social-science.
179 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-034 v3 | Curry et al. 2019, morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies | Coding 3,460 eHRAF paragraphs on the 60 Probability Sample Files societies found 962 morally valenced mentions of seven cooperative behaviours, 961 of them positive. The one negative is Chuuk admiration of open theft as dominance. Presence varied widely by domain: property 54/60 (90%), kin 47 (78%), group 44 (73%), reciprocity 43 (72%), respect 35 (58%), bravery 32 (53%), fairness 9 (15%). Presence correlated with ethnographic coverage (r = 0.43). The design can detect a morally positive mention but has almost no way to register a negative one, so the 99.9% is weak evidence for universality. | Read |
| NOTE-036 v2 | Lindahl et al. 2017, varieties of contemplative experience | This is a qualitative taxonomy, not a prevalence estimate. Sixty Western Buddhist meditators were recruited for having had meditation-related difficulties, and 32 teachers/clinicians were interviewed. Their accounts were coded into 59 experience categories in 7 domains and 26 influencing-factor categories in 4 domains. The most frequent category was fear/anxiety/panic/paranoia (82%). 73% reported moderate-to-severe impairment in at least one domain, 17% suicidality and 17% inpatient hospitalisation. Median symptom duration was 1–3 years. All of these are frequencies within a sample selected for difficulty, as the authors state. | Read |
| NOTE-037 v2 | Debreu 1952, a social equilibrium existence theorem | Debreu proves existence of an equilibrium for an “abstract economy” (generalized game), in which each agent’s feasible set A_ι(ā_ι) depends on the others’ actions. The conditions: each action set 𝔄_ι is a contractible polyhedron; A_ι has a closed graph with non-empty compact values; f_ι is continuous on the graph into the extended reals; the value function φ_ι(ā_ι) = max f_ι is continuous; and each best-response set M_ā_ι is contractible. The proof applies the Eilenberg–Montgomery/Begle fixed-point theorem to the product best-response map. A Remark replaces the joint continuity of φ_ι with continuity (lower hemicontinuity) of A_ι plus a compact graph. A Corollary gives a saddle-point theorem that contains Kakutani’s and von Neumann’s. | Read |
| NOTE-039 v2 | Orosz 2025, software job openings at a five-year low | Orosz reports that US software-development postings on Indeed stood at 65% of the pre-pandemic baseline, “3.5x” below the 2022 peak and 8% down year on year, while all postings were +10%. He attributes most of the fall to the end of zero interest rates, gives GenAI a secondary “wait and see” role, and doubts Indeed’s coverage. - Against Indeed’s current data the headline US figures reproduce: 65.2, peak ratio 3.59×, −8.3% y/y, all postings 109.5. - Several side figures and one comparative claim do not reproduce (see corrections). | Read |
| NOTE-049 v2 | Feinman et al. 2025, grand narratives of inequality | Across a global archaeological house-size compilation (SiteGiniLevel: 1,176 sites, 47,019 houses), site Gini coefficients rise only weakly with the number of political levels (r² = 0.16 all sites, 0.22 apex, 0.27 H50) and with log polity population (r² = 0.11, 0.21, 0.08; values printed on Fig. 2, not in the text). The spread widens at three or more levels. A 0–3 expert-coded autocracy score does about as well (r² = 0.10, 0.18, 0.32; Fig. S4), and its sum with levels (“Hierarchical Clout”) reaches r² = 0.30 (apex), 0.42 (H50) and 0.50 (H100). All tests are bivariate OLS fits with no controls and no correction for many sites sharing polity-level values. | Read |
| NOTE-056 v2 | Thompson, “Who Goes Nazi?” (Harper’s, 1941) | Thompson’s answer is that susceptibility to Nazism is “something in them”, not race, nationality, creed or class. She argues it through fourteen character sketches of guests at an imagined New York party. People with an inner code, security or happiness “never go Nazi”. The humiliated intellectual, the scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labour boss and the success-chaser “would all go Nazi in a crisis”. It is a journalist’s typology from experience in Germany, Austria and France, and no data supports it. | Read |
| NOTE-059 v2 | Peters & Adamou 2022, the ergodicity solution of cooperation | If N entities’ resources follow GBM (drift μ, volatility σ, independent noise), then pooling and sharing equally every step leaves the drift at μ, cuts the volatility to σ/√N (Eq. 3.9), and raises each member’s time-average growth rate from μ − σ²/2 to μ − σ²/(2N) (Eq. 4.1). The premium is (σ²/2)(1 − 1/N) (Eq. 4.2). With pairwise correlation ρ the effective volatility is σ√((1 + (N−1)ρ)/N), and the large-N limit is μ − σ²ρ/2 (Eqs. 5.12–5.13). | Read |
| NOTE-071 v2 | Shabrina, Arcaute & Batty 2021, Airbnb and London housing | Using Inside Airbnb data, “possible misuse” is defined as entire-home listings available for more than 180 days a year whose host has 2 or more listings. On that definition, about 0.16% of London’s housing stock (≈5,300 homes) was possibly misused in 2018, rising to 3.5–7% in a few central LSOAs. Across LSOAs, misuse correlates weakly with purpose-built flats (r = +0.28), private renting (+0.33) and low dwelling-type entropy (−0.14). In a 33-borough OLS with 4 predictors, logged 2015 misuse has β = 0.084 (p = 0.001) on a min–max-normalised 2015–17 rent change. The paper translates this as “a 100% increase … up to 8%” in rent, which is £90 a year. | Read |
| NOTE-083 v2 | Garg & Fetzer, causal claims in economics | GPT-4o-mini is run in nine passes per paper over the first 30 pages of 44,852 NBER/CEPR working papers. Edges kept in at least 4 of 9 passes, JEL-mapped, give “claim graphs” in which the share of edges backed by DiD/IV/RCT/RDD/synthetic control rises from 7.7% (1990) to 31.7% (2020). In year-fixed-effect-only regressions, doubling causal edges is associated with +1.36 pp top-five probability and +11.2% citations, while non-causal counterparts are flat or negative. The validation checks paper-level method labels, and only weakly: RCT and field labels have precision ≤ 0.10. It never checks the edges themselves against human labels. | Read |
| NOTE-113 v2 | Status distrust of scientific experts | Desmond gives a “how-possibly” argument, not a demonstration, that stubborn distrust of scientific experts can be valid reasoning. A low-status truster who is vulnerable in collective decision-making (Premise 1) and has reason to think the prevailing “service-for-prestige” ethos leaves out their core interests (Premise 2) has reason to distrust a high-prestige expert because of that prestige (§6, p. 16–17). The paper explicitly declines to say when those premises are true. | Read |
| NOTE-131 v3 | Schwitzgebel — If materialism is true, the US is conscious | A conditional, informal argument. Any materialist criterion liberal enough to credit rabbits (and rabbit-level distributed aliens, the “squidbits”) and behaviourally human-like but oddly built aliens (Sirian supersquids, Antarean antheads) with consciousness also credits the United States. On this argument the US meets the usual materialist marks of consciousness: sophisticated information processing (roughly 10^14 person-to-person visual “connections”, comparable to the brain’s about 10^14 synapses), goal-directed environmental responsiveness, self-representation and historical embedding. The only exits are eliminativism, extreme sparseness or neurochauvinism, each costlier than the conclusion. The paper argues for no universal criterion. It ends undecided between three readings: US consciousness, a challenge to materialists, or grounds to distrust universal metaphysics of mind. | Read |
| NOTE-132 v2 | Moral disciplining: foundations of puritanical morality | Puritanical norms (condemning lust, gluttony, intoxicants, immodesty, idleness; praising temperance and piety) are argued to be cooperative morality after all: people believe cooperation needs self-control and that indulgence erodes it (and discipline trains it), so a single harm/fairness-sensitive moral system condemns victimless pleasures as indirect, probabilistic threats to cooperation. Its decline in rich societies is put down to people seeing others as already self-controlled and trustworthy. The theory is explicitly agnostic about whether the norms actually work. Its most direct support is the authors’ own vignette studies (N > 1,100), in which perceived loss of self-control mediated 100% of the perceived effect of indulgence on cooperativeness. | Read |
| NOTE-161 v2 | Cartwright — Rigour vs evidential diversity | Cartwright offers a characterisation of “rigour”: a method is rigorous when a valid argument shows its results are evidence for the conclusion and its premises are well established or secured by design. On that definition even well-run RCTs often fail to rigorously establish a study-population ATE, because orthogonality holds only at assignment and the potential-outcomes premise carries heavy metaphysics, and they seldom answer singular questions. Her alternative is a causal-process-tracing theory of change (pToC) with five elements (steps, causal principles, support factors, derailers, safeguards). It catalogues the diverse and mostly non-rigorous evidence that singular causal predictions need. | Read |
| NOTE-167 v2 | Studying philosophy makes people better thinkers | In HERI/CIRP freshman–senior survey data (N = 649,511 students at 804 US institutions, 4,843 philosophy majors), one SD more SAT Verbal raises the odds of majoring in philosophy by 57% (OR 1.57), and freshman Habits of Mind by 34%. After adjusting for SAT or freshman scores, philosophy majors still score higher than non-majors on GRE Verbal (+33 points, SMD 0.48), LSAT (+2, SMD 0.35), Habits of Mind (SMD .24) and Pluralistic Orientation (SMD .21), with no difference on GRE Quantitative. On point estimates they rank first of 57 or 62 majors on GRE Verbal, LSAT and Habits of Mind. | Read |
| NOTE-173 v3 | Griesemer & Shavit — Scaffolding individuality (3Cs) | The paper sets out an idealized three-stage sequence of interaction types, which it calls a “first and rough sketch” (§1). Stage 1 is coordination in collections (pairwise, “aggregative” interactions of co-located individuals). Stage 2 is cooperation in conexuses (a connected web of binary interactions whose benefits can still be counted per member). Stage 3 is collaboration in communities: heterogeneous multi-way interactions around a shared goal, in which generatively entrenched “core” interactions give organizational closure. Table 1 puts the transition to a new level of individuality between stages 2 and 3 only. The paper asserts, rather than argues, that this describes evolutionary transitions non-circularly and that individuality is a special case of collectivity. Its one argued conclusion is hedged: community-level inheritance “seem[s] likely to evolve in tandem” with community-level individuality (§3). | Read |
| NOTE-196 | Why Replication Is Overrated | Every experiment and every replication rests on individuation judgments about what is being manipulated and measured (“conceptual scope”). So direct replication can at most help rule out random error, and “perhaps” establish that some effect exists but not which effect, while conceptual replication begs the question by presupposing that two operationalisations individuate the same effect. What productive research actually does, as in the Mozart-effect debate, is probe systematic errors, which is better called exploration than replication. | Read |
| NOTE-197 | A Pragmatist Theory of Evidence | Reiss proposes an “eliminativist hypothetico-contextualist” (EHC) theory of evidence for type-level causal claims in biomedical and social science. Support comes in two kinds: direct support (patterns we are “entitled to expect” if h is true) and indirect support (patterns incompatible with relevant alternatives). Warrant is graded by which alternatives have been eliminated, on four grades from “weak warrant” to “proof”. Where to stop probing is set by context, meaning background knowledge, a default entitlement to other scientists’ claims, and cost-benefit values. On this account there is no gold standard: RCTs are good only because they eliminate many alternatives at once. The 1950s smoking–lung cancer case illustrates the theory; it does not test it. | Read |
| NOTE-235 v2 | Dzhafarov, Zhang & Kujala, contextuality in behaviour | Under Contextuality-by-Default, which separates context-dependent marginals (“inconsistent connectedness”) from contextuality, no behavioural or social data set re-analysed is contextual: 73 poll question-order pairs, Schröder staircases, conjoint choices, 23 primed word combinations and psychophysical matching. The quantum question model’s QQ equality implies noncontextuality, so a quantum model here predicts its absence. The worked Rose–Jackson example mislabels two marginals; its conclusion stands. | Read |
| NOTE-256 | Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice | Nussbaum argues that Sen’s capability approach yields no theory of social justice until it commits to a definite, if revisable, list of central capabilities, each owed to every citizen up to a threshold. She sets out her list of ten (Life; Bodily Health; Bodily Integrity; Senses, Imagination and Thought; Emotions; Practical Reason; Affiliation; Other Species; Play; Control over one’s Environment). She rejects Sen’s talk of freedom as a general good because some freedoms are trivial or unjust. And she argues that political-liberal respect for pluralism favours a short list of capabilities over the promotion of freedom across the board. | Read |
| NOTE-257 | Sen’s Capability Approach | A Sen-centred overview. It presents the approach as Sen’s answer to four concerns: conversion variation, adaptive preferences, the value of options not taken, and informational exclusion. It sets out his critiques of the three pillars of utilitarianism (act-consequentialism, welfarism, sum-ranking) and of Rawlsian resourcism, and his two-stage structure, valuation then evaluation. In that structure selection is a social-choice exercise of public reasoning, able to reach partial agreement through “intersection” and “ranges of weights” (§3b). It reports four criticisms (illiberalism, under-theorisation, individualism, information gaps) with Sen’s replies, and closes on Nussbaum and on how she differs from Sen. It never mentions the well-being/agency distinction, and it cites none of Sen’s human-rights papers. | Read |
