation on their individual members. The outcome is a naturalist account of the emergent, and thereby irreducible, nature of distributed cognitive systems that avoids the reductionists’ threat of epiphenomenalism, while being well in line with materialism. (shrink)

We interpret the basic notions of topological dynamics in the model-theoretic setting, relating them to generic types of definable group actions and their generalizations.

Over-time variability characterizes not only individual-level emotions, but also group-level emotions, those that occur when people identify with social groups and appraise events in terms of their implications for those groups. We discuss theory and research regarding the role of emotions in intergroup contexts, focusing on their dynamic nature. We then describe new insights into the causes and consequences of emotional dynamics that flow from conceptualizing emotions as based in group membership, and conclude with research recommendations.

We give a commentary on Newelski's suggestion or conjecture [8] that topological dynamics, in the sense of Ellis [3], applied to the action of a definable group $G(M)$ on its “external type space” $S_{G,\textit{ext}}(M)$, can explain, account for, or give rise to, the quotient $G/G^{00}$, at least for suitable groups in NIP theories. We give a positive answer for measure-stable (or $fsg$) groups in NIP theories. As part of our analysis we show the existence of “externally definable” generics (...) of $G(M)$ for measure-stable groups. We also point out that for $G$ definably amenable (in a NIP theory) $G/G^{00}$ can be recovered, via the Ellis theory, from a natural Ellis semigroup structure on the space of global $f$-generic types. (shrink)

The principle of homophily says that people associate with other groups of people who are mostly like themselves. Many online communities are structured around groups of socially similar individuals. On Twitter, however, people are exposed to multiple, diverse points of view through the public timeline. The authors captured 30,000 tweets about the shooting of George Tiller, a late-term abortion doctor, and the subsequent conversations among pro-life and pro-choice advocates. They found that replies between like-minded individuals strengthen group identity, whereas (...) replies between different-minded individuals reinforce in-group and out-group affiliation. Their results show that people are exposed to broader viewpoints than they were before but are limited in their ability to engage in meaningful discussion. They conclude with implications for different kinds of social participation on Twitter more generally. (shrink)

Exchange of arguments in a discussion often makes individuals more radical about their initial opinion. This phenomenon is known as Group-induced Attitude Polarization. A byproduct of it are bipolarization effects, where the distance between the attitudes of two groups of individuals increases after the discussion. This paper is a first attempt to analyse the building blocks of information exchange and information update that induce polarization. I use Argumentation Frameworks as a tool for encoding the information of agents in a (...) debate relative to a given issue a. I then adapt a specific measure of the degree of acceptability of an opinion. Changes in the degree of acceptability of a, prior and posterior to information exchange, serve here as an indicator of polarization. I finally show that the way agents transmit and update information has a decisive impact on polarization and bipolarization. (shrink)

AssumeGis a group definable in a modelMof a stable theoryT. We prove that the semigroupSG of completeG-types overMis an inverse limit of some semigroups type-definable inMeq. We prove that the maximal subgroups ofSG are inverse limits of some definable quotients of subgroups ofG. We consider the powers of types in the semigroupSG and prove that in a way every type inSG is profinitely many steps away from a type in a subgroup ofSG.

The authors study how an aerosol technology research group constructed a research agenda for itself and how its activity was changed in the process. The group's research agenda was heterogeneous, comprising several research areas in which the knowledge of aerosols was applied in different industrial contexts. The authors analyze the development of one of these areas, the research on the production of ultrafine particles from 1992 to 1997, employing the concept of mediated activity that has been developed in (...) the cultural-historical theory of activity. In the analysis, the activity is seen as the coevolution of the subject, the means, and the research object and the networks of collaboration with other activities. The applications developed in the collaborative networks significantly influence the identity and learning of the researchers, the construction of tools and instruments, and the selection of the phenomena to be studied. (shrink)

Felix Klein classified geometries by their group structure. It is pointed out that a similar program has been in place for particle physics and canonical quantum mechanics.

We investigate definable topological dynamics of groups definable in an o‐minimal expansion of the field of reals. Assuming that a definable group G admits a model‐theoretic analogue of Iwasawa decomposition, namely the compact‐torsion‐free decomposition, we give a description of minimal subflows and the Ellis group of its universal definable flow in terms of this decomposition. In particular, the Ellis group of this flow is isomorphic to. This provides a range of counterexamples to a question by Newelski (...) whether the Ellis group is isomorphic to. We further extend the results to universal topological covers of definable groups, interpreted in a two‐sorted structure containing the o‐minimal sort and a sort for an abelian group. (shrink)

We study the flow of trigonalizable algebraic group acting on its type space, focusing on the problem raised in [17] of whether weakly generic types coincide with almost periodic types if the group has global definable f‐generic types, equivalently whether the union of minimal subflows of a suitable type space is closed. We shall give a description of f‐generic types of trigonalizable algebraic groups, and prove that every f‐generic type is almost periodic.

