The Contagious Effects of Rural Violence: Social Pathologies and Injured Bodies in Blasco Ibáñez’s La barraca (The Cabin)

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s La barraca (The Cabin, 1898) presents a vivid portrait of the struggles of the rural population of the Valencian huerta. When the local people prevent a plot of land from being cultivated as an act of popular resistance against the landowning class, the arrival of Batiste Borrull provokes a campaign of marginalisation and aggression against his family. The collective violence of the mob enacted by men, women and children is unleashed against his daughter Roseta, his sons, and finally five-year-old Pascualet, who is pushed into an irrigation ditch by hostile boys and contracts a fatal infection. The mounting brutality that culminates in the death of a young child becomes a powerful manifestation of social pathologies including rural primitivism, alcoholism and entrenched poverty. This article explores ideological and discursive contexts for the portrait of rural violence at the turn of the twentieth century, including class-based theories of degeneration and crowd psychology. It also examines the trope of stagnant water that courses through the plain as a symbol of contamination, echoing the moral sickness of rural society. Critics have argued that in his social protest novels, Blasco Ibáñez denounces the idle and degenerate bourgeoisie, following instead the anarchist and socialist argument that the vices of the proletariat are the result of capitalist exploitation (Fuentes 2009). By contrast, this article proposes that La barraca underscores the primitivism and pathological violence of the landless rural labourers, thereby reinforcing a bourgeois ideological foundation for the exposition of social injustice in late nineteenth-century Spain.

Intelligent and Adaptive Web Page Recommender System

In this manuscript, an Intelligent and Adaptive Web Page Recommender System is proposed that provides personalized, global and group mode of recommendations. The authors enhance the utility of a trie node for storing relevant web access statistics. The trie node enables dynamic clustering of users based on their evolving browsing patterns and allows a user to belong to multiple groups at each navigation step. The system takes cues from the field of crowd psychology to augment two parameters for modeling group behavior: Uniformity and Recommendation strength. The system continuously tracks the user’s responses in order to adaptively switch between different recommendation-criteria in the group and personalized modes. The experimental results illustrate that the system achieved the maximum F1 measure of 83.28% on CTI dataset which is a significant improvement over the 70% F1 measure reported by Automatic Clustering-based Genetic Algorithm, the prior web recommender system.

Understanding crowd responses to emergencies using virtual reality and social psychological methods

Our project brings together research from crowd psychology and evacuation research to design and build virtual reality experiments that explore crowd responses to perceived threats. This summary outlines some of the main advantages and considerations that we have found when combining our research areas. We discuss novel ways to overcome practical and ethical limitations when researching responses to emergencies and behaviour in large groups, methodological advances that address common issues such as interdependence of data and experimental control, the ability to integrate and test theory into study design, and the benefits of triangulating diverse data collection methods to understand how and why crowd reactions occur in emergencies in real-time.

The factors affecting the student’s decision to continue to rent accommodation in Thu Duc district

The authors have carried out a study to determine and evaluate the impact of the factors affecting students' decisions to continue renting accommodation in Thu Duc District. The research model is built on Maslow's theory of demand hierarchy, Mankiw's theory of choice in consumption, Le Bon's theory of crowd psychology, Hoang Huu Phe and Wakely's theory of position and quality. The study is conducted through 2 phases: Qualitative research and quantitative research with the answer sheets of 668 students. Preliminary research results with responses from 30 students conducted by the direct interview method show that all students agree 7 factors are affecting the decision to continue renting. The primary research was performed with answer sheets of 668 students, all valid votes were filtered, coded, and then analyzed for the reliability of Cronbach's Alpha, EFA method, Logit analysis method, correct forecast rate of the Logit model, Logit model defect test, and Logit model conformity test. Logit's analysis results show that there are 4 factors affecting the decision to continue renting, including (1) Social relations, (2) Facilities, (3) Environment, (4) Price. The results show the needs and concerns of students in Thu Duc District when making the decision to continue renting, through which the authors give recommendations to improve the quality of accommodation for homeowners and student awareness.

