Networking
Joanna Schug, Masaki Yuki & William Maddux
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the current research, we tested a novel explanation for previously demonstrated findings that East Asians disclose less personal information to other people than do Westerners. We propose that both between- and within-culture differences in self-disclosure to close friends may be explained by the construct of relational mobility, the general degree to which individuals in a society have opportunities to form new relationships and terminate old ones. In Study 1, we found that cross-cultural differences (Japan vs. United States) in self-disclosure to a close friend were mediated by individuals' perceptions of relational mobility. In Study 2, two separate measures of relational mobility predicted self-disclosure within a single culture (Japan), and this relationship was mediated by the motivation to engage in self-disclosure to strengthen personal relationships. We conclude that societies and social contexts higher in relational mobility (in which relationships can be formed and dissolved relatively easily) produce stronger incentives for self-disclosure as a social-commitment device.
----------------------
Political leanings vary with facial expression processing and psychosocial functioning
Jacob Vigil
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, September 2010, Pages 547-558
Abstract:
Conservative, Republican sympathizers show heightened threat reactivity, but greater felt happiness than liberal, Democrat sympathizers. Recent evolutionary models interpret these findings in the context of broader perceptual and expressive proclivities for advertising cues of competency (Republicans) and trustworthiness (Democrats) to others, and in ways that facilitate the formation of distinct social networks, in coordination with individuals' life histories. Consistent with this perspective, I found that Republican sympathizers were more likely to report larger social networks and interpret ambiguous facial stimuli as expressing more threatening emotions as compared to Democrat sympathizers, who also reported greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction, and experiential hardships. The findings are discussed in the context of proximate and ultimate explanations of social cognition, relationship formation, and societal cohesion.
----------------------
Yoojung Kim, Dongyoung Sohn & Sejung Marina Choi
Computers in Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
While the explosive growth of social network sites is a common phenomenon across many countries, the ways people use them and their reasons for doing so may differ depending on their social and cultural milieu, for fundamental values are divergent from culture to culture. This study is an attempt to examine how cultural contexts shape the use of communication technology by examining the motives for and patterns of using social network sites among college students in the US and Korea. The findings of this study suggest that the major motives for using social network sites - seeking friends, social support, entertainment, information, and convenience - are similar between the two countries, though the weights placed on these motives are different. Reflecting the unique social nature of the medium, Korean college students put more weight on obtaining social support from existing social relationships, while American students place relatively greater emphasis on seeking entertainment. Additionally, American college students' networks in an online social venue are far larger than their Korean counterparts, which may reflect the cultural difference between the two countries regarding developing and managing social relationships.
----------------------
The Social Origins of Adult Political Behavior
Jaime Settle, Robert Bond & Justin Levitt
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Political socialization research has focused on the role of parents, extracurricular activities, and the school curriculum during adolescence on shaping early adult political behavior (Beck & Jennings, 1982; Flanagan, Syvertsen, & Stout, 2007; Torney-Purta, Richardson, & Barber, 2004). However, no study to date has examined how properties of adolescents' social networks affect the development of adult political outcomes. Using social network analysis, we find that both a respondent's social integration in high school and his friends' perceptions of their own social integration affect the respondent's later political behavior as a young adult. Peer and network effects are at work in political socialization. This has important implications for our understanding of the development of social capital, political trust, and political participation, as well as our general understanding about how one's social network influences one's own attitudes and behavior.
----------------------
If You Can't Join 'Em, Beat 'Em: The Gender Gap in Individual Donations to Congressional Candidates
Michael Crespin & Janna Deitz
Political Research Quarterly, September 2010, Pages 581-593
Abstract:
The authors revisit the gender gap in campaign finance and find an advantage for women candidates in earning donations from individual donors due to the activities of female donor networks and the changing congressional donor pool. Women supported by these networks, especially Democratic women, receive a boost in campaign fund-raising compared to their male counterparts, whereas women not supported by these networks receive significantly less. The ideological leanings of congressional donors also advantage Democratic women. Substantial partisan gender differences in this area of campaign finance persist, and this fund-raising gap may contribute to the growing partisan gender gap in Congress.
----------------------
The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Network Experiment
Damon Centola
Science, 3 September 2010, Pages 1194-1197
Abstract:
How do social networks affect the spread of behavior? A popular hypothesis states that networks with many clustered ties and a high degree of separation will be less effective for behavioral diffusion than networks in which locally redundant ties are rewired to provide shortcuts across the social space. A competing hypothesis argues that when behaviors require social reinforcement, a network with more clustering may be more advantageous, even if the network as a whole has a larger diameter. I investigated the effects of network structure on diffusion by studying the spread of health behavior through artificially structured online communities. Individual adoption was much more likely when participants received social reinforcement from multiple neighbors in the social network. The behavior spread farther and faster across clustered-lattice networks than across corresponding random networks.
