scholarly journals The Psychology of Cultural Dynamics: What Is It, What Do We Know, and What Is Yet to Be Known?

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 499-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoshihisa Kashima ◽  
Paul G. Bain ◽  
Amy Perfors

The psychology of cultural dynamics is the psychological investigation of the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time. This article maps out the terrain, reviews the existing literature, and points out potential future directions of this research. It is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on micro-cultural dynamics, which refers to the social and psychological processes that contribute to the dissemination and retention of cultural information. The second part, on micro–macro dynamics, investigates how micro-level processes give rise to macro-cultural dynamics. The third part focuses on macro-cultural dynamics, referring to the distribution and long-term trends involving cultural information in a population, which in turn enable and constrain the micro-level processes. We conclude the review with a consideration of future directions, suggesting behavior change research as translational research on cultural dynamics.

1984 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-795 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Daniels

The “litigation explosion” has been a frequent topic of concern in both academic circles and the popular press. This idea draws its polemical power from the assumption that litigation rates were lower in the past. But we presently know little about long-term trends in court activity. This article is a critical review of the existing literature on long-term litigation trends and the social development model which scholars have posited to explain changes in litigation patterns. Whether courts are indeed facing imminent crisis because of an explosion is still very much an open question; the extant literature offers no proof of an explosion. The available data do suggest, however, that previous studies may have been overly optimistic in expecting litigation trends to follow any single pattern. The questions about litigation rates will remain open until we are able to gain a fuller understanding of the trends in court activity over time.


Author(s):  
Edda Humprecht ◽  
Linards Udris

The way news is produced and consumed has changed dramatically during the first two decades of the 21st century due to digitalization and economic pressures. In a globalized world, current events are reported in almost real time in various countries and are diffused rapidly via social media. Thus much scholarly attention is devoted to determining whether these developments have changed news content. Comparative research in the area of journalism focuses on whether news content across countries converges over time and to what degree national differences persist across countries. When studying the research on long-term trends in news content, three main observations can be made. First, theoretical assumptions are often rooted in different models of democracies, but they are rarely explicitly discussed. Second, many studies focus on the organizational level using theoretical concepts related to increased market orientation of news outlets, such as personalization, emotionalization, or scandalization. Furthermore, commercialization is associated with the effects of digitalization and globalization, namely, decreased advertising revenues and increased competition. A commonly expressed fear is that these changes have consequences for democracy and informed citizenship. Third, in recent years, there has been a steady increase of studies employing international comparisons as well as a growing standardization for measurements. These developments lead to more multicountry studies based on large samples but come at the expense of more fine-grained analysis of the way news content changes over time. Finally, the vast majority of cross-national and single-country studies focus on Western democracies. Thus our knowledge about recent changes in news content is limited to a small set of countries. Overall, many studies provide evidence for constant changes of news content driven by social, political, and economic developments. However, different media systems exhibit a sustained resilience toward transnational pressures reflected in a persistence of national differences in news content over time.


Author(s):  
Luciana Echazu ◽  
Diego Nocetti ◽  
William T. Smith

Abstract How should changes in environmental quality occurring in the future be discounted? To answer this question we consider a model of “ecological discounting”, where the representative consumer has a utility function defined over two attributes, consumption and environmental quality, which evolve stochastically over time. We characterize the determinants of the social discount rate and its behavior over time using a preference structure that disentangles attitudes towards intertemporal inequality, attitudes towards risk, and tastes over consumption and environmental quality. We show that the degree of substitutability between consumption and environmental quality, the degree of risk aversion, the degree of inequality aversion, and the rate at which these attitudes change as natural and man-made resources evolve over time are all important aspects of the ecological discount rate and its term structure. Our analysis suggests that over medium and long term horizons the ecological discount rate should be below the rate of time preference, supporting recent proposals for immediate action towards climate change mitigation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-441
Author(s):  
Herbert S. Klein

Economic inequality has become one of the most important themes in the social sciences. The debate has revolved around two basic models. Was Kuznets correct in his prediction that inequality declines with economic growth, or was Piketty, along with others in the Berkeley/Paris/Oxford group, correct to counter that capitalism without severe constraints inevitably leads to increasing inequality? The resolution will depend on long-term historical analysis. In Global Inequality, Milanovic proposed new models to analyze the social, economic, political, and historical factors that influence changes in inequality over time and space. In Capitalism, Alone, he changes direction to examine what patterns of capitalism and inequality will look like in the twenty-first century and beyond, as well as how inequality might be reduced without violence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 607-613
Author(s):  
Kathleen B. McDermott ◽  
Christopher L. Zerr

Most research on long-term memory uses an experimental approach whereby participants are assigned to different conditions, and condition means are the measures of interest. This approach has demonstrated repeatedly that conditions that slow the rate of learning tend to improve later retention. A neglected question is whether aggregate findings at the level of the group (i.e., slower learning tends to improve retention) translate to the level of individual people. We identify a discrepancy whereby—across people—slower learning tends to coincide with poorer memory. The positive relation between learning rate (speed of learning) and retention (amount remembered after a delay) across people is referred to as learning efficiency. A more efficient learner can acquire information faster and remember more of it over time. We discuss potential characteristics of efficient learners and consider future directions for research.


