Lessons from Social Psychology for Complex Operations

This short essay looks at several social forces that powerfully affect human behavior, often trumping individual “character,” personality, knowledge, and even deeply held moral beliefs. Specifically, this essay looks briefly at issues of obedience, conformity, and group polarization, discussing the ways in which they can affect and distort individual behavior. Ultimately, this essay suggests, understanding these dynamics can have important implications for how we think about counterinsurgency and stability operations

Pemberdayaan Petani Sayuran: Kasus Petani Sayuran di Sulawesi Selatan

This study was focused on analyzing farmers' empowerment and studying factors affecting group dynamic in relation with their business improvement. The objectives of this study were: (1) to identify factors that influence empowerment of crop farmer within groups, (2) the relation between group dynamics and productivity and, (3) the formulation of empowerment strategy through group approach. This study was conducted at two districts area: Gowa and Enrekang at South Sulawesi Province. Primary data were obtained from 240 respondents from members of group farmer who their business mostly cultivate vegetable. Quantitative analysis and qualitative-descriptive analysis were employed to explain the result of the research. Variabels used in the study were individual characteristics. The level of farmer empowerment within group is low, and factors that affect farmers' empowerment within group are low (underdeveloped). These factors are empowerment pattern, level of personality, social environment, information access and level of farmers' productivity. Development of elements of group dynamics in two locations shows low performance that means underdeveloped. The main constraints for developing group dynamics are lack of initiative and participation of group members to encourage group activities, and lack of cooperation and coordination of tasks within group. Individual characteristics include level of formal education, empowerment pattern, farmers' personality, social environment and information access show significantly positive relationship with group dynamic. There are fourteen variabels which positively influence group dynamics. These variabels are empowerment pattern; level of farmers' personality; social environment; and information access. Based on the relationship among variabels in the model of farmer development toward farmer's productivity, it shows that variabels of working network (X2.2), self confident (X3.2), culture norms (X4.1), accurate information (X5.2), group objective (Y1.1) and group development (Y1.3) affect significantly of farmers' productivity. This means these variables have significant role in promoting farmers' productivity. Farmers' productivity is still low and it should be developed through more diynamic activities

Boldness by habituation and social interactions: a model

Most studies of animal personality attribute personality to genetic traits. But a recent study by Magnhagen and Staffan (Behav Ecol Sociobiol 57:295–303, 2005) on young perch in small groups showed that boldness, a central personality trait, is also shaped by social interactions and by previous experience. The authors measured boldness by recording the duration that an individual spent near a predator and the speed with which it fed there. They found that duration near the predator increased over time and was higher the higher the average boldness of other group members. In addition, the feeding rate of shy individuals was reduced if other members of the same group were bold. The authors supposed that these behavioral dynamics were caused by genetic differences, social interactions, and habituation to the predator. However, they did not quantify exactly how this could happen. In the present study, we therefore use an agent-based model to investigate whether these three factors may explain the empirical findings. We choose an agent-based model because this type of model is especially suited to study the relation between behavior at an individual level and behavioral dynamics at a group level. In our model, individuals were either hiding in vegetation or feeding near a predator, whereby their behavior was affected by habituation and by two social mechanisms: social facilitation to approach the predator and competition over food. We show that even if we start the model with identical individuals, these three mechanisms were sufficient to reproduce the behavioral dynamics of the empirical study, including the consistent differences among individuals. Moreover, if we start the model with individuals that already differ in boldness, the behavioral dynamics produced remained the same. Our results indicate the importance of previous experience and social interactions when studying animal personality empirically

Opinion dynamics within a virtual small group: the stubbornness effect

The modeling of opinion dynamics in social systems has attracted a good deal of attention in the last decade. Even though based on intuition and observation, the mechanisms behind many of these models need solid empirical grounding. In this work, we investigate the relation among subjective variables (such as the personality), the dynamics of the affinity network dynamics, the communication patterns emerging throughout the social interactions and the opinions dynamics in a series of experiments with five small groups of ten people each. In order to ignite the discussion, the polemic topic of animal experimentation was proposed. The groups essentially polarized in two factions with a set of stubborn individuals (those not changing their opinions in time) playing the role of anchors. Our results suggest that the different layers present in the group dynamics (i.e., individual level, group dynamics and meso-communication) are deeply intermingled, specifically the stubbornness effect appears to be related to the dynamical features of the network topologies, and only in an undirected way to the personality of the participants.This work was funded by the European Commission under the FET-AWARENESS RECOGNITION (257756). AG and FB acknowledges partial financial support from the EU projects 288021 (EINS – Network of Excellence in Internet Science) and 611299 (FP7 Programme on Collective-Awareness Platforms SciCafe2.0).Peer Reviewe