| NOTE-258 | Equality of What? | Sen argues that utilitarian equality (equal marginal utility), total-utility equality (completed as leximin) and Rawlsian equality (maximin/leximin on an index of primary goods) are each insufficient, and so is any combination of them, even for the needs-based part of equality: the test case is a disabled person who has no marginal-utility claim, no total-utility deprivation (he is contented) and no primary-goods deprivation, yet has an evident claim. He proposes “basic capability equality” — equality in “a person being able to do certain basic things” (p. 218) — as a non-fetishist, culture-dependent extension of Rawls, explicitly only “a partial guide” to the equality part of morality, and says his main (negative) thesis does not depend on this constructive proposal (p. 220). | Read |
| NOTE-259 | Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined | Robeyns defines the capability approach as an open, underspecified framework whose only compulsory content is an eight-part “A-module” (pp. 38–59, table 2.5 p. 74). The eight parts are: functionings and capabilities as core concepts; their value-neutrality; conversion factors; the means–ends distinction; functionings and/or capabilities as the evaluative space; other things may also have ultimate value; value pluralism; and each person as an end, i.e. ethical individualism. Every particular “capability theory” must also fill seven compulsory-but-open “B-modules” (purpose, selection of dimensions, human diversity, agency, structural constraints, functionings vs capabilities, meta-theory) and may add four contingent “C-modules”. On that basis she argues that most standing critiques (no list, individualism, power, political economy, liberalism) are valid at most against particular capability theories, not against the approach. She places Nussbaum’s work as one capability theory, not a rival version of the approach. | Read |
| NOTE-260 | The Capability Approach | The entry treats the capability approach as an open normative framework, not a theory. Its core is the commitment to assess well-being and well-being freedom in the space of functionings (achieved doings and beings) and capabilities (real opportunities to achieve them). Everything else is optional specification: purpose, which capabilities count, functionings or capabilities, how to aggregate, and a distributive rule. On this view the approach is not a theory of justice (§4). Sen is reported as refusing any canonical list and appealing to public reasoning without ever specifying the procedure (§3.3). Sen’s paywalled texts appear only as citations: the Dewey Lectures for the well-being/agency freedom split (§2.5), and “Human Rights and Capabilities” 2005 p. 158 for the no-canonical-list quotation (§3.3). | Read |
| NOTE-263 | The Possibility of Social Choice | Sen argues that Arrow’s impossibility is a result about voting-type rules, which are forced on social choice by excluding interpersonal comparisons, and that broadening the informational basis escapes it: cardinal utilities without interpersonal comparison do not help (Theorem 8*2 of Sen 1970a, cited), but even ordinal interpersonal comparisons break the exact impossibility, and partial comparability is often enough (pp. 188–189). The comparisons need not be of mental states; he offers capabilities — “to live the way he or she has reason to value” (p. 192) — as one informational basis among several, and shows it at work in poverty, famine and gender deprivation. The liberal paradox, by contrast, is not resolved by interpersonal comparisons and needs a different enrichment: people’s own priorities between liberty and desire-fulfilment (pp. 199–200). | Read |
| NOTE-340 | List — What is it like to be a group agent? | A short, conditional argument. Group agents are real by a thin functionalist definition and a naturalistic indispensability argument, and they have consciousness as awareness. Phenomenal consciousness turns on a bridge principle. Agency-, biology- and information-based principles are surveyed, and IIT is adopted. Three structural reasons (functional decomposability, robustness of steering bodies to partial randomisation, processing done mainly inside members) are said to make a group’s Φ low. The exclusion postulate is a second route. Nothing is computed. The result is used to ground a normative asymmetry: group agents have only derivative rights. | Read |
| NOTE-388 | Social ontology: Some basic principles | Searle restates the 1995 theory in twenty pages. Social facts are facts involving collective intentionality. Institutional facts are the subclass in which collective acceptance imposes a status function, “X counts as Y in C”, carrying deontic powers that give desire-independent reasons for action. Language is constitutive, since such facts exist only as represented. He revises the book in two places: status indicators matter in their own right, and some Y terms are free-standing, with no X, as with corporations and money without currency. “We accept (S has power (S does A))”, a formula from later in the book, is now ranked as the more general form. Collective intentionality is assumed, not argued for. | Read |
| NOTE-391 | Durkheim — Qu’est-ce qu’un fait social ? | Defines the social fact by exteriority to individual consciousness and external constraint, shown by sanction or by resistance, with diffusion plus independent existence as an equivalent test. Social facts are neither organic nor individual-psychic, so their substrate is society; they are general because collective, and “in each part because in the whole”. Statistics isolates collective currents from individual cases. Ways of being are consolidated ways of doing. All of it is definition and illustration; the elimination that yields “a new species” is assumed exhaustive. | Read |
| NOTE-392 | North — Institutions | An essay, not a proof. Institutions are humanly devised constraints, formal and informal; with technology they fix transaction and production costs and so the incentives of an economy. Village, bazaar and caravan exchange stayed put; early modern European trade evolved, through merchant law, negotiable bills, insurance and a constrained state. Change is path dependent through increasing returns. The game-theoretic motive is one paragraph, the history is narrative, and the one number (the transaction sector’s share of GNP) is cited, not derived. | Read |
| NOTE-393 | Epstein — Social Ontology (SEP) | A survey organised by its author’s own distinction: what grounds a social fact versus what anchors the category it falls under. It reports that ontological individualism is widely assumed and now contested; that grounding has displaced supervenience; that convention, collective acceptance, patterns, practices and language are rival theories of anchoring; and that whether anchoring is a distinct relation is disputed. It covers groups, group agency, institutions, race and gender, artifacts, money, law and language. Survey claims are reported, not argued; one citation (Epstein 2016) is missing from the bibliography, and Schwitzgebel 2015 is listed with critics of group phenomenal states. | Read |
| NOTE-395 | Hindriks & Guala — Institutions, rules, and equilibria | Institutions are correlated equilibria of coordination games with several equilibria, represented by the players as rules. Searle’s constitutive rules are derived from a regulative rule by coining a term that splits it into a base rule and a status rule; the term is conservative and eliminable, so constitutive rules add a name and cognitive economy, not a new kind of fact. The derivation is shown for one toy institution and asserted in general. The reply adds that normativity needs no constitutive rules, because a right is a bundle of other people’s regulative obligations. | Read |
| NOTE-396 | Graham et al. 2013, Moral Foundations Theory | MFT in four claims: a first draft of the moral mind organized in advance of experience, edited by culture, working through fast intuitions, with several foundations because there were several adaptive challenges. Five foundations, each with an evolutionary model (Care: kin selection; Fairness: reciprocal altruism; Loyalty: coalitions; Authority: rank; Sanctity: disease avoidance). MFQ findings: liberals rely on Care and Fairness, conservatives on all five, in every region sampled; Sanctity predicts culture-war attitudes best. Five criteria for foundationhood; Liberty, Efficiency, Ownership and Honesty named as candidates. | Read |
| NOTE-397 | Yilmaz, Harma & Doğruyol 2021, the MAC-Q in Turkey | An independent validation of the MAC-Q. In Turkish undergraduates (n = 445) seven factors fit the Relevance items (CFI .949, RMSEA .053, SRMR .046) but not the Judgement items (CFI .828) or the full form (CFI .752), as in the original. Family and deference track resistance to change; deference tracks, and fairness counters, opposition to equality. Resource-scarcity primes in Turkey (n = 576) and in a preregistered US MTurk study (n = 921) had no effect. Relevance scores correlate about .1–.3 with prosocial intentions. The seven are strongly intercorrelated. | Read |
| NOTE-398 | Atari et al. 2023, the MFQ-2 | A new Moral Foundations Questionnaire, built across 25 populations in local languages: 116 candidate items cut to 36, six each for Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority and Purity, in a “describes me” format. Six factors fit across 19 nations (ESEM CFI .979); reliabilities ω .73–.95; Purity alone fails the alignment invariance threshold. Equality and Proportionality are nearly orthogonal in WEIRD samples. Purity rises most with cultural distance from the U.S. The individualizing–binding split appears in only three national networks. The MFQ-2 predicts criterion scales better than the MFQ-1. | Read |
| NOTE-399 | Curry et al. 2021, moral molecules | The seven morality-as-cooperation domains are cast as elements whose pairwise combinations are moral “molecules”. For each of 21 pairs the authors hypothesise a concept and find a definition or quotation that fits: fraternity, blood revenge, family pride, filial piety, gavelkind, primogeniture, friendship, patriotism, tribute, diplomacy, common ownership, honour, confession, turn-taking, restitution, modesty, mercy, munificence, arbitration, mendicance and queuing. The counts are right (127 positive combinations, 2,186 of mixed valence). The test is a search for confirming instances with no stated protocol, and the theory says it does not predict which molecules exist. | Read |
| NOTE-400 | Haidt & Joseph 2004, intuitive ethics | An essay, not a study. Humans are innately prepared to feel quick approval or disapproval at four patterns, suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity and purity, each a module with an evolved proper domain and a culturally widened actual domain; ingroup is the best fifth candidate (fn. 15). Three of the four were the concerns all five surveyed works shared; purity was added from the authors’ own research on disgust. Cultures vary in actual domains, in which modules they lean on, in what a virtue means, and in how virtues cluster. No data are reported. | Read |
| NOTE-402 | The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism | A verbal model: altruists who withhold help from non-reciprocators beat non-altruists when benefit exceeds cost, encounters are many, partners stable and exposure symmetric. Cleaner-fish hosts that do not eat their cleaners fit it; bird alarm calls are explained by a different, self-interested model. Human friendship, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy, guilt, trust, suspicion and their sham forms are proposed as adaptations regulating exchange, supported by 1960s social psychology, not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-403 | Haidt 2001, the social intuitionist model | The social intuitionist model: moral judgments appear in consciousness as quick intuitions with an affective valence, and moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc search for supporting reasons, used to persuade others. Six links are drawn, four of them reasoning links, two of them private. The case rests on dual-process research, motivated reasoning, post-hoc confabulation and the weak tie between moral reasoning and moral action, mostly from outside morality. Harmless taboo violations are condemned regardless, and affect predicts the condemnation better than perceived harm. | Read |
| NOTE-405 | Rai & Fiske 2011, relationship regulation | A theoretical review. Moral psychology is the regulation of social relationships: an act is right or wrong according to the relational model participants and observers apply, not according to its harm, fairness or purity in the abstract. Fiske’s four models (communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, market pricing) each carry a moral motive: Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, Proportionality. Honour killing, obedient massacre, blood feud and collateral damage are each read as one motive at work. Purity and ingroup loyalty are both Unity. No new data are reported. | Read |
| NOTE-406 | Alfano, Cheong & Curry 2024, moral universals in 256 societies | The Morality-as-Cooperation Dictionary (fourteen virtue and vice sub-dictionaries, built by brainstorming, colleague crowd-sourcing and WordNet expansion, culled by two coders at κ ≈ .65–.70) is run with LIWC over 9,653 eHRAF Ethics paragraphs from 256 societies. Most domains are detected in most societies. Region and subsistence matter significantly but slightly. Against the sixty-society hand codes, agreement is about 80% but κ only .08–.25, with false positives outnumbering true ones. The method cannot detect valence. A spot-check found admired theft in four societies and societies that do not value bravery or reciprocity. | Read |
| NOTE-407 | Baumard, André & Sperber 2013, mutualistic morality | Partner choice with outside options constrains how the gains of cooperation are split: nobody accepts less than they could get elsewhere, so with equal options the stable split is proportional to each partner’s contribution of effort and talent. Being chosen then rewards a genuine sense of fairness over calculated fairness. Dictator, ultimatum, trust and public-goods results are read as allocations by perceived entitlement. Twenty-eight commentators accept partner choice and dispute that fairness is all of morality; the authors reply with a broad and a narrow position they have not settled between them. | Read |
