Hasil untuk "Other beliefs and movements"

Trevor Hill

Little academic attention has been given to two closely-related styles of traditional wrestling in Great Britain: Scottish Backhold (‘Backhold’) and Cumberland & Westmorland (‘C/W’) Wrestling. Both sports are represented by the Scottish Wrestling Bond and the Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling Association, and while each organisation maintains its own traditions and practices, they are able to participate in each other’s competitions as well as in international tournaments. Many areas of mutual satisfaction and respect exist between the two organizations and especially amongst the wrestlers themselves. There have, however, been areas of tension between the two groups. This article will explore several such issues that arose between 1998 and 2002, including regulations concerning dress, number of falls to a bout, and alleged non-recognition of certain techniques. We shall then discuss developments in Scottish Backhold between 2014 and 2019; and lastly, we shall examine the recent rise in female participation in what has historically been a male-dominated sport. This analysis raises questions of tradition, as well as potential breaks from tradition, in the development of both types of traditional wrestling. It also attempts to partially redress the lack of academic scrutiny, particularly with regard to Scottish Backhold.

Yuheun Kim, Joshua Introne

The internet has transformed activism, giving rise to more organic, diverse, and dynamic social movements that transcend geo-political boundaries. Despite extensive research on the role of social media and the internet in cross-cultural activism, the fundamental motivations driving these global movements remain poorly understood. This study examines two plausible explanations for cross-cultural activism: first, that it is driven by influential online opinion leaders, and second, that it results from individuals resonating with emergent sets of beliefs, values, and norms. We conduct a case study of the interaction between K-pop fans and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement on Twitter following the murder of George Floyd. Our findings provide strong evidence that belief alignment, where people resonate with common beliefs, is a primary driver of cross-cultural interactions in digital activism. We also demonstrate that while the actions of potential opinion leaders--in this case, K-pop entertainers--may amplify activism and lead to further expressions of love and admiration from fans, they do not appear to be a direct cause of activism. Finally, we report some initial evidence that the interaction between BLM and K-pop led to slight increases in their overall belief similarity.

Feng Fu, Ran Zhuo, Xingru Chen

Declines in vaccination coverage for vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles and chickenpox, have enabled their surprising comebacks and pose significant public health challenges in the wake of growing vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine opt-outs and refusals are often fueled by beliefs concerning perceptions of vaccine effectiveness and exaggerated risks. Here, we quantify the impact of competing beliefs -- vaccine-averse versus vaccine-neutral -- on social imitation dynamics of vaccination, alongside the epidemiological dynamics of disease transmission. These beliefs may be pre-existing and fixed, or coevolving attitudes. This interplay among beliefs, behaviors, and disease dynamics demonstrates that individuals are not perfectly rational; rather, they base their vaccine uptake decisions on beliefs, personal experiences, and social influences. We find that the presence of a small proportion of fixed vaccine-averse beliefs can significantly exacerbate the vaccination dilemma, making the tipping point in the hysteresis loop more sensitive to changes in individuals' perceived costs of vaccination and vaccine effectiveness. However, in scenarios where competing beliefs spread concurrently with vaccination behavior, their double-edged impact can lead to self-correction and alignment between vaccine beliefs and behaviors. The results show that coevolution of vaccine beliefs and behaviors makes populations more sensitive to abrupt changes in perceptions of vaccine cost and effectiveness compared to scenarios without beliefs. Our work provides valuable insights into harnessing the social contagion of even vaccine-neutral attitudes to overcome vaccine hesitancy.

