A neurobiological perspective on social influence: Serotonin and social adaptation

Humans are inherently social beings. Being suggestible to each other's expectations enables pro-social skills that are crucial for social learning and adaptation. Despite their high relevance for psychiatry, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying social adaptation are still not well understood. This review, therefore, provides a conceptual framework covering various distinct mechanisms underlying social adaptation and explores the neuropharmacology — in particular the role of the serotonin (5-HT) system — in modulating these mechanisms. This article reviews empirical results on social influence processing and reconciles them with recent findings from psychedelic research on social processing to elucidate neurobiological and neuropharmacological underpinnings of social adaptation. Various computational, neurobiological, and neurochemical processes are involved in distinct mechanisms underlying social adaptation such as the multisensory process of social information integration that is crucial for the forming of self-representation and representations of social norms. This is again associated with self- and other-perception during social interactions as well as value-based decision-making that guides our behavior in daily interactions. We highlight the critical role of 5-HT in these processes and suggest that 5-HT can facilitate social learning and may represent an important target for treating psychiatric disorders characterized by impairments in social functioning. This framework also has important implications for psychedelic-assisted therapy as well as for the development of novel treatment approaches and future research directions

I'll Have What She's Having: Reflective Desires and Consequentialism

HonorsPhilosophyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/167897/1/jkoz.pd

AI: Limits and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence

The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence

Investigating children’s perspective taking and normative frames of social understanding: A critical design ethnographic study of teacher-led dialogue around stories in early years’ classrooms

Abstract Social communication with adults and peers supports children to play a shared, active, and reflective role in negotiating meaning and making sense of their own social experiences. Through these conversations, children begin to adopt narrative structures, heuristics and rules which help them to organise and explain the social world, but these shortcuts also prompt biases in how children process social information and make judgments about how to engage with others. One of these biases, called the ‘Fundamental Attribution Error’ (Jones & Harris, 1967), also referred to as ‘correspondence bias’ or ‘attribution bias’ is the tendency to make dispositional judgments while overlooking situational factors in considering others’ perspectives and explaining behaviour. It emerges between 4 and 6 years of age in western cultures (Seiver, Gopnik, & Goodman, 2013) and is a precursor to stereotyping. This bias has spurred vast research exploring underlying mechanisms and approaches to intervention which are largely focused on promoting situational explanations of others’ perspectives. In addition to these structured intervention approaches, some researchers have raised the wider issue of the role educators and caregivers can play in reflecting on and challenging broader social norms that frame children’s dispositional judgments. I partnered with six early years teachers to investigate how teacher-led classroom dialogue around stories could challenge children’s normative frames of social understanding, promote children’s context-sensitive perspective taking, and lessen dispositional judgments. I also homed in on the role of teachers’ reflective practice in supporting children to think and negotiate meaning together in ways that reduce attribution bias. Findings demonstrate how ‘normative frames’ (i.e. expectations about how people tend to behave in specific circumstances and ideas about what kinds of behaviour are socially valued) guided children’s dispositional judgments of characters. Findings also show how, through processes of positioning within the group and with support from teachers, children questioned and shifted their normative frames over the course of the discussions, which was associated with greater context-sensitive perspective taking and fewer decontextualized dispositional judgments. In their reflections, teachers demonstrated how they took ownership of their own professional development within the project, however they also reported that receiving ongoing personalised feedback and support from me during and after the discussions helped them to find new ways to extend the children’s thinking further. In this thesis, I have proposed a conceptual framework which outlines the mechanisms by which children’s normative frames and perspective taking might link together to promote or inhibit attributional bias in the context of classroom dialogue around stories. This framework posits that relational reasoning and attributionally-biased reasoning are not mutually exclusive but counterbalanced, as if on a weighing scale. Further, these two types of reasoning are upheld by a central pillar of shared social reasoning, involving an interconnected process of normative framing and perspective taking. In this model, the type of reasoning that becomes more dominant for children largely depends on guided participation with adults and peers, especially within the context of conversation about social life. Further, small group dialogue around stories is conceptualised as a lever that teachers can use to challenge children’s normative frames and promote greater context-sensitive perspective taking in order to tip the scale toward relational reasoning and reduce the pull of attributional bias. On the whole, this project extends Educational Design Research and Design Ethnography, providing a model for how educational specialists, researchers, or advisors can support teachers to play a more active and reflective role in children’s developing social reasoning.The School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Gonville and Caius Colleg