| NOTE-408 | Curry 2016, morality as cooperation: a problem-centred approach | The founding statement of morality-as-cooperation. Nonzero-sum game theory gives seven cooperation problems (kin, coordination, exchange, hawk and dove contest displays, division, possession), and their solutions are said to be what morality is. Each domain gets an animal case, a human case and quotations from moral philosophers. No data are reported. The sharpest content is the predictions on pp. 39–40: non-cooperative behaviour is morally neutral, no culture moralizes “aesthetics or nutrition”, and religious morality and food taboos will turn out cooperative. | Read |
| NOTE-412 | Curry, Jones Chesters & Van Lissa 2019, the MAC-Q | A 42-item questionnaire for morality-as-cooperation’s seven domains, written by the authors from the theory and reduced to three items per subscale. In UK (n = 1,392) and US (n = 469) online samples, seven factors fit the Relevance items well (CFI .98) and the Judgement items poorly (CFI .87). The two sets cannot be pooled into seven domains (CFI .73); the best model keeps fourteen correlated factors. The MFQ’s five factors are not recovered. MFQ purity items are rated about as morally relevant as its loyalty and authority items, which the authors concede contradicts the theory. The data cannot be shared. | Read |
| NOTE-428 | How effective psychological treatments work: mechanisms of change in cognitive behavioural therapy and beyond | A history-and-argument paper. It separates common factors from mechanisms of change, holds that a treatment’s success does not validate its theory, and proposes one mechanism for all effective therapy: the person, “stuck” in an exaggerated negative meaning (Theory A) maintained by their own reactions, builds and tests a less threatening alternative (Theory B), a meaning-making flexibility. The proposal is argued from clinical examples and cited trials. The paper itself says mechanism research has not yet met Kazdin’s standards. | Read |
| NOTE-429 | The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review | Gross’s founding review. Emotions are modulable response tendencies. Regulation, defined as influencing which emotions one has, when, and how they are experienced and expressed, is split from coping, mood regulation and defense, and sorted into five families by where it acts in emotion generation: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, response modulation. The paper’s own open problem is whether regulation can be told apart from generation at all. | Read |
| NOTE-430 | Relational Frame Theory: Some Implications for Understanding and Treating Human Psychopathology | RFT stated for clinicians. Human relating is bidirectional and arbitrarily applicable, a generalized operant under contextual control, with mutual and combinatorial entailment and transformation of function. Relating relations explains metaphor, rules are networks whose coordination with events regulates behaviour, and the self is content, process and context. These are offered as the reason direct-contingency behaviour therapy is “inadequate”, and ACT’s acceptance, defusion and values are given RFT readings explicitly labelled heuristic. | Read |
| NOTE-431 | Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, Processes and Outcomes | The ACT model, read in an early manuscript. Psychopathology is psychological inflexibility: cognitive fusion (fed by literality, reason-giving and emotional control) supports experiential avoidance, and both displace present-moment contact and values. Six processes restore flexibility. The manuscript’s evidence: AAQ correlations with distress (21 studies), component studies of acceptance and defusion, mediation in seven trials, and weighted outcome effect sizes (d = .49 post and .69 follow-up against active treatments). | Read |
| NOTE-436 | Psychological Flexibility as a Fundamental Aspect of Health | A narrative review that defines psychological flexibility by four dynamic abilities (adapting to situations, reconfiguring resources, shifting perspective, balancing domains). Flexible regulation beats any fixed strategy (Bonanno 2004; Cheng 2001). Inflexibility marks depression and anxiety, and cardiac vagal control may integrate its forms. Causal direction is open. It recommends experience sampling and multi-informant measures over global self-report. | Read |
| NOTE-437 | The Future of Intervention Science: Process-Based Therapy | A programme paper. Thirty years of DSM-linked trials never turned syndromes into diseases, so evidence-based therapy should target theory-derived, empirically supported processes of change with procedures shown to move them. Its distinctive commitments are a falsification rule for models of change, moderated mediation as a basis for a new nosology, and an idiographic, functional-analytic diagnosis. It offers predictions and cited examples, not new data. | Read |
| NOTE-438 v2 | A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation | 128 experiments on interesting tasks, separate meta-analyses for free-choice behaviour and self-reported interest. Tangible rewards expected for engaging in, completing or doing well at a task undermine free-choice intrinsic motivation (d from −0.28 to −0.40), and less so self-reports; unexpected and task-noncontingent rewards do not; positive feedback enhances, except for children’s free choice. The pattern fits cognitive evaluation theory and contradicts Eisenberger and Cameron’s helplessness and learned-industriousness account. | Read |
| NOTE-439 | The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior | Needs in SDT are innate psychological nutriments, identified functionally by the costs of their thwarting, not by individual differences in their strength. The three needs organize findings on intrinsic motivation and internalization, predict that both the “why” (autonomous vs controlled regulation) and the “what” (intrinsic vs extrinsic aspirations) of goals affect well-being, and explain need substitutes and rigid defences when needs are thwarted. Autonomy is self-organization, defended as an evolved, domain-general design feature. | Read |
| NOTE-440 | Basic psychological need theory: Advancements, critical themes, and future directions | The authors set out nine criteria a basic psychological need must meet, separate need frustration from mere lack of satisfaction, review need frustration’s costs (ill-being, compensatory behaviour, need substitutes) and propose it as transdiagnostic, review the interplay with sleep, food, sex and safety, map need-supportive and need-thwarting practices on a circumplex, and argue that the needs are universal in their effects (“output side”) while the practices that satisfy them vary (“input side”). Novelty, morality and beneficence are weighed as fourth needs and not yet admitted. | Read |
| NOTE-441 | Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will? | SDT’s autonomy is “regulation by the self”: acting with reflective endorsement, graded along the internalization continuum, compatible with external influence, dependence and a single option. Ryan and Deci align it with phenomenological and hierarchical (Frankfurt, Dworkin) accounts and use that definition to answer behaviourist, social-cognitive, reductionist, nonconscious-priming, choice-overload and cultural critiques. Autonomy lies not in being an uncaused cause but in the capacity to “reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions” (p. 1573). | Read |
| NOTE-442 v2 | Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being | SDT’s canonical short statement. Social contexts that support competence, autonomy and relatedness sustain intrinsic motivation and let people internalize and integrate extrinsic regulations; controlling, rejecting or overchallenging contexts undermine intrinsic motivation and leave regulations external or introjected. Autonomy is graded: four kinds of extrinsic motivation lie on a continuum of relative autonomy (Ryan & Connell’s quasi-simplex). Basic needs are defined by their consequences for well-being, and need-deprivation is offered as a principal source of distress and psychopathology. | Read |
| NOTE-443 | Précis of Breakdown of Will | Hyperbolic discounting makes preference reverse with delay alone, so a person is a population of interests that forestall one another. Will is the recursive bundling of choices by treating each as a precedent, which gives an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma and makes Kavka’s toxin rational to drink. The same recursion predicts legalism, “lapse districts”, motivated misperception and compulsive over-control, and premature satiation of appetite limits what will can do for emotional reward. | Read |
| NOTE-448 | Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model | Sheldon and Elliot’s integrated model of goal striving. Self-concordance (identified + intrinsic − introjected − external reasons) predicts sustained effort, effort fully mediates attainment (Study 1 β = .02 ns vs .76; Study 3 β = .08 ns vs .72), attainment predicts change in well-being more strongly when goals are self-concordant (interaction β = .11, .23), and accumulated daily autonomy, competence and relatedness partly mediate attainment’s effect on well-being (Study 3). Three correlational student samples; SEM fits reached after adding paths the modification indices suggested. | Read |
| NOTE-452 | The Intimate Contest for Self-Command | Schelling’s essay proposes “egonomics”, the art of managing oneself. Its core claim is that many self-control tactics are the tactics for managing another person, applied to a “sometime self” who will be in command later. It gives a taxonomy of habits by time profile, onset time, warning time, cost, visibility, damage function and self-aggravation. It refuses a general answer to which self is authentic. It estimates the stakes at “on the order of a trillion dollars” for the current population. | Read |
| NOTE-469 | Thine Own Self: True Self-Concept Accessibility and Meaning in Life | Five studies with students. True-self accessibility, the residual speed of “me” judgments for one’s own true-self traits, predicts MLQ presence of meaning (β = .29, .24, .19 in Studies 1, 2, 4) beyond actual-self accessibility, affect, need satisfaction, liking, overlap, state self-esteem and AI-3 authenticity. Subliminal true-self primes raised reported meaning against actual-self primes (Study 3, ANCOVA F = 4.46) and against disliked actual-self primes (Study 5, contrast F = 5.07), with disliked true-self traits as effective as liked ones. | Read |
| NOTE-470 | “First we invented stories, then they changed us”: The Evolution of Narrative Identity | McAdams’s review essay on narrative identity: “the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”. Storytelling is placed in human evolution as a tool for simulating social life and binding groups. The self is layered as actor, then agent, then author, with the life story arriving in adolescence on the back of autobiographical memory, theory of mind and autobiographical reasoning. Story features predict well-being and generativity. Culture supplies master narratives. Claims are cited, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-550 | List & Pettit — Group Agency and Supervenience | Four conditions of agency (§2). A group’s judgments supervene on members’ contributions under a constitution (§3). With a universal domain, robust group rationality is inconsistent with majoritarian, uniform proposition-wise and proposition-wise supervenience (Propositions 1–3), and consistent with set-wise supervenience, as the premise-based and distributed premise-based procedures show (Propositions 4–5; Table 4). The group’s judgment on a conclusion can be fixed by members’ judgments on premises alone. Emergent agency without members’ conception of the group is judged unintelligible (§6). | Read |
| NOTE-551 | The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and its Influence on Group Behavior | Study 1 (94 undergraduates, 29 groups, 2×2 confederate valence × energy): members’ mood followed the confederate’s valence (self-report change +.41 vs −.26, χ²(1) = 9.97; coders 2.75 vs 2.33, χ²(1) = 10.30). Pleasant contagion predicted self- and peer-rated cooperativeness, coder-rated group cooperativeness (r = .44) and lower conflict (r = −.42 to −.48). Valence asymmetry failed (χ² < 1) and energy effects were marginal and opposite in sign. Study 2 (113 MBA students, 26 groups, no confederate): mood ICC rose from .00 to .24; contagion correlated with cooperation (.49) and conflict (−.49). | Read |
| NOTE-552 | Towards a Theory of Collective Emotions | Collective emotion as synchronous convergence in affective responding towards one event or object. The minimal case needs only shared appraisal structures. Mutual awareness (contagion, mediated sharing) and group membership (identity, collective intentions, norms, collective memory, group-based sentiments) amplify it and change its quality, including a transition from “I-mode” to “We-mode” collective emotion. A conceptual synthesis with no data; the authors say the key linkages lack evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-554 | List — Three kinds of collective attitudes | Aggregate attitudes: a rule or market summarises members’ attitudes; proposition-wise supervenience; no direct role; rationality contingent (majority beliefs on p, q, p∧q can be inconsistent, Table 1). Common attitudes: all hold, with common awareness; enriched proposition-wise supervenience; coordination; consistent by unanimity. Corporate attitudes: a group agent’s; holistic supervenience, like non-reductive physicalism; action-guiding; rationality presupposed. Three lessons of near-independence; Table 2 summarises. | Read |
| NOTE-561 | Double-Loop Learning, Teaching, and Research | Defines single- and double-loop learning and restates the theory of action. People espouse many theories but act on one, Model I, which keeps reasoning tacit and makes errors in governing values undiscussable. That produces self-sealing individual and organizational defensive routines. A CEO workshop transcript shows the pattern, and a quasi-experimental design to test it is proposed but not run. | Read |
| NOTE-563 | Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems | Ostrom’s retrospective. Polycentric arrangements, many formally independent decision centres, can outperform single hierarchies. Long-surviving common-pool resource institutions share eight design principles, not specific rules. In experiments communication and self-chosen sanctions sustain cooperation, and in the field local monitoring predicts outcomes. No single regime type is a panacea. | Read |