Henry Waldhausen, Christopher Griffin

Using techniques from information geometry, we construct a semi-Hamiltonian system modelling trader beliefs in a binary asset market and study the impact of inequality or asymmetry in beliefs, information, and power on price dynamics. We show that in a market with no inequality and $N$ completely symmetric traders, the resulting dynamics evolve on a $2N + 1$ dimensional manifold consisting of a $2N-2$ dimensional centre manifold, a $2$ dimensional stable manifold and a $1$ dimensional slow manifold. Introducing asymmetry into the traders has the potential to decrease the dimension of the centre manifold, which we prove using a parameter analysis. Using the belief model, we also study the impact of inter-agent communication, exogenous information and asymmetric purchasing power on price dynamics, showing that market bubbles can emerge when powerful traders produce outsize influence in the market, thus impacting other traders' beliefs as well as the price. This process is exacerbated when back-channel communication is permitted. The impact of areas of high curvature in belief space is also discussed.

Frances Wilkins

The evangelical revivals (known in English as ‘awakenings’ and in Gaelic as na dùsgaidhean) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had an immediate impact upon singing and music-making in Presbyterian communities in the Western Isles as well as a significant long-term effect on both traditional and sacred musical practice and performance. Awakenings often led converts to re-evaluate their participation in traditional music-making and singing and compelled many to give up their secular music practices upon conversion. Even so, music-making itself was not discouraged, and these religious revivals created an environment which encouraged converts to replace their secular repertoire with spiritual songs and hymns, and to embrace the singing and new composition of spiritual songs to express their newly experienced Christian faith. This article examines the impact of religious revivals on music-making in the Outer Hebrides – particularly Lewis – and the significant musical shifts, including the composition of new repertoire, which took place within communities as a result.

Houda Nait El Barj, Theophile Sautory

We study the dynamics of opinions in a setting where a leader has a payoff that depends on agents' beliefs and where agents derive psychological utility from their beliefs. Agents sample a signal that maximises their utility and then communicate with each other through a network formed by disjoint social groups. The leader has a choice to target a finite set of social groups with a specific signal to influence their beliefs and maximise his returns. Heterogeneity in agents' preferences allows us to analyse the evolution of opinions as a dynamical system with asymmetric forces. We apply our model to explain the emergence of hatred and the spread of racism in a society. We show that when information is restricted, the equilibrium level of hatred is determined solely by the belief of the most extremist agent in the group regardless of the inherent structure of the network. On the contrary, when information is dense, the space is completely polarised in equilibrium with the presence of multiple "local truths" which oscillate in periodic cycles. We find that when preferences are uniformly distributed, the equilibrium level of hatred depends solely on the value of the practical punishment associated with holding a hate belief. Our finding suggests that an optimal policy to reduce hatred should focus on increasing the cost associated with holding a racist belief.

Byunghwee Lee, Rachith Aiyappa, Yong-Yeol Ahn et al.

Beliefs form the foundation of human cognition and decision-making, guiding our actions and social connections. A model encapsulating beliefs and their interrelationships is crucial for understanding their influence on our actions. However, research on belief interplay has often been limited to beliefs related to specific issues and relied heavily on surveys. We propose a method to study the nuanced interplay between thousands of beliefs by leveraging an online user debate data and mapping beliefs onto a neural embedding space constructed using a fine-tuned large language model (LLM). This belief space captures the interconnectedness and polarization of diverse beliefs across social issues. Our findings show that positions within this belief space predict new beliefs of individuals and estimate cognitive dissonance based on the distance between existing and new beliefs. This study demonstrates how LLMs, combined with collective online records of human beliefs, can offer insights into the fundamental principles that govern human belief formation.

Risnawat, Sri Wahyuni Zuhri, I. Fadilah et al.

This study aims to describe and explain Soekarno's perception of discrimination against women in his memoir Sarinah (1947). In this aspect, the role of women and Soekarno's hopes for the latest developments are blended in the role and discrimination against women. The material object of this study is a memoir entitled Sarinah. The formal object of this study is all of Soekarno's perceptions in Indonesian. Data collection was carried out using reading method developed with note-taking techniques and literature studies to collect data on social identity, knowledge, and beliefs of the author and literature searches to obtain data on situations in which the memoir was born. Data analysis was carried out by data reduction, data display, data verification, and conclusion of the results. The development of feminist movements in Europe, America, and other countries can benefit for the stimulator of Indonesian women that there would not a struggle without scarification. There is an important problem of Indonesian women, between their role in the period of colonialism and after national independence. Keywords: perception, discrimination, women’s roles, Soekarno’s hopes.