Understanding Effects of Feedback on Group Collaboration

http://www.aaai.org/Press/Reports/Symposia/Spring/ss-09-04.phpSmall group collaboration is vital for any type of organization to function successfully. Feedback on group dynamics has been proven to help with the performance of collaboration. We use sociometric sensors to detect group dynamics and use the data to give real-time feedback to people. We are especially interested in the effect of feedback on distributed collaboration. The goal is to bridge the gap in distributed groups by detecting and communicating social signals. We conducted an initial experiment to test the effects of feedback on brainstorming and problem solving tasks. The results show that real-time feedback changes speaking time and interactivity level of groups. Also in groups with one or more dominant people, the feedback effectively reduced the dynamical difference between co-located and distributed collaboration as well as the behavioral difference between dominant and non-dominant people. Interestingly, feedback had a different effect depending on the type of meeting and types of personality. We intend to continue this direction of research by personalizing the visualization by automatically detecting type of meeting and personality. Moreover we propose to demonstrate the correlation of group dynamics with higher level characteristics such as performance, interest and creativity

Social networks and positive and negative affect

We followed 100 university students in the UK for one week, instructing them to record all face-to-face, phone and digital contacts during the day as well as their positive and negative affect. We wanted to see how positive and negative affect spread around a social network while taking into account participants’ socio-demographic data, personality, general health and gratitude scores. We focused on the participants’ connections with those in their class; excluding friends and family outside this group. The data was analysed using actor-based models implemented in SIENA. Results show differences between positive and negative affect dynamics in this environment and an influence of personality traits on the average number and rate of communication

Being the center of attention: A Person-Context CNN framework for Personality Recognition

This paper proposes a novel study on personality recognition using video data from different scenarios. Our goal is to jointly model nonverbal behavioral cues with contextual information for a robust, multi-scenario, personality recognition system. Therefore, we build a novel multi-stream Convolutional Neural Network framework (CNN), which considers multiple sources of information. From a given scenario, we extract spatio-temporal motion descriptors from every individual in the scene, spatio-temporal motion descriptors encoding social group dynamics, and proxemics descriptors to encode the interaction with the surrounding context. All the proposed descriptors are mapped to the same feature space facilitating the overall learning effort. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of jointly modeling the mutual Person-Context information, outperforming the state-of-the art-results for personality recognition in two different scenarios. Lastly, we present CNN class activation maps for each personality trait, shedding light on behavioral patterns linked with personality attributes

Social network structure and personality in captive meerkat, Suricata suricatta, populations: assessment, comparison between wild and captive meerkat populations and captive management implications.

Research into the social behaviour of wild animals living in groups has demonstrated the importance of social structure dynamics and their consequences for an individual’s fitness. Many aspects of animal behaviour and ecology, including interactions with conspecifics, habitat use and willingness to take risks, can be a reflection of personality. One of the key concerns of captive animal husbandry is the social environment, as it is regularly modified and can shape the social behaviour of the animals in question in different ways. In this thesis I explore how meerkat, Suricata suricatta, social dynamics and individual positions may differ between wild and captive groups; I explore personality in the context of social networks and, lastly, I explore how physical and husbandry factors vary across enclosures and how this corresponds to a variation in the social structure of meerkats. Differences were found between the fifteen groups of captive meerkats when considering association networks based on foraging and resting. Some of these differences could be explained by intrinsic differences between the groups. An individual’s position within a network as described by their centrality and closeness measures could be predicted by their age and status, but rarely by their sex. I did not detect consistent patterns of non-random assortment amongst group members based on their sex, age or status. Groups of wild and captive meerkats differed in various aspects of their social network structure. Such differences may be due to individuals occupying different network positions and the difference in their number and strength of their connections to other individuals. This distinct way of interacting and associating could be a result of group specific attributes, such as group size, and/or the attributes of the donor and recipient, including sex, status or age. Critically, the differences may be explained by the dissimilar living environment that each encounters. The current results suggest that a meerkat social network in captive conditions can be less consistent than in their wild environment in the way they associate with one another, and in the manner they occupy particular positions in the network. Principal component analysis of the four personality traits revealed two personality dimensions, Friendliness and Aggressiveness, across the fifteen groups of meerkats. However, within a subset of my data (five groups), Friendliness was the only measure that robustly captured consistent individual differences across at least one year. A relationship was not found between attributes and personality dimensions due to age, status, and sex. Individuals with high Friendliness scores were more central in networks of foraging competitions. Aggressiveness did not explain an individual’s position in any form of interaction. There was no evidence that meerkats preferentially associated with or avoid others based on each of their personality scores. A relationship was found in the way animals associate with one another in the resting network based on the size and complexity of the enclosure and the type of shelter. Individuals were less likely to associate with others of the same sex or dominance status in enclosures that were larger or more complex. All the six external measures (the size and complexity of the enclosure, the type of barrier and day shelter, environmental enrichment frequency and human contact) influenced how individuals interacted with other group members within grooming, playing and dominance networks. In general, it seems to be that the key features to address in meerkat management in zoos are those of enclosure size and complexity (and perhaps provision of adequate shelters). Providing captive meerkats with more naturalistic and complex enclosures can help to preserve their natural social system.National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT)- Mexic