| NOTE-566 | ”Exit, Voice, and Loyalty”: Further Reflections and a Survey of Recent Contributions | Hirschman revisits Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Voice deserves more weight than he gave it: it can be felt as a benefit, it carries richer information than exit, and it suits goods whose quality nobody fully knows. Exit can be costly without loyalty and can convey nothing. An organization needs floor levels of both for feedback and cannot survive beyond ceilings; managers may favour the response least threatening to them. | Read |
| NOTE-577 | The Viable System Model: Its Provenance, Development, Methodology and Pathology | Beer’s retrospective on the Viable System Model. Five subsystems are necessary and sufficient for any organism or organization to keep its identity independently, and the structure recurs at every level. The model is defended as a scientific model built by homomorphic mapping, testable but never proved. Pathologies are traced to failing subsystems, chiefly the collapse of Three and Five when Four is missing. Evidence is the author’s recollected consultancy. | Read |
| NOTE-578 | History As Cause: Columbia and Challenger | The Board finds that Columbia and Challenger had the same organizational cause. Evidence that foam shedding and O-ring erosion departed from the design was repeatedly reinterpreted as acceptable, each decision seeming correct in itself. Political and budget constraints, schedule pressure, consensus sign-off, a hierarchy that silenced dissent, and a safety organization dependent on the program sustained the pattern for twenty years and undid post-Challenger reforms. | Read |
| NOTE-581 | Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning | Exploitation’s returns are surer, nearer and closer to the decision than exploration’s, so adaptive processes favour it and become self-destructive. In a simulation of mutual learning, an organizational code improves only from members who deviate from it. Slow socialization, a mix of fast and slow learners, and moderate turnover raise what the organization knows; under environmental change without turnover, its knowledge decays to chance. Where only first place counts, variance beats reliability. | Read |
| NOTE-584 | Risk management in a dynamic society: a modelling problem | Risk management is a control problem across a sociotechnical hierarchy. Under cost and effort gradients, activity migrates toward the boundary of acceptable performance, and redundant defences erode unobserved because breaching one shows no effect. Accidents come from the interaction of many locally reasonable decisions. The remedy is making boundaries visible, not suppressing errors. | Read |
| NOTE-587 | Pervasive negative effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation: The myth continues | The authors of the 1994 rival meta-analysis re-analyse 145 studies. They accept several of Deci, Koestner and Ryan’s corrections, and code reward contingencies by what participants were told rather than by cognitive evaluation theory’s categories. Result: no overall effect on free choice; enhancement on low-interest tasks; on high-interest tasks, undermining only for expected tangible rewards loosely tied to performance, or earned at less than the maximum; neutral or positive effects for rewards tied to a standard or to beating others. All of it is small. | Read |
| NOTE-590 | The stance triangle | Stance is one act with three aspects: in taking a stance a speaker evaluates an object, thereby positions a subject (usually the self), and thereby aligns with other subjects. The triangle’s nodes are two subjects and a shared object; its sides are directed vectors of evaluation (two) and alignment, with positioning reflected back on each subject. Stance belongs to utterances in dialogic context, not to sentences, and needs an object even when none is spoken. A stance follow that resonates with a stance lead must mark the relation (too, either). Argued from Santa Barbara Corpus excerpts; no counts are reported. | Read |
| NOTE-596 | Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory | Four chains of ten adults each learned a 27-item artificial language from 14 items and passed their test output on. Transmission error fell and string–meaning structure rose. Unfiltered (Experiment 1), the languages collapsed to 2–5 words that systematically underspecified meanings (colour lost in every chain). With homonyms filtered from training (Experiment 2), they became compositional, with substrings for colour, shape and motion. Participants believed they were copying. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-604 | Wang, Solloway, Shiffrin & Busemeyer, the QQ equality in 72 surveys | Across all 66 Pew surveys of 2001–2011 that varied the order of two questions, chosen without regard to their outcome, question order changes the answers (p = 0.0004 for the order-effect χ² distribution) while the probability of answering the two questions alike does not change (p = 0.4625 for the q values), as the QQ equality predicts. Paired context effects across 72 studies lie along the predicted line of slope −1 (r = −0.82). | Read |
| NOTE-609 | Computational challenges to Lévi-Strauss transformational methodology | Proposes DEVS modelling and simulation, in the authors’ DEVSimPy, as a way to generate and visualise Lévi-Strauss’s transformations of myth, and extends the canonical formula’s “boundary condition” to a programme on identity politics. What it shows is software: myths as mytheme lists, variants produced by user-specified operations, and one Corsican folktale’s mythemes placed on Google Earth. No claim about myth is tested. | Read |
| NOTE-615 v2 | Морфология сказки | Finds that in a hundred Russian wondertales the stable units are characters’ functions, defined by their consequence for the action: 31 of them, in one order, over seven spheres of action, so every wondertale is a selection from one sequence and the variety lies in omissions, realisations and the casting of characters. Plot and variant cannot be separated, tales can be generated from the scheme, and the wondertale is conjectured to be morphologically a myth. | Read |
| NOTE-618 | Structuralism | From a one-page-in-four preview of chs. I–IV: a structure is defined by wholeness, transformation and self-regulation. Its elements are subordinated to laws of composition; “all known structures… are, without exception, systems of transformation”; and in logic and mathematics regulation is perfect because every operation has an inverse. Structures whose transformations unfold in time, linguistic or social, are regulated but not fully reversible. Structures are real only if governed from within, by a subject defined as “the center of functional activity”. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-628 v2 | Larger communities create more systematic languages | Varies community size alone in a laboratory language-creation game: groups of eight built more systematic, compositional languages than groups of four, faster and more uniformly across groups, while reaching the same communicative success and convergence. Input variability, greater in larger groups, predicted gains in structure; small groups differed more from each other on every measure. | Read |
| NOTE-632 | Discrete-event simulation of Lévi-Strauss’s myth analysis | Specifies the DEVS models behind the authors’ Lévi-Strauss simulation. A myth is a list of (term, function) mythemes; homology, inversion, opposition and symmetry are each the replacement of one term by a user-supplied other in every mytheme; mythemes can be added or removed; the canonical formula is described but not given a computation. Reproducing 70 Mythologiques myths and 28 Corsican tales by transformations chosen to produce them is offered as validation of Lévi-Strauss’s method; it shows only that the encoding can express them. | Read |
| NOTE-636 | Wang & Busemeyer, the QQ model and QQ equality | Derives the QQ equality from a Lüders-projection model of answering attitude questions: the probability of answering two questions differently is the same in both orders, for any belief state, any projectors and any dimension, provided only the first answer changes the state before the second. It holds in five of six data sets and fails, as the authors predicted, in the sixth, where new information came between the questions. The argument that classical models fail it is informal. | Read |
| NOTE-641 | Transformation transformed | Separates structuralism’s method from Lévi-Strauss’s doctrine and makes transformation its core: a structure is the set of invariant relations that orders passage between variants. Lévi-Strauss transformed in two regimes, Goethean development of an initial form (kinship) and Thompsonian deformation between given forms (myth, where the analyst cuts the continuum); Descola’s four ontologies are a Goethean group, and structural comparison the fairest symmetrization anthropology has. | Read |
| NOTE-642 | Morphology of the Folktale | In chs. II–III of the 1968 English text, Propp’s four theses and his 31 functions appear as in the Russian. The functions are named by nouns of action under capitalised headings, with Greek signs for the seven preparatory functions and Latin ones after. “Dramatis personae” and “characters” alternate for the same word, and the class studied is “fairy tales”, under a title Dundes calls misleading. The second edition’s additions are visible on the page: Wagner’s notes correct about forty of Propp’s tale references in two chapters and renumber the tales to the later Afanas’ev numbering. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-649 | Large AI models are cultural and social technologies | Argues that large models are a cultural and social technology, not intelligent agents: lossy, uninvertible summaries of human-produced corpora that, like prices and bureaucratic categories, allow the information to be reorganized at scale. The argument is by analogy and classification; no evidence is offered that could have come out otherwise. It names one mechanism (fitting the training distribution on average makes models worst where data are rare, which may homogenize culture) and leaves both it and its remedy untested. | Read |
| NOTE-704 | Simon — The Architecture of Complexity | Complexity usually takes the form of hierarchy, defined by intensity of interaction rather than subordination. Hierarchies evolve fast because stable intermediate forms survive interruption, and they are nearly decomposable: fast, nearly independent dynamics inside subsystems; slow, aggregate dynamics between them. The theorem is cited, not shown; the evolutionary numbers are illustrative; the social claims are asserted. | Read |
| NOTE-710 | boyd (2008), Taken Out of Context: collapsed contexts | Networked publics remove the boundaries that kept a person’s social contexts apart. Self-presentations that differ by audience coexist while the audiences are segmented, and collide when the medium brings them together. People manage the collision by scripting it (a wedding), by noticing it (meeting the boss while out with friends), or by rebuilding walls (privacy settings, false details). Online, the collision often goes unseen by the person it happens to. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-724 | Wu & Silva — How Millions Coordinate at Scale | A descriptive study of all three r/place editions plus a coalition-recovery method run on 2017. Participation stays heavy-tailed under the uniform five-minute cap; larger coalitions waste more actions and have lower median activity per member; participants concentrate into large coalitions as an event goes on; and which coalitions survive is barely predictable from their size, area, start time and colour entropy until late. Lasting artworks are those whose coalitions keep working under continual overwriting. | Read |
| NOTE-725 | Adams, Fernandez & Witkowski — Two Ways of Understanding Social Dynamics | A short, preliminary study of the 2017 canvas alone. Transitions between 10-minute snapshots are tallied as cellular-automaton-style neighbourhood rules, and a CNN predicts each pixel from its 3×3 neighbourhood. Prediction worsens with the horizon and dips in the middle of the event. Locally growing objects are predicted, and designs coordinated off the canvas are missed. There are no baselines or error bars, and participants are never modelled. | Read |
| NOTE-731 | Falmagne, Stephenson & Levin — Interpretable early warnings using machine learning in an online game-experiment | On the 2022 r/place canvas, gradient-boosted trees fed 19 composition-level time series with a 7-hour memory predict the time until a crowd-built image is abruptly overrun, far better than variance or autocorrelation trends, and still work on 2023. The precursors it relies on are many and do not reduce to critical slowing down; a large share of transitions give no warning. The interpretation of the precursors is the authors’ conjecture from SHAP curves. | Read |
| NOTE-733 | Litherland & Mørch — Instruction vs. emergence on r/place | A mixed-methods case study of one 2017 r/place artwork, the Mona Lisa, and its forum, r/monalisaclan. The design was set and revised in the forum through linked blueprints, negotiated with neighbouring communities, and carried out by tens of thousands of placers. A few central forum members could allow or stop proposals. The authors frame the outcome as two control mechanisms, top-down platform rules (“instruction”) and bottom-up emergence, and stress that quantitative traces cannot tell cooperation from conflict or reveal affiliation. | Read |
| NOTE-768 | Nowak et al. — Functional Synchronization | A programmatic proposal, offered by its authors “as a heuristic for research agendas”: functions at every level from neurons to groups are performed by functional units, which form when lower-level elements synchronize and dissolve when the task ends. Synchronization here means any binding of dynamics, including complementary roles, not convergence on one state. Group synchronization may come from mutual influence or from a common external signal, and the paper treats both alike. | Read |
| NOTE-778 | Rasooly and Rozzi — How manipulable are prediction markets? | A randomised field experiment on 817 Manifold markets moved prices by ±5 percentage points. The yes–no gap of 10 points was 7.5 after a week, 6.9 after 30 days and 5.9 after 60 days in unresolved markets, so about 60% of an arbitrary shock was still there. Reversion is fast in the first week and then slows. A price-impact model with finite, risk-averse traders predicts lasting partial persistence even when no trader learns from the price. Markets with more traders, more activity or a Metaculus twin revert more, but those splits are correlational and only marginally significant. | Read |