L. A. Ganichev

The review of the second edition of the monograph of the Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor P.N. Bazanov “The Tsar and the Soviets: Russian Emigration in the Struggle for Russian Statehood: Political and Publishing Activities” (2022) is presented. The author examines the unions of the Russian abroad figures of the era of the firstwave emigration (smenovekhovtsy, post-revolutionaries and Young Russians). They were distinguished by a special (in comparison with other movements of emigration) interpretation of the events of the October Revolution and their attitude towards Soviet Russia (stemming from the justification of the very fact of the 1917 revolution). The monograph shows how the periodicals published and distributed by these associations reflected their original philosophical and political beliefs. The review also contains some stories related to the history of Russian book culture and literature (for example, the story of the “revenge” of the writer M.A. Bulgakov to the secretary of the publishing house “Nakanune” (On the Eve)). The significance of P.N. Bazanovʼs book for understanding the fate of modern Russia, as well as mastering the unknown heritage of caring thinkers and patriots of Russia abroad, is noted.

Michelle Friend, A. Swift, Betty Love et al.

If computer science programs face a challenge of convincing students that programming is fun and achievable, they have nothing on mathematics departments who face societal beliefs that math is hard and scary. Several movements in computer science education have focused on broadening participation within computer science and across disciplines. The "CS + X" efforts have focused on helping computer science integrate into other disciplines. The "CS For All" movement has highlighted the importance of providing high quality computing education for all students. Simultaneously, there is increasing attention to the need to provide general education alternatives to college algebra. This paper describes a course designed to combine these goals: a course that uses programming to introduce students to functions, patterns, and spatial and computational thinking in order to meet quantitative reasoning goals set by the university. The course initially used Bricklayer as the programming environment, then transitioned to Processing. Students were successful in writing programs that created art, demonstrated mastery of quantitative literacy, and had improved attitudes following the course. This project suggests that in addition to the creation of introductory computer science classes, courses which embed computer science into disciplinary requirements can be a successful pathway to expand opportunities for students to learn computing.

Irena Pilch, Agnieszka Turska-Kawa, Paulina Wardawy et al.

BackgroundThe number of psychological studies on conspiracy beliefs has been systematically growing for about a dozen years, but in recent years, the trend has intensified. We provided a review covering the psychological literature on conspiracy beliefs from 2018 to 2021. Halfway through this period, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, accompanied by an explosion of movements based on conspiracy theories, intensifying researchers’ interest in this issue.MethodsAdhering to PRISMA guidelines, the review systematically searched for relevant journal articles published between 2018 and 2021. A search was done on Scopus and Web of Science (only peer-reviewed journals). A study was included if it contained primary empirical data, if specific or general conspiracy belief(s) were measured and if its correlation with at least one other psychological variable was reported. All the studies were grouped for the descriptive analysis according to the methodology used, the participants’ characteristics, the continent of origin, the sample size, and the conspiracy beliefs measurement tools. Due to substantial methodological heterogeneity of the studies, narrative synthesis was performed. The five researchers were assigned specific roles at each stage of the analysis to ensure the highest quality of the research.ResultsFollowing the proposed methodology, 308 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility and 274 articles (417 studies) meeting the inclusion criteria were identified and included in the review. Almost half of the studies (49.6%) were conducted in European countries. The vast majority of the studies (85.7%) were carried out on samples of adult respondents. The research presents antecedents as well as (potential) consequences of conspiracy beliefs. We grouped the antecedents of conspiracy beliefs into six categories: cognitive (e.g., thinking style) motivational (e.g., uncertainty avoidance), personality (e.g., collective narcissism), psychopathology (e.g., Dark Triad traits), political (e.g., ideological orientation), and sociocultural factors (e.g., collectivism).Conclusion and limitationsThe research presents evidence on the links between conspiracy beliefs and a range of attitudes and behaviors considered unfavorable from the point of view of individuals and of the society at large. It turned out that different constructs of conspiracy thinking interact with each other. The limitations of the study are discussed in the last part of the article.