----------------------
'Two's up and poncing fags': Young women's smoking practices, reciprocity and friendship
Fin Cullen
Gender and Education, September 2010, Pages 491-504
Abstract:
Over the past decade much has been written by journalists, policy makers, and academics, about young women's leisure time pursuits. A great deal of this interest has focused around a concern that teenage girls in the UK are taking up smoking in larger numbers than their male peers. This paper draws on findings from my small-scale doctoral research into teenage girls' use of tobacco and alcohol in a town in southern England. I examine young women's use of cigarettes as an informal social currency, and as a way of thinking about such tobacco use beyond the deficit model of the young female smoker common to many drugs education interventions. In this paper I draw upon theoretical material from the social theories of exchange to explore how young women's reciprocal networks of cigarettes operate to underpin friendships and mobilise power within girls' social networks. I explore how smoking as a reciprocal gift-giving practice supports and maintains friendship groups and particular gendered practices. My argument is that teen girls create and sustain bonds of friendship through their use and exchange of cigarettes. I want to suggest that within the girls' friendship groups, the flow of branded cigarettes as a resource highlights alliances, inter-group rivalries, and provides space for the production and negotiation of teenage 'cool' femininities.
----------------------
The Power of Asking: How Communication Affects Selfishness, Empathy, and Altruism
James Andreoni & Justin Rao
NBER Working Paper, September 2010
Abstract:
To understand the "pure" incentives of altruism, economic laboratory research on humans almost always forbids communication between subjects. In reality, however, altruism usually requires interaction between givers and receivers, which clearly must influence choices. Charities, for example, speak of the "power of asking." Indeed, evolutionary theories of altruism are built on human sociality. We experimentally examine communication in which one subject allocates $10 between herself and a receiver, and systematically altered who in the pair could speak. We found that any time the recipient spoke, giving increased - asking is powerful. But when only allocators could speak, choices were significantly more selfish than any other condition. When empathy was heightened by putting allocators "in the receivers shoes," altruism appeared as if recipients had been able to ask, even when they were silent. We conclude that communication dramatically influences altruistic behavior, and appears to largely work by heightening empathy.
----------------------
The closeness-communication bias: Increased egocentrism among friends versus strangers
Kenneth Savitsky, Boaz Keysar, Nicholas Epley, Travis Carter & Ashley Swanson
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers. We propose, however, that closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate, a phenomenon we term the closeness-communication bias. In one experiment, participants who followed direction of a friend were more likely to make egocentric errors - look at and reach for an object only they could see - than were those who followed direction of a stranger. In two additional experiments, participants who attempted to convey particular meanings with ambiguous phrases overestimated their success more when communicating with a friend or spouse than with strangers. We argue that people engage in active monitoring of strangers' divergent perspectives because they know they must, but that they "let down their guard" and rely more on their own perspective when they communicate with a friend.
----------------------
The transmission and evolution of experimental microcultures in groups of young children
Andrew Whiten & Emma Flynn
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
A new experimental microculture approach was developed to investigate the creation and transmission of differing traditions in small communities of young children. Four playgroups, with a total of 88 children, participated. In each of 2 playgroups, a single child was shown how to use 1 of 2 alternative methods of tool use, "lift" or "poke," to extract a reward from an artificial "foraging" device (the "panpipes") used in earlier diffusion experiments with chimpanzees. Each of these proficient models then participated in his or her playgroup during free play for 5 days, with the panpipes available to all. Compared with a condition in which no model was witnessed, where only 18% of children successfully gained rewards and the lift technique never appeared, 66% of children in the open diffusion conditions (83% of those who attempted the task) were successful. Each of the 2 different seeded approaches initially spread strongly in their respective groups. These seeded differences eroded over time as modifications were spontaneously invented, but social learning played a dominant role throughout, with a majority of children adopting the technique they witnessed most commonly, whether initially seeded or resulting from other children's innovations. A majority of children thus fell into 1 of several categories of "follower," relying primarily on social learning, with a minority displaying 1 of several other categories of innovation. One of the techniques was modified into a distinctively different form that was then socially transmitted further, allowing us to document the microevolution of small-scale traditions in this cultural microcosm.
----------------------
Daniel Hawes & Rene Rocha
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Robert Putnam's work suggests social capital is compatible with social equality, while Rodney Hero argues the two are inversely related. Hero and Putnam, however, are limited in their arguments because they have only cross-sectional data and their theoretical arguments imply dynamic relationships over time. We create a state-level social capital index and a measure of racial diversity that varies over time and across states. We use multivariate models to determine whether social capital or racial diversity better predicts levels of policy equity. We find that social capital detrimentally affects policy equity and racial diversity is positively associated with policy equity.
----------------------
Michael Stefanone, Derek Lackaff & Devan Rosen
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, July 2010, Pages 508-525
Abstract:
Social cognitive theory suggests a likely relationship between behavior modeled on increasingly popular reality television (RTV) and user behavior modeled on social networking sites (SNSs). This study surveyed young adults (N = 456) to determine the extent to which RTV consumption explained a range of user behavior in the context of social network sites. Results show a consistent relationship between RTV consumption and the length of time spent on these sites, the size of users' networks, the proportion of friends not actually met face to face, and photo sharing frequency while controlling for age and gender.