| NOTE-792 | Devezer et al. — Scientific discovery in a model-centric framework | A population of scientists, chosen at random each step, tests a proposed linear model against the current consensus model by AIC or SC, and the winner becomes the consensus. Which models get proposed (the strategy mix) decides where the consensus spends its time. A population of boundary testers reproduces results almost perfectly while spending little time at the true model. Replication does not change the transition matrix, so reproducibility cannot cause convergence. A population with all four strategies equally represented is never the worst and has low variance. | Read |
| NOTE-795 | Handfield et al. — Cooperative Dilemmas in Rational Debate | Two debaters move through a Betz-style space of truth assignments, each moving minimally when refuted, with payoff u = w·v − d (true beliefs against changes of mind). At moderate truth weights the truth-optimal equilibrium is asymmetric: one debater argues boldly and the other free-rides with a compromise strategy, a snowdrift dilemma. At low weights, or with error, both exit. In a narrow borderline region of mixed equilibria, raising the weight on truth lowers collective accuracy. A two-person model, n = 3 propositions, and every result is numerical. | Read |
| NOTE-810 | Vilone and Polizzi — Opinion misperception and the emergence of silence | In two agent-based models on scale-free networks, agents’ private beliefs are fixed and only what they say changes. A small hard-core minority placed on nodes of a chosen degree makes the expressed and locally perceived opinion far more minority-leaning than the beliefs, mainly by driving 55–60% of agents, almost all of the majority, into silence. The network’s direct effect on perception is small and not even of constant sign. Simulation only, with no empirical validation. | Read |
| NOTE-840 | Golub & Jackson — Naïve Learning in Social Networks and the Wisdom of Crowds | Agents get independent signals with mean μ and repeatedly replace their beliefs by fixed weighted averages of their neighbours’ (DeGroot). In a convergent network the consensus is s·p(0), with s the unit left eigenvector of the interaction matrix, and a growing society’s limits converge in probability to μ if and only if the largest influence weight tends to zero (Proposition 2). With reciprocal, equal weights this is maximum degree over total degree → 0. A finite group that everyone attends to blocks it; balance plus minimal out- or in-dispersion guarantee it. How fast consensus is reached is unrelated to whether it is right. | Read |
| NOTE-852 | Chuai & Zhao — Anger makes fake news viral online | On Weibo 2011–2016, lexicon-scored fake news carries more anger and less joy than true news, and in regressions with content, author and topic controls a post’s share of anger words goes with more retweets and its share of joy words with fewer; the R² of the retweet models is 0.08–0.13. Two anger-dominated items in a 1,291-response survey drew slightly more anxiety-management and information-sharing motive than joy-dominated ones. The paper calls this causal; the design is observational. | Read |
| NOTE-876 | Harris et al. — Failures to replicate a key result of selective accessibility | Five preregistered experiments (N = 128 each, about four times the originals’ N) failed to replicate the lexical-decision result of Mussweiler and Strack (2000a, Studies 1 and 2). That result was that after a comparison with a high or low anchor, words consistent with the anchor are recognised faster. Every experiment produced a large anchoring effect on the later estimate (d ≈ 0.85–1.39), and none showed the accessibility interaction (all η²G ≤ .004). An exploratory Bayesian meta-analysis gave a Bayes factor of 21.1 for the null. Validation experiments found that the same tasks also missed direct picture priming. So the authors conclude that the method cannot detect the effect, not that selective accessibility is false. They still call the theory “a good explanation”, but say the earlier lexical-decision evidence “is not a strong part of the evidence base”. | Read |
| NOTE-877 | Strack & Mussweiler — Explaining the enigmatic anchoring effect | In three small between- and within-subjects studies (N = 32, 32 and 67), the anchor’s effect on a later estimate depended on what the comparison task brought to mind, not on the number alone. With the anchor number held fixed, the effect was large when the estimate was on the dimension compared (Study 1). It reversed to contrast when the estimate was about a very different object (Study 2). After plausible anchors, the comparison took longer and the estimate came faster (Study 3). Accessibility is inferred from these moderations and from latencies. No study measures what knowledge was retrieved. The paper also keeps an adjustment-like route for implausible anchors, which anchored at least as strongly. | Read |
| NOTE-995 | Starmans & Bloom — Windows to the soul | Asked which of two pictured flies or snowflakes was “closer to” a cartoon character, preschoolers and adults chose those near the eyes, even when the eyes were on an alien’s chest and even over positions the character could see. The authors conclude that people intuitively locate the self at or near the eyes, and, since 4-year-olds do it too, not from learned ideas about the brain. The judgement is about where another, drawn person is; the step to the self, and on to a “phenomenological sense” of where we reside, is assumed and not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-1021 | Boyle — The Public Domain | Intellectual property is a limited monopoly, and its limits and the public domain do as much work as its rights. Cheaper copying makes the limits more important, not less. A second enclosure is fencing facts, genes, methods and musical fragments without evidence that it helps; the database right is the one natural experiment, and it failed. The music chapter shows a genre founded by rewording recent songs. The argument is mostly from chosen cases. | Read |
| NOTE-1023 | Lessig — Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy | Remix is quotation in media, and its meaning comes from the reference, so it needs the original. Copyright regulates copies, every digital use is a copy, so the law that once left amateurs alone now reaches every ordinary use and makes read/write culture presumptively illegal. Commercial and sharing economies are kept apart by whether money is a proper term; hybrids join them and survive only while the line holds. The legal reforms and the economics are argued, not measured. | Read |
| NOTE-1026 | Perzanowski and Schultz — The End of Ownership | Ownership of what we buy is being replaced by licences, DRM and services. The law of exhaustion that protected buyers is built around owning a tangible copy, and digital use and transfer either copy at every step or involve no copy the buyer holds. The authors argue licences are permissions that cannot redefine a sale, show by survey that “Buy Now” misleads, and propose a multifactor digital exhaustion test. Argued from cases and one survey; US law as of 2016. | Read |
| NOTE-1031 | Besley and Prat — Handcuffs for the grabbing hand | A retrospective-voting model in which an incumbent can pay outlets to suppress verifiable bad news. Because one outlet reporting informs every voter, each outlet must be paid what it would earn as the only one to break the story, so the media are captured exactly when n·τa < r: the number of outlets, the transaction cost of transfers and audience revenue protect against capture, and the rent of office invites it. Capture ends turnover and lowers voter welfare without deceiving anyone: voters know silence is uninformative. | Read |
| NOTE-1033 | Kleinberg and Raghavan — Algorithmic monoculture and social welfare | Two firms each hire the best available candidate by either a private noisy ranking or one shared algorithmic ranking. If, at equal accuracy, a second mover prefers an independent ranking (preference for the first position) and is better off after a less accurate competitor (preference for weaker competition), then for every human accuracy there is a more accurate algorithm that both firms strictly prefer to use, yet both are worse off, and so is welfare, than if neither used it. The Mallows model meets the conditions for every candidate distribution; Gaussian and Laplacian random utility models meet them for three candidates; Plackett–Luce never does. | Read |
| NOTE-1036 | Hayek — The use of knowledge in society | Argues that the economic problem of a society is not allocating given resources by a known plan but using knowledge “of the particular circumstances of time and place”, which exists only dispersed and cannot be put into statistics for a central authority. Decisions that depend on it must be left to the “man on the spot”, and the price system tells him the relative scarcities he needs without the causes behind them. An argument from examples and from the logic of choice, with no model or evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-1039 | Szeidl and Szucs — Media capture through favor exchange | In Hungary, 1994–2016, state-owned firms’ advertising, unlike private firms’, shifted sharply toward outlets at five events that made them connected to the right-wing government and away at the event that cut the connection, and corruption coverage moved the other way at the three events with content data. A structural model whose slant gap between a connected and an unconnected outlet splits into owner ideology plus a favor-exchange term attributes the coverage drop to both, under identifying assumptions the authors call strong for print and weaker for online. | Read |
| NOTE-1040 | Di Tella and Franceschelli — Government advertising and media coverage of corruption scandals | In the four main Argentine national newspapers, April 1998–December 2007, months in which a newspaper received more government advertising were months in which it gave less front-page space to the federal government’s corruption scandals, within newspaper and month and within each newspaper-president pair: in this version, 0.31 of a front page per month per standard deviation of advertising. The association holds for advertising placed by the central agency Télam and not for autonomous agencies, and not for scandals of non-political actors. The design shows an association; the authors read it as consistent with coverage traded for transfers. | Read |
| NOTE-1042 | Collins — Learning from the outsider within | Black women intellectuals in sociology are outsiders within: trained into its paradigms but rooted in experience those paradigms omit or distort. From that position they see two kinds of anomaly, omission and distortion, which outsiders lack the professional authority to press and insiders are not placed to see, having produced them. The essay argues this from the content of Black feminist thought, with no study of who detects what; it proposes institutionalizing the tension rather than resolving it. | Read |
| NOTE-1046 | McCombs and Shaw — The agenda-setting function of mass media | Among 100 Chapel Hill voters not yet committed to a candidate in September–October 1968, the aggregate emphasis they gave the campaign’s issues correlated +.967 (major items) and +.979 (minor items) with the composite emphasis of the nine news media serving them, and voters who leaned to a candidate agreed more with all the news than with news about their own side in 18 of 24 comparisons. The authors read this as agenda-setting rather than selective perception, and say the correlations do not prove it. | Read |
| NOTE-1050 | Espeland and Sauder — Rankings and reactivity | An interview study of US law schools (136 open-ended interviews with administrators and faculty, with corroborating data) proposing that public measures are reactive through two mechanisms: self-fulfilling prophecy, by which reactions to a measure confirm its expectations or raise its validity by making the measured conform to it, and commensuration, which simplifies, decontextualizes and ranks. The effects it sorts are reallocation of resources, redefinition of work, and gaming. A framework offered as “an orienting heuristic”, not a general theory, and not a measurement of effect sizes. | Read |
| NOTE-1052 | Arthur — Competing technologies and historical small events (working paper) | In a model where two types of agent arrive in random order and each adopts whichever of two technologies pays it more, with returns linear in the number of previous adopters, increasing returns make the difference in adoptions a random walk with absorbing barriers: one technology takes the market with probability one, which one is decided by the order of arrivals, it need not be the better one, and marginal subsidies cannot move it once it has locked in. Under diminishing returns the barriers reflect and the market shares predictably. | Read |
| NOTE-1053 | Schram and Ule — Regulatory independence may limit electoral holdup but entrench capture | In a laboratory game of one infrastructure operator, two policymakers and three voters (59 groups), letting the first elected policymaker fix the price for all nine periods, the paper’s “regulatory independence”, moved prices toward the efficient level when policymakers’ payoffs were aligned with consumers’, and raised prices further above it when they were aligned with the operator, “capture entrenchment”. Voters’ pressure under flexible regulation lowered prices under capture but did not remove the effect. | Read |
| NOTE-1074 | Wacquant — A concise genealogy and anatomy of habitus | A short essay that takes habitus back to Aristotle’s hexis and to Bourdieu’s first use of it, for the misfit between dispositions and a changing world in Béarn and Algeria, and clears four misreadings: habitus is multilayered and revised in practice, not the replica of one structure; it need not be coherent; it suits crisis and change as well as reproduction; and it never generates action by itself, but only as triggered by positions in a social world. A conceptual clarification, not a finding; its empirical warrant is cited. | Read |
| NOTE-1075 | Swidler — Culture in action | Culture does not cause action by supplying the values that set its ends. It supplies a repertoire of skills, habits and styles from which people build strategies of action, which outlast the ends they serve. In settled periods culture constrains through the cost of retooling and loosely coupled beliefs; in unsettled periods explicit ideologies govern action directly, but structural opportunities decide which survive. A theoretical argument with illustrative cases and no data of its own. | Read |