Getting to know QM(s):exploring the actor-networks of quantitative methods across higher education social science subjects

In the UK, the need for more quantitatively-skilled citizens and employees has been widely publicised. This skills deficit has prompted a wide range of policy initiatives and academic research into quantitative methods (QM(s)) learning-teaching across all levels of education. Although the academic literature has provided useful insights into the learning-teaching of QM(s), it has overlooked key questions concerning the character of QM(s) across Social Science disciplines and the role of non-human actors. This thesis begins to fill this gap in the literature by adopting Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to explore the learning-teaching of QM(s) within four Higher Education Social Science subjects. To investigate the actor-networks that QM(s) is comprised of, and located within, an assemblage of methods was used, including: semi-structured interviews, concept mapping, participant observation and document analysis. Together, these methods capture QM(s) across Harvey’s (2004) three spaces (abstract, relative, and relational), supplementing ANT’s own relational understanding of space(-time). Challenging the passive and singular framings of QM(s), presented within policy initiatives and the literature, here, QM(s) was found to be a character occupying multiple positions of agency, taught content, and locations on participants’ concept maps. Within the teaching-learning environments, the construction of QM(s) as linear, fixed and learnt through doing was translated by worksheets and correct answers, producing a characterisation of QM(s) as a passive, linear activity of completing tests. When placed within disciplinary actor-networks, QM(s) was identified as performing a variety of roles: providing patterns/trends; offering reliable answers and predictions; aiding theory testing; and assisting decision-making. However, these positionings were being challenged by new techniques, software, and learning-teaching environments. These findings imply that instead of a focus on differentiating QM(s) knowledge, to successfully integrate QM(s) with disciplinary knowledges attention should be given to QM(s’) link to data and theoretical positionings. Overall, this thesis provides an original contribution to knowledge through its adoption of ANT, a theory not before applied to QM(s) learning-teaching research. In doing this, it challenges common assumptions made within the literature to provide new insights into the character of QM(s) and the role of previously overshadowed non-human actors

The Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox; Protection and Development of the Dutch Archeological-Historical Landscape and its European Dimension

To what extent can we know past and mainly invisible landscapes, and how we can use this still hidden knowledge for actual sustainable management of landscape’s cultural and historical values. It has also been acknowledged that heritage management is increasingly about ‘the management of future change rather than simply protection’. This presents us with a paradox: to preserve our historic environment, we have to collaborate with those who wish to transform it and, in order to apply our expert knowledge, we have to make it suitable for policy and society. The answer presented by the Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape programme (pdl/bbo) is an integrative landscape approach which applies inter- and transdisciplinarity, establishing links between archaeological-historical heritage and planning, and between research and policy. This is supported by two unifying concepts: ‘biography of landscape’ and ‘action research’. This approach focuses upon the interaction between knowledge, policy and an imagination centered on the public. The European perspective makes us aware of the resourcefulness of the diversity of landscapes, of social and institutional structures, of various sorts of problems, approaches and ways forward. In addition, two related issues stand out: the management of knowledge creation for landscape research and management, and the prospects for the near future. Underlying them is the imperative that we learn from the past ‘through landscape’

Could Alexa Increase Your Social Worth?

People have historically used personal introductions to build social capital, which is the foundation of career networking and is perhaps the most effective way to advance a career (Lin, 2001). With societal changes, such as the pandemic (Venkatesh & Edirappuli, 2020), and the increasing capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), new approaches may emerge that impact societal relationships. Social capital theory highlights the need for reciprocal agreements to establish the trust between parties (Gouldner, 1960). My theoretical prediction and focus of this research include two principles: The impact of reciprocity in evaluating trust of the source of the introduction and the acceptability of AI in interpersonal relationships. I test this relationship through the creation of plausible vignettes that the participants may have encountered in business. The results show that a higher trust of AI and could replace one side of the relationship, thus reducing the dependency on or eliminating reciprocal behavior