Hasil untuk "Sociology"

Juhoon Lee, Joseph Seering

Large Language Model (LLM) agents offer a potentially-transformative path forward for generative social science but face a critical crisis of validity. Current simulation evaluation methodologies suffer from the "stopped clock" problem: they confirm that a simulation reached the correct final outcome while ignoring whether the trajectory leading to it was sociologically plausible. Because the internal reasoning of LLMs is opaque, verifying the "black box" of social mechanisms remains a persistent challenge. In this paper, we introduce SLALOM (Simulation Lifecycle Analysis via Longitudinal Observation Metrics), a framework that shifts validation from outcome verification to process fidelity. Drawing on Pattern-Oriented Modeling (POM), SLALOM treats social phenomena as multivariate time series that must traverse specific SLALOM gates, or intermediate waypoint constraints representing distinct phases. By utilizing Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) to align simulated trajectories with empirical ground truth, SLALOM offers a quantitative metric to assess structural realism, helping to differentiate plausible social dynamics from stochastic noise and contributing to more robust policy simulation standards.

Yongqi Li, Shen Zhou, Xiaohu Li et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) aligned with general human objectives, such as being harmless and hallucination-free, have become valuable assistants of humans in managing visual tasks. However, people with diversified backgrounds have different cognition even in the same situation. Consequently, they may have personalized expectations for VLM assistants. This highlights the urgent need to align VLM assistants with personalized situated cognition for real-world assistance. To study this problem, we first simplify it by characterizing individuals based on the sociological concept of Role-Set. Then, we propose to evaluate the individuals' actions to examine whether the personalized alignment is achieved. Further, we construct a benchmark named PCogAlignBench, which includes 18k instances and 20 individuals with different Role-Sets. Finally, we present a framework called PCogAlign, which constructs a cognition-aware and action-based reward model for personalized alignment. Experimental results and human evaluations demonstrate the reliability of the PCogAlignBench and the effectiveness of our proposed PCogAlign. We will open-source the constructed benchmark and code at https://github.com/NLPGM/PCogAlign.

Pengjia Cui, Yawen Dong

Network science is an interdisciplinary field that transcends traditional academic boundaries, offering profound insights into complex systems across disciplines. This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of three leading journals, Social Networks, Network Science, and the Journal of Complex Networks, each representing a distinct yet interconnected perspective within the field. Social Networks focuses on empirical and theoretical advancements in social structures, emphasizing sociological and behavioral approaches. Network Science bridges physics, computer science, and applied mathematics to explore network dynamics in diverse domains. The Journal of Complex Networks, by contrast, is dedicated to the mathematical and algorithmic foundations of network theory. By employing co-authorship and citation network analysis, we map the intellectual landscape of these journals, identifying key contributors, influential works, and structural trends in collaboration. Through centrality measures such as degree, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality, we uncover the most impactful publications and their roles in shaping the discourse within and beyond their respective domains. Our analysis not only delineates the disciplinary contours of network science but also highlights its convergence points, revealing the evolving trajectory of this dynamic and rapidly expanding field.

Laura Aymerich-Franch, Tarek Taha, Hiroshi Ishiguro et al.

Robot avatars for customer service are gaining traction in Japan. However, their acceptance in other societal contexts remains underexplored, complicating efforts to design robot avatars suitable for diverse cultural environments. To address this, we interviewed key stakeholders in Dubai's service sector to gain insights into their experiences deploying social robots for customer service, as well as their opinions on the most useful tasks and design features that could maximize customer acceptance of robot avatars in Dubai. Providing information and guiding individuals to specific locations were identified as the most valued functions. Regarding appearance, robotic-looking, highly anthropomorphic designs were the most preferred. Ultra-realistic androids and cartoonish-looking robots elicited mixed reactions, while hybrid androids, low-anthropomorphic robotic designs, and animal-looking robots were considered less suitable or discouraged. Additionally, a psycho-sociological analysis revealed that interactions with robot avatars are influenced by their symbolic meaning, context, and affordances. These findings offer pioneering insights into culturally adaptive robot avatar design, addressing a significant research gap and providing actionable guidelines for deploying socially acceptable robots and avatars in multicultural contexts worldwide.

