A Biological Approach to Understanding Resistance to Apology, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation in Group Conflict

This article introduces a biological approach to understanding resistance to apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation in intergroup conflict. To start with, reconciliation takes place at the level of the individual. To understand resistance to group reconciliation, one must understand why individuals resist reconciliation. In turn, one must understand how membership in the group affects individual resistance. This article first examines the behaviors that promote or discourage reconciliation. Using evolutionary biology and game theory, we illustrate how the strategic dynamics of dyadic interaction tend to favor these behaviors and derive a schema relevant to a reconciliatory cycle. We then explore how the distinct context of intra- and intergroup conflict reinforces these behaviors. Finally, we identify those barriers to individual reconciliation that result from the strategic dynamics of social group architectures, particularly those that differ from the ancestral social architecture within which individual behavior has evolved. We conclude with a brief application of this conceptual approach to truth and reconciliation commissions

Social influences on affective responses to negative experiences

As social human beings, the way we emotionally respond to what happens around us is often regulated by our interactions with others. The overall aim of this thesis is to advance the understanding of how social influences surrounding negative experiences can affect the formation, regulation and transfer of affective responses. Throughout four studies, we examined the impact of different kinds of social influences (face-to-face and online) surrounding various negative experiences (experimental analogues for trauma experiences), and how these social influences impact affective responses (from self-reported measures to physiological responses). In Study I, dyads of participants underwent a vicarious threat conditioning paradigm to investigate whether physiological synchrony between them during learning predicted the strength of observationally acquired conditioned responses and examine the potential role of trait empathy. As predicted, increased physiological synchronization during learning led to a stronger CS differentiation during the test phase, but unlike our predictions, self-reported empathy was not found to be related to physiological coupling. These findings support the role of social influences in the formation of affective responses and indicate that the physiological synchrony captured here may be more related to experience sharing rather than individuals’ tendency to empathize with others. Study II tested whether threat conditioning generated persistent intrusive memories of neutral stimuli, and whether different social support interactions after threat acquisition modulated the expression of emotional memories, as measured by skin-conductance responses and number of intrusive memories. Social support interactions consisted of two social support conditions (supportive social interaction versus unsupportive social interaction) and a control group (no social interaction). Our results indicated that threat conditioning generated intrusive memories, with greater number of intrusions of CS+ than CS- and these intrusive memories were still measurable one year later, especially for individuals with higher trait anxiety and a greater number of previous trauma experiences. Our findings support the literature indicating the contribution of associative processes in the formation of intrusive memories and demonstrate the advantage of adding the measure of intrusive memories to a standard Pavlovian threat conditioning paradigm for investigating short and long term intrusive memories. Finally, these findings suggest that the specific the support interactions used in this study might not modulate the processes underlying memory consolidation and call attention to the difficulty of operationalizing social support interactions in an experimental context. Study III is composed of two online sub-studies investigating the social transmission of threat and safety evaluations. In sub-study 1, we combined behavioral and computational modeling approaches to estimate the influence of others’ online evaluations of negative pictures on participant’s own evaluations. In sub-study 2, we replicated these findings and further demonstrated that others’ evaluations led participants to shift their affective response to these pictures. Interestingly, seeing that others evaluate pictures as safe resulted in individuals feeling less distressed towards these pictures, suggesting that the observation of social safety cues online could attenuate the spread of negative emotions. Our findings offer a mechanism for how people integrate their own and others’ experiences when exposed to emotional content online. Furthermore, knowing how threat and safety information propagate online and its impact on people’s wellbeing could be an important tool to prevent the impact of the spread of threatening information online. Study IV asked whether using the trauma film paradigm in an online setting could induce similar emotional responses as in-lab experiments. We also tested whether reading previous participants’ appraisals after watching the trauma film modulated participants’ emotional responses, as measured by changes in negative mood and number of intrusive memories during the subsequent seven days. The trauma film online replicated previous in-lab results, although with a somewhat lower mean number of intrusive memories. Our results indicated that reading positive comments after watching the film decreased negative mood, compared to reading negative comments or no comments. Reading others’ appraisal did not modulate the number of intrusive memories. These results demonstrate that the digital version of the trauma film paradigm can be used as an experimental analogue for exposure to aversive content online and enables the experimental investigation of how such content impacts mental health. Moreover, our findings indicate an improvement of mood following the exposure to negative visual content through positive social reappraisal, paving the way towards this goal. These four studies demonstrate that vast range of ways in which social interactions influence affective responses, from verbal to non-verbal exchanges in both face-to-face and online settings. Our work also illustrates the complexity of experimentally investigating social influences and the specific processes involved

Computational and Simulation Modeling of Political Attitudes: the 'Tiger' Area of Political Culture Research

In almost one century long history, political attitudes modeling research has accumulated a critical mass of theory and method. Its characteristics and particularities have often suggested that political attitude approach to political persuasion modeling reveals a strong theoretical autonomy of concept which entitles it to become a new separate discipline of research. Though this did not actually happen, political attitudes modeling research has remained the most challenging area - the "tiger" - of political culture modeling research. This paper reviews the research literature on the conceptual, computational and simulation modeling of political attitudes developed starting with the beginning of the 20th century until the present times. Several computational and simulation modeling paradigms have provided support to political attitudes modeling research. These paradigms and the shift from one to another are briefly presented for a period of time of almost one century. The dominant paradigmatic views are those inspired by the Newtonian mechanics, and those based on the principle of methodological individualism and the emergence of macro phenomena from the individual interactions at the micro level of a society. This period of time is divided in eight ages covering the history of ideas in a wide range of political domains, going from political attitudes to polity modeling. Internal and external pressures for paradigmatic change are briefly explained

