Towards a Model of Understanding Social Search

Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social interactions play an important role throughout the search process. Our main contribution is that we have integrated models from previous work in sensemaking and information seeking behavior to present a canonical social model of user activities before, during, and after search, suggesting where in the search process even implicitly shared information may be valuable to individual searchers.Comment: Presented at 1st Intl Workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking, 2008 (arXiv:0908.0583

Opinion dynamics: models, extensions and external effects

Recently, social phenomena have received a lot of attention not only from social scientists, but also from physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, in the emerging interdisciplinary field of complex system science. Opinion dynamics is one of the processes studied, since opinions are the drivers of human behaviour, and play a crucial role in many global challenges that our complex world and societies are facing: global financial crises, global pandemics, growth of cities, urbanisation and migration patterns, and last but not least important, climate change and environmental sustainability and protection. Opinion formation is a complex process affected by the interplay of different elements, including the individual predisposition, the influence of positive and negative peer interaction (social networks playing a crucial role in this respect), the information each individual is exposed to, and many others. Several models inspired from those in use in physics have been developed to encompass many of these elements, and to allow for the identification of the mechanisms involved in the opinion formation process and the understanding of their role, with the practical aim of simulating opinion formation and spreading under various conditions. These modelling schemes range from binary simple models such as the voter model, to multi-dimensional continuous approaches. Here, we provide a review of recent methods, focusing on models employing both peer interaction and external information, and emphasising the role that less studied mechanisms, such as disagreement, has in driving the opinion dynamics. [...]Comment: 42 pages, 6 figure

What makes a gatekeeper? Insights from the Finnish nano-community

In the process of transferring scientific knowledge to industry the role of individual academics has received less attention than the other actors in this process. This paper aims to identify the characteristics of these key individuals, or gatekeepers, by analysing them within the context of technology transfer in a science and technology community. The estimation results show that individuals who are able to provide firms with relevant research information and results are connected to the firms informally and formally. They have commercial motivations in their research and are more likely to act as gatekeepers in social networks. On the other hand, some of the a priori assumptions of these characteristics fail to have significant influence.Technology transfer, nanotechnology, social networks, gatekeepers

Influence of warmth and competence on the promotion of safe in-group selection. Stereotype content model and social categorization of faces

Categorizing an individual as a friend or foe plays a pivotal role in navigating the social world. According to the Stereotype Content Model, social perception relies on two fundamental dimensions, Warmth and Competence, which allow us to process the intentions of others and their ability to enact those intentions, respectively. Social cognition research indicates that, in categorization tasks, people tend to classify other individuals as more likely to belong to the out-group than the in-group (In-group Overexclusion Effect, IOE) when lacking diagnostic information, probably with the aim of protecting in-group integrity. Here, we explored the role of Warmth and Competence in group-membership decisions by testing 62 participants in a social-categorization task consisting of 150 neutral faces. We assessed whether (i) Warmth and Competence ratings could predict the in-group/out-group categorization, and (ii) the reliance on these two dimensions differed in low-IOE vs. high-IOE participants. Data showed that high ratings of Warmth and Competence were necessary to categorize a face as in-group. Moreover, while low-IOE participants relied on Warmth, high-IOE participants relied on Competence. This finding suggests that the proneness to include/exclude unknown identities in/from one's own in-group is related to individual differences in the reliance on SCM social dimensions. Furthermore, the primacy of Warmth effect seems not to represent a universal phenomenon adopted in the context of social evaluatio

Occupation Choice: Family, Social and Market Influences

The advance of knowledge-based societies has modified the labor markets and qualification requirements. In this sense, and considering that individual choices about careers and occupations have pervasive social effects, there is a growing interest from both academics and policy makers in understanding and influencing the process of education choice. Specifically, there is a worldwide renewed concern on achieving higher levels of graduation from scientific and technological disciplines. Available evidence shows that mobilizing individual wills towards these highly priority careers is not an easy nor mechanical task. Thus, it is necessary to expand the standard view about the process of occupation choice by adding non pecuniary factors, influence of social networks and the role of information and guidance policies. With these objectives in mind, and after reviewing the theoretical literature about occupation choice in economics, the present paper analyzes the effects that diverse personal, family, social and economic aspects have in the selection of an university career. Based on the empirical findings, some policy recommendations are put forward.Occupational Choice, Professions, Public Policy

Social Europe. ENEPRI Occasional Paper No. 5, November 2003

[From the Introduction and Summary]. Building a Social Europe has received due attention since the founding of the European Community in Rome. The European summit in Lisbon in 2000 was an important milestone in this process. European leaders committed themselves to working together through the 'open coordination' method to develop a policy to combat poverty and social exclusion. The open coordination approach means that countries exchange information and encourage each other to pursue policies geared to their social objectives. The European Union does not itself play an active role in the way in which individual member states set about achieving those objectives. It has however been agreed that member states will draw up a National Action Plan every two years setting out the way in which they plan to realise their objectives

Studying the Co-evolution of Individual Actions and Emergent Social Structures using Digital Trace Data

The information systems field has a long-standing interest in how individual actions co-evolve with social structures. Yet, studying the exact process of co-evolution turned out to be elusive. We propose a novel way to study this co-evolution using digital trace data. By analyzing the sequence of individual actions through digital trace data and the process of emergent social structuring expressed in collective action patterns, we can measure the recursive influence of individual actions and the process of emergent social structuring over time. We illustrate our approach using data from GitHub. We analyze the social structuring expressed through collective action patterns of a project and compare them with the idiosyncratic action patterns of individual developers. Our research has implications for studies that examine the connection between social structures and individual actions. Our approach particularly allows us to investigate the role of power and social influence in structuration processes, which has been typically neglected in existing research

The role of social interaction in farmers' climate adaptation choice

Adaptation to climate change might not always occur, with potentially\ud catastrophic results. Success depends on coordinated actions at both\ud governmental and individual levels (public and private adaptation). Even for a “wet” country like the Netherlands, climate change projections show that the frequency and severity of droughts are likely to increase. Freshwater is an important factor for agricultural production. A deficit causes damage to crop production and consequently to a loss of income. Adaptation is the key to decrease farmers’ vulnerability at the micro level and the sector’s vulnerability at the macro level. Individual adaptation decision-making is determined by the behavior of economic agents and social interaction among them. This can be best studied with agentbased modelling. Given the uncertainty about future weather conditions and the costs and effectiveness of adaptation strategies, a farmer in the model uses a cognitive process (or heuristic) to make adaptation decisions. In this process, he can rely on his experiences and on information from interactions within his social network. Interaction leads to the spread of information and knowledge that causes learning. Learning changes the conditions for individual adaptation decisionmaking. All these interactions cause emergent phenomena: the diffusion of adaptation strategies and a change of drought vulnerability of the agricultural sector. In this paper, we present a conceptual model and the first implementation of an agent-based model. The aim is to study the role of interaction in a farmer’s social network on adaptation decisions and on the diffusion of adaptation strategies\ud and vulnerability of the agricultural sector. Micro-level survey data will be used to parameterize agents’ behavioral and interaction rules at a later stage. This knowledge is necessary for the successful design of public adaptation strategies, since governmental adaptation actions need to be fine-tuned to private adaptation behavior