Evaluating agents’ trustworthiness within virtual societies in case of no direct experience

A great deal of effort has been made to introduce trust models to assess trustworthiness within virtual societies. The great majority of them makes extensive use of direct experience as the main source of information, considering recommendation/reputation and inferential processes just later, as a secondary mechanism to refine trust assessment. In this kind of networks, unfortunately, direct experience might not always represent the best solution to assess trustworthiness. In fact, their highly dynamic structure promotes an increase of the average number of interconnections among agents. This in turn negatively affects the degree of knowledge the agents possess about each specific individual, i.e. direct experience. To date, however, it has not been said much about how to face these situations.It is fundamental to find an effective approach for trust assessment even in lack of direct experience, which is the central focus of this research. By the means of a multi-agent social simulation, we consider the situation in which an agent can just access indirect knowledge for trust assessment, namely recommendations of specific individuals or whole categories of individuals. Then, we compare the efficiency of these two approaches in order to identify when it is more convenient to rely on the first or on the second one. As expected, our results confirm that the dynamic nature of these networks strongly affects the role of categories. We modeled this feature introducing the “turnover” in the simulations, whereby the higher is the turnover the more convenient it is relying on categories. Besides this confirmatory result, our simulations highlight the higher degree of robustness of categories in the presence of unreliable recommenders. Such a result is even more significant if there is no available information about how reliable the recommenders are.The results we obtained are in accordance with the current literature and can be of important interest for the development of this sector.     

La déférence : une norme sociale complémentaire de l’internalité en contexte de promotion professionnelle ?

Regarding evaluation, numerous researches highlighted the social valuation of the internality. From the end of 1990s, the diversification of the studied situations came to put in perspective the impact of this norm, while revealing the existence of others social norms. The present research was designed to investigate the phenomenon of social valuation of the deference in situation of annual performance review. The social valuation of the power of others was examined by two studies: one led from paradigm of autopresentation with employees and other one, conducted under legislator paradigm with Human Resources specialists (students in their final year of Institutes Business Administration). If the results indicate, in a classic way, important normative effects of the internality, the valuation of the deferential explanations is globally so obvious. These results question about the contextual expression of a norm of deference: employees and RH experts give weight to the power of others. The results show a convergent use of the internality and the power of others.     

Parents’ moral intentions towards antisocial parent behaviour: An identity approach in youth sport

ObjectivesGrounded in personal and social identity theory, the purpose of this study was to examine whether parents’ personal and social identity perceptions influence their moral intentions towards antisocial parent behaviour in a youth sport setting.DesignParents of competitive youth ice hockey players (N = 437) read a vignette that either described a parent from the participant’s own team (i.e., ingroup), or a parent from an opposing team (i.e., outgroup) acting antisocially towards an athlete from the participant’s own team, an opposing athlete, or their own child. Parents were asked whether they would respond to the antisocial behaviour in the form of direct or indirect criticism or report the behaviour to the coach or to the league.ResultsParents were more likely to directly criticize ingroup parents than outgroup parents and they were more likely to indirectly criticize outgroup parents than ingroup parents. Further, parents with stronger social identities reported higher intentions to indirectly criticize an outgroup parent. There were no main effects for reporting behaviour (to coach or league), and personal identity did not moderate relationships with moral intentions towards antisocial behaviour.ConclusionBy providing parents with a situation that includes antisocial parent behaviour in the immediate youth sport environment, novel insight was gathered with regard to what contextual elements might drive parents’ intention to criticize, but not report antisocial behaviour.     

童年晚期亲社会行为与儿童的心理社会适应

对2097名六年级儿童(平均年龄12.27岁, 男生1093名)的亲社会行为以及多种心理社会适应指标进行测量, 主要运用个体定向的方法考察童年晚期亲社会行为与儿童心理社会适应之间的关系。结果发现:(1)亲社会行为与孤独感、攻击等不良适应呈中等程度负相关, 与同伴接纳、社交自我概念等积极适应呈中等程度正相关;(2)童年晚期儿童的心理社会适应表现为内化问题、外化问题、同伴拒绝与正常发展4种模式;(3)个体亲社会行为水平越高, 越可能属于正常发展组, 越不可能属于不良适应组;在各种不良适应组中, 个体亲社会行为水平越高, 更可能属于内化问题组, 而非外化问题和同伴拒绝组;(4)高亲社会组的儿童有6.8%存在内化问题;低亲社会组的儿童有50.2%适应良好;与普通儿童相比, 低亲社会组的儿童表现出更多的适应不良。     

中国丧亲个体社会支持体验的质性研究

本研究通过对28位丧亲者进行深度访谈,使用解释现象学分析法对质性数据进行分析,探索中国丧亲个体的社会支持体验。结果显示,丧亲社会支持的内容包括后事处理、情感支持、生活恢复帮助,经济与物资支持等。支持来源除家人和朋友之外,还包括同事、相同经历者,以及相关机构等。社会支持通过调节情绪、改变认知等方式促进个体对丧亲的适应。本研究结果为最新丧亲社会支持模型提供了支持,同时也反映出中国社会对丧亲人群的社会支持特色。     

青少年的学校适应问题：家庭亲密度、家庭道德情绪和责任感的作用

随机选取某市三所普通中小学四、六、八、十年级的755名青少年为被试,使用自评和他评问卷探讨家庭亲密度、家庭道德情绪和责任感与青少年学校适应之间的关系。结果显示：（1）青少年家庭亲密度、责任感与学校适应问题存在性别差异,女生家庭亲密度和责任感高于男生,外化和学业问题少于男生;家庭亲密度、道德情绪和责任感随年龄增长呈下降趋势;（2）家庭亲密度正向预测道德情绪和责任感,直接和间接负向预测青少年学校适应问题。（3）责任感负向预测学校适应问题,并在家庭亲密度和学校适应问题之间起部分中介作用;结构方程模型各指标的拟合效果较好。家庭亲密度、责任感是学校适应问题的良好预测指标。