| NOTE-1077 | Abbott — Linked ecologies (through its French precursor) | In the precursor, Abbott’s audiences for professional claims, above all the state, are themselves ecologies of competing actors, so every event in a profession’s history sits in two ecologies at once and succeeds only if it serves actors in both. New York’s medical licensing swung back and forth because it was a minor issue in politics and a major one in medicine; differences of tempo between the ecologies changed the doctors’ allies. “Hinges” are named and left undeveloped. The published article’s universities, avatars and English case were not reached. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1078 | Sewell — A theory of structure | A reformulation of Giddens’s duality of structure. Structures are sets of virtual schemas and actual resources that sustain each other: resources enact schemas and schemas are validated by the resources their enactment yields. Change comes from inside, because structures are multiple and intersect, schemas transpose to new cases, resources are polysemic and accumulate unpredictably. Agency is the capacity to transpose schemas and remobilize resources. A conceptual argument, with a conjecture that depth, more than power, makes a structure durable. | Read |
| NOTE-1080 | Cooley — Human nature and the social order | The looking-glass self is one large class of the social self, not its definition: “I” is a feeling of appropriation attached to any idea, and in the looking-glass kind its tone is set by an imagined judgement in an imagined mind. The imagined others need not be living, present or accurately pictured, and the group is realized in the mind through imagined persons. Non-conformity driven by opposition is itself steered by what others enjoin. An essay from observation and literature, with no method that could fail. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1085 | Lerman, Yan & Wu — The majority illusion in social networks | A sampling fact about networks, not a finding about people: when an attribute is correlated with degree, the share of nodes that see it in a majority of their neighbours can far exceed its global share (60–80% of nodes when 5% hold it, in a heavy-tailed synthetic network), and more so in disassortative networks. A binomial model from the joint degree distribution predicts the share. No person’s belief or behaviour is measured, and the attributes on the real networks are assigned, not observed. | Read |
| NOTE-1087 | Helmreich, Merritt & Wilhelm — The evolution of Crew Resource Management training | A short history and argument. CRM began with a 1979 NASA workshop and United’s 1981 program, and passed through five “generations”, from managerial-style seminars to integration with technical training under the FAA’s AQP. Its effects are hard to validate (accident rates cannot be used), acceptance of its concepts decays over time even with recurrent training, and it exported poorly across cultures. The authors propose error management (avoid, trap, mitigate) as a rationale all pilots can accept. Command is mentioned only in passing. | Read |
| NOTE-1089 | Acharya, Blackwell & Sen — The political legacy of American slavery | Among Southern whites today, those in counties where a larger share of the 1860 population was enslaved are more Republican, more opposed to affirmative action, more racially resentful and colder toward blacks; the association survives 1860 controls and a cotton-suitability instrument, and is not accounted for by today’s black share, by 1935–40 migration or by income inequality. The divergence in voting appears after Reconstruction, not before the war, and is smaller where agriculture mechanized early, which the authors read as a post-emancipation amplification of attitudes then passed down locally. | Read |
| NOTE-1092 | Penglase — The unspoken whiteness of Brazilian jiu-jitsu | An anthropologist’s argument, from secondary histories, Gracie family sources and a little ethnography, that the Gracies’ challenge matches against luta livre placed their jiu-jitsu in Brazil’s racial hierarchy as white, mostly through class, neighbourhood and employment rather than in words. Along the way it documents that the Gracies fought over the rules as well as under them, and that jiu-jitsu prospered while luta livre, poorer and darker, went underground; it then absorbed luta livre’s no-gi style until only the social difference remained. | Read |
| NOTE-1093 | Bigand et al. — The geometry of interpersonal synchrony in human dance | In 35 dyads of untrained dancers facing each other, shared music and visual contact were varied independently. Each raised interpersonal synchrony, in different principal movements and with no interaction: lateral and hand movements synchronized through seeing the partner, anteroposterior movements such as head bobs through the shared music, and vertical bounce through both. Which factor drove a movement’s synchrony could be read from its spatial direction (100% classification) and not from its periodicity. The direction of coupling between partners was not estimated. | Read |
| NOTE-1112 | Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium | Read for §4.6 only. Not every complete preorder has a utility function: the lexicographic ordering of R² has none. Under a continuity assumption (closed upper and lower contour sets), a complete preorder on a connected subset of Rˡ, and more generally on a connected separable space, has a continuous utility function, and conversely. Debreu credits the separable form to Eilenberg (1941), and his own 1954 paper for dropping connectedness on second-countable spaces. Utility is defined only up to increasing transformation. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1122 | Juhász — Temporary protection and technology adoption (December 2015 draft) | A natural experiment: the Napoleonic blockade raised the effective cost of reaching London much more for northern than for southern departments of the French Empire. Better-protected departments added more mechanized cotton-spinning capacity by 1812, kept and extended that lead through 1887, had more productive spinning firms in 1840 and higher industrial value added per capita in 1860, but not in 1896, 1930 or 2000. The long-run estimates rest on an instrument the author concedes is weak (first-stage F mostly below 10). The protection was a war measure, not a policy; what persisted was the industry’s location, not the protection. | Read |
| NOTE-1124 | Gollwitzer & Sheeran — Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis | A meta-analysis of 94 tests (1990–2003, 8,461 participants, mostly students and laboratory tasks) finds that adding an if-then plan to a goal intention raised goal attainment by d = .65 against the goal intention alone, across four problems of goal striving, with large effects on cue accessibility and on the immediacy, efficiency and non-conscious running of the planned response in small sets of tests (k = 1 to 7). Plans are said to delegate control “to specified situational cues” while staying dependent on an active goal. Publication bias was checked only by comparing published with unpublished tests; the 2024 meta-analysis of 642 tests finds it substantial. | Read |
| NOTE-1126 | Friedkin, Jia & Bullo — A theory of the evolution of social power | A Friedkin–Johnsen model of opinion change on each issue, with a reflection mechanism between issues: a member’s closure to influence on the next issue equals their influence centrality on the last. In simulation it drives one member to full closure and the rest to full openness. In 30 four-person student groups discussing 15 choice dilemmas, prior centrality predicted next-issue closure, more strongly along the sequence; influence networks thinned and discussions shortened. The rate of consensus did not change. | Read |
| NOTE-1131 v2 | Sheeran, Listrom & Gollwitzer — The when and how of planning: 642 tests of implementation intentions | A meta-analysis of 642 tests (294 reports to September 2019). Forming implementation intentions improved behaviour (d = .27), cognitive performance (.47), affect regulation (.66) and social judgement (.52), pooled d = .36; publication bias was substantial, and a robust Bayesian estimate is d = .15, small and highly heterogeneous. Contingent if-then plans beat schedule plans (.43 against .29); rehearsing the plan once helped, recording it hurt, and effects were large only when motivation was high. A taxonomy of cues and responses finds nearly every kind effective. | Read |
| NOTE-1135 | Jia, MirTabatabaei, Friedkin & Bullo — Opinion dynamics and the evolution of social power in influence networks | DeGroot averaging on each issue, and between issues each member’s self-weight is set to their share of control over the last consensus. With a fixed, strongly connected matrix of relative interpersonal weights, self-weights converge from every non-autocratic start to a unique equilibrium fixed by the eigenvector centralities: power ranks as centrality, accumulates at the top, is autocratic exactly for a star network and democratic exactly for a doubly stochastic one. Members whom no path reaches end with no power. | Read |
| NOTE-1139 | Miller, Resnick and Zeckhauser — Eliciting informative feedback: the peer-prediction method | A mechanism-design paper with proofs and a worked example. A center with no ground truth pays each rater a strictly proper scoring rule applied to the posterior over a reference rater’s report implied by her own report. Truth-telling is a strict Nash equilibrium, payments can be scaled to buy effort and balanced among raters, and coarse reports can be elicited for two types. Uninformative equilibria remain, and collusion, risk aversion, unelicited private signals and trust in the center are left as limits. | Read |
| NOTE-1151 | Leibo et al. — Multi-agent reinforcement learning in sequential social dilemmas | A descriptive simulation study. It defines sequential social dilemmas, Markov games whose learned cooperative and defecting policies give social-dilemma payoffs, and runs independent deep Q-learners on two two-player games. Scarcity and costly conflict produce aggression in Gathering; group benefit produces joint hunting in Wolfpack; and network size moves defection in opposite directions in two games that both embed a Prisoner’s Dilemma. | Read |
| NOTE-1157 | DeGroot — Reaching a consensus | A group whose members each replace their opinion, over and over, by a fixed weighted average of everyone’s current opinions, F⁽ⁿ⁾ = PⁿF, is a Markov chain run on opinions. It reaches a consensus from every start exactly when the chain has one closed class and that class is aperiodic. The consensus is then a linear opinion pool whose weights are the chain’s stationary vector, which gives members outside the closed class no weight. Two closed classes, or one periodic class, give no consensus. The weights are fixed, and nothing in the model tracks the truth. | Read |
| NOTE-1216 | Flack — Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism | A conceptual paper, not a report of new data. Downward causation is made operational as components tuning their behaviour to their own estimates of coarse-grained variables that they collectively compute. In its weak, “apparent” form only one component need tune, to a variable slower than the behaviour producing it, and estimates need be neither correct nor shared. The strong, “effective” form needs the variable to be predictive (slow), robust, used nearly universally, agreed on, and gaining mutual information with the microscopic behaviour; only then does Flack speak of a new organizational level. Regeneration of the variable by its use is not among the criteria; what reinforces itself is convergence of the estimates. The macaque power distribution is the worked example, reviewed from earlier papers. | Read |
| NOTE-1244 | Supporters, Followers, Fans, and Flaneurs: A Taxonomy of Spectator Identities in Football | A conceptual taxonomy of how spectators identify with football clubs, on two axes: traditional–consumer (the basis of investment) and hot–cool (how central the club is to the self). Supporters are traditional and hot; followers traditional and cool; fans consumer and hot; flâneurs consumer and cool. Giulianotti argues that football’s “hypercommodification” since the late 1980s moves identification from the supporter towards the flâneur, while clubs still depend on supporters to make the spectacle flâneurs consume. Ideal types, with no data. | Read |
| NOTE-1246 | Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity | The book’s first chapter, read alone. Cultural trauma is a loss of identity and meaning in a group, not an individual wound, and need not be felt by everyone in it. Slavery became the trauma of African Americans “in retrospect”: in the 1880s, when Reconstruction failed and white North and South reconciled around a memory of slavery as benign, a generation never enslaved made its memory the “primal scene” of a collective identity. Membership was set by “a common fate, not necessarily a common experience”, whether or not one’s ancestors were enslaved. Intellectuals and social movements carry the trauma; each social generation reworks it; it became national memory only with the civil rights movement. The chapter is a framework and a plan; the evidence is in chapters 2–6. | Read |
| NOTE-1251 | Self-categorization and social identification: Making sense of us and them | A textbook account of the social identity perspective. Self-categorization is hierarchical (personal, social, human) and situational (salience = accessibility × fit, with comparative and normative fit), and leads to depersonalization. Social identification has seven components (Ashmore et al. 2004). Social identity theory explains minimal-group bias by positive distinctiveness. Multiple-categorization models predict when bias falls. Unlike Hornsey 2008, it says the self-esteem hypothesis “has received extensive empirical support”. | Read |
| NOTE-1253 | Social Identity Theory and Self-categorization Theory: A Historical Review | A short critical history of the social identity approach. Social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner 1979) is about intergroup relations: positive distinctiveness and the socio-structural variables of status, permeability, stability and legitimacy. Self-categorization theory (Turner et al. 1987) is about categorization at levels of inclusiveness, salience by accessibility and fit, and depersonalization. It records two dead ends (identification predicting bias, and the self-esteem hypothesis) and a later softening of the “functional antagonism” between personal and social identity. Hornsey lists the criticisms and declines to answer them. | Read |
