Intercultural Computing Education: Toward Justice Across Difference

Even in the turn toward justice-oriented pedagogy, computing education tends to overlook the quality of intergroup relationships, which risks entrenching division. In this article, we establish an intercultural approach to computing education, informed by intercultural and peace education, prejudice reduction, and the sociology of racism and ethnicity. We outline three major concerns of intercultural computing: shifting from content toward relationships, from cultural responsiveness to cultural reflexivity, and from identity to identification. For the last, we complicate discourses of race and identity widespread in U.S. education. Drawing from studies of youth programming classes in East Africa and U.S. contexts, we then reflect on our attempts to address the first shift of fostering relationships across difference. We highlight three promising design tactics: intergroup pairing, interdependent programming, and making relational goals explicit. Overall, we find that computing can indeed be a site of intergroup bonding across difference, but that bonding can carry complications and tensions with other equity goals and tactics. Rather than framing justice-oriented CS primarily as changes to the aims of computational learning, we argue that future work should explore making relational goals explicit and teach students how to attend to friction.

Facing disinformation: Five methods to counter conspiracy theories amid the Covid-19 pandemic

Among the burgeoning discussions on the argumentative styles of conspiracy theories and the related cognitive processes of their audiences, research thus far is limited in regard to developing methods and strategies that could effectively debunk conspiracy theories and reduce the harmful influences of conspiracist media exposure. The present study critically evaluates the effectiveness of five approaches to reducing conspiratorial belief, through experiments (N=607) conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our results demonstrate that the content-based methods of counter conspiracy theory can partly mitigate conspiratorial belief. Specifically, the science- and fact-focused corrections were able to effectively mitigate conspiracy beliefs, whereas media literacy and inoculation strategies did not produce significant change. More crucially, our findings illustrate that both audience-focused methods, which involve decoding the myth of conspiracy theory and re-imagining intergroup relationships, were effective in reducing the cognitive acceptance of conspiracy theory. Building on these insights, this study contributes to a systematic examination of different epistemic means to influence (or not) conspiracy beliefs -an urgent task in the face of the infodemic threat apparent both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Entre las crecientes discusiones sobre los estilos argumentativos de las teorías de conspiración y los procesos cognitivos relacionados de su público, los estudios hasta ahora son limitados en lo que respecta al desarrollo de métodos y estrategias que podrían desacreditar eficazmente las teorías de conspiración y reducir las influencias dañinas de la exposición a los medios de comunicación conspirativos. El presente estudio evalúa de manera crítica la efectividad de cinco enfoques para reducir la creencia en conspiraciones, a través de experimentos (N=607) realizados en Amazon Mechanical Turk. Nuestros resultados demuestran que los métodos basados en el contenido al enfrentar las teorías de la conspiración pueden mitigar parcialmente la creencia conspiratoria. Específicamente, las correcciones centradas en la ciencia y los hechos fueron capaces de mitigar eficazmente las creencias en la conspiración, mientras que las estrategias de alfabetización mediática e inoculación no produjeron cambios significativos. Más importante aún, nuestros hallazgos ilustran que ambos métodos centrados en el público, que implican decodificar el mito de la teoría de la conspiración y reimaginar las relaciones intergrupales, fueron efectivos para reducir la aceptación cognitiva de la teoría de la conspiración. Basado en estos conocimientos, este estudio contribuye a un examen sistemático de distintos medios epistemológicos para influir (o no) en las creencias conspirativas, una tarea urgente frente a la evidente amenaza infodémica, tanto durante como después de la pandemia de COVID-19.

Distinguishing intergroup and long-distance relationships

While intergroup relationships (IRs) dominate the literature on human sociality, long-distance relationships (LDRs) are also highly prevalent in human social life; however, they are often conflated with IRs or overlooked entirely. We suggest that by focusing on IRs to the exclusion of LDRs, scholars are painting an incomplete picture of human sociality. Though both IRs and LDRs function to provide resource access, LDRs likely evolved before IRs in the human lineage and are especially effective for both responding to widespread resource shortfalls and providing access to resources not locally available. To illustrate the importance of distinguishing IRs from LDRs, we draw on an example from rural Bolivia. This case study illustrates how (1) IRs and LDRs vary in importance, even between nearby communities, due to differences in socioecology and past experience, and (2) researcher expectations about IR prevalence can bias both data collection and data interpretation. We close by highlighting areas of LDR research that will expand our understanding of human sociality.

Societies within peace systems avoid war and build positive intergroup relationships

A comparative anthropological perspective reveals not only that some human societies do not engage in war, but also that peaceful social systems exist. Peace systems are defined as clusters of neighbouring societies that do not make war with each other. The mere existence of peace systems is important because it demonstrates that creating peaceful intergroup relationships is possible whether the social units are tribal societies, nations, or actors within a regional system. Peace systems have received scant scientific attention despite holding potentially useful knowledge and principles about how to successfully cooperate to keep the peace. Thus, the mechanisms through which peace systems maintain peaceful relationships are largely unknown. It is also unknown to what degree peace systems may differ from other types of social systems. This study shows that certain factors hypothesised to contribute to intergroup peace are more developed within peace systems than elsewhere. A sample consisting of peace systems scored significantly higher than a comparison group regarding overarching common identity; positive social interconnectedness; interdependence; non-warring values and norms; non-warring myths, rituals, and symbols; and peace leadership. Additionally, a machine learning analysis found non-warring norms, rituals, and values to have the greatest relative importance for a peace system outcome. These results have policy implications for how to promote and sustain peace, cohesion, and cooperation among neighbouring societies in various social contexts, including among nations. For example, the purposeful promotion of peace system features may facilitate the international cooperation necessary to address interwoven global challenges such as global pandemics, oceanic pollution, loss of biodiversity, nuclear proliferation, and climate change.

SPORT AS AN IMPORTANT FACTOR OF SOCIALIZATION AND A WAY TO MODIFY “TROUBLED” TEENAGERS BEHAVIOR

In sports activities, during the process of regulating the behavior of adolescents and teenagers, interpersonal and intergroup relationships are important as they contribute to transformation of deviant behavior. It is well known that people cannot evolve and exist outside of human society, communications and culture. This is where worldview and path of development lies. The psychological characteristics of teenagers with deviant behavior differ greatly. They require special individual approach, clear knowledge, skills, abilities and interpersonal relationships. The problem of deviant behavior among teenagers remains one of the most difficult socioeconomic and socio-psychological problems that our society has faced. Although at present the state bodies as well as many international and national non-governmental organizations, including sports federations are interested in overcoming this problem, the problem of deviant behavior among teenagers is still actual.

Step 2

Once we know what kind of information to keep for analyzing the situation, we are able to estimate what information is missing. More particularly, this chapter shows how responsivity in observation and enquiry facilitates the search for high-quality pieces of information, such as those that describe when, where, and for whom the problem occurs, as well as depict the students' situation at the intraindividual (reactions to different tasks or activities), interindividual (relationships with classmates), intergroup (relationships in class and at school), and conception levels (students' vision of school success and failure, intelligence conception, etc.). Through real-life situations, this chapter shows the role of the linguistic categories used in discussion and types of discussion in general to avoid the pitfalls of shared reality in impression formation, as well as conformism and groupthink in decision making.