scholarly journals Social prevalence information is rationally integrated in belief updating

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Orticio ◽  
Louis Martí ◽  
Celeste Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Information Sources ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Belief Change ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Social World ◽  
Belief Updating ◽  
The Social ◽  
Other Information

People rely heavily on information from the social world to inform their real-world beliefs. We ask whether the perceived prevalence of a belief, divorced from any direct evidence, serves as an independent cue in belief updating. Using real-world pseudoscientific and conspiratorial claims, our experiment (N = 403 American adults) shows that increases in people’s estimates of the prevalence of a belief led to increases in their endorsement of said belief. Belief change was most dramatic when initial beliefs were most uncertain and when novel prevalence information was most convincing, suggesting that people weigh social information rationally with other information sources. We discuss the implications of our results in the context of online misinformation.

scholarly journals Historical Materialism

2018 ◽  
pp. 36-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Blackledge
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social World ◽  
Theory Of Change ◽  
The Real ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
Theory Of History

Marx’s theory of history is often misrepresented as a mechanically deterministic and fatalistic theory of change in which the complexity of the real world is reduced to simple, unconvincing abstractions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though Stalin attempted to transform Marxism into something akin to this caricature to justify Russia’s state-capitalist industrialization after 1928, neither Marx nor his most perceptive followers understood historical materialism in this way. This chapter shows that Marx’s theory of history, once unpicked from its misrepresentations, allows us to comprehend social reality as a non-reductive, synthetic, and historical totality. This approach is alive to the complexity of the social world without succumbing to the descriptive eclecticism characteristic of non-Marxist historiography. And by escaping the limits of merely descriptive history, Marxism offers the possibility of a scientific approach to revolutionary practice as the flipside to comprehending the present, as Georg Lukács put it, as a historical problem.

Political Approaches

2018 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett ◽  
Martha Finnemore
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
Real World ◽  
Social World ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Interstate Cooperation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
World Organization

This chapter examines how prominent theories capture the various ways that the UN affects world politics. Different theories of international relations (IR) cast the UN in distinctive roles, which logically lead scholars to identify distinctive kinds of effects. We identify five roles that the UN might have: as an agent of great powers doing their bidding; as a mechanism for interstate cooperation; as a governor of an international society of states; as a constructor of the social world; and as a legitimation forum. Each role has roots in a well-known theory of international politics. In many, perhaps most, real-world political situations, the UN plays more than one of these roles, but these stylized theoretical arguments about the world body’s influence help discipline our thinking. They force us to be explicit about which effects of the world organization we think are important, what is causing them, and why.

scholarly journals Collective Attitudes and the Anthropocentric View

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattia Gallotti
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Good Theory ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Social

AbstractThe anthropocentric view holds that the social world is a projection of mental states and attitudes onto the real world. However, there is more to a society of individuals than their psychological make up. In The Ant Trap, Epstein hints at the possibility that collective intentionality can, and should, be discarded as a pillar of social ontology. In this commentary I argue that this claim is motivated by an outdated view of the nature and structure of collective attitudes. If we aim at a good theory of social ontology, we need a good theory of collective intentionality.

scholarly journals Strategies for integrating disparate social information

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas Molleman ◽  
Alan Novaes Tump ◽  
Andrea Gradassi ◽  
Stefan Michael Herzog ◽  
Bertrand Jayles ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Belief Updating ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adjustment Strategies ◽  
Filter Bubble ◽  
Information Combining ◽  
Simple Heuristics

**Note that the paper has been published on https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.2413.** Our increasingly interconnected world provides virtually unlimited opportunities to observe the behavior of others. This affords abundant useful information but also requires navigating complex social environments with people holding disparate or conflicting views. It is, however, still largely unclear how people integrate information from multiple social sources that (dis)agree with them, and among each other. We address this issue in three steps. First, we present a judgment task in which participants could adjust their judgments after observing the judgments of three peers. We experimentally varied the distribution of this social information, systematically manipulating its variance (extent of agreement among peers) and its skewness (peer judgments clustering either near or far from the participant’s). As expected, higher variance among peers reduced their impact on behavior. Importantly, observing a single peer confirming an individual’s judgment markedly decreased the influence of other—more distant—peers. Second, we develop a framework for modelling the cognitive processes underlying the integration of disparate social information, combining Bayesian updating with simple heuristics. Our model accurately accounts for observed adjustment strategies and reveals that people particularly heed social information that confirms personal judgments. Moreover, the model exposes strong inter-individual differences in strategy use. Third, using simulations, we explore the possible implications of identified strategies for belief updating more broadly. They show how confirmation effects can hamper the influence of disparate social information, exacerbate filter bubble effects and worsen group polarization. Overall, our results clarify what aspects of the social environment are, and are not, conducive to changing people’s minds.

