Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation

We develop a conceptual framework for studying collective adaptation: the process of iterative co-adaptation of cognitive strategies, social environments, and problem structures. Going beyond searching for “intelligent” collectives, we integrate research from different disciplines to show how collective adaptation perspective can help explain why similar collectives can follow very different and sometimes counter-intuitive trajectories. We further discuss how this perspective explains why successful collectives appear to have a general collective intelligence factor, why collectives rarely optimize their behaviour for a single problem, why their behaviours can appear myopic, and why playful exploration of alternative social systems can be useful. We describe different approaches for the study of collective adaptation, including computational models inspired by evolution and statistical physics. The framework of collective adaptation enables the integration and formalization of knowledge about human collective phenomena and opens doors to a rigorous transdisciplinary pursuit of important outstanding questions about human sociality.

Enactive Principles for the Ethics of User Interactions on Social Media: How to Overcome Systematic Misunderstandings Through Shared Meaning-Making

This paper proposes three principles for the ethical design of online social environments aiming to minimise the unintended harms caused by users while interacting online, specifically by enhancing the users’ awareness of the moral load of their interactions. Such principles would need to account for the strong mediation of the digital environment and the particular nature of user interactions: disembodied, asynchronous, and ambiguous intent about the target audience. I argue that, by contrast to face to face interactions, additional factors make it more difficult for users to exercise moral sensitivity in an online environment. An ethics for social media user interactions is ultimately an ethics of human relations mediated by a particular environment; hence I look towards an enactive inspired ethics in formulating principles for human interactions online to enhance or at least do not hinder a user’s moral sensitivity. This enactive take on social media ethics supplements classical moral frameworks by asking us to focus on the relations established through the interactions and the environment created by those interactions.

Adjustment of fecundity and sex ratio in response to social environments in a haplodiploid mite

Animals can adjust reproductive strategies in favour of corporation or competition in response to local population size and density, the two key factors of social environments. However, previous studies usually focus on either population size or density but ignore their interactions. Using a haplodiploid spider mite, Tetranychus ludeni Zacher, we carried out a factorial experiment in the laboratory to examine how ovipositing females adjust their fecundity and offspring sex ratio during their early reproductive life under various population size and density. We reveal that females laid significantly more eggs with increasing population size and significantly fewer eggs with increasing population density. This suggests that large populations favour cooperation between individuals and dense populations increase competition. We demonstrate a significant negative interaction of population size and density that resulted in significantly fewer eggs laid in the large and dense populations. Furthermore, we show that females significantly skewed the offspring sex ratio towards female-biased in small populations to reduce the local mate competition among their sons. However, population density incurred no significant impact on offspring sex ratio, while the significant positive interaction of population size and density significantly increased the proportion of female offspring in the large and dense populations, which will minimise food or space competition as females usually disperse after mating at crowded conditions. These results also suggest that population density affecting sex allocation in T. ludeni is intercorrelated with population size. This study provides evidence that animals can manipulate their reproductive output and adjust offspring sex ratio in response to various social environments, and the interactions of different socio-environmental factors may play significant roles.

The Construction of Self-Identity in the Chronically Mentally Ill: A Focus on Autobiographic Narratives of Mentally Ill Patients in South Korea

A systematic policy for treatment and management of chronic psychiatric patients in South Korea was begun with the passage of the Mental Health Act in 1995. The mentally ill patients who were previously separated from the society now have opportunities to live in local communities under medication with the help of rehabilitation facilities. This study aims to understand how mentally ill patients deal with their new medical environment. An autobiographic narrative analysis is methodically applied in order to link the social and the individual levels. Autobiographic narratives of illness show how the patient’s self-identity is formed and further developed according to the chronic conditions of his illness and the continual learning from experiences. In regard to the construction of selfidentity, two aspects should be taken into consideration: First, medication is absolutely necessary before patients can leave the hospital and participate in rehabilitation programs. Secondly, social integration is usually evaluated by the return of the patient into a normal biographical stage. It turns out that medication deprives the patients of control over their emotions, their bodies. Furthermore, their social environments – including family, friends and the labor market – work against them. Under these circumstances, mentally ill patients are liable to adhere to their own interpretation of mental illness, and what they experience is far different from the expectations of experts in the field. The new mental health environment also contributes to the formation of patient communities. As a result, chronic psychiatric patients are able to build their own subculture and to see themselves through their own eyes. Further studies are needed to explore whether and to what extent the ongoing improvement of social conditions for mentally ill patients has an impact on autobiographic narratives and self-identity construction.