Materials ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 5228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justyna Tomaszewska

Poland’s economy as the sixth largest economy in the EU is painfully experiencing the effects of natural resource depletion, which extend to increasing prices and the growing dependence on foreign suppliers. The situation is particularly unfavorable in the construction sector, which is among the most resource- and energy-consuming areas of the economy. This paper juxtaposes the situation of Polish construction industry in the context of the national economy with the context of the evolving EU policies promoting green solutions. The resulting changes in Polish legislation, industry and society are identified. The implementation of selected Circular Economy (CE) aspects, outcomes, emerging challenges and future directions are discussed. The social aspects related to this transformation were analyzed based on a survey carried out among construction industry consumers. The results clearly highlight that individuals are aware of the need to protect the environment, but also indicate a strong necessity to educate the populace about the consequences of the excessive exploitation of the environment and the long-term benefits of CE solutions.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bloxam

This chapter considers past and current research of procurement landscapes (quarries and mines) and the extent to which landscape archaeologies, together with comparative and cross-cultural methods in practice and theory have impacted on this field of study. Two case studies are presented in which these new methods of survey and characterization of procurement landscape have been deployed, along the Aswan West Bank and in the central Wadi Hammamat (Eastern Desert). The chapter goes on to address the ways in which holistic ‘bottom up’ approaches to interpreting micro-level data offers us fresh insights into understanding the social organization of procurement within broader aspects of social and cultural transformations over time.


2015 ◽  
Vol 129 (3) ◽  
pp. 206-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
G L Garrett ◽  
I Beegun ◽  
A D'souza

AbstractObjective:To present the clinical outcomes obtained by the first facial transplant teams worldwide, reviewing current practice and addressing controversies.Methods:A bibliographic search of Medline and Embase databases was performed, and a comparative analysis of all articles published from 1980 to the present was conducted. Two independent investigators screened the manuscripts in accordance with pre-defined criteria.Results:A total of 12 partial and 5 full facial transplants were recorded in the literature. Procedures included partial and near-total facial myocutaneous flaps, and complex osteomyocutaneous grafts. Fifteen patients had fully vascularised grafts, and two patients died of transplant-related and infectious complications.Conclusion:Facial transplantation can restore quality of life and enable the social re-integration of recipients. Results published by the first facial transplant teams are promising. However, long-term reports of aesthetic and functional outcomes are needed to more precisely define outcomes. In addition, significant technical, medical and ethical issues remain to be solved.


SAGE Open ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824401770197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali H. Al-Hoorie

This article offers a historical analysis of the major themes that the language motivation field has examined in its 60-year history. The discussion starts by briefly reviewing the social-psychological and the situated–cognitive periods. The former was primarily concerned with affective factors in intergroup relations, while the latter with learners in classroom contexts. The second half of the article surveys a number of emerging themes in the field to highlight major findings and potential future directions. These themes include the dynamic, affective, unconscious, and long-term aspects of motivation to learn English and other languages, as well as the implications of the pervasive presence of technology in daily life.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hassan Alzahrani ◽  
Subrata Acharya ◽  
Philippe Duverger ◽  
Nam P. Nguyen

AbstractCrowdsourcing is an emerging tool for collaboration and innovation platforms. Recently, crowdsourcing platforms have become a vital tool for firms to generate new ideas, especially large firms such as Dell, Microsoft, and Starbucks, Crowdsourcing provides firms with multiple advantages, notably, rapid solutions, cost savings, and a variety of novel ideas that represent the diversity inherent within a crowd. The literature on crowdsourcing is limited to empirical evidence of the advantage of crowdsourcing for businesses as an innovation strategy. In this study, Starbucks’ crowdsourcing platform, Ideas Starbucks, is examined, with three objectives: first, to determine crowdsourcing participants’ perception of the company by crowdsourcing participants when generating ideas on the platform. The second objective is to map users into a community structure to identify those more likely to produce ideas; the most promising users are grouped into the communities more likely to generate the best ideas. The third is to study the relationship between the users’ ideas’ sentiment scores and the frequency of discussions among crowdsourcing users. The results indicate that sentiment and emotion scores can be used to visualize the social interaction narrative over time. They also suggest that the fast greedy algorithm is the one best suited for community structure with a modularity on agreeable ideas of 0.53 and 8 significant communities using sentiment scores as edge weights. For disagreeable ideas, the modularity is 0.47 with 8 significant communities without edge weights. There is also a statistically significant quadratic relationship between the sentiments scores and the number of conversations between users.


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