Elias Tsakas

It is well known that individual beliefs cannot be identified using traditional choice data, unless we exogenously assume state-independent utilities. In this paper, I propose a novel methodology that solves this long-standing identification problem in a simple way. This method relies on the extending the state space by introducing a proxy, for which the agent has no stakes conditional on the original state space. The latter allows us to identify the agent's conditional beliefs about the proxy given each state realization, which in turn suffices for indirectly identifying her beliefs about the original state space. This approach is analogous to the one of instrumental variables in econometrics. Similarly to instrumental variables, the appeal of this method comes from the flexibility in selecting a proxy.

D. Maisto, Francesco Donnarumma, G. Pezzulo

We advance a novel computational model of multi-agent, cooperative joint actions that is grounded in the cognitive framework of active inference. The model assumes that to solve a joint task, such as pressing together a red or blue button, two (or more) agents engage in a process of interactive inference. Each agent maintains probabilistic beliefs about the joint goal (e.g., Should we press the red or blue button?) and updates them by observing the other agent’s movements, while in turn selecting movements that make his own intentions legible and easy to infer by the other agent (i.e., sensorimotor communication). Over time, the interactive inference aligns both the beliefs and the behavioral strategies of the agents, hence ensuring the success of the joint action. We exemplify the functioning of the model in two simulations. The first simulation illustrates a “leaderless” joint action. It shows that when two agents lack a strong preference about their joint task goal, they jointly infer it by observing each other’s movements. In turn, this helps the interactive alignment of their beliefs and behavioral strategies. The second simulation illustrates a “leader–follower” joint action. It shows that when one agent (“leader”) knows the true joint goal, it uses sensorimotor communication to help the other agent (“follower”) infer it, even if doing this requires selecting a more costly individual plan. These simulations illustrate that interactive inference supports successful multi-agent joint actions and reproduces key cognitive and behavioral dynamics of “leaderless” and “leader–follower” joint actions observed in human–human experiments. In sum, interactive inference provides a cognitively inspired, formal framework to realize cooperative joint actions and consensus in multi-agent systems.

Emily Lyle, John Shaw

No abstract provided

Vittorio Lippi, Raphael Deimel

Probabilistic Movement Primitives (ProMPs) are a widely used representation of movements for human-robot interaction. They also facilitate the factorization of temporal and spatial structure of movements. In this work we investigate a method to temporally align observations so that when learning ProMPs, information in the spatial structure of the observed motion is maximized while maintaining a smooth phase velocity. We apply the method on recordings of hand trajectories in a two-dimensional reaching task. A system for simultaneous recognition of movement and phase is proposed and performance of movement recognition and movement reproduction is discussed.

Francesca Bianco, Dimitri Ognibene

In complex environments, where the human sensory system reaches its limits, our behaviour is strongly driven by our beliefs about the state of the world around us. Accessing others' beliefs, intentions, or mental states in general, could thus allow for more effective social interactions in natural contexts. Yet these variables are not directly observable. Theory of Mind (TOM), the ability to attribute to other agents' beliefs, intentions, or mental states in general, is a crucial feature of human social interaction and has become of interest to the robotics community. Recently, new models that are able to learn TOM have been introduced. In this paper, we show the synergy between learning to predict low-level mental states, such as intentions and goals, and attributing high-level ones, such as beliefs. Assuming that learning of beliefs can take place by observing own decision and beliefs estimation processes in partially observable environments and using a simple feed-forward deep learning model, we show that when learning to predict others' intentions and actions, faster and more accurate predictions can be acquired if beliefs attribution is learnt simultaneously with action and intentions prediction. We show that the learning performance improves even when observing agents with a different decision process and is higher when observing beliefs-driven chunks of behaviour. We propose that our architectural approach can be relevant for the design of future adaptive social robots that should be able to autonomously understand and assist human partners in novel natural environments and tasks.