Future research avenues to facilitate social connectedness and safe collective behavior at organized crowd events

During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers of crowd events must facilitate physical distancing in environments where attendees previously enjoyed being close with ingroup members, encourage accurate perception of health risks and close adherence to safety guidance, and stop expected normative behaviors that may now be unsafe. Research from crowd psychology demonstrates how group processes are integral to each of these issues. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has created an extreme case environment in which to evaluate the collective findings from previous research and identify future research directions. This paper outlines how organizers of crowd events and researchers can work together to further develop our understanding of social connectedness in crowds, reasons for risk-taking behavior, and level of engagement in new collective behaviors. By working together to address these issues, practitioners and researchers can develop our understanding of crowd processes and improve safety at future crowd events.

Le Bon’s crowd psychology and post-truth

The phenomenon of post-truth, in which truth (or facts or the best scientific evidence) is brushed aside in public debates, has recently caught the eye of many philosophers, who typically see it as a threat to deliberative democracy. In this paper, it is argued that Gustave Le Bon?s remarks on crowd psychology, which had been very popular in past (and brushed aside later on), might be relevant for a better understanding of psychological mechanisms that lead to post-truth. According to Le Bon, crowds are often irrational, whereas those who try to convince them to do something should use specific techniques of persuasion, such as affirmation, repetition, contagion and prestige, of which the last one can be undermined either by fiasco (the fastest way), or by critique (a bit slower, but nonetheless effective way). It is the age of posttruth that goes towards the neutralization of any critique (Le Bon himself considered such neutralization devastating for democratic societies), which has been, according to some authors, affected to a great extent by technological innovations in media, such as social media that some authors consider anti-social due to their negative impact on society. I argue that Le Bon?s insights might be useful to members of scientific and philosophical community in their attempts to eliminate the spreading of quasi-scientific views in public discourse.

Italian Social Psychologies and Fascist Regimes: History of a Collective Removal

The first Italian social psychologies showed a pluralism of perspectives that disappeared in the subsequent development of the discipline. With the presence of a collective sociological psychology (SP), a philosophical SP, and a psychological SP rooted in the sociocentric dimension, the field appeared variously articulated with a negotiation and a dialogue between different disciplinary approaches for the construction of its identity. This dialogue was destined to be swept away, first, during the fascist period, and then in 1954, with the affirmation of a psychological and experimental SP, sanctioned by the first National Congress of SP. However, in Italy, unlike in the United States, SP maintained strong social roots. These roots had already been evident from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, when three central topics for SP were emerging in Europe: crowd psychology, psychology of public opinion, and race psychology. Each of these topics played a particular role under the totalitarian regimes. In Italy, Antonio Miotto and Paolo Orano were the scholars who dealt with these three themes, developing them to different degrees of involvement with the fascist regime. Antonio Miotto remained relatively autonomous from the political lines dictated by fascism. Thus, he articulated an original positive conception of the crowd, contrasting the vision of passive masses to maneuver in ways typical of fascism. He did not express himself in favor of or against the censorship of the media and the control of public opinion, and only after fascism took hold did he reflect on the role of political propaganda, analyzing examples from totalitarian regimes. He avoided taking strong and clear positions on the theme of race, although a few of his statements on the subject were completely in line with the regime’s racist ideology. Orano, by contrast, had a marginal interest in crowds, sharing the negative prejudice typical of the conservative crowd psychology. However, Orano had a great deal to say on the role of public opinion. His thoughts developed along the lines of fascist totalitarian policy. He was one of the protagonists of this field, and in 1938 he founded the first Italian center of study of public opinion (Demodoxalogy Center). He created the center with the aim of knowing public opinion, guiding it, and controlling it. With respect to the theme of race, Orano was also completely involved in the fascist racist ideology, devoting considerable energy and framing his original contribution according to the historiographic point of view defined as “national racism.” Yet the development of SP that occurred after World War II showed no traces of these different forms of social psychologies and their role during the fascist regime. Postwar Italian social psychology completely removed the contribution of these two psychologists. Only recently has the prewar social psychology begun to be analyzed by a critical history centered on both disciplinary and sociocultural contexts.