Predicting informant accuracy from patterns of recall among individuals

This paper examines the question of informant accuracy in reporting patterns of communication in face-to-face groups. We are attempting to establish the extent to which it is possible to predict individual differences in accuracy from the patterns of recall among informants. We use data from a series of studies by Bernard, Killworth, and Sailer (Killworth and Bernard, 1976, Killworth and Bernard, 1979Bernard and Killworth 1977;Bernard et al., 1980, Bernard et al., 1982) in which they collected observed behavior interaction frequencies and subsequently asked informants to recall and rate the degree of previous communication. In this paper we attempt to predict the accuracy of recall, i.e. how well each individual's ranking corresponds to the overall observed interactions for the group as a whole, by looking solely at the recall ranking. Using this method, we are able to account for a major share of the variance in accuracy among the subjects. We outline a theory and method for predicting accuracy based upon recall data that may be generalized to a variety of situations beyond social interaction data.     

Replication: Cheating,loss aversion,and moral attitudes in Vietnam

We use the coin-flip paradigm and a short survey about moral attitudes under three conditions to answer three questions: (i) Do people cheat more when financial incentives are present in comparison with no incentives? (ii) Do they find it more difficult to maintain their ethical standards when they have been given a small amount of money? and (iii) Do moral attitudes predict cheating behavior? Using a sample of Vietnamese college students, we discover that a financial incentive does not matter until people feel that they are facing a loss. In addition, we do not find any evidence that moral attitudes could predict the unethical behavior in our sample. Our findings shed further light on cheating behaviors and loss aversion through an experimental investigation.     

‘If You Could Change One Thing’: Social Service Workers and Restructuring

Robert R. Carkhuff and Bernard G. Berenson¹ boldly state that: “When we look at the data, we find that troubled people, both children and adults, are as likely to be rehabilitated if they are left alone as if they are treated in professional counselling and psychotherapy.”     

ROLE‐REVERSAL CONSISTENCY: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE GOLDEN RULE

We report an experiment that asks whether people in a strategic situation behave according to the Golden Rule, that is, do not treat others in ways that they find disagreeable to themselves, a property that we call role‐reversal consistency. Overall, we find that over three quarters of the subjects are role‐reversal consistent. Regression analysis suggests that this finding is not driven by players maximizing their subjective expected monetary earnings given their stated beliefs about their opponents' behavior. We find that subjects' stated beliefs and actions reveal mild projection bias. (JEL C78, C91)     

Partnerwahl als konsensuelle Entscheidung

This study continues our analyses of contacting behavior in online dating (KZfSS 2/2009). As the beginning and continuation of a relationship is based on consensual decisions of both partners to interact, we concentrate on the question if and how potential partners indeed reply to contact offers. Data from online dating platforms therefore offer a unique opportunity for sociologists to study how partnerships are initiated and how they develop over time. This contribution provides four important empirical results: Firstly, it demonstrates that only 20% of all first contact offers are answered. This is a surprisingly small proportion. Secondly, it supports the hypothesis of homophily. According to this hypothesis, people with similar education, age and physical attractiveness should prefer each other and thus are more likely to form couples. Third, it shows that women still have severe problems to reply to contact offers from lower educated men, while men are already less reluctant to reply to higher educated women. Thus, the rarity of couples where women are higher educated than their partners are to a large proportion the consequence of women’s preferences rather than men’s preferences. Finally, our study does not find any support for the trade-off hypothesis, indicating that women do not exchange their physical attractiveness for men’s educational resources, and vice versa.     

‘They are harsher to me than to my friend who is blonde’. Police critique among ethnic minority youth in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Young people belonging to categories and living in areas that are targeted by the police find more arguments for detailed police critique than others. When they narrate their assessments there is a series of experiential references being made, which can be used to sort out their police critique. This article draws on 20 interviews with ethnic minority youth in so-called vulnerable neighborhoods in Sweden. It shows how young people portray the police as sometimes profiling and racist, sometimes just and legitimate, and how they do so by comparisons and identifications. Comparisons within Sweden and identifications with police targets tend to result in more negative assessments whereas comparisons with countries of origin and identifications with non-targeted categories may result in more positive or mixed assessments. These young people also evaluate the police with reference to the stigmatization of their neighborhoods. To be stopped because you are associated with a residential area is described as deeply unfair, even if the police are polite, and observations of how the police change behavior in different areas promote critique. Our findings point to the importance of extending a criteria-based model of how today’s young people assess the police with a more social and ethnographic understanding.     

