1,115,022 research outputs found
Collective emotions online and their influence on community life
E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an
object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet
exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional
information - how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group
members. Emotions are known to be important in affecting interaction partners
in offline communication in many ways. Could emotions in Internet exchanges
affect others and systematically influence quantitative and qualitative aspects
of the trajectory of e-communities? The development of automatic sentiment
analysis has made large scale emotion detection and analysis possible using
text messages collected from the web. It is not clear if emotions in
e-communities primarily derive from individual group members' personalities or
if they result from intra-group interactions, and whether they influence group
activities. We show the collective character of affective phenomena on a large
scale as observed in 4 million posts downloaded from Blogs, Digg and BBC
forums. To test whether the emotions of a community member may influence the
emotions of others, posts were grouped into clusters of messages with similar
emotional valences. The frequency of long clusters was much higher than it
would be if emotions occurred at random. Distributions for cluster lengths can
be explained by preferential processes because conditional probabilities for
consecutive messages grow as a power law with cluster length. For BBC forum
threads, average discussion lengths were higher for larger values of absolute
average emotional valence in the first ten comments and the average amount of
emotion in messages fell during discussions. Our results prove that collective
emotional states can be created and modulated via Internet communication and
that emotional expressiveness is the fuel that sustains some e-communities.Comment: 23 pages including Supporting Information, accepted to PLoS ON
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES: HOW INSTITUTIONAL CARRIERS INFLUENCE ONLINE GOVERNANCE STRUCTURES
This research investigates how institutional carriers â from rules and power systems to cognitive schemas and information technology â influence the reproduction of centralized decision-making governance structures in virtual communities. Studying a group of four virtual communities, the findings show that community members invoke a variety of institutional carriers in order to try to legitimate actual centralized governance structures, which contradict their stated intentions of building decentralized decision making. The research illustrates in the micro-level how an institutionalized social structure is seen as meaningful by social actors in spite of being the opposite of what community members would rhetorically defend. The study explores how institutional carriers become sanction and legitimating mechanisms, which influence the reproduction of institutionalized behavior in virtual interactions, concluding on the relevance of understanding the institutional context to make sense of behavior patterns, which emerge from interactions in online environments in general and virtual communities in particular
Solvation force for long ranged wall-fluid potentials
The solvation force of a simple fluid confined between identical planar walls
is studied in two model systems with short ranged fluid-fluid interactions and
long ranged wall-fluid potentials decaying as , for
various values of . Results for the Ising spins system are obtained in two
dimensions at vanishing bulk magnetic field by means of the
density-matrix renormalization-group method; results for the truncated
Lennard-Jones (LJ) fluid are obtained within the nonlocal density functional
theory. At low temperatures the solvation force for the Ising film
is repulsive and decays for large wall separations in the same fashion as
the boundary field , whereas for temperatures larger than
the bulk critical temperature is attractive and the asymptotic decay
is . For the LJ fluid system is always
repulsive away from the critical region and decays for large with the the
same power law as the wall-fluid potential. We discuss the influence of the
critical Casimir effect and of capillary condensation on the behaviour of the
solvation force.Comment: 48 pages, 12 figure
THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL POWER ON TRANSACTIVE MEMORY SYSTEMS AND KNOWLEDGE UTILIZATION
Many organizations have attempted to develop knowledge management strategies through which they can substantially enhance their employeesâ ability to utilize knowledge resources dispersed across business units. While previous studies have acknowledged that social power is one of the critical factors in facilitating or constraining social interactions among individuals, few studies have examined in-depth how social power within a work group influences an individualâs knowledge utilization. Given that social power in an organization determines the processes of recognizing othersâ knowledge and applying it to real business, the investigation of the influence of social power on knowledge utilization is of value to researchers and practitioners. Integrating the volitional model and the theory of social power, this study develops a theoretical model that explains how social power influences individualsâ affect, transactive memory system (TMS), and knowledge utilization. The proposed model was tested using data collected from 206 individuals. The results of this study show that social power significantly influences an individualâs affect and TMS, which in turn influences intention to utilize knowledge. Notably, this study reveals that different power bases have different effects on individualsâ cognitive (TMS levels) and emotional (positive affect) aspects in relation to knowledge utilization in organizations