| NOTE-1255 | Intergenerational transmission of paternal trauma among US Civil War ex-POWs | Children of Union Army veterans born after the Civil War and surviving to 45 (19,903 children of 6,367 fathers). Sons of men held in Confederate camps when prisoner exchanges had stopped and conditions were worst had a mortality hazard 1.11 times that of non-POWs’ sons (P = 0.009); exchange-period POWs’ sons and all daughters were unaffected. Within families, sons born after the war died at 2.23 times the rate of brothers born before it (P = 0.056). The effect was 1.20 among sons born in the second quarter and nil in the fourth, read as maternal nutrition reversing it. Socioeconomic and maternal controls left it unchanged. By elimination the authors favour an epigenetic route but cannot reject psychological or cultural ones. | Read |
| NOTE-1268 | Social Influence and Group Identity | A review of the group-identity account of social influence, grounded in self-categorization theory. Influence from a group need not be compliance for approval: when the group is a level of the self, in-group sources produce private acceptance, so influence is “partly self-influence”. Classic conformity, obedience, minority-influence, emergency, helping and contagion findings are reread as bounded by shared identity. Identification, prototypicality, intergroup threat and context moderate the effect. Isolation and anonymity strengthen group influence, and crowd members switch to a group identity rather than losing the self. The evidence is reported, not presented. | Read |
| NOTE-1271 | Managing the Terror of Publication Bias: A Systematic Review of the Mortality Salience Hypothesis | Re-runs Burke et al.’s meta-analysis of the mortality-salience hypothesis on a decade more data, with five tools for bias. Uncorrected, 635 effects give g = 0.81 (about r = .37), close to Burke et al.’s r = .35. Selection models (g = 0.36) and WAAP-WLS (g = 0.39) put the average near r = .18; PET-PEESE finds no positive effect. A p-curve of 825 focal tests finds evidential value at 25% average power; z-curve puts the expected replication rate at 19% and the expected discovery rate at 8%. Five of nine preregistered replications succeeded. True effects are so heterogeneous that 95% of them span r = −.47 to .66. The authors conclude some MS effects are real, the average is about half the published one, and most studies could not detect it. | Read |
| NOTE-1272 | The Oral History of ‘I’m the Juggernaut, Bitch!’ | Journalism. Xavier Nazario and Randy Hayes redubbed a 1990s X-Men episode in November 2005 and posted it on 14 February 2006. Within months it had millions of views. A TV news segment, before the film’s release, reported the line “making it into the new X-Men movie”. The film says “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” Kinberg, via Polygon: “That was a reshoot Ratner line.” That Ratner was “likely a fan” of the video is Siegel’s inference, not testimony. The videos were later taken down amid Viacom’s takedowns, and the creators were never paid. | Read |
| NOTE-1280 | Group Identity, Social Influence, and Collective Action Online: Extensions and Applications of the SIDE Model | The SIDE model as its authors state it. Deindividuation theory’s account, in which anonymity and immersion cut self-awareness and release antinormative behaviour, is rejected. Anonymity within a group makes the salient identity more salient. With a group identity salient, people conform more to its local norms. With personal identity salient, they move away from the group norm. Depersonalization is “the emergence of group in the self”, not a loss of self. A strategic dimension adds that anonymity to a powerful out-group frees in-group-normative behaviour it would punish. The model is extended to visible media, online communities and collective action. The evidence is reported, not presented. | Read |
| NOTE-1284 | Self and Collective: Cognition and Social Context | Self-categorization theory’s statement on the self. Personal and social identity are levels of self-categorization, equally authentic. Which category is used, and with what content and prototype, is set by perceiver readiness and fit (metacontrast and normative fit), and so varies lawfully with the comparative frame of reference. The authors go on to speculate that the self is not a stored structure at all but is generated each time. A theoretical paper; the evidence is the group’s own studies, reported and not presented. | Read |
| NOTE-1287 | A Mathematical Theory of Saving | How much should a nation save? For a community that lives for ever, with fixed numbers, tastes and motives, and that does not discount later enjoyments (“ethically indefensible”, from “the weakness of the imagination”), saving times the marginal utility of consumption must equal the shortfall of present net enjoyment from Bliss, the maximum obtainable. The rule does not depend on the interest rate, and asks much more saving than usual: £300 out of £500 on an illustrative scale. A constant discount rate below the interest rate gives the same rule for a “modified utility”; one above it runs consumption down to subsistence. The paper then takes discounting as a fact of saving. People care less for heirs than for themselves, and families with different rates end divided between bliss and subsistence. | Read |
| NOTE-1295 | Reconceptualizing Individuals, Categories, and the Social Group: Self-Categorization Theory 2.0 | An insider’s critique and reconstruction of self-categorization theory. Categorization into equivalence classes yields interchangeable members, not a group entity. Meta-contrast, taken as the mechanism of entity formation, is intractable (2ⁿ subsets: 9.3 hours for 25 people at 1,000 operations a second). Its prototype semantics fails compositionality. The proposed SCT2.0: self-categorization is the categorization of intentional agents; groups are holistic entities triggered by cues to collective intentionality; and relations are propositional, in a language of thought. A theoretical paper; its own evidence is under review. | Read |
| NOTE-1299 | Belonging to a community of European fans? European common in-group identity formation through football fandom | A quota-sampled online survey of football fans in Germany, Spain, Poland and Norway (n = 3,685 analysed). Fans identify with fan communities at three levels, club (mean 6.13/10), nation (5.57) and Europe (5.29). In a two-factor solution the European item loads on its own factor. In OLS, European fan-community identification goes with trust in European fans (b = 0.34), foreign-league viewing, positive views of fans, attachment to Europe, youth and education. It is not associated with critiques of football governance. Cross-sectional; the dependent variable is one item. | Read |
| NOTE-1301 | The Minimal Group Paradigm and its maximal impact in research on social categorization | A brief review of the minimal group paradigm. Groups are novel, arbitrary and anonymous, and allocations serve no personal interest. Tajfel’s first studies found fairness strong but in-group favouritism reliable, and maximizing the in-group’s relative advantage sometimes beat maximizing its gain. It replicated with revised matrices. It is criticized as reciprocity, as projection of the positive personal self onto the new group, and as limited to positive resources. When participants could also pay themselves, they kept the most for themselves and still favoured the in-group with the rest. The paradigm now serves mostly to study other effects of mere categorization. | Read |
| NOTE-1303 | Enemies with benefits: the dual role of rivalry in shaping sports fans’ identity | Stadium-intercept survey at eight Bundesliga clubs in December 2014 (N = 571 after 164 fans with no named archrival were dropped); SEM. Perceived rivalry intensity lowers fans’ sense of being respected by the rival’s fans (β = −.31). It raises perceived distinctiveness (.27), cohesion (.20) and respect from other clubs’ fans (.09). These positive effects run indirectly, almost entirely through perceived reciprocity of the rivalry (indirect .18–.20), and barely through disidentification with the rival. For respect from other fans the direct path is negative (−.08, ns). Cross-sectional, with a single-item predictor. | Read |
| NOTE-1305 | Witnessing and cultural trauma: the role of flashbulb memories in the trauma process | An essay, with no new data, that adds a carrier group to Alexander’s trauma process: ordinary members of a community who learned of an event at a distance. Their flashbulb memories, of where they were when they heard, let them say “I was there” and testify to what it was like. Such memories are specific to the affected community and can mark membership in it; where nearly everyone has one, speaker and audience coincide and the process starts democratically. They are inaccurate in detail but held with high confidence, and that shared confidence makes the witness “authentic”. They pass to children: in Meyler et al. (2020), 89% of children nine or younger at 9/11 could report a parent’s flashbulb memory, and stronger identification as American went with knowing it better. | Read |
| NOTE-1311 | Economics and Identity | Puts identity, a person’s self-image as a member of social categories, into the utility function. Utility falls when one’s own actions break one’s category’s prescriptions (Is) and when others’ actions do (Io); the second can be relieved, at a cost, by acting against the violator. A two-person game gives four equilibria and shows taxes and rhetoric shifting them. Applications: gender-typed jobs and their erosion after the women’s movement; the socially excluded choosing an oppositional identity even with no peer pressure; and the gender asymmetry in housework, where husbands’ share rises to no more than 37% however little they earn. Evidence is illustrative. The authors call identity a nonpecuniary motive and never call it self-interest. | Read |
| NOTE-1319 | A comparison of minimal group induction procedures | Two experiments (N = 42, 73) with US undergraduates compare four minimal-group inductions: false feedback on painting preference (the classic), imagined assignment, random assignment, and memorizing five names of one group with no categorization. All four gave comparable explicit in-group liking, identification and bonus-money favouritism. Only memorization gave large IAT effects of in-group preference and self-association (d up to 2.16 against the classic); the classic gave none. Implicit and explicit measures correlated weakly. Allocation favouritism tracked explicit identification (r = .37) and was carried mostly by one colour group. | Read |
| NOTE-1322 | Many Labs 4: Failure to Replicate Mortality Salience Effect With and Without Original Author Involvement | Twenty-one labs at 18 US universities replicated Study 1 of Greenberg et al. (1994), in which writing about one’s own death raised preference for a pro-US over an anti-US essay author (d = 1.34, N = 59). Half the labs used a protocol designed with the original authors, half built their own from the paper. With 17 labs and 1,550 usable participants, the pooled effect was Hedges’ g = 0.07 (95% CI −0.03 to 0.17), with no heterogeneity across labs and no difference between protocols, under each of three preregistered exclusion rules. The expert-advised labs alone reached g = 0.08 to 0.19, none significant. The question of whether expertise aids replication went untested, because there was no effect for it to aid. | Read |
| NOTE-1353 v2 | Guida, Minutola and Presti — Propagation, not aggregation | A conceptual paper with no data. Organizational flexibility is put as a pattern of coordinated, values-consistent action that is retained and spread or absorbed and extinguished, not as the mean of members’ flexibility. Whether a rise in a member’s flexibility propagates is said to depend jointly on that member’s leverage over the consequences colleagues meet and on whether the culture reinforces or penalizes values-consistent action; Bond’s (2018) leader-based route is the high-leverage special case. Five propositions, a factorial design and two measures that do not yet exist are set out. | Read |
| NOTE-1355 | SEI CERT — Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats, seventh edition | A practitioners’ guide of 22 best practices for insider risk, each with challenges, quick wins and mappings to NIST SP 800-53 and other standards, grounded in the CERT repository of more than 3,000 insider cases that ended in conviction or civil liability. Its separation of duties practice turns on collusion, and its positive-incentives practice argues, from three rated cases and a 23-response survey, that perceived organizational support lowers insider misbehaviour. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1360 | Franklin — The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin | Franklin’s memoir of his life to 1757, written in four sittings from 1771 to 1790 and left unfinished. Its constant subject is how he got others to act with him: by modest, undogmatic speech, by putting his projects forward as “a scheme of a number of friends”, by preparing opinion in print and through the Junto’s satellite clubs, and, in the borrowed-book anecdote of Part Three, by asking an opponent for a favour. He gives that anecdote as proof of an “old maxim” and as a lesson in prudence, not as a claim about how liking forms. | Read |
| NOTE-1362 | Soros — Fallibility, reflexivity, and the human uncertainty principle | Soros’s statement of his framework. Participants’ views are fallible, and acting on them changes the situation they are views of; a cognitive function (world to mind) and a manipulative one (mind to world) run at once, so neither has an independent variable. He calls fallibility and reflexivity together the human uncertainty principle, and says fallibility, not reflexivity, is the main source of the Knightian uncertainty in human affairs. A postscript withdraws the sharp line he draws between natural and social science. | Read |
| NOTE-1373 | Marquis and Tilcsik — Imprinting: toward a multilevel theory | A review that defines imprinting by three features, a brief sensitive period, the stamp of the environment during it, and persistence despite later environmental change, and separates it from path dependence and cohort effects. It orders the literature in a 4 × 3 table (collectives, organizations, building blocks, individuals; economic and technological, institutional and individual sources) and proposes that entities carry layered imprints from several sensitive periods, including imprints taken secondhand from entities they copy. | Read |
