Exploring the Role of Digital and Socio-civic Skills for Promoting Youth Participation and Digital Citizenship

<p style="text-align: justify;">The emergence of digital technologies and a more global and digital society has brought about the need to develop and educate in Digital Citizenship, as well as to study how youth are taught to participate and learn citizenship in a digital age. This paper aims to explore the role of digital and socio-civic skills development, as facilitators for youth participation and analyses the relationship between sociodemographic variables (sex, age, educational level, and political ideology) with the participatory profile of participants. This is a study with a quantitative methodology, where, based on non-probabilistic convenience sampling, 534 young people between 16 and 35 years old from Spain, completed an online questionnaire regarding the development of digital and socio-civic skills. The results indicate how a participant’s participatory profile is related to other variables. In addition, significant differences are observed between the different participation profiles and digital and socio-civic skills, underlining that the development of digital and socio-civic skills are essential for educating in digital citizenship.</p>

Using deep learning to predict ideology from facial photographs: Expressions, beauty, and extra-facial information

Deep learning techniques can use common public data such as facial photographs to predict sensitive personal information, but little is known about what information contributes to the predictive success of these techniques. This lack of knowledge limits both the public’s ability to protect against revealing unintended information as well as the scientific utility of deep learning results. We combine convolutional neural networks, heat maps, facial expression coding, and classification of identifiable features such as masculinity and attractiveness in our study of political ideology in 3323 Danes. Predictive accuracy from the neural network was 61% in each gender. Model-predicted ideology correlated with aspects of both facial expressions (happiness vs neutrality) and morphology (specifically, attractiveness in females). Heat maps highlighted the informativeness of areas both on and off the face, pointing to methodological refinements and the need for future research to better understand the significance of certain facial areas.

Resistance to Persuasion: Examining the Influence of Political Ideology on COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake Hesitancy

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to the death of over 625,000 Americans and it continues to have monumental consequences worldwide for economic, social and individual life. An effective vaccine program is considered vital to securing collective immunity; yet, many Americans are still hesitant to be vaccinated. This two-part study first experimentally tests two message frames (inoculation vs control) designed to counter resistance to the COVID-19 vaccine with individuals who are initially supportive, neutral or opposed to it. Based on a key finding from Study 1 (that political ideology appears to be impacting receptiveness to the messaging), Study 2 examines response to these same two messages using either a politicized (Dr. Anthony Fauci) or neutral source to test the mediating effects of political ideology. Results contribute to existing literature by examining inoculation effects in a new context (“debunking” misinformation vs “prebunking” to bolster supportive attitudes), and demonstrate how psychological reactance is working in tandem with inoculation to influence attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine.

White (but Not Black) Americans Continue to See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game; White Conservatives (but Not Moderates or Liberals) See Themselves as Losing

Norton and Sommers (2011) assessed Black and White Americans’ perceptions of anti-Black and anti-White bias across the previous six decades—from the 1950s to the 2000s. They presented two key findings: White (but not Black) respondents perceived decreases in anti-Black bias to be associated with increases in anti-White bias, signaling the perception that racism is a zero-sum game; White respondents rated anti-White bias as more pronounced than anti-Black bias in the 2000s, signaling the perception that they were losing the zero-sum game. We collected new data to examine whether the key findings would be evident nearly a decade later, and whether political ideology would moderate perceptions. Liberal, moderate, and conservative White (but not Black) Americans alike believed that racism is a zero-sum game. Liberal White Americans saw racism as a zero-sum game they were winning by a lot, moderate White Americans saw it as a game they were winning by only a little, and conservative White Americans saw it as a game they were losing. This work has clear implications for public policy and behavioral science, and lays the groundwork for future research that examines to what extent racial differences in perceptions of racism by political ideology are changing over time.

Convicts

Clare Anderson provides a radical new reading of histories of empire and nation, showing that the history of punishment is not solely connected to the emergence of prisons and penitentiaries, but to histories of governance, occupation, and global connections across the world. Exploring punitive mobility to islands, colonies, and remote inland and border regions over a period of five centuries, she proposes a close and enduring connection between punishment, governance, repression, and nation and empire building, and reveals how states, imperial powers, and trading companies used convicts to satisfy various geo-political and social ambitions. Punitive mobility became intertwined with other forms of labour bondage including enslavement, with convicts a key source of unfree labour that could be used to occupy territories. Far from passive subjects, however, convicts manifested their agency in various forms, including the extension of political ideology and cultural transfer, and vital contributions to contemporary knowledge production.

TRANSDISCIPLINARITY THEORY THROUGH PLATO PHILOSOPHY, TAOISM, ALCHEMICAL TRADITION AND JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Transdisciplinary is a paradigm based on the integration and balance of opposite points of view (dualities). This paper methodology involves transdisciplinarity applied to problem solutions, mainly from 1) Plato philosophy; 2) Taoist principle of duality Yin Yang, 3) Jungian psychology, so connected to modern physics and 4) Weil, Leloup and Crema psychological vision of holistic transdisciplinarity. Our findings in this regard involves Figure 11 for Jungian functions and Figure 12 model for problem solving through duality plus four elements. The objective is to create a comprehensive understanding of reality through Plato and Taoist philosophies, Alchemical tradition and Jungian psychology improved by the MBTI system, as tools for problem solving. Understanding the psychological types types to comprehend on how to achieve the best of each one, due to their innate strengths and capacities, so that a synergy of results can be created within the relationships. The MBTI serves both i) for self-knowledge, to make his own self-management on a day-to-day life, and ii) to understand how other people work psychologically, so that a synergy can be created in the process of relationships. The applied transdisciplinary approach is based on the principles of i) duality – interaction and integration of opposites, specially the analytical and synthetic methods and ii) four elements - rationality, feasibility, reasonableness and meaning. However, it is not a simplistic or a magical-vitalistic approach as it may seem to rationalists at first, as far as modern physics is concerned. The holistic view of reality, including holology (the study of the whole) and holopraxis (the praxis of the whole) can´t be confused with political ideology, something that happens very frequently to scientificists, who consider themselves "exempt" and “impartial”. Finally, the core idea is to promote transformation of the culture and personal behavior, connected to reasonableness and meaning, emotional and intuitive intelligences, mainly because of psychological sustainability and mental health.