Just as we learn from, influence, and are influenced by others, our social interactions drive economic growth in cities, regions, and nations--determining where households live, how children learn, ...and what cities and firms produce.From Neighborhoods to Nationssynthesizes the recent economics of social interactions for anyone seeking to understand the contributions of this important area. Integrating theory and empirics, Yannis Ioannides explores theoretical and empirical tools that economists use to investigate social interactions, and he shows how a familiarity with these tools is essential for interpreting findings. The book makes work in the economics of social interactions accessible to other social scientists, including sociologists, political scientists, and urban planning and policy researchers.
Focusing on individual and household location decisions in the presence of interactions, Ioannides shows how research on cities and neighborhoods can explain communities' composition and spatial form, as well as changes in productivity, industrial specialization, urban expansion, and national growth. The author examines how researchers address the challenge of separating personal, social, and cultural forces from economic ones. Ioannides provides a toolkit for the next generation of inquiry, and he argues that quantifying the impact of social interactions in specific contexts is essential for grasping their scope and use in informing policy.
Revealing how empirical work on social interactions enriches our understanding of cities as engines of innovation and economic growth,From Neighborhoods to Nationscarries ramifications throughout the social sciences and beyond.
Winner of the Best Book of2008 from The International Gender and Language AssociationIn this ground-breaking ethnography of girls on a playground, Goodwin offers a window into their complex social ...worlds.Combats stereotypes that have dominated theories on female moral development by challenging the notion that girls are inherently supportive of each other Examines the stances that girls on a playground in a multicultural school setting assume and shows how they position themselves in their peer groups Documents the language practices and degradation rituals used to sanction friends and to bully others Part of the Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series
•The importance of motion in social interaction perception is not fully understood.•Using naturalistic social scenes, we examined the role of motion in the social brain.•pSTS plays a central role in ...dynamic, but not static, social interaction perception.•EBA and pSTS collaborate when dynamic interactions are conveyed by body information.•However, selectivity for visual motion does not drive interactive sensitivity.
Humans are an inherently social species, with multiple focal brain regions sensitive to various visual social cues such as faces, bodies, and biological motion. More recently, research has begun to investigate how the brain responds to more complex, naturalistic social scenes, identifying a region in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (SI-pSTS; i.e., social interaction pSTS), amongst others, as an important region for processing social interaction. This research, however, has presented images or videos, and thus the contribution of motion to social interaction perception in these brain regions is not yet understood. In the current study, 22 participants viewed videos, image sequences, scrambled image sequences and static images of either social interactions or non-social independent actions. Combining univariate and multivariate analyses, we confirm that bilateral SI-pSTS plays a central role in dynamic social interaction perception but is much less involved when ‘interactiveness’ is conveyed solely with static cues. Regions in the social brain, including SI-pSTS and extrastriate body area (EBA), showed sensitivity to both motion and interactive content. While SI-pSTS is somewhat more tuned to video interactions than is EBA, both bilateral SI-pSTS and EBA showed a greater response to social interactions compared to non-interactions and both regions responded more strongly to videos than static images. Indeed, both regions showed higher responses to interactions than independent actions in videos and intact sequences, but not in other conditions. Exploratory multivariate regression analyses suggest that selectivity for simple visual motion does not in itself drive interactive sensitivity in either SI-pSTS or EBA. Rather, selectivity for interactions expressed in point-light animations, and selectivity for static images of bodies, make positive and independent contributions to this effect across the LOTC region. Our results strongly suggest that EBA and SI-pSTS work together during dynamic interaction perception, at least when interactive information is conveyed primarily via body information. As such, our results are also in line with proposals of a third visual stream supporting dynamic social scene perception.