The role of personality and organisational cultural differences in the success of salesperson-buyer dyads

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Commerce Law and Management, University of Witwatersrand Business School, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Johannesburg, 2015Arguably the most important function a business focuses on is revenue generation, which is ultimately achieved through immediate sales and the inculcation of future customer spend. For many businesses, notably in the business-to-business realm, salespeople are still required to form relationships with key customer buyers and to achieve or facilitate sales through this “dyadic” interpersonal relationship. Understanding what makes relationships and interactions between customer buyers and salespeople successful – from a sales perspective – remains an important concern for organisations and marketing theorists. In such sales relationships, the “success” of the sale and the longer term sales relationship can depend on aspects of the interpersonal relationships such as the ability of the parties to communicate well, come to agreement, and potentially even bond socially. The ability of parties to form productive and conducive interpersonal relationships in turn depends on factors such as personality and culture. This thesis argues that there is no particular “best” personality or culture for the formation of successful sales relationships, but that match between the personality traits of salespeople and customers as well as between their respective organisation’s cultures may facilitate success in sales. As indicated above, the thesis studies two main dependent variables, namely sales success and word-of-mouth. These variables are derived from the theory of customer equity management (Rust, Lemon, & Narayandas, 2005). The thesis argues that prior to generating income through either a sale or through word-of-mouth the organisation will need to have a relationship with the customer. Relationship marketing (Morgan & Hunt, 1994) provides a framework for understanding what constitutes a relationship. The current study aligns itself with prior literature arguing that relationship quality comprises three components specifically; trust, satisfaction and commitment. Personality research has remained at the heart of industrial research and managerial practise. Voluminous literature has used the Big Five personality traits for understanding customer’s interactions. The five personality traits include Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness to Experience (Soto & John, 2012). The current study argues that it is not the personality traits themselves which are important, but rather the similarities or differences between the customer and the salesperson. Organisation culture has been shown to affect several different arenas within the management field, but has not been much examined within the context of dyadic relationships. The specific relationship that the study addresses is the customer-salesperson relationship. In this thesis I argue that both the customer and salesperson to some extent embody and reflect their respective organisational cultures, and in addition, sales systems can reflect organizational cultures, for instance where bureaucratic organizational culture creates sales systems with high levels of formality. In turn, match or mismatch in organizational cultures may affect sales or relationship outcomes in various ways. The well-known organisational culture index (Wallach, 1983) will be used to capture the cultures from both the salesperson and customer. The three elements of organisational culture measured by the index include bureaucratic cultural aspects, innovative cultural aspects, and supportive cultural aspects. To test these relationships, the thesis presents an empirical study based on a cross-sectional, quantitative, survey of the SME market in South Africa. One hundred salesperson-customer dyads participated in the study, and data from each member of the dyad was surveyed separately. Statistical techniques such as partial least squares structural equation modelling and polynomial regression were used in the analysis of the data. A response surface methodology allowed for graphical representation of the polynomial regression results. These results then acted as inputs for a Bayesian Networks analysis (Charniak, 1991), which are used to improve the understanding of causality. Results of the empirical survey indicate that trust, satisfaction and commitment affect the level of word-of-mouth while only trust and commitment have an effect on sales. The analysis indicates that matches or mismatches in the personality traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness do affect dependent variables of relationship quality, sales success and word-of-mouth, and do so in differing ways. This thesis provides several unique contributions to sales theory and literature. First, although the salesperson-customer dyad has been studied before, the differences in personality traits have not been included. This is particularly true within the South African context. Secondly, organisational culture literature has been reviewed and studied but has neglected the role that organisational culture plays in the sales environment, specifically when interacting with a customer. Third, several theories are used to explain why the constructs came together; however certain aspects of these theories are questioned. Lastly, several practical applications are provided that allow organisations to improve the hiring process and implement training objectives for their sales force. Key Words: Dyad, satisfaction, trust, commitment, customer lifetime value, relationship marketing, relationship quality, organisational culture, bureaucracy, innovation, supportive, response surface, polynomial regression, Bayesian network, customer equity management.MB201

Intersubjectivity, Empathy and Nonverbal Interaction

PhDEmpathy is thought to involve cognitive processes that depend on the simulation of another's experiences. Embodiment has a key role for empathy as vehicle for recreating the experience of another. This thesis explores the validity of this claim by investigating what people do when communicating about their experiences. In particular, what is the contribution of our embodied resources such as gestures, postures and expressions to empathy and intersubjectivity? These questions are explored against two corpora of dyadic interactions. One features conversations of people describing recalled embodied experiences to each other, such as painful or pleasant bodily experiences like a headache or laughing. The other features a series of interactions designed to emulate informal conversations. The analysis uses hand coded gestures, feedback and clari cation questions, body movement data and a new approach to quantifying posture congruence. The analysis shows the embodied responses observed within these interactions are intentionally placed and formulated to facilitate the incremental process of a conversation as a joint activity. This is inconsistent with accounts that propose there is an automatic and non-conscious propensity for people to mimic each other in social interactions. Quantitative analysis show that patterns of gesture type and use, feedback form and posture di er systematically between interlocutors. Additionally, results show that resources provided by embodiment are allocated strategically. Nonverbal contributions increase in frequency and adjust their form responding to problems in conversation such as during clari cation questions and repair. Detailed qualitative analysis shows the instances that appear to display mimicry within the interaction function rather as embodied adaptations or paraphrases. In their contrast with the original contribution they demonstrate a speci c understanding of the type of experience being conveyed. This work shows that embodiment is an important resource for intersubjectivity and embodied communication is speci cally constructed to aid the collaborative, sequential and intersubjective progression of dialogue.Media and Arts Technology programme, EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre EP/G03723X/