Xinmin Fang, Lingfeng Tao, Zhengxiong Li

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reframed as a cognitive engine driving a novel productivity revolution distinct from the Industrial Revolution's physical thrust. This paper develops a theoretical framing of AI as a cognitive revolution akin to written language - a transformative augmentation of human intellect rather than another mechanized tool. We compare AI's emergence to historical leaps in information technology to show how it amplifies knowledge work. Examples from various domains demonstrate AI's impact as a driver of productivity in cognitive tasks. We adopt a multidisciplinary perspective combining computer science advances with economic insights and sociological perspectives on how AI reshapes work and society. Through conceptual frameworks, we visualize the shift from manual to cognitive productivity. Our central argument is that AI functions as an engine of cognition - comparable to how human language revolutionized knowledge - heralding a new productivity paradigm. We discuss how this revolution demands rethinking of skills, organizations, and policies. This paper, balancing academic rigor with clarity, concludes that AI's promise lies in complementing human cognitive abilities, marking a new chapter in productivity evolution.

Pandora Pound

The use of non-animal, new approach methodologies (NAMs) is increasing but there has been no associated decrease in animal use. Reasons may include the focus on phasing-in NAMs over phasing-out animal use and the focus on transition within the regulatory sphere, although most animals are used in basic research. The transition to NAMs is often viewed as a technical matter, without acknowledging that scientific knowledge and practices are socially produced and that scientists may be motivated – like all social beings – by interests and power relationships. This paper employs the insights of French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, to explore the persistence of animal research within academia. Several of Bourdieu’s concepts are applied, including field and habitus, but perhaps it is his concept of capital that is most valuable in this context, providing a valuable shorthand for discussing the system of rewards and penalties within academia, clarifying how animal research converts into symbolic as well as social and economic capital and elucidating what scientists risk if they attempt to transition from animal research to NAMs. Bourdieu reminds us to attend to power relationships, particularly the relationship between the animal research field and the field of power. Importantly, he argued that scientific change does not occur simply as a result of paradigm shifts, but because of struggles between scientists for capital and for the power to define their science as ‘legitimate’. Bourdieu’s concepts bring clarity and sensitivity to discussions about the transition as these gather momentum.

Alessandro Ferrara, Claudia Brunori

Theories of immigrant selection posit that immigrants’ pre-migration social standing may explain their children’s educational outcomes. However, this has only been tested in Nordic and Western European countries, where the children of immigrants perform especially well in education. Moreover, few studies investigate the impact of selection on different educational outcomes. Using the 2015 Italian survey ‘Integration of the Second Generation’, we investigate whether (a) immigrant parents are more educated than similar individuals in their countries of origin (positively selected); (b) selection is associated with children’s school grades, attitudes, and aspirations; (c) selection explains educational differences across immigrant groups. We find wide variation in educational selectivity between origin groups. In line with prior evidence, educational selectivity is associated with higher educational aspirations but not school grades, which may lock the second-generation into an “aspiration squeeze”, with ambitious goals but lower means to attain them.

José F. Fontanari, Mauro Santos

Understanding the conditions for maintaining cooperation in groups of unrelated individuals despite the presence of non-cooperative members is a major research topic in contemporary biological, sociological, and economic theory. The $N$-person snowdrift game models the type of social dilemma where cooperative actions are costly, but there is a reward for performing them. We study this game in a scenario where players move between play groups following the casual group dynamics, where groups grow by recruiting isolates and shrink by losing individuals who then become isolates. This describes the size distribution of spontaneous human groups and also the formation of sleeping groups in monkeys. We consider three scenarios according to the probability of isolates joining a group. We find that for appropriate choices of the cost-benefit ratio of cooperation and the aggregation-disaggregation ratio in the formation of casual groups, free-riders can be completely eliminated from the population. If individuals are more attracted to large groups, we find that cooperators persist in the population even when the mean group size diverges. We also point out the remarkable similarity between the replicator equation approach to public goods games and the trait group formulation of structured demes.

Kush R. Varshney

Prior work has explicated the coloniality of artificial intelligence (AI) development and deployment through mechanisms such as extractivism, automation, sociological essentialism, surveillance, and containment. However, that work has not engaged much with alignment: teaching behaviors to a large language model (LLM) in line with desired values, and has not considered a mechanism that arises within that process: moral absolutism -- a part of the coloniality of knowledge. Colonialism has a history of altering the beliefs and values of colonized peoples; in this paper, I argue that this history is recapitulated in current LLM alignment practices and technologies. Furthermore, I suggest that AI alignment be decolonialized using three forms of openness: openness of models, openness to society, and openness to excluded knowledges. This suggested approach to decolonial AI alignment uses ideas from the argumentative moral philosophical tradition of Hinduism, which has been described as an open-source religion. One concept used is viśe\d{s}a-dharma, or particular context-specific notions of right and wrong. At the end of the paper, I provide a suggested reference architecture to work toward the proposed framework.

