Culture is increasingly being understood as a driver of mammalian phenotypes. Defined as group-specific behaviour transmitted by social learning, culture is shaped by social structure. However, ...culture can itself affect social structure if individuals preferentially interact with others whose behaviour is similar, or cultural symbols are used to mark groups. Using network formalism, this interplay can be depicted by the coevolution of nodes and edges together with the coevolution of network topology and transmission patterns. We review attempts to model the links between the spread, persistence and diversity of culture and the network topology of non-human societies. We illustrate these processes using cetaceans. The spread of socially learned begging behaviour within a population of bottlenose dolphins followed the topology of the social network, as did the evolution of the song of the humpback whale between breeding areas. In three bottlenose dolphin populations, individuals preferentially associated with animals using the same socially learned foraging behaviour. Homogeneous behaviour within the tight, nearly permanent social structures of the large matrilineal whales seems to result from transmission bias, with cultural symbols marking social structures. We recommend the integration of studies of culture and society in species for which social learning is an important determinant of behaviour.
Bu çalışmada, geçerli ve güvenilir bir konformizm (uymacı davranış) ölçeği geliştirmek amaçlanmıştır. Schwab (1980) tarafından önerilen üç aşamalı ölçek geliştirme adımları neticesinde 50 maddelik ...önerme havuzu oluşturulmuş, görünüş ve kapsam geçerliliği açısından 5 uzman görüşüne sunulmuş ve yapılan değerlendirmelerle 35 madde ölçekten çıkarılmıştır. Elde edilen 15 maddelik taslak ölçek özel sektörde çalışan 216 beyaz yakalı çalışana uygulanmıştır İstatistiki analizler neticesinde ölçek bütünlüğüne uymadığı düşünülen 5 madde daha modelden çıkarılmış ve ölçeğin değerlendirilmesi aşamasında 10 maddeli ve tek boyutlu, toplam varyansın %57.5’ini açıklayan bir model/ölçek elde edilmiştir. Analizler göstermiştir ki, konformizm (uymacı davranış) işe adanmışlık ile negatif yönlü ve anlamlı bir ilişki içindeyken; işten ayrılma niyeti ile pozitif yönlü ve anlamlı bir ilişki içindedir. Ölçeğin tamamı için Cronbach alpha iç tutarlılık katsayısı .91 olarak tespit edilmiştir. Elde edilen sonuçlar, geliştirilen konformizm (uymacı davranış) ölçeğinin istatistiksel olarak geçerli ve güvenilir olduğunu kanıtlamaktadır.
I present a model of conformism in social networks that incorporates both peer effects and self-selection. I show that conformism has positive social value and that social welfare can be bounded by ...network polarization and connectivity measures. I apply the model to empirical data on high school students' participation in extracurricular activities. I find that the local effect of conformism (i.e. the endogenous peer effect for a fixed network structure) ranges from 7.5% to 45%, depending on the number of peers that an individual has. Simulations show that the optimal policies of an inequality-averse policymaker change depending on a school's enrollment. Small schools should encourage shy students to interact more with other students, while large schools should focus on promoting role models within the school.
•I present a model of conformism in social networks that incorporates both peer effects and self–selection.•I find and characterize the set of all equilibria.•I find that conformism has social value.•I find a local effect of conformism ranging from 7.5% to 45%, depending on the individuals' number of peers.
Fear of infectious disease is substantially different from that evoked by other medical conditions. Such a difference depends on psychological and behavioral adaptations shaped by natural selection ...throughout the evolutionary history of
Homo sapiens
. Selective pressures have favored the evolution of a behavioral immune system that is separate from, and complementary to, the physiological immune system. The two systems interact in a complex way. The psychological mechanisms (i.e. disgust and fear) involved in the behavioral immune system impact also on aspects that pertain to social psychology (i.e. xenophobia, conformism, and authoritarianism). Acknowledging the existence of psychological and behavioral adaptations to avoid infection has important implications for public health programs, including the necessity of fighting stigma and the dubious utility of trauma debriefing for healthcare workers facing the COVID-19 emergency.
Peer observation can influence social norm perceptions as well as behavior in various moral domains, but is the tendency to be influenced by and conform with peers domain-general? In an online ...experiment (N = 815), we studied peer effects in honesty and cooperation and tested the individual-level links between these two moral domains. Participants completed both honesty and cooperation tasks after observing their peers. Consistent with the literature, separate analysis of the two domains indicated both negative and positive peer influences in honesty and in cooperation, with negative influences tending to be stronger. Behavioral tests linking the two domains at the individual-level revealed that cooperative participants were also more honest—a link that was associated with low Machiavellianism scores. While standard personality trait measures showed no links between the two domains in the tendency to conform, individual-level tests suggested that conformism is a domain-general behavioral trait observed across honesty and cooperation. Based on these findings, we discuss the potential of and difficulties in using peer observation to influence social norm compliance as an avenue for further research and as a tool to promote social welfare.