The Mass Psychology of Classroom Discourse
In a majority of cases observed in classrooms over the last several decades, what has gone
by the name âdiscussionâ is not discussion, but rather an interaction better known as recitation. If one
sees this phenomenon as a problem, then an aspect of its resolution must be theoretical (as opposed
to empirical or pedagogical): What series of conceptual terms might we adopt such that recitation does
not pass for discussion? Such a theoretical response would have to address internal and external, or
subjective and intersubjective, phenomena to describe what it means to participate in an interaction
like discussion or recitation. Next the theory would have to explain the differences between interactions
such as discussion and recitation in robust terms. Finally, these robust differences would have to
prevent the âmistakingâ of discussion for recitation, and vice versa. David Backer sets out to accomplish
these three goals in the following essay. The theory he builds relies on a distinction between two
psychological-affective states: dehiscence and melancholia. Backer argues that recitation forms a mass
through melancholic introjection of a single object, while discussion forms a group that dehiscently
introjects no particular object at all. The chief finding of this essay is that viewing discussion and
recitation through the mass-psychological lens offers a new way to examine what kind of relations of
influence and power form during classroom discourse and, specifically, the political significance of those
discourses
Regionalism and African agency : negotiating an Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union and SADC-Minus
This article investigates the regional dynamics of African agency in the case of negotiations for an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the EU and a group of Southern African countries, known as SADC-Minus. I argue that these negotiations were shaped by a pattern of differentiated responses to the choice set on offer under the EPAs by SADC-Minus policymakers and by a series of strategic interactions and power plays between them. I offer two contributions to an emerging literature on the role of African agency in international politics. First, I argue for a clear separation between ontological claims about the structure-agency relationship and empirical questions about the preferences, strategies and influence of African actors. Second, I suggest that in order to understand the regional dynamics of African agency it is important to pay close attention to the diversity and contingency of African preferences and to the role of both power politics and rhetorical contestation in regional political processes
Structural power and the evolution of collective fairness in social networks
From work contracts and group buying platforms to political coalitions and international climate and economical summits, often individuals assemble in groups that must collectively reach decisions that may favor each part unequally. Here we quantify to which extent our network ties promote the evolution of collective fairness in group interactions, modeled by means of Multiplayer Ultimatum Games (MUG). We show that a single topological feature of social networks-which we call structural power-has a profound impact on the tendency of individuals to take decisions that favor each part equally. Increased fair outcomes are attained whenever structural power is high, such that the networks that tie individuals allow them to meet the same partners in different groups, thus providing the opportunity to strongly influence each other. On the other hand, the absence of such close peer-influence relationships dismisses any positive effect created by the network. Interestingly, we show that increasing the structural power of a network leads to the appearance of well-defined modules-as found in human social networks that often exhibit community structure-providing an interaction environment that maximizes collective fairness.This research was supported by Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) through grants SFRH/BD/94736/2013, PTDC/EEI-SII/5081/2014, PTDC/MAT/STA/3358/2014 and by multi-annual funding of CBMA and INESC-ID (under the projects UID/BIA/04050/2013 and UID/CEC/50021/2013) provided by FCT. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
European Parliamentâs Political Groups in Turbulent Times
This open access book provides the first ever authoritative collection of scholarly insights, based upon original research, into the political groups of the EP tackling the fundamental changes since the Lisbon Treaty and the upsurge of radical right parties. It analyses political groups and their importance from multiple perspectives critically assessing their role and significance in EU politics. Each chapter is authored by leading scholars in the field, working on key topics in relation to political groups: political group formation and function, their role in parliamentary and EU policy-making, the way that Eurosceptic MEPs influence (or not) the Parliament, and the nature and form of interactions with external actors. In doing so, each chapter opens hitherto unexplored âblack boxesâ in the political work of the EP, such as the internal practices of, and power relations within the political groups, and informal arenas of intra-group decision-making
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