Loesje Verhoeven, Jo Ritzen

Are institutional trust and interpersonal trust threatened by globalisation? For nineteen countries in Europe, using a fixed effects model for a panel data set relating globalisation to several economic and social macro variables, like income inequality and diversity, to average institutional and interpersonal trust derived from responses in European Social Surveys, we do not find any significant relation between the relatively moderate globalisation of the first two decades of the 21st century on average interpersonal and institutional trust. At the same time, occurrences of economic decline in a country are negatively related to institutional trust. GDP has a positive effect on both institutional and interpersonal.Combining the macro factors with the individual traits of respondents using pooled repeated cross-sectional data demonstrate the dominance of personal characteristics in individual levels of trust, with only institutional quality emerging as a macro variable which is significantly and positively related to trust, especially for the Socio-Economic Groups 3 to 7 (of the eight groups distinguished). Those who are born in the country exhibit higher levels of interpersonal trust, in particular in the higher SES groups 4–7, but show significantly lower institutional trust for the SES groups 0–2. Age is negatively related to institutional trust for all SES groups, but positively related to interpersonal trust for SES groups 4–7.These findings appear to imply that those who are concerned with the level of institutional trust in the population as a basic requirement for democracy in Europe should focus on the quality of institutions and not on globalisation.

Roberta Cucca, Thomas Thaler

The Covid-19 pandemic and energy, climate, and demographic crises have shown how cities are vulnerable to these impacts and how the access to green and blue spaces has become highly relevant to people. One strategy that we can observe is the strong focus on the resilience discourse, meaning implementing more green and blue spaces in urban areas, such as at previous brownfield quarters. However, social justice implications of urban greening have been overlooked for a long time. The implementation of strategies to improve the quality and availability of the green and blue infrastructures may indeed have negative outcomes as far as housing accessibility is concerned by trigging gentrification processes. Issues related to environmental justice and socio-spatial justice are increasing in contemporary cities and call for a better understanding of the global and local mechanisms of production and reproduction of environmental and spatial inequalities. This thematic issue includes eleven articles with different methodologies, with examples from Europe and North America as well as different lenses of green gentrification. Some articles focus more on the question of costs, benefits, and distributional consequences of various infrastructural options for urban greening. Others, instead, discuss how the strategic urban planning tools and policy processes take into account distributional consequences, with specific attention on participatory processes.

Monique Cardinal

The Arab uprisings of 2010-2011 generated a growing movement for change among the judicial corps throughout the Arab world. Judges and prosecutors created independent associations in Morocco, Mauritania, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, and Tunisia to represent their interests and promote a better administration of justice. Since the March Revolution of 2011 in Syria, members of the judiciary also attempted to create their own association, but failed to do so. This article briefly outlines the demographics of the judicial corps after ten years of conflict in Syria. A noticeable change is the increase in the number of women in the judiciary and their promotion to positions of power. How have women judges and prosecutors used the greater authority granted to them? To the advantage of the regime, as a means for self-promotion or to better defend the rights of all? The second part of the article details the progressive disempowerment of the judiciary, the expansion of the criminal justice system and the creation of the Counterterrorism Court used by the regime to quash the popular uprising. In the final section, stories of off-bench resistance highlight efforts made by judges and prosecutors to defend their judicial autonomy and the basic human rights and freedoms of all Syrians.  

Piera Riccio, Bill Psomas, Francesco Galati et al.

Augmented Reality or AR filters on selfies have become very popular on social media platforms for a variety of applications, including marketing, entertainment and aesthetics. Given the wide adoption of AR face filters and the importance of faces in our social structures and relations, there is increased interest by the scientific community to analyze the impact of such filters from a psychological, artistic and sociological perspective. However, there are few quantitative analyses in this area mainly due to a lack of publicly available datasets of facial images with applied AR filters. The proprietary, close nature of most social media platforms does not allow users, scientists and practitioners to access the code and the details of the available AR face filters. Scraping faces from these platforms to collect data is ethically unacceptable and should, therefore, be avoided in research. In this paper, we present OpenFilter, a flexible framework to apply AR filters available in social media platforms on existing large collections of human faces. Moreover, we share FairBeauty and B-LFW, two beautified versions of the publicly available FairFace and LFW datasets and we outline insights derived from the analysis of these beautified datasets.

