Committed activists and the reshaping of status-quo social consensus

The role of committed minorities in shaping public opinion has been recently addressed with the help of multiagent models. However, previous studies focused on homogeneous populations where zealots stand out only for their stubbornness. Here we consider the more general case in which individuals are characterized by different propensities to communicate. In particular, we correlate commitment with a higher tendency to push an opinion, acknowledging the fact that individuals with unwavering dedication to a cause are also more active in their attempts to promote their message. We show that these activists are not only more efficient in spreading their message but that their efforts require an order of magnitude fewer individuals than a randomly selected committed minority to bring the population over to a new consensus. Finally, we address the role of communities, showing that partisan divisions in the society can make it harder for committed individuals to flip the status-quo social consensus

Doing IT for Themselves: Management versus Autonomy in Youth E-Citizenship

Part of the Volume on Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. This chapter explores tensions between managed and autonomous conceptions of youth e-citizenship as manifested in six UK-based projects. Managed youth e-citizenship projects are characterized as seeking to establish "connections" between young people and institutions that have power over their lives. Regarding youth as apprentice citizens who need to learn appropriate ways of engaging with encrusted structures of governance, they seek to promote habits of civility, while at the same time encouraging young people to think of themselves as empowered social actors whose (virtual) voices deserve to be heard. In contrast, autonomous e-citizenship projects tend not to be funded by government, and express strong reservations about having relationship too close to the state. These projects are less interested in engaging with powerful institutions than in forming powerful networks of young people, engaged with one another to resist the power of institutions. Regarding youth as independent political agents, autonomous e-citizens expect less from the communicative potential of having their say; for them, empowerment entails an intimate relationship between voice and action. The chapter concludes by proposing a set of policy recommendations that might lead to a productive convergence between these two models of youth e-citizenship

Building the Access to Justice Movement

There are innumerable individual problems of access to civil justice. Civil justice, or its absence, will often determine whether people can keep their homes, their family relationships, their health and well-being, their actual safety, their jobs, and their opportunity for a fair resolution of so many more of the challenges that life presents. There are presently many important efforts that enable people to obtain justice, both through the direct provision of legal services and through the broader pursuit of systemic reforms, such as securing and expanding civil rights to counsel, expanding roles for non-lawyers to empower individuals and communities, making the civil justice system work better for people without legal assistance, and ending excessive court-imposed fines and fees. Is it possible to identify common themes and threads running through the access to justice problems, the direct efforts to help individuals, and the pursuit of a broader reform agenda? Can there be an access to justice “movement” capable of galvanizing public outrage and energy, as the racial justice, criminal justice, immigrants’ rights, Me Too, and other modern movements are doing in their attacks on inequality, poverty, and other manifestations of injustice

Collective dynamics of belief evolution under cognitive coherence and social conformity

Human history has been marked by social instability and conflict, often driven by the irreconcilability of opposing sets of beliefs, ideologies, and religious dogmas. The dynamics of belief systems has been studied mainly from two distinct perspectives, namely how cognitive biases lead to individual belief rigidity and how social influence leads to social conformity. Here we propose a unifying framework that connects cognitive and social forces together in order to study the dynamics of societal belief evolution. Each individual is endowed with a network of interacting beliefs that evolves through interaction with other individuals in a social network. The adoption of beliefs is affected by both internal coherence and social conformity. Our framework explains how social instabilities can arise in otherwise homogeneous populations, how small numbers of zealots with highly coherent beliefs can overturn societal consensus, and how belief rigidity protects fringe groups and cults against invasion from mainstream beliefs, allowing them to persist and even thrive in larger societies. Our results suggest that strong consensus may be insufficient to guarantee social stability, that the cognitive coherence of belief-systems is vital in determining their ability to spread, and that coherent belief-systems may pose a serious problem for resolving social polarization, due to their ability to prevent consensus even under high levels of social exposure. We therefore argue that the inclusion of cognitive factors into a social model is crucial in providing a more complete picture of collective human dynamics

A People's History Of Recent Urban Transportation Innovation

Who are the people leading the charge in urban transportation? As our report explains, the short answer is that it takes leaders from three different sectors of urban society to make change happen quickly.First, there needs to be a robust civic vanguard, the more diverse their range of skills and participation, the better. Second, mayors, commissioners and other city leaders need to create the mandate and champion the change. The third sector is the agency staff. When these three sectors align, relatively quick transformation is possible. Several cities, including New York and Pittsburgh, recently experienced this alignment of a healthy civic community, a visionary and bold mayor and transportation head, and internal agency champions. Our report also highlighted the potential of other cities, such as Charlotte, where the civic sector continues to build on and widen their base

Rethinking prefigurative politics: introduction to the special thematic section

This special thematic section responds to the 21st century proliferation of social movements characterised by the slogans ‘another world is possible’ and ‘be the change you want to see’. It explores prefigurative politics as a means of instantiating radical social change in a context of widening global inequalities, climate change, and the crises and recoveries of neoliberal global capitalism. ‘Prefigurative politics’ refers to a range of social experiments that both critique the status quo and offer alternatives by implementing radically democratic practices in pursuit of social justice. This collection of articles makes the case for psychologists to engage with prefigurative politics as sites of psychological and social change, in the dual interests of understanding the world and changing it. The articles bridge psychology and politics in three different ways. One group of articles brings a psychological lens to political phenomena, arguing that attention to the emotional, relational and intergroup dynamics of prefigurative politics is required to understand their trajectories, challenges, and impacts. A second group focuses a political lens on social settings traditionally framed as psychological sites of well-being, enabling an understanding of their political nature. The third group addresses the ‘border tensions’ of the psychological and the political, contextualising and historicising the instantiation of prefigurative ideals and addressing tensions that arise between utopian ideals and various internal and external constraints. This introduction to the special section explores the concept and contemporary debates concerning prefigurative politics, outlines the rationale for a psychological engagement with this phenomenon, and presents the articles in the special thematic section. The general, prefigurative, aim is to advance psychology’s contribution to rethinking and remaking the world as it could be, not only documenting the world as it is

Participatory action research, sacred existential epistemology, the eighth moment of qualitative research and beyond…

[Abstract]: This paper discusses how, in a doctoral study, a collaborative methodology employing Participatory Action Research was embraced, upholding respectful relationships and partnerships that generated co-construction of change in two preschool settings. Participatory Action Research signifies an epistemology that underpins the belief that knowledge is embedded in social relationships and is most influential when produced collaboratively through action. This paper also explains how the research group moved away from the label of feminist poststructuralist researchers towards a feminist communitarian ethic. Such an ethic is underpinned by a sacred existential epistemology that values empowerment, morally involved observers, shared governance, love, care, community, solidarity and civic transformation. This epistemology is based on a philosophical anthropology that affirms all human beings, without exception, are worthy of dignity and ‘sacred status’. The paper concludes by locating the research firmly in what Denzin and Lincoln (2005) refer to as the eighth moment of qualitative research. This moment is marked by researchers concerned with social justice, liberation methodology and moral purpose