Positive weighing of the other's collective narrative among Jewish and Bedouin‐Palestinian teachers in Israel and its correlates

Teachers play a pivotal role in the educational discourse around collective narratives, and especially the other's narrative. The study assumed that members of groups entangled in a conflict approach the different modules of the other's narrative distinctively. Jewish and Palestinian teachers, Israeli citizens, answered questionnaires dealing with the narrative of the other, readiness for interethnic contact, negative between‐group emotions and preferences for resolutions of the Israeli–Palestinian (I–P) conflict. Positive weighing of the other's narrative among Jewish teachers correlated with high levels of readiness for interethnic contact and low levels of negative between‐group emotions, across the various modules of the Palestinian narrative. Preferences for a peaceful resolution of the I–P conflict and rejection of a violent one were noted in two of the modules. Among Palestinian teachers, positive weighing of the other's collective narrative was exclusively noted for the Israeli narrative of the Holocaust, and this stance negatively related to negative between‐group emotions and preference for a violent solution of the I–P conflict, and positively related to readiness for interethnic contact and preference of a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Practical implications of these findings for peace education are discussed.     

Modeling collective rule at ancient Teotihuacan as a complex adaptive system: Communal ritual makes social hierarchy more effective

Experts remain divided about the nature of the sociopolitical system of ancient Teotihuacan, which was one of the earliest and largest urban civilizations of the Americas. Excavations hoping to find compelling evidence of powerful rulers, such as a royal tomb, keep coming away empty-handed. But the alternative possibility of collective rule still remains poorly understood as well. Previously we used a computational model of this city’s hypothetical sociopolitical network to show that in principle collective rule based on communal ritual could be an effective strategy of ensuring widespread social coordination, as long as we assume that the network’s structure could be transformed via social learning and local leaders were not strongly subdivided. Here we extended this model to investigate whether increased social hierarchy could mitigate the negative effects of such strong divisions. We found a special synergy between social hierarchy and communal ritual: only their combination improved the extent of social coordination, whereas the introduction of centralization and top-down influence by themselves had no effect. This finding is consistent with portrayals of the Teotihuacan elite as religious specialists serving the public good, in particular by synchronizing the city’s ritual calendar with the rhythms of the stars.     

Reputation blackboard systems

Blackboard systems are motivated by the popular view of task forces as brainstorming groups in which specialists write promising ideas to solve a problem in a central blackboard. Here we study a minimal model of blackboard system designed to solve cryptarithmetic puzzles, where hints are posted anonymously on a public display (standard blackboard) or are posted together with information about the reputations of the agents that posted them (reputation blackboard). We find that the reputation blackboard always outperforms the standard blackboard, which, in turn, always outperforms the arrangement where the agents work independently. The asymptotic distribution of the computational cost of the search, which is proportional to the total number of agent updates required to find the solution of the puzzle, is an exponential distribution for those three search heuristics. Only for the reputation blackboard we find a nontrivial dependence of the mean computational cost on the system size and, in that case, the optimal performance is achieved by a single agent working alone, indicating that, though the blackboard organization can produce impressive performance gains when compared with the independent search, it is not very supportive of cooperative work.     

Group belongingness and collective action: Effects of need to belong and rejection sensitivity on willingness to participate in protest activities

Engaging in political protests are becoming increasingly common, and considering the potential, individual, costs and the low probability of affecting the political outcome, it is necessary to understand the motivations behind such actions. The desire to be part of a social group is deeply rooted in human nature, and previous research proposes that the groups one belongs to may influence the decision to engage in protests. We build on this research and suggest that social exclusion, individual fear of exclusion and need to belong interact in explaining who is likely to become engaged. In two studies, one natural experiment and one lab‐experiment, we show that social exclusion increase willingness to participate in protests for individuals high in both rejection sensitivity and need to belong. We conclude that contextual factors, such as exclusion or marginalization should be considered in relation to individual level personality factors when explaining who is likely to become engaged in political protests. These results are important since they suggest that some people engage in politics simply due to social reasons and are less ideologically motivated.     

Culture and collective argumentation

What are the mechanisms underlying the reproduction and change of collective beliefs? The paper suggests that a productive and promising approach for dealing with this question can be found in ontogenetic and cross-cultural studies on ‘collective argumentations and belief systems’; this is illustrated with regard to moral beliefs: After a short discussion of the rationality/relativity issue in cultural anthropology some basic elements of a conceptual framework for the empirical study of collective argumentations are outlined. A few empirical case studies are summarized; the results deliver some empirical evidence to the assumption that as the ‘logic of collective argumentations’ develops in children and adolescent there will be different and increasingly more complex constraints on the kinds of basic moral beliefs that can be collectively accepted. Most importantly, as children approach adolescence they may have acquired a ‘logic of argumentation’ which makes possible a collectively valid distinction between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of some disputed particular moral issue. A comparison with a land litigation among Trobriands (Papua New Guinea) shows that the ‘logic of argumentation’ and the corresponding basic moral beliefs of Trobriands very much resemble the ‘logic of argumentation’ and moral rationality standards of (German) adolescents.     