The studies of present religious situation in Eastern Europe based mainly on quantitative surveys show differences from the Western Europe secularization process and detect more contradictory changes ...here, but they only draw inferences on the religious past about the post-Soviet situation in different Middle and Eastern European countries. The novelty of this study is to analyze how former social experiences have influenced the social life of present formal believers and religious indifferent in Lithuania, who are represented by numerous vague Catholics as well as an indefinite group of religious indifferent formed during the Soviet regime and due to the peculiarities of their social and personal experiences. Two types of empirical research methods (quantitative and qualitative) are used for the research question, applying the development principle in a sequence with the 'quantitative preliminary' and 'qualitative follow-up' for elaboration, enhancement, illustration, and clarification of the results from one method with the results from the other one. This yields a better understanding of the religious attitudes and social behavior of this group. Meanwhile the complementarity principle, where two methods of empirical research are used to assess different aspects in forming a new social group of vague Catholics and religious indifferent, gives possibility to analyze how the experiences of the Soviet regime manifest themselves in their personal lives of the post-Soviet situation with forming a specific phenomenon in the direction of religious identity and general social orientations. On the basis of oral life histories three types of religious indifference are distinguished.
We study a stochastic model of anonymous influence with conformist and anti-conformist individuals. Each agent with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ initial opinion on a certain issue can change his opinion due to ...social influence. We consider anonymous influence, which depends on the number of agents having a certain opinion, but not on their identity. An individual is conformist/anti-conformist if his probability of saying ‘yes’ increases/decreases with the number of ‘yes’-agents. We focus on three classes of aggregation rules (pure conformism, pure anti-conformism, and mixed aggregation rules) and examine two types of society (without, and with mixed agents). For both types we provide a complete qualitative analysis of convergence, i.e., identify all absorbing classes and conditions for their occurrence. Also the pure case with infinitely many individuals is studied. We show that, as expected, the presence of anti-conformists in a society brings polarization and instability: polarization in two groups, fuzzy polarization (i.e., with blurred frontiers), cycles, periodic classes, as well as more or less chaotic situations where at any time step the set of ‘yes’-agents can be any subset of the society. Surprisingly, the presence of anti-conformists may also lead to opinion reversal: a majority group of conformists with a stable opinion can evolve by a cascade phenomenon towards the opposite opinion, and remains in this state.
The ‘social complexity hypothesis’ suggests that complex social structure is a driver of diversity in animal communication systems. Sperm whales have a hierarchically structured society in which the ...largest affiliative structures, the vocal clans, are marked on ocean-basin scales by culturally transmitted dialects of acoustic signals known as ‘codas’. We examined variation in coda repertoires among both individual whales and social units—the basic element of sperm whale society—using data from nine Caribbean social units across six years. Codas were assigned to individuals using photo-identification and acoustic size measurement, and we calculated similarity between repertoires using both continuous and categorical methods. We identified 21 coda types. Two of those (‘1+1+3’ and ‘5R1’) made up 65% of the codas recorded, were shared across all units and have dominated repertoires in this population for at least 30 years. Individuals appear to differ in the way they produce ‘5R1’ but not ‘1+1+3’ coda. Units use distinct 4-click coda types which contribute to making unit repertoires distinctive. Our results support the social complexity hypothesis in a marine species as different patterns of variation between coda types suggest divergent functions, perhaps representing selection for identity signals at several levels of social structure.
The penetration of science into all spheres of life has self-evidently become a contemporary “megatrend”. In turn, science itself is also undergoing distinct transformations, e.g., as a result of ...such processes as increasing regulation and bureaucratisation within academia. In this context, researchers as active producers of scientific knowledge face multiple challenges, including the need to cope with increasing regulation of their everyday practices. Therefore, our research purpose was to investigate the phenomenon of conformity, which, although always having been inseparable from social life, is acquiring a new significance today. Various representations of conformity (e.g. conformist behaviour) have received a great deal of attention from sociologists, biologists and psychologists; however, to our knowledge, there is no generally accepted philosophical understanding of its nature. In this paper, we provide a phenomenological study of conformity on the basis of a comprehensive literature analysis and evaluate its role as a mode of existence in modern science. For the sake of clarity, some illustrations from the everyday lives of researchers are given, including the distribution of the IMRAD format of research articles. Conformity in science is predicted to involve consequences at three distinct levels: (1) within a scientific community, when scientists follow prescribed patterns of conduct; (2) within a particular society when people from all walks of life conform to the standards set by the scientised world-view; and (3) at the global level when non-western communities conform to western standards of life through borrowing western scientific world picture.
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