Kyle Richardson, Ronen Tamari, Oren Sultan et al.

Can we teach natural language understanding models to track their beliefs through intermediate points in text? We propose a representation learning framework called breakpoint modeling that allows for learning of this type. Given any text encoder and data marked with intermediate states (breakpoints) along with corresponding textual queries viewed as true/false propositions (i.e., the candidate beliefs of a model, consisting of information changing through time) our approach trains models in an efficient and end-to-end fashion to build intermediate representations that facilitate teaching and direct querying of beliefs at arbitrary points alongside solving other end tasks. To show the benefit of our approach, we experiment with a diverse set of NLU tasks including relational reasoning on CLUTRR and narrative understanding on bAbI. Using novel belief prediction tasks for both tasks, we show the benefit of our main breakpoint transformer, based on T5, over conventional representation learning approaches in terms of processing efficiency, prediction accuracy and prediction consistency, all with minimal to no effect on corresponding QA end tasks. To show the feasibility of incorporating our belief tracker into more complex reasoning pipelines, we also obtain SOTA performance on the three-tiered reasoning challenge for the TRIP benchmark (around 23-32% absolute improvement on Tasks 2-3).

Kai Sauerwald, Christoph Beierle

Iterated Belief Change is the research area that investigates principles for the dynamics of beliefs over (possibly unlimited) many subsequent belief changes. In this paper, we demonstrate how iterated belief change is connected to computation. In particular, we show that iterative belief revision is Turing complete, even under the condition that broadly accepted principles like the Darwiche-Pearl postulates for iterated revision hold.

Saif Shahin, Yee Man Margaret Ng

ABSTRACT Connective action, or individuals networking with each other online to form social movements, rarely leads to lasting change. In this study, we argue that such movements are ultimately ineffective because they struggle to sustain themselves over time and identify the reasons behind their transience. Our analysis focuses on Twitter conversations about Aadhaar, a biometric ID project that has raised concerns about data privacy and civil liberty in India, the world’s largest democracy. A computational mixed-methods approach incorporating social network analysis, sentiment analysis, and structural topic modeling demonstrates that connective action against Aadhaar failed to produce a sustained discourse of resistance, with people’s feelings toward and beliefs about Aadhaar vacillating sharply. The analysis draws attention to the power of brick-and-mortar social institutions, including the state and its agencies, political parties, courts, technology companies, and ‘legacy’ news media, in shaping and reshaping seemingly bottom-up discourses on digital platforms. It also identifies three interlinked weaknesses of connective action – the individualized nature of mobilization, excessive flexibility of social networks, and a negative emotional culture. We contend that in order to be effective, contemporary social movements need to utilize digital technologies for ‘collective’ action by forging collective identities that bind participants affectively and cognitively, empower them against structures of social control, and enable them to commit to non-personal and long-term objectives.

E. Heleven, Kim van Dun, F. Van Overwalle

Social neuroscience largely ignored the role of the cerebellum, despite its implications in a broad range of tasks and neurological disorders related to social functioning and inferences on others’ mental state such as beliefs. One hypothesis states that during human evolution, the cerebellum’s function evolved from a mere coordinator of fluent sequences of motions and actions, to an interpreter of action sequences without overt movements that are important for social understanding. The present study introduces new tasks to investigate the role of the cerebellum in sequencing, in which participants generated the correct chronological order of new or well-known event stories with or without social elements during functional neuroimaging (fMRI). Results showed strong cerebellar activation during order generation for all event types compared to passive viewing or reading events. More importantly, new social events involving true or false beliefs showed stronger activation in the bilateral posterior cerebellum (Crus 1 and Crus 2) compared to routine social and non-social (mechanical) events. This confirms the critical role of the posterior cerebellum in the understanding and construction of the correct order of action sequences relevant for social understanding. The present tasks and results may facilitate diagnoses and treatments of cerebellar dysfunctions in the future.