----------------------
Vili Lehdonvirta & Pekka Rasanen
Journal of Youth Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Peer groups such as neighbourhoods and hobby circles are important sources of social identity for young people, but their viability is challenged by processes of urbanisation and labour mobility. In recent years, traditional peer groups have been joined by easily accessible computer-mediated groups, which have become an everyday part of life in many countries. In this article, we examine how young people identify with various online and offline peer groups. We compare online and offline identification experiences from the perspective of how socio-demographic position and individual sociability characteristics influence them, and examine how these identification processes differ between national contexts. Empirical analyses are conducted based on a survey of online community users from the UK, Spain and Japan (N=4299). It is found that participants identify as strongly with their online communities as they do with their own families, and stronger than with offline hobby groups. In the mature online societies of the UK and Japan, the online group provides a more socio-demographically inclusive source of identification than traditional leisure-time formations. As friends and family move online, affinity towards online groups is more likely to be a reflection of high sociability than a lack of it. Games, social networking sites and other online environments should be seen as crucial contexts for today's youth's socialisation and identification experiences.
----------------------
Zhongmin Wang
B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2010
Abstract:
This paper takes a first step toward understanding the working of the online market for reviews. Most online review firms rely on unpaid volunteers to write reviews. Can a for-profit online review firm attract productive volunteer reviewers, limit the number of ranting or raving reviewers, and marginalize fake reviewers? This paper sheds light on this issue by studying reviewer productivity and restaurant ratings at Yelp, where reviewers are encouraged to establish a social image, and two competing websites, where reviewers are completely anonymous. Using a dataset of nearly half a million reviewer accounts, we find that the number (proportion) of prolific reviewers on Yelp is an order of magnitude larger than that on either competing site, more productive reviewers on all three websites are less likely to give an extreme rating, and restaurant ratings on Yelp tend to be much less extreme than those on either competing site.
----------------------
Jeff Clune, Heather Goldsby, Charles Ofria & Robert Pennock
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Inclusive fitness theory predicts that natural selection will favour altruist genes that are more accurate in targeting altruism only to copies of themselves. In this paper, we provide evidence from digital evolution in support of this prediction by competing multiple altruist-targeting mechanisms that vary in their accuracy in determining whether a potential target for altruism carries a copy of the altruist gene. We compete altruism-targeting mechanisms based on (i) kinship (kin targeting), (ii) genetic similarity at a level greater than that expected of kin (similarity targeting), and (iii) perfect knowledge of the presence of an altruist gene (green beard targeting). Natural selection always favoured the most accurate targeting mechanism available. Our investigations also revealed that evolution did not increase the altruism level when all green beard altruists used the same phenotypic marker. The green beard altruism levels stably increased only when mutations that changed the altruism level also changed the marker (e.g. beard colour), such that beard colour reliably indicated the altruism level. For kin- and similarity-targeting mechanisms, we found that evolution was able to stably adjust altruism levels. Our results confirm that natural selection favours altruist genes that are increasingly accurate in targeting altruism to only their copies. Our work also emphasizes that the concept of targeting accuracy must include both the presence of an altruist gene and the level of altruism it produces.
----------------------
Hélène Amieva, Ralitsa Stoykova, Fanny Matharan, Catherine Helmer, Toni Antonucci & Jean-François Dartigues
Psychosomatic Medicine, forthcoming
Objective: To test the association between several social networks variables reflecting both structural characteristics and quality of relationships with the risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease 5 and up to 15 years later.
Methods: The study sample is gathered from the Paquid cohort, a French population-based study of 3,777 elderly people evaluated at baseline and regularly revisited during a 15-year interval. The sample consisted of 2,089 subjects who completed the social network questionnaire and were free of dementia at the time of enrollment and also at the next two follow-ups to minimize the problem of reverse causality. The questionnaire collected at baseline included marital status, number of ties, nature of social network, satisfaction, perception of being understood/misunderstood, and reciprocity in relationships.
Results: The incident cases of dementia considered were those diagnosed at 5-year and subsequent follow-ups, resulting in 461 dementia and 373 Alzheimer's disease cases. The multivariate Cox model, including the six social network variables and adjusted for numerous potential confounders, showed significant associations with satisfaction and reciprocity in relationships. Participants who felt satisfied with their relations had a 23% reduced dementia risk. Participants who reported that they received more support than they gave over their lifetime had a 55% and 53% reduced risk for dementia and Alzheimer's disease, respectively.
Conclusion: The only variables associated with subsequent dementia or Alzheimer's disease were those reflecting the quality of relationships. The delay between social network assessment and dementia diagnosis was from 5 up to 15 years, thus minimizing the problem of reverse causality.