The psychodynamics of ethnic terrorism

1995 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Vamik D. Volkan ◽  
Max Harris

AbstractThis paper proposes to examine the phenomenon of ethnic terrorism through a psychological lens. Its intention is not to relegate the importance of "real-world" issues to secondary stature, but to broaden causality to include psychological motivation. In effect, we believe that terrorism is inspired by the complex intertwining of real-world issues and the psychological processes of individuals and large groups.

2021 ◽  
pp. 46-67
Author(s):  
Jason Brennan

Philosophers often try to “solve” democracy’s problems by arguing we need more and better democracy. They tend to think certain kinds of democratic systems could unleash the hidden “wisdom of the crowds.” Some defenders of democracy propose deliberative democracy and some extol the reliability of large groups. However, both ideas have limitations in the real world. This chapter objects to such arguments as they rely upon mistaken applications of certain mathematical theorems, or they end up retreating toward unrealistic ideals of how people ought to behave. In effect, they say that democracy would be wonderful if only people behaved the right way.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schott ◽  
Stephen Marshall

<p>Virtual reality is widely recognised as offering the potential for fully immersive environments. This paper describes a framework that guides the creation and analysis of immersive environments that are pedagogically structured to support situated and experiential education. The “situated experiential education environment” framework described in this paper is used to examine the impact that a virtual environment can have on the user experience of participants in a virtual space. The analysis of a virtual environment implemented to support learner exploration of issues of tourism development and the related impacts suggests that this type of experience is capable of providing participants with a holistic experience of real world environments that are otherwise too expensive, impractical or unethical for large groups of people to visit in person. The pedagogical value of such experiences is enabled through immersion in a reality-based environment, engagement with complex and ambiguous situations and information, and interaction with the space, other students and teachers. The results demonstrate that complex immersive learning environments are readily achievable but that high levels of interactivity remains a challenge.</p>


Author(s):  
Bethany Growns ◽  
James D. Dunn ◽  
Erwin J. A. T. Mattijssen ◽  
Adele Quigley-McBride ◽  
Alice Towler

AbstractVisual comparison—comparing visual stimuli (e.g., fingerprints) side by side and determining whether they originate from the same or different source (i.e., “match”)—is a complex discrimination task involving many cognitive and perceptual processes. Despite the real-world consequences of this task, which is often conducted by forensic scientists, little is understood about the psychological processes underpinning this ability. There are substantial individual differences in visual comparison accuracy amongst both professionals and novices. The source of this variation is unknown, but may reflect a domain-general and naturally varying perceptual ability. Here, we investigate this by comparing individual differences (N = 248 across two studies) in four visual comparison domains: faces, fingerprints, firearms, and artificial prints. Accuracy on all comparison tasks was significantly correlated and accounted for a substantial portion of variance (e.g., 42% in Exp. 1) in performance across all tasks. Importantly, this relationship cannot be attributed to participants’ intrinsic motivation or skill in other visual-perceptual tasks (visual search and visual statistical learning). This paper provides novel evidence of a reliable, domain-general visual comparison ability.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schott ◽  
Stephen Marshall

<p>Virtual reality is widely recognised as offering the potential for fully immersive environments. This paper describes a framework that guides the creation and analysis of immersive environments that are pedagogically structured to support situated and experiential education. The “situated experiential education environment” framework described in this paper is used to examine the impact that a virtual environment can have on the user experience of participants in a virtual space. The analysis of a virtual environment implemented to support learner exploration of issues of tourism development and the related impacts suggests that this type of experience is capable of providing participants with a holistic experience of real world environments that are otherwise too expensive, impractical or unethical for large groups of people to visit in person. The pedagogical value of such experiences is enabled through immersion in a reality-based environment, engagement with complex and ambiguous situations and information, and interaction with the space, other students and teachers. The results demonstrate that complex immersive learning environments are readily achievable but that high levels of interactivity remains a challenge.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schott ◽  
Stephen Marshall

<p>Virtual reality is widely recognised as offering the potential for fully immersive environments. This paper describes a framework that guides the creation and analysis of immersive environments that are pedagogically structured to support situated and experiential education. The “situated experiential education environment” framework described in this paper is used to examine the impact that a virtual environment can have on the user experience of participants in a virtual space. The analysis of a virtual environment implemented to support learner exploration of issues of tourism development and the related impacts suggests that this type of experience is capable of providing participants with a holistic experience of real world environments that are otherwise too expensive, impractical or unethical for large groups of people to visit in person. The pedagogical value of such experiences is enabled through immersion in a reality-based environment, engagement with complex and ambiguous situations and information, and interaction with the space, other students and teachers. The results demonstrate that complex immersive learning environments are readily achievable but that high levels of interactivity remains a challenge.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schott ◽  
Stephen Marshall