Social media chat groups, such as WeChat and WhatsApp groups, are widely applied in online communication. This research has conducted two studies to examine the individual level and collective level’s opinion dynamics in those groups. The opinion dynamic is driven by two variables, people’s perceived peer support and willingness of opinion expression. The perceived peer support influences the willingness of opinion expression, and the willingness influences the dynamics of real opinion-expression. First, the quasi-experimental study recruited twenty-five participants as (...) the observation group and found that decreasing perceived peer support would significantly increase individuals’ expression willingness to protect his/her opinion. To generalize the individual level findings to a collective level, the second study treated the social media chat groups as an undirected fully-connected social network and simulated people’s opinion expression dynamics with an agent-based model. The simulation indicated that with the help of increased willingness of opinion expression, the minority opinion supporters as a collective did not fall silent but continue to express themselves and increasing willingness of opinion expression would maintain the existence of minority opinion but could not help the minority reverse to the majority. (shrink)

David Hull's analysis of conceptual change in science, as presentedin his book, Science as a Process (1988), provides a useful framework for understanding one of the scientific controversies in which he actively and constructively intervened, the units of selectiondebates in evolutionary biology. What follows is a brief overview ofthose debates and some reflections on them.

The performance and the success of a group working as a team on a common goal depends on the individuals’ skills and the collective coordination of their abilities. On a perceptual level, individual gaze behavior is reasonably well investigated. However, the coordination of visual skills in a team has been investigated only in laboratory studies and the practical examination and knowledge transfer to field studies or the applicability in real-life situations have so far been neglected. This is mainly due (...) to the fact that a methodological approach along with a suitable evaluation procedure to analyze the gaze coordination within a team in highly dynamic events outside the lab, is still missing. Thus, this study was conducted to develop a tool to investigate the coordinated gaze behavior within a team of three human beings acting with a common goal in a dynamic real-world scenario. This team was a basketball referee team adjudicating a game. Using mobile eye-tracking devices and an indigenously designed software tool for the simultaneous analysis of the gaze data of three participants, allowed, for the first time, the simultaneous investigation of the coordinated gaze behavior of three people in a highly dynamic setting. Overall, the study provides a new and innovative method to investigate the coordinated gaze behavior of a three-person team in specific tasks. This method is also applicable to investigate research questions about teams in dynamic real-world scenarios and get a deeper look at interactions and behavior patterns of human beings in group settings. (shrink)

The physical motivations for the dynamical group are presented and it is shown how Barut's mathematical speculations were combined with the idea of an elementary length to provide group theoretical models of relativistic extended objects. Then the simplest nonrelativistic and relativistic models are described.

In a highly influential work, List and Pettit (Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents, Oxford University Press, 2011) draw upon the theory of judgement aggregation to offer an argument for the existence of nonreductive group agents; they also suggest that nonreductive group agency is a widespread phenomenon. In this paper, we argue for the following two claims. First, that the axioms they consider cannot naturally be interpreted as either descriptive characterisations or normative constraints (...) upon group judgements, in general. This makes it unclear how the List and Pettit argument is to apply to real world group behaviour. Second, by examining empirical data about how group judgements are made by a powerful international regulatory board, we show how each of the List and Pettit axioms can be violated in ways which are straightforwardly explicable at the level of the individual. This suggests that group agency may best be understood as a pluralistic phenomenon, where close inspection of the dynamics of intragroup deliberation can reveal that what prima facie appears to be a nonreductive group agent is, in fact, reducible. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the comparison of individual and group decision-making, in a stochastic inter-temporal problem in two decision environments, namely risk and ambiguity. Using a consumption/saving laboratory experiment, we investigate behaviour in four treatments: individual choice under risk; group choice under risk; individual choice under ambiguity and group choice under ambiguity. Comparing decisions within and between decision environments, we find an anti-symmetric pattern. While individuals are choosing on average closer to the theoretical optimal predictions, compared to (...) groups in the risk treatments, groups tend to deviate less under ambiguity. Within decision environments, individuals deviate more when they choose under ambiguity, while groups are better planners under ambiguity rather than under risk. Our results extend the often observed pattern of individuals behaving more optimally under risk, to its dynamic dimension. (shrink)

We give a model-theoretic treatment of the fundamental results of Kechris-Pestov-Todorčević theory in the more general context of automorphism groups of not necessarily countable structures. One of the main points is a description of the universal ambit as a certain space of types in an expanded language. Using this, we recover results of Kechris et al. (Funct Anal 15:106–189, 2005), Moore (Fund Math 220:263–280, 2013), Ngyuen Van Thé (Fund Math 222: 19–47, 2013), in the context of automorphism groups of not (...) necessarily countable structures, as well as Zucker (Trans Am Math Soc 368, 6715–6740, 2016). (shrink)