Modelling the acceptance of fully autonomous vehicles: A media-based perception and adoption model

As the technology matures, fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) are on the corner. This calls for exploring the factors that might influence potential users’ perception and acceptance of AVs. Limited existing studies related to acceptance modeling investigated the effects of media and human on fully AVs’ beliefs. Hence, a media-based perception and adoption model (MPAM) is developed to investigate how information and opinion (from mass media and social media) affect human self-perception (including self-efficacy and subjective norms) and product value perception (including perceived usefulness and risks), which in turn drive users’ adoption intention to private AVs and public AVs as well. Through a questionnaire survey, 355 samples from two universities were collected in Beijing. The structural equation model results confirm that media channels have salient effects on consumer and product with different emphases. Mass media enhances potential users’ self-efficacy of fully AVs, while social media strengthens subjective norms. Both usefulness and risks of AVs are perceived simultaneously via mass media, whereas risks perception can be significantly eliminated by social media. All constructs of user’s self-perception and product perception are verified to drive users’ intention to using AVs and public AVs. Besides the theoretical and modeling contributions, practical implications are provided for the marketers and stakeholders in the early stages of AVs launch.     

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.     

The relationship between peer servant leadership,social identity,and team cohesion in intercollegiate athletics

Servant leadership is characterized by a leader’s emphasis on serving their followers first. Within the sport context, servant leadership has been studied primarily in coaches and has been associated with positive athlete outcomes, such as increased athlete satisfaction, motivation, and performance. However, the impact of servant leadership from an athlete perspective (e.g., formal team captains) has been underexplored. As such, the purpose of the present study was to examine the relationships between peer servant leadership, cohesion, and social identity within intercollegiate athletes. Two hundred and eighty-eight Division I and Division III NCAA intercollegiate athletes participated in the present study (female n = 165; male n = 123; M_age = 19.41, SD_age = 1.09) and completed the Revised Servant Leadership Profile for Sport (RSLP-S; Hammermeister et al., 2008), Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ; Carron et al., 1985; Eys et al., 2007), and Social Identity Questionnaire for Sport (SIQS; Bruner & Benson, 2018). Structural equation modeling was used to assess the relationships between peer servant leadership, cohesion, and social identity. Results revealed that peer servant leadership positively predicted cohesion, and this relationship was fully mediated by social identity. The current study supports the effectiveness of peer servant leadership in sport contexts and provides theoretical support for the social identity approach to leadership.     

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.     

Psychological mechanisms underlying the relationship between commercial physical activity app use and physical activity engagement

PurposePrevious studies have indicated a relationship between the use of commercial physical activity apps (e.g., Fitbit, Strava) and physical activity engagement. The use of social components of such apps, in particular app-specific communities (connecting with other app users) and existing social networking platforms (e.g., Facebook) have the potential to enhance physical activity. This study aimed to explore the psychological mechanisms underlying the relationship between the use of commercial physical activity apps (and their social components) and physical activity engagement.MethodAn online cross-sectional survey assessed physical activity, use of commercial physical activity apps (and their associated social components), and psychological constructs (social support, self-efficacy, motivation, trait competitiveness, trait social comparison).Results1274 adults aged 18–83 years (M_age = 34.1 ± 13.5 years, 87.6% female) participated. App use was positively associated with physical activity engagement. The relationship between app use and physical activity was fully mediated by social support, self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation and identified regulation. Trait competitiveness, but not trait social comparison, moderated the relationship between app use and physical activity. Most features (e.g., sharing posts, providing or receiving encouragement) of the social components of apps were positively associated with psychological constructs linked to engagement in physical activity. Mediation pathways linking features of existing social networking platforms with physical activity were found. Specifically, sharing posts was linked to higher engagement in physical activity via positive associations with self-efficacy, and receiving encouragement with linked to higher engagement in physical activity via positive associations with both self-efficacy and identified regulation. In addition, engagement in comparisons was associated with lower self-efficacy and higher external regulation, and in turn, lower physical activity.ConclusionsThe relationship between the use of commercial physical activity apps and physical activity is underpinned by social support, self-efficacy and autonomous motivations. The findings highlight the importance of trait competitiveness, which should be taken into consideration when leveraging physical activity apps. Overall, the present study demonstrated that commercial physical activity apps (and their social components) hold great potential to increase physical activity engagement given their associations with psychological constructs strongly linked with physical activity.     

An empirical typology of violent incidents reported by prison inmates with convictions for violence

Forty-four male prison inmates convicted for violent offences were interviewed, and details of current offence, previous convictions for violence, prison incidents, and violent situations outside of prison were obtained from each offender. Information on victim, circumstances, precipitating events, type of violence, emotions at the time, and the like, was derived for 246 violent incidents. Cluster analysis revealed eight clusters: “criminal” violence to familiar victims, peer violence within prison, domestic violence, peer violence in pubs, gang violence, violence to staff in prison, “criminal” violence to unknown victims with accomplices, and public violence against younger victims. Results were discussed in terms of treatment of violent offenders, with special emphasis on Social Skills Training.     

社会认识的悖论分析

本文论为社会认识是一种特殊的认识,其特殊性表现为它是一种自认识,或者说是“悖论式”的认识,本文提出“双重角色悖论”、“视交叉悖论”、“纽康悖论”和“价值关涉悖论”,就社会认识的悖论现象作哲学分析,试图揭示社会认识活动的特殊性和规律性。     

A psychometric evaluation of the social skills rating system in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

The social skills rating system (SSRS) was developed to assess social skills of children, as observed by multiple raters (teacher, parent, child). Studies of the SSRS have been conducted with handicapped, mentally retarded and learning disabled children. No studies have reported the psychometric properties of the SSRS in a clinical ADHD sample. This is important, because deficient social functioning is associated with ADHD. The present study assesses the psychometric properties of the teacher, parent and child versions of the SSRS in children with ADHD (n = 123), and normal controls (n = 239). Also, the social skills of children with ADHD, as rated on the SSRS were examined. Results support the factor structure and internal consistency of the original SSRS-teacher version. Moreover, support was found for 3 out of 4 scales of the SSRS-parent version. The factor structure of the SSRS-child version could not be replicated. An explanatory factor analysis on the SSRS-child version yielded two factors. Evidence was found for discriminative ability of the SSRS between normal controls and children with ADHD. Finally, informant agreement between raters was found to be poor.     

Ruminative coping and post-event processing in social anxiety

Cognitive models of social anxiety implicate various factors in the initiation and maintenance of socially anxious states, including anticipatory processing, self-focused attention and post-event processing. The present study focused on post-event processing, which is a post-mortem analysis following a social event that is described as ruminative in nature and serves to maintain social anxiety. Participants (N=112; 64 women, 48 men) were presented with vignettes that involved making mistakes in public and were instructed to record their thoughts to allow for the examination of the content of post-event processing. Ruminative coping and distraction were assessed via self-report. Results indicated that participants high in social anxiety (n=55) were more likely to ruminate and less likely to distract when faced with socially anxious stressors compared to those low in social anxiety (n=57). Further, as hypothesized, participants high in social anxiety recorded more negative thoughts and more upward counterfactual thoughts ('if only' type thoughts on how things could have been better; associated with negative affect) compared to those low in social anxiety. These results are discussed in terms of cognitive models of social anxiety.