Being the best or doing the right thing? An investigation of positional,prosocial and conformist preferences in provision of public goods

Based on a simple theoretical framework, we show that when individuals exhibit positional, prosocial or conformist preferences which are endogenous, the end outcomes in terms of private provision of public goods can differ significantly from traditional neo-classical predictions. Indeed, when a given individual selects a specific subset of preferences according to what others do, he/she will contribute positively to the public good provision. We provide anecdotal evidence to support our theoretical analysis by using data from an Internet survey on a sample of French individuals. Analyses of individual responses confirm our theoretical arguments. For instance, we show that relative concerns matter, that is, for several environmental goods, people might prefer polluting more in absolute terms but less than others in society. Moreover, we also test whether people exhibit a social desirability bias and show that they attribute more (less) positional (prosocial) concerns to others in society.     

Spiritual but not religious seek unrestricted connection to selves,others, and earth: Formative research on the explosive growth of an ‘inactive public’ beyond the organization

In the last half century, we have observed an explosive growth in individuals who identify as spiritual but not religious. Today, over one in four U.S. adults fall into this category. This phenomenon is an influential component of our modern and changing society, as spiritual beliefs are associated with health, well-being, goals, feelings, and attitudes. In this formative research study, we apply the public relations’ approach of Sense-Making of an ‘inactive public’ beyond the organization to explore how these individuals define themselves, how their beliefs influence their behaviors (such as political, environmental, communal) and how they feel they are perceived by those around them. Amongst others, our main findings reveal that the spiritual but not religious have disparate specific beliefs and often struggle or resist articulating who they are, yet more broadly share a common belief in connection to others, the natural environment, and one’s self. The majority emphasize acceptance, tolerance, compassion, and the importance of each individual embracing their own spiritual positions. The participants report feeling misunderstood, misrepresented, or ignored by others and media, and that their behaviors (perspective on the world, actions, political ideologies, etc) are influenced by their spiritual beliefs.     

Antecedents and Consequences of Words

As instances of behavior, words interact with environments. But they also interact with each other and with other kinds of behavior. Because of the interlocking nature of the contingencies into which words enter, their behavioral properties may become increasingly removed from nonverbal contingencies, and their relationship to those contingencies may become distorted by the social contingencies that maintain verbal behavior. Verbal behavior is an exceedingly efficient way in which one organism can change the behavior of another. All other functions of verbal behavior derive from this most basic function, sometimes called verbal governance. Functional verbal antecedents in verbal governance may be extended across time and space when individuals replicate the verbal behavior of others or their own verbal behavior. Differential contact with different verbal antecedents may follow from differential attention to verbal stimuli correlated with consequential events. Once in place, verbal behavior can be shaped by (usually social) consequences. Because these four verbal processes (verbal governance, replication, differential attention, and verbal shaping) share common stimulus and response terms, they produce interlocking contingencies in which extensive classes of behavior come to be dominated by verbal antecedents. Very different consequences follow from verbal behavior depending on whether it is anchored to environmental events, as in scientific verbal practices, or becomes independent of it, as in religious fundamentalism.     

Individual determinants of social behavior

By using unique data from the section on social behavior of the Bank of Italy's 2004 Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW), the paper studies the individual determinants of several aspects of social behavior: attitudes to cooperating with anonymous others; interest in politics; participation in groups and associations; and propensity to rely on favoritism both in finding a job and in dealing with government red tape. Our findings suggest that these different aspects of social behavior are only weakly correlated to each other and are explained by different individual determinants. We find that older and more educated individuals display a greater willingness to cooperate, a stronger interest in politics, and more intense association activity. By contrast, the likelihood of relying on favoritism does not depend on age and education. We also find that home-ownership is associated with good social conduct, while urban residence has mostly a negative impact on public behavior. Finally, having left-wing political opinions increases the interest in politics, while it does not affect the other aspects of social behavior.     