Puddings and Pies

Table Lands ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Kara K. Keeling ◽  
Scott T. Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Real World ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Real ◽  
Social Work Theory ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Landscape

In The Tale of Mr. Tod, The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan, and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, or, the Roly-Poly Pudding, Potter uses quintessential British foods—pies and puddings—to motivate the plot, shape the characters, and create a social world. The chapter uses period cookbooks by Mrs. Beeton and Eliza Acton to understand the preeminence of puddings and pies in British cooking. To take into account Potter’s representations of class and setting, the analysis considers British rural and urban cultures, the food-related problems of poverty, and period-applied social work theory. In these tales of failed pies and puddings, Potter represents food as strategic in a fictive world where characters must be alert to the constantly changing ways that food shapes the social landscape. Potter uses food to show the complexities of the real world within her stories, acknowledging the hidden violence of social relations.

Reputation in Moral Philosophy and Epistemology

2019 ◽  
pp. 68-81
Author(s):  
Gloria Origgi
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Social World ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
Extract Information

This chapter analyzes the philosophical import of the notion of reputation along two main axes: (1) reputation as a motivation for action, and (2) reputation as a special kind of social information. Is reputation a rational motive of action? Can it be an ultimate aim or is it always reducible to some kind of self-interest? Is reputation a rational means to extract information from the social world? Should we rely on other’s evaluations? By reconstructing the philosophy of reputation in the history of thought and analyzing the contemporary approaches to reputation in philosophy, the chapter also provides also some rudiments of an “epistemology of reputation.”

scholarly journals The Complex Affective Scene Set (COMPASS): Solving the Social Content Problem in Affective Visual Stimulus Sets

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariann R. Weierich ◽  
Olena Kleshchova ◽  
Jenna K. Rieder ◽  
Danielle M. Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Visual Stimulus ◽  
Real World ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Social Content ◽  
The Social ◽  
Valence And Arousal ◽  
Normative Ratings

Social information, including faces and human bodies, holds special status in visual perception generally, and in visual processing of complex arrays such as real-world scenes specifically. To date, unbalanced representation of social compared with nonsocial information in affective stimulus sets has limited the clear determination of effects as attributable to, or independent of, social content. We present the Complex Affective Scene Set (COMPASS), a set of 150 social and 150 nonsocial naturalistic affective scenes that are balanced across valence and arousal dimensions. Participants (n = 847) rated valence and arousal for each scene. The normative ratings for the 300 images together, and separately by social content, show the canonical boomerang shape that confirms coverage of much of the affective circumplex. COMPASS adds uniquely to existing visual stimulus sets by balancing social content across affect dimensions, thereby eliminating a potentially major confound across affect categories (i.e., combinations of valence and arousal). The robust special status of social information persisted even after balancing of affect categories and was observed in slower rating response times for social versus nonsocial stimuli. The COMPASS images also match the complexity of real-world environments by incorporating stimulus competition within each scene. Together, these attributes facilitate the use of the stimulus set in particular for disambiguating the effects of affect and social content for a range of research questions and populations.

The Contribution of Enrique Pichon-Rivière: Comparisons with His European Contemporaries and with Modern Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Scharff
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Family Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Original Family ◽  
Kurt Lewin ◽  
Social Applications

Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, worked and wrote in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, but his work has not so far been translated into English. From the beginning, Pichon-Rivière understood the social applications of analytic thinking, centring his ideas on "el vinculo", which is generally translated as "the link", but could equally be translated as "the bond". The concept that each individual is born into human social links, is shaped by them, and simultaneously contributes to them inextricably ties people's inner worlds to the social world of family and society in which they live. Pichon-Rivière believed, therefore, that family analysis and group and institutional applications of analysis were as important as individual psychoanalysis. Many of the original family and couple therapists from whom our field learned trained with him. Because his work was centred in the analytic writings of Fairbairn and Klein, as well as those of the anthropologist George Herbert Mead and the field theory of Kurt Lewin, his original ideas have important things to teach us today. This article summarises some of his central ideas such as the link, spiral process, the single determinate illness, and the process of therapy.

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