PEMBERDAYAAN PETANI SAYURAN: KASUS PETANI SAYURAN DI SULAWESI SELATAN

This study was focused on analyzing farmers’ empowerment and studying factors affecting group dynamic in relation with their business improvement. The objectives of this study were: (1) to identify factors that influence empowerment of crop farmer within groups, (2) the relation between group dynamics and productivity and, (3) the formulation of empowerment strategy through group approach. This study was conducted at two districts area: Gowa and Enrekang at South Sulawesi Province. Primary data were obtained from 240 respondents from members of group farmer who their business mostly cultivate vegetable. Quantitative analysis and qualitative-descriptive analysis were employed to explain the result of the research. Variabels used in the study were individual characteristics. The level of farmer empowerment within group is low, and factors that affect farmers’ empowerment within group are low (underdeveloped). These factors are empowerment pattern, level of personality, social environment, information access and level of farmers’ productivity. Development of elements of group dynamics in two locations shows low performance that means underdeveloped. The main constraints for developing group dynamics are lack of initiative and participation of group members to encourage group activities, and lack of cooperation and coordination of tasks within group. Individual characteristics include level of formal education, empowerment pattern, farmers’ personality, social environment and information access show significantly positive relationship with group dynamic. There are fourteen variabels which positively influence group dynamics. These variabels are empowerment pattern; level of farmers’ personality; social environment; and information access. Based on the relationship among variabels in the model of farmer development toward farmer’s productivity, it shows that variabels of working network (X2.2), self confident (X3.2), culture norms (X4.1), accurate information (X5.2), group objective (Y1.1) and group development (Y1.3) affect significantly of farmers’ productivity. This means these variables have significant role in promoting farmers’ productivity. Farmers’ productivity is still low and it should be developed through more diynamic activities

Specialised minds: extending adaptive explanations of personality to the evolution of psychopathology

Traditional evolutionary theory invoked natural and sexual selection to explain species- and sex-typical traits. However, some heritable inter-individual variability in behaviour and psychology – personality – is probably adaptive. Here we extend this insight to common psychopathological traits. Reviewing key findings from three background areas of importance – theoretical models, non-human personality and evolved human social dynamics – we propose that a combination of social niche specialisation, negative frequency-dependency, balancing selection and adaptive developmental plasticity should explain adaptation for individual differences in psychology – ‘specialised minds’ – explaining some variance in personality and psychopathology trait dimensions, which share various characteristics. We suggest that anthropological research of behavioural differences should be extended past broad demographic factors (age and sex) to include individual specialisations. As a first step towards grounding psychopathology in ancestral social structure, we propose a minimum plausible prevalence, given likely ancestral group sizes, for negatively frequency-dependent phenotypes to be maintained as specialised tails of adaptive distributions – below the calculated prevalence, specialisation is highly unlikely. For instance, chronic highly debilitating forms of autism or schizophrenia are too rare for such explanations, whereas attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder and broad autism phenotypes are common enough to have existed in most hunter-gatherer bands, making adaptive explanations more plausible