Revisiting age identity: A research note

Using data from 666 Midwesterners, we reexamine the issue of age identity. We consider five dimensions of age identity—subjective age, others' view of one's age, desired age, desired longevity, and perceived old age. We find that people believe that others think they are the age they feel rather than their actual age. Findings also suggest that “old age” is thought to begin in the mid-seventies. Finally, although subjective age increases as people age, it is not a one-to-one correspondence. Rather people feel relatively younger than their age as they get older.     

Capital and context: using social capital at home and at school to predict child social adjustment

Research examining the influence of social relationships on child outcomes has seldom examined how individuals derive social capital from more than one context and the extent to which they may benefit from the capital derived from each. We address this deficit through a study of child behavior problems. We hypothesize that children derive social capital from both their families and their schools and that capital from each context is influential in promoting social adjustment. Using a large national data set and structural equation modeling, we find that social capital at home and at school can be measured as separate constructs and that capital at home is more influential than is capital at school. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research on social capital and for practical interventions promoting social adjustment.     

Institutional isomorphism and nonprofit managerialism: For better or worse?

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have increasingly adopted business‐like practices as a response to institutional pressures. Some researchers argue that this development leads to mission drift, whereas others find a positive effect on organizational performance. However, the institutional pressures responsible for shaping the nonprofit sector have remained hard to distinguish from each other. This study explores the consequences of mimetic, normative, and coercive pressures, and looks at how they affect managerialism, organizational performance, and mission drift. We link these concepts through a structural equation model based on survey data and find that one aspect of managerialism, strategic behavior, is a key construct in influencing the response to isomorphic pressures and can positively affect organizational performance while holding off‐mission drift. Normative isomorphism even has a direct positive effect on organizational performance. Mission drift can take place when organizations are under coercive pressure without having strategies or internal processes in place. These findings imply that organizations should invest in their strategy and the professional development of their staff to increase organizational performance and avoid mission drift.     

Majority size and conformity behavior in charitable giving: Field evidence from a donation-based crowdfunding platform in Japan

A charitable donor typically imitates the majority contribution of other donors. This study examines the relationships between majority size and this so-called donor’s conformity behavior, by empirically investigating the impacts of multiple earlier donations on the donation of a subsequent donor to JapanGiving, a donation-based crowdfunding platform in Japan. This analysis is possible because the platform’s webpage displays the previous donation amounts in chronological order, thus allowing us to examine the modal amount of more recent donations. By using data on 9989 actual donations, our dynamic panel analysis suggests that when the number of most recent continuous modal donations increases, the likelihood that a subsequent donor matches the modal amount increases. This result supports the notion that a donor’s conformity behavior is more likely to occur when a greater proportion of other donors give a similar amount. Furthermore, the effects of continuous modal donations are strongly observed for low monetary ranges. We interpret that initiating further cooperation among a large number of less cooperative other donors would become harder, or individuals would obtain an excuse for less cooperation due to the others’ behaviors. Finally, we discuss how our findings connect economic studies of charity and social psychology studies of conformity and could help improve the effectiveness of fundraising by charities.     

GENDER MATCHING AND COMPETITIVENESS: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

This paper experimentally investigates if and how people's competitiveness depends on their own gender and on the gender of people with whom they interact. Participants are given information about the gender of the co‐participant they are matched with, they then choose between a tournament or a piece rate payment scheme, and finally perform a real task. As already observed in the literature, we find that significantly more men than women choose the tournament. The gender of the co‐participant directly influences men's choices (men compete less against other men than against women), but only when the gender information is made sufficiently salient. A higher predicted competitiveness of women induces more competition. Giving stronger tournament incentives, or allowing the participants to choose the gender of their co‐participant, increases women's willingness to compete, but does not close the gender gap in competitiveness. (JEL C70, C91, J16, J24, J31, M52)     

Overconfidence in absolute and relative performance: The regression hypothesis and Bayesian updating