Neighborhood Protective Effects on Depression in Latinos

Neighborhood social ecologies may have protective effects on depression in Latinos, after adjusting for demographic risk factors, such as nativity and length of stay in the US. This study examines the effects of neighborhood collective efficacy and linguistic isolation on depression in a heterogeneous urban Latino population from 1,468 adult respondents in Los Angeles County. We used multilevel models to analyze how major depression is associated with socioeconomic background, length of stay in the U.S., neighborhood collective efficacy and linguistic isolation among Latinos. A significant cross-level interaction effect was found between collective efficacy and foreign-born Latinos who resided in the US ≥ 15 years. We report cross-level interaction effects between linguistic isolation and nativity for U.S.-born and nativity and duration of residence for foreign-born Latinos who had lived in the U.S. at least 15 years. The moderating effects reported in this study suggest that the benefits of neighborhood collective efficacy and linguistic isolation vary by Latino subgroup and are conceptually discrete forms of social capital and offer insights for community based interventions.     

A social host in the machine? The case of group attention

I argue that akin to mind-body dualism, social-mental dualism is open to critique. That is, mental processes can be inherently social, with sociality ‘baked into’ the architecture of the cognitive mechanism. As a case in point, I introduce the reader to the cognitive mechanism of group attention. In particular, I focus on the differences between group attention and ideomotor imitation in terms of their (a) compliance to the social-mental dichotomy, and (b) contributions to building common knowledge—a prerequisite for human communication and collective action. Finally, I suggest possible implications of group attention scholarship for other social memory phenomena such as social contagion, socially shared memory-induced forgetting, and the saying-is-believing effect.     

Mnemonic convergence in a social network: Collective memory and extended influence

Research on the social influences on remembering has focused on how people influence one another's memory through direct conversation. This project examined indirect influence, that is, the influence of those to whom one may be connected through a social network. We extend Christakis and Fowler's (2007. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. The New England Journal of Medicine, 357(4), 370–379) discovery that factors may propagate across several degrees of influence; influences of social remembering may also propagate. In a naturalistic study, we tracked weekly recollections of a narrative in a small social network. Two individuals’ mnemonic convergence could be predicted by their degree of separation. Directly and indirectly connected pairs show more convergent remembering than unconnected pairs, indicating that conversation is not the only route by which two individuals may come to hold a shared representation of the past. This propagation of memories across the links of a social network is an important means by which a group converges on a collective memory.     

Does interaction matter? Testing whether a confidence heuristic can replace interaction in collective decision-making

In a range of contexts, individuals arrive at collective decisions by sharing confidence in their judgements. This tendency to evaluate the reliability of information by the confidence with which it is expressed has been termed the ‘confidence heuristic’. We tested two ways of implementing the confidence heuristic in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task: either directly, by opting for the judgement made with higher confidence, or indirectly, by opting for the faster judgement, exploiting an inverse correlation between confidence and reaction time. We found that the success of these heuristics depends on how similar individuals are in terms of the reliability of their judgements and, more importantly, that for dissimilar individuals such heuristics are dramatically inferior to interaction. Interaction allows individuals to alleviate, but not fully resolve, differences in the reliability of their judgements. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of confidence and collective decision-making.     

Broken Windows and Low Adolescent Prosociality: Not Cause and Consequence, but Co-symptoms of Low Collective Efficacy

The current study presents a case in which adolescent prosociality is lower in neighborhoods with greater physical disorder. Current theory provides two interpretations for such a pattern: (1) that disorder signals a threatening environment and discourages prosociality (“broken windows theory”); (2) that disorder and low prosociality are both symptoms of a weak community (i.e., low collective efficacy). A survey of 642 students from a small American city was combined with an assessment of the built environment to evaluate these two interpretations. Students were nested in 59 Census block groups. Multilevel models demonstrated that collective efficacy best explained variation in prosociality between neighborhoods, and that perceived collective efficacy best explained variation within neighborhoods. Objective and perceived disorder had no significant relationship with prosociality in these models, suggesting that disorder is not directly responsible for cross-neighborhood variation in prosociality. The paper discusses the implications for place-based interventions promoting prosociality. The results also emphasize the need for measures of social processes (e.g., collective efficacy) when evaluating “broken windows” hypotheses.