| NOTE-1374 | Friedkin — A formal theory of reflected appraisals in the evolution of power | Friedkin extends the Friedkin–Johnsen influence model across a sequence of issues: each member’s self-weight on the next issue is set to their average total control over the last. In 50 four-person laboratory groups, prior control predicts the next self-weight. In 100,000 simulated random networks, over 98% evolve to one leader whose uninfluenced preference settles every issue through intermediaries. A re-run reproduces this, and shows that the DeGroot–Friedkin version of LIT-1146 does not concentrate power on the same networks. | Read |
| NOTE-1378 | Carstens and Land — Hyperstition: an introduction | A short interview in which Nick Land defines hyperstition as “a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component”, “the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies”, whose ideas “function causally to bring about their own reality”. His examples are confidence in markets, cyberspace and Jerusalem’s destiny, and he says that under favourable conditions, “whose exact nature requires further investigation”, hyperstition can “transmute lies into truths”. Most of the interview is occult and apocalyptic, not analytic. | Read |
| NOTE-1382 | Herd and Moynihan — Administrative Burden, the introduction | The introduction only. Administrative burden is the learning, compliance and psychological costs of a person’s encounter with the state; the book’s three themes are that burdens are consequential, distributive (heaviest on those least able to bear them) and constructed by political and administrative choice, and that they can be reduced or shifted from the person to the state. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1386 | Feldman and Pentland — Reconceptualizing organizational routines | Feldman and Pentland split an organizational routine into an ostensive aspect, the pattern as participants understand and refer to it, and a performative aspect, its particular enactments, and argue that the ostensive guides, accounts for and names performances while performances create, maintain and modify the ostensive, so that variation and selective retention inside one routine make it a source of endogenous change. A theory paper with one worked example, academic hiring, and no data of its own. | Read |
| NOTE-1389 | Gioia, Schultz and Corley — Organizational identity, image, and adaptive instability | Gioia, Schultz and Corley argue that organizational identity, usually defined as central, distinctive and enduring, is better seen as fluid: members compare who they think they are with how they think outsiders see them, and the discrepancy pushes them to change either identity or image, so identity shifts while its labels stay. They call the result adaptive instability and argue that it helps organizations change. A conceptual paper with illustrations (Shell’s Brent Spar, IBM, Oticon, British Airways) and no data. | Read |
| NOTE-1392 | DeMarzo, Vayanos and Zwiebel — Persuasion bias, social influence, and unidimensional opinions | Agents average the reports of those they listen to with fixed relative weights, treating every round’s report as new (persuasion bias, a DeGroot model). In a strongly connected network they reach a consensus weighted by the stationary distribution of the listening matrix, so influence comes from network position as well as precision; the consensus is correct only in “balanced” networks, and fully rational agents who know the network reach the correct beliefs in at most N² rounds. Long-run differences of opinion line up along one line given by the second eigenvectors, across every issue. | Read |
| NOTE-1393 | Paluck, Green and Green — The contact hypothesis re-evaluated | The 27 randomized contact studies with outcomes measured at least a day later give a random-effects average of Δ = 0.39 SD, but the effects are heterogeneous (I² = 0.85), shrink with precision (the meta-regression’s intercept is −0.01), are largest for disability, fall to 0.25 for ethnic, racial, religious and immigrant targets, and are 0.016 in the three pre-registered studies. No study tests interracial contact on anyone over 25. | Read |
| NOTE-1396 | Kalla and Broockman — Reducing exclusionary attitudes through interpersonal conversation | Three pre-registered, placebo-controlled canvassing experiments (6,869 voters reached at the door or by phone). In Experiment 1, a conversation with narratives exchanged non-judgmentally moved an index of immigration attitudes by d = 0.08 pooled over 4.5 months; the same conversation without the narratives moved it by 0.02 (n.s.), and the difference, 0.06, is significant. Transphobia replications give 0.08 (with or without the participants’ own narratives) and 0.04 by phone. | Read |
| NOTE-1403 | Kleinman, Liu and Redding — International friends and enemies | A country’s real-income elasticity to a partner’s productivity, from a constant-elasticity trade model with input-output links, predicts political alignment with that partner. Instrumented by a counterfactual Chinese productivity shock from the 1980 equilibrium (119 countries, 1980–2010) or by air-versus-sea distance (pairs, 1970–2012), it moves UN voting similarity (0.094 SD per SD in the panel), lowers strategic rivalry, and raises formal alliances. The paper’s own model is strategic: alignment is a costly action a country takes to raise a partner on whom its income depends. | Read |
| NOTE-1404 | Edmondson — Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams | In 51 work teams at one office-furniture manufacturer, a team-level belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking (psychological safety) predicted members’ and outside observers’ ratings of the team’s learning behavior; team efficacy added little once safety was controlled. Learning behavior predicted observers’ ratings of performance and carried the association of safety with performance, and safety carried the association of context support and leader coaching with learning. All of it is cross-sectional. | Read |
| NOTE-1405 | Pettigrew and Tropp — Meta-analytic tests of three mediators of contact | Meta-analytic mediation tests over 54 studies of contact and prejudice that also measured knowledge of the outgroup (17 samples), intergroup anxiety (60) or empathy and perspective taking (14). All three mediate. Knowledge is much the weakest (Sobel Z = 3.87); anxiety reduction (26.6) and empathy (12.4) are strong, and in nine samples measuring both, anxiety and empathy together account for about half of the contact–prejudice covariance. | Read |
| NOTE-1407 | Pettigrew and Tropp — A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory | Meta-analysis of 515 studies (713 samples, 1,383 tests, 250,089 people, 38 countries, through 2000) of face-to-face intergroup contact and prejudice. The random-effects mean is r ≈ −.21, 94% of samples are negative, experiments give −.34, and the most rigorous samples −.32. Samples structured to meet Allport’s conditions give −.29 against −.20 for the rest, so the conditions help but are not needed; they work as a bundle. One of six publication-bias checks, Vevea and Hedges’s, leaves no significant overall effect. | Read |
| NOTE-1408 | Pettigrew — Intergroup contact theory | Pettigrew reformulates Allport’s contact hypothesis as a longitudinal theory. Contact works through four processes (learning about the outgroup, changed behavior, affective ties, ingroup reappraisal, the last yielding “deprovincialization”). Its effects generalize through a sequence of decategorization, salient categorization and recategorization. A fifth essential condition, friendship potential, joins Allport’s four; other proposed conditions are facilitating. Selection bias is real, but in European survey data the path from outgroup friendship to less prejudice is stronger than the reverse. | Read |
| NOTE-1409 | Merton — The self-fulfilling prophecy | Names the self-fulfilling prophecy, “in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true”, and applies it to American ethnic and racial prejudice. Beside it the essay sets a second route, “moral alchemy”, in which the in-group condemns the out-group whatever it does by renaming the same conduct. It argues that institutional change, not education or good will, breaks the circle. | Read |
| NOTE-1418 | Scacco and Warren — Can social contact reduce prejudice and discrimination? | A randomized field experiment with 849 young Christian and Muslim men in Kaduna: sixteen weeks of cooperative computer training in mixed or single-religion classes left stated prejudice and its supposed mediators unchanged, while mixed classes discriminated less than single-religion classes in dictator and destruction games. The control arm shows the contrast is mostly in-group bonding raising discrimination in single-religion classes; the effect toward unfamiliar out-group members holds for Christians only. | Read |
| NOTE-1419 v2 | Lemmer and Wagner — Can we really reduce ethnic prejudice outside the lab? | Contact programmes run outside the laboratory improve self-reported ethnic attitudes by about a quarter of a standard deviation in controlled designs, and the effect is still there one to twelve months later in the few studies that looked. Indirect programmes do as well as direct ones between studies; within them, stories of cross-group friendship give the largest subtype estimate (0.42, k = 8) and online interaction none in the stronger designs. No included study measured behaviour. | Read |
| NOTE-1432 | boyd — Taken Out of Context: networked publics and context collapse | In boyd’s full chapters on networked publics, collapsed contexts are one of three dynamics produced by four properties of networked media: without spatial, social and temporal boundaries, distinct contexts are hard to keep apart, and a performer may not see the collision. The teens’ documented collisions are mostly one presentation read by an unintended audience that lacks its context, and their remedy is to control the audience, not to unify the presentation. The evidence is ethnographic, with no comparison of conflict when audiences are kept apart against when they meet. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1439 | Schroeder & Prentice — Exposing pluralistic ignorance | First-year students who heard, in a peer-led discussion, that peers are privately less comfortable with campus drinking than they seem reported drinking less months later than students given a decision-making discussion. Their estimates of peer comfort did not differ by condition: the authors infer that the correction weakened the norm’s force, not its content. Men closed the self–other gap by revising their view of others, not their own attitude, the reverse of the 1993 result this paper restates. | Read |
| NOTE-1482 | Bencherki — A pre-individual perspective to organizational action | After Simondon, action is pre-individual: it is not an agent’s deed but a difference that contributes to the individuation of persons and organizations at once, and authorship is an outcome. Affect is how a person finds a pre-individual load that only a collective individuation can resolve, and its refusal is felt as disindividuation. An action’s signification is its participation in an individuation. The illustration, a documentary on military spouses, sorts the army’s treatment of the women’s actions into co-individuation, channeling and usurpation. | Read |
| NOTE-1483 | Bencherki & Iliadis — Organization as informational individuation | Proposes Simondon’s informational individuation as the theory of communication that CCO research lacks. Information is a differential of action potential between differently ordered domains; communication is its kin-to-kin propagation, which orders each domain it crosses; meaning is that reordering; organizations and members are coexisting informational levels, not stages. Four propositions and one meeting excerpt; no test, and agency is not theorized. | Read |
| NOTE-1484 | Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy — Agency without agents | A conceptual paper. Agency is redefined, after Massumi and Simondon, as the affective force that governs a transition between individuation processes toward an augmented ability to act. It is expressed in a communicative event in which one process takes up another’s excess action, and it may start a collective transindividuation. Agents are its effects, not its sources. It is illustrated by rereading one meeting from Cooren’s MSF ethnography. The paper gives a vocabulary for redescription, with no criterion that would let an observation count against it. | Read |
| NOTE-1487 | Wilhoit — Ventriloquism’s methodological scope | A short reply to Cooren (2014). Montréal School CCO’s commitment to interaction makes conversation analysis its method of choice, so ventriloquism carries epistemological and methodological commitments that other communication traditions will not share, and it cannot be the open metamodel Craig (1999) called for. Dialogue is instead coming from CCO studies that use other methods. It says nothing about agents being entified. | Read |
| NOTE-1489 | Tsoukas & Chia — On organizational becoming | A conceptual paper. It reverses the priority of organization and change. Change is the reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits as they accommodate new experience. It is driven by the radial structure of categories, whose nonprototypical applications extend them, and by human reflexivity. Organization is both the attempt to stem that change and the pattern that emerges from it. Its illustrations are other researchers’ ethnographies. Its becoming is carried by human agents. | Read |
| NOTE-1513 | Chirkov, Ryan, Kim & Kaplan — Differentiating autonomy from individualism | 559 students in South Korea, Russia, Turkey and the USA rated their reasons (external, introjected, identified, integrated) for engaging in practices typical of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism. For every type of practice, the relative autonomy of one’s reasons predicted a well-being composite (β = .24–.29), with no country × autonomy or gender × autonomy interaction. Vertical practices were far less internalized than horizontal ones (mean index 1.60 against 4.68). Cross-sectional self-report; the authors’ definition of autonomy as volition is the paper’s thesis and its measure. | Read |