Studies have found that people are overconfident in estimation involving difficult tasks but underconfident in easy tasks. Conversely, they are overconfident in placing themselves in easy tasks but underconfident in hard tasks. These findings can be explained by a regression hypothesis that implies random errors in estimation as well as by rational Bayesian updating (that implies no random error). We test these hypotheses in five experiments. We find overconfidence in estimation involving hard tasks but underconfidence in easy tasks. However, for placement (involving both easy and hard tasks) we find no overconfidence, regression effects due to low and high anchor points, and extreme underconfidence when people choose between multiple alternatives. On the other hand, when given precise information about absolute performance, people’s re-assessments of relative performance are consistent with the Bayesian model. Since placement judgments are important in many competitive settings, our results emphasize the need for more research to identify their determinants.     

A note on inferences regarding network subgroups

The evidence presented in Bernard et al. (1980) does not warrant their conclusion. We comment on their lack of concern with the substance of social differentiation in the systems they use as evidence. The substance of social structure is argued to affect the scope, adequacy and power of conclusions drawn from a network analysis and is accordingly a factor to be explicitly considered in justifying those conclusions. With these ideas in mind, our reanaly sis of one system on which good data are available, ostensibly supporting the Bernard et al. conclusion, illustrates how their conclusion regarding network subgroups in that system is unwarranted     

Sex for you, but not for me: discontinuity in undergraduate emerging adults' definitions of "having sex"

The purpose of this study was to determine if undergraduates (N = 839) apply the same standard to themselves when labeling a behavior "having sex" as they apply to their significant others if those persons engage in the same behaviors outside the relationship. Using a between-participants design, one form asked participants if each of 11 behaviors constituted having sex if they engaged in the activity; the other form asked participants if each of the same behaviors constituted having sex if their significant other engaged in the activity outside their relationship. Participants answering for themselves were less likely to indicate a behavior was having sex for all behaviors except penile-anal and penile-vaginal intercourse. Men were also more likely than women to indicate most behaviors were having sex. The authors discuss what they define as a definitional discontinuity in undergraduate emerging adults' definitions of having sex. Fundamental attribution error (FAE) and emerging adulthood literature are used to explain the findings. Health and relationship implications are identified.     

Friends in Old Age

Psychoanalysis has long recognized the vital role that relationships between people play in human development and in the maintenance of sense of well being throughout life. While the internalization of representations of significant others and their interactions with each other, the achievement of object constancy, makes it possible to gain support from the realization that we live in the minds of others and they in ours’, it is “not enough.” We need people “in the flesh” from “cradle to grave.” Unfortunately, this need is more difficult to meet in our later years. Parents, siblings, mates, love partners die. Children move away. No longer do we have daily contact with our work colleagues. Old friends are lost, never to be replaced, making the ability to form and maintain additional friendships as well as the opportunity to do so critical in the life of the elderly. This paper considers the roles that friends play in old age, the developmental achievements that contribute to the capacity for friendship, some of the factors that may impede doing so, and finally the ways in which psychoanalytic treatment may foster an individual’s ability to be a friend and make friends.     

Campaigning in the fourth age of political communication. A multi-method study on the use of Facebook by German and Austrian parties in the 2013 national election campaigns

Starting from the contribution to the discussion on a fourth age of political communication, here we argue that, as a consequence of how the Web 2.0 has changed political campaigns, the theoretical time-bound three-phase models of political campaigning must be reconsidered. We propose four ideal campaign types based on their ideal-typical target audience: partisan-, mass-, target group- and individual-centered campaigns. In reality, each campaign combines elements of all types. To examine this mixture empirically, we apply a most similar systems design and investigate five German and six Austrian parties’ use of Facebook in the 2013 national election campaigns. On the basis of face-to-face interviews with the campaign managers and a quantitative content analysis of the respective parties’ Facebook pages, we analyze how parties used Facebook as a campaigning tool to inform, interact with, and mobilize voters, as well as which target audiences they addressed. We find that, although the campaign managers declare Facebook their most important Web 2.0 campaigning tool, the German and Austrian parties did not make use of Facebook’s interactive and mobilizing potential, rather relying on mass-centered information, possibly due to the framework conditions in both countries. Based on our findings, we conclude that the role of context for election campaigning should be discussed more carefully.