From Individuals to Group Members: A Dialectic for the Social Sciences

AbstractUnderstanding why people join, stay, or leave social groups is a central question in the social sciences, including computational social systems, while modeling these processes is a challenge in complex networks. Yet, the current empirical studies rarely focus on group dynamics for lack of data relating opinions to group membership. In the NetSense data, we find hundreds of face-to-face groups whose members make thousands of changes of memberships and opinions. We also observe two trends: opinion homogeneity grows over time, and individuals holding unpopular opinions frequently change groups. These observations and data provide us with the basis on which we model the underlying dynamics of human behavior. We formally define the utility that members gain from ingroup interactions as a function of the levels of homophily of opinions of group members with opinions of a given individual in this group. We demonstrate that so-defined utility applied to our empirical data increases after each observed change. We then introduce an analytical model and show that it accurately recreates the trends observed in the NetSense data.

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Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences

10.1017/cbo9780511801938 ◽

2008 ◽

Cited By ~ 88

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

The Social

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Social attribution, correspondence bias, and the emergence of stereotypes *This research has been completed in partial requirement of a doctoral dissertation of the first author under the supervision of the second author. We wish to thank the members of the social psychology division at the University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve, especially Steve Rocher and Emanuele Castano for their insightful comments on preliminary drafts. This paper has been enriched by feedbacks received from Russell Spears, Roos Vonk, Margit Oswald, and anonymous reviewers. Many thanks to Philippe Kemp and Christophe Remy for their assistance in running the study, and to the students who volunteered to appear on the video. This research has been presented at the Social Cognition workshop of the Kurt Lewin Institute, workshop held at the Free University of Amsterdam in April 1998: we want to thank participants of this workshop and especially Gün Semin for their useful feedback. Completion of this study benefited from a research grant from the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research to the first author.

Swiss Journal of Psychology ◽

10.1024//1421-0185.58.4.233 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 58 (4) ◽

pp. 233-240 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Anouk Rogier ◽

Vincent Yzerbyt

Keyword(s):

Correspondence Bias ◽

Social Attribution ◽

The Social ◽

Dispositional Attributions ◽

Kurt Lewin ◽

Group Members ◽

Group Target ◽

The University ◽

Institute Workshop ◽

Research Grant

Yzerbyt, Rogier and Fiske (1998) argued that perceivers confronted with a group high in entitativity (i.e., a group perceived as an entity, a tight-knit group) more readily call upon an underlying essence to explain people's behavior than perceivers confronted with an aggregate. Their study showed that group entitativity promoted dispositional attributions for the behavior of group members. Moreover, stereotypes emerged when people faced entitative groups. In this study, we replicate and extend these results by providing further evidence that the process of social attribution is responsible for the emergence of stereotypes. We use the attitude attribution paradigm ( Jones & Harris, 1967 ) and show that the correspondence bias is stronger for an entitative group target than for an aggregate. Besides, several dependent measures indicate that the target's group membership stands as a plausible causal factor to account for members' behavior, a process we call Social Attribution. Implications for current theories of stereotyping are discussed.

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What Can We Learn From Factorial Surveys About Human Behavior?

Methodology ◽

10.1027/1614-2241/a000161 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 19-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Knut Petzold ◽

Tobias Wolbring

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Behavioral Intentions ◽

Actual Behavior ◽

Full Time ◽

Factorial Survey ◽

Survey Experiment ◽

Intended Behavior ◽

The Social ◽

Survey Experiments ◽

High Level

Abstract. Factorial survey experiments are increasingly used in the social sciences to investigate behavioral intentions. The measurement of self-reported behavioral intentions with factorial survey experiments frequently assumes that the determinants of intended behavior affect actual behavior in a similar way. We critically investigate this fundamental assumption using the misdirected email technique. Student participants of a survey were randomly assigned to a field experiment or a survey experiment. The email informs the recipient about the reception of a scholarship with varying stakes (full-time vs. book) and recipient’s names (German vs. Arabic). In the survey experiment, respondents saw an image of the same email. This validation design ensured a high level of correspondence between units, settings, and treatments across both studies. Results reveal that while the frequencies of self-reported intentions and actual behavior deviate, treatments show similar relative effects. Hence, although further research on this topic is needed, this study suggests that determinants of behavior might be inferred from behavioral intentions measured with survey experiments.

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