<p>Virtual reality is widely recognised as offering the potential for fully immersive environments. This paper describes a framework that guides the creation and analysis of immersive environments that are pedagogically structured to support situated and experiential education. The “situated experiential education environment” framework described in this paper is used to examine the impact that a virtual environment can have on the user experience of participants in a virtual space. The analysis of a virtual environment implemented to support learner exploration of issues of tourism development and the related impacts suggests that this type of experience is capable of providing participants with a holistic experience of real world environments that are otherwise too expensive, impractical or unethical for large groups of people to visit in person. The pedagogical value of such experiences is enabled through immersion in a reality-based environment, engagement with complex and ambiguous situations and information, and interaction with the space, other students and teachers. The results demonstrate that complex immersive learning environments are readily achievable but that high levels of interactivity remains a challenge.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schott ◽  
Stephen Marshall

<p>Virtual reality is widely recognised as offering the potential for fully immersive environments. This paper describes a framework that guides the creation and analysis of immersive environments that are pedagogically structured to support situated and experiential education. The “situated experiential education environment” framework described in this paper is used to examine the impact that a virtual environment can have on the user experience of participants in a virtual space. The analysis of a virtual environment implemented to support learner exploration of issues of tourism development and the related impacts suggests that this type of experience is capable of providing participants with a holistic experience of real world environments that are otherwise too expensive, impractical or unethical for large groups of people to visit in person. The pedagogical value of such experiences is enabled through immersion in a reality-based environment, engagement with complex and ambiguous situations and information, and interaction with the space, other students and teachers. The results demonstrate that complex immersive learning environments are readily achievable but that high levels of interactivity remains a challenge.</p>


2006 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto A Weber

Previous experiments using the minimum-effort coordination game reveal a striking regularity—large groups never coordinate efficiently. Given the frequency with which large real-world groups, such as firms, face similarly difficult coordination problems, this poses an important question: Why do we observe large, successfully coordinated groups in the real world when they are so difficult to create in the laboratory? This paper presents one reason. The experiments show that, even though efficient coordination does not occur in groups that start off large, efficiently coordinated large groups can be “grown.” By starting with small groups that find it easier to coordinate, we can add entrants—who are aware of the group's history—to create efficiently coordinated large groups. This represents the first experimental demonstration of large groups tacitly coordinated at high levels of efficiency.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Grining ◽  
Marek Klonowski ◽  
Malgorzata Sulkowska

Abstract In our article, we present several protocols that allow to efficiently construct large groups of users based only on local relations of trust. What is more, our approach proves to need only very small computational and communication overhead. Moreover, we give guarantees that a trusted core of the network is defended, even facing a powerful adversary capable of controlling a vast majority of users. This is non-trivial property in real-life networks, as those are usually modelled using preferential attachment graphs, which are extremely prone to attacks on the hub nodes. We show that using our protocols we can achieve similar robustness as Erdős–Renyí graphs, which, on the contrary, are very resistant against attacks focused on chosen nodes. Our protocols have been tested on graphs representing real-world social networks using high performance computing due to the size of the networks. In addition for some protocols, we provided a formal analysis to prove some phenomena in random graphs following power-law distribution, which we use as a network model. Finally, we explicitly demonstrate how our approach can be used to amplify security offered by some privacy-preserving protocols. We believe however that our results can be also seen as a contribution to fundamental observation about the nature of social networks. These results may help to design protocols, whenever it is necessary to gather a big group of users in highly dynamic or even adversarial settings.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Gregor Aas

To understand virtual realities and the effect on its users, empirical research into a variety of social and psychological domains has to be conducted in online virtual environments. It is argued that presence, the experience of being-in-the-virtual-world, plays a key role in most psychological processes connected with virtual worlds. A short overview of studies addressing personality, identity, emotions, and stereotypes in virtual reality is given, to subsequently offer improved approaches, by using a setup that compares participants on an individual level. Furthermore, potential cohort-differences are discussed; there is reason to believe that people who have grown up with computers, Internet, and virtual worlds experience and use virtual worlds differently than those who haven’t. Finally, it is hypothesized that virtual worlds influence real life in a reciprocal loop, by shaping cognitive, psychological, and social processes of the real world and – seemingly paradoxical – might even trigger experiencing the real as real.


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