Enrico Michelini, Laura Schreiner

Refugee sites are a means to manage large-scale refugee movements, a recurring event in today's world. Sport is supposed to have beneficial effects for the residents of such sites and is therefore an activity, which is standardly organized by the sites' management. Moreover, many NGOs and “Sport for Development and Peace” programmes endorse the use of sport in emergency situations—including in refugee sites—to achieve several biopsychosocial objectives. There is a growing body of scientific literature, however, that is calling into question the beneficial effects of sport in this setting as well as the rationale behind this idea. Against this background, we explore the question “How does multiperspectivity influence sport in refugee sites?” based on two case studies. We use the ethnographic materials we were able to collect for the case studies to conduct a (sociological) analysis of multiperspectivity in sport and to develop (pedagogical) proposals on how to incorporate multiperspectivity when devising sports activities for refugees. The fact that the perspectives and motivations beyond the actual sports activities in the refugee site setting might be extremely homogenous leads us to conclude that multiperspectivity is key for planning, organizing and monitoring sports activities, and that refugees' positions must also be acknowledged. We recommend programmes and practical ways of achieving these objectives with a focus on the role of trainers and coaches.

Daniel Beunza

My response to the Comments on Taking the Floor underscores the book’s call for a balanced consideration of the social and material in the study of markets, as well as for an organizational — and not simply material, or structural — engagement with them. This form of “baboon sociology” sheds light on how market participants deal with devices that prove unfair, destabilizing, or simply inadequate to the market, and is particularly useful at a time when the dark side of information technology has become readily apparent.

Camille Vion

Theatre review of Henry VIII by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, staged by Amy Hodge. Globe Theatre, London, May 19th-October 21st, 2022.

Ivan Srba, Gabriele Lenzini, Matus Pikuliak et al.

From a computer science perspective, addressing on-line hate speech is a challenging task that is attracting the attention of both industry (mainly social media platform owners) and academia. In this chapter, we provide an overview of state-of-the-art data-science approaches - how they define hate speech, which tasks they solve to mitigate the phenomenon, and how they address these tasks. We limit our investigation mostly to (semi-)automatic detection of hate speech, which is the task that the majority of existing computer science works focus on. Finally, we summarize the challenges and the open problems in the current data-science research and the future directions in this field. Our aim is to prepare an easily understandable report, capable to promote the multidisciplinary character of hate speech research. Researchers from other domains (e.g., psychology and sociology) can thus take advantage of the knowledge achieved in the computer science domain but also contribute back and help improve how computer science is addressing that urgent and socially relevant issue which is the prevalence of hate speech in social media.

Semra Gunduc

In this work, the spread of a contagious disease on a society where the individuals may take precautions is modeled. The primary assumption is that the infected individuals transmit the infection to the susceptible members of the community through direct contact interactions. In the meantime, the susceptibles gather information from the adjacent sites which may lead to taking precautions. The SIR model is used for the diffusion of infection while the Bass equation models the information diffusion. The sociological classification of the individuals indicates that a small percentage of the population take action immediately after being informed, while the majority expect to see some real advantage of taking action. The individuals are assumed to take two different precautions. The precursory measures are getting vaccinated or trying to avoid direct contact with the neighbors. A weighted average of states of the neighbors leads to the choice of action. The fully connected and Scale-free Networks are employed as the underlying network of interactions. The comparison between the simple contagion diffusion and the diffusion of infection in a responsive society showed that a very limited precaution makes a considerable difference in the speed and the size of the spread of illness. Particularly highly connected hubs nodes play an essential role in the reduction of the spread of disease.

Iván Sambade Baquerín

Este artículo es una revisión de uno de los estudios más relevantes sobre los hombres que ejercen violencia machista realizados desde la psicología social y la teoría del apego, a la luz de la filosofía política y la sociología feminista del conocimiento. Propone, por lo tanto, una apuesta por el enfoque interdisciplinar en el estudio de la conducta humana. Desde este enclave, el trabajo se centra en el análisis de las relaciones sistémicas entre el estado vigente de la estructura patriarcal de poder, la socialización de género de los hombres y la violencia machista contra las mujeres.