Promoting Health in a Rural Community in the Basque Country by Leveraging Health Assets Identified through a Community Health Diagnosis

Salutogenesis focuses on factors that generate health and is a useful construct for identifying factors that promote health and for guiding activities to this end. This article describes health assets identified in a community diagnosis and how to leverage them with actions for improvement to deepen the understanding of this concept and its impact on health promotion. An intervention strategy was designed following the principles of participatory action research (PAR). The study was carried out in Mañaria (Basque Country, Spain) using semi-structured and in-depth interviews, participant observation, desk review, and photographs, alongside different participatory strategies. Twenty-six women were interviewed, 21 of whom were community inhabitants, and five were key informants who worked in public or private institutions. Participant recruitment stopped when data saturation was reached. Data were analysed through discourse analysis, progressive coding, and categorisation. Six meta-categories emerged, and for each of these categories, health assets were identified together with actions to improve the community’s health. The latter were presented by the community to the authorities to trigger specific actions towards improving the health of the community. Identification of health assets led to different actions to improve the health of the community including improving the existing physical and social environments, personal and group skills, and the promotion of physical, social, emotional and cultural well-being.

Models of Identity Signaling

Identity signals inform receivers of a signaler’s membership in a subset of individuals, and in doing so shape cooperation, conflict, and social learning. Understanding the use and consequences of identity signaling is therefore critical for a complete science of collective human behavior. And, as with all complex social systems, this understanding is aided by the use of formal mathematical and computational models. Here I review some formal models of identity signaling. I divide these models into two categories. The first concerns models that assert how identity functions as a signal and test the consequences of those assertions, with a focus on public health behavior and disease transmission. The second concerns models used to understand how identity signals operate strategically in different social environments, with a focus on covert or encrypted communication.

Runet Users' Attitude to Outrageous Content in Virtual Social Environments

This study of the Runet virtual social environments deals with identifying and analyzing user reactions to watching a video clip containing outrageous behavior, and studying social attitudes of the respondents. The Celebrium-X platform employing the adjoint ideomotion technology for remote collection and processing of group neuro-responses was chosen as a research tool. As the empirical basis of the research, the raw data obtained as a result of the conducted survey was used. The results of the study have shown the respondents' negative attitude to publishing of outrageous video clips in virtual social environments. The Internet audience realizes a negative effect produced by the aggressive content on people's psychological sphere and social behavior. Received: 12 October 2021 / Accepted: 11 December 2021 / Published: 3 January 2022

Is Network Structure Important for Protest Mobilization? Findings from Agent-Based Modeling

In recent decades, the focus of civic engagement research has shifted towards studying social environments’ effects on individuals’ decisions on whether to participate in a given activity or not. Online communication has been increasingly influencing the scale of social environments as well as the features of both online and offline interpersonal communications. Surely, then, individuals’ decisions concerning protest mobilization are bound to be affected by network properties. Using a series of ABM models with different network structures, we try to identify the structural factors of networks that can influence individuals who are deciding whether to join a protest. The established research in this field traditionally points to two structural factors: network topology and homophily. To our knowledge, however, the literature has not considered two above-mentioned structural factors in combination. In other words, their joint influence on protest mobilization has not been tested. To fill this research gap, we combine several network topologies with enabled/disabled homophily and examine how the combination influences protest turnout and survival. Numerical experiments show that homophily is positively associated with the survival of the protest, but negatively with its size for any network topology. Since we infer this conclusion from a theory-based computational model, we also propose how empirical testing can be conducted. Acknowledgments: This research is supported by the Russian Science Foundation under grant no. 20-18-00274, HSE University.

The Ecology of Religious Knowledges

Different religious traditions, beliefs, and experiences claim to have epistemic contact with the ultimate source of reality. However, this epistemic claim has encountered one of its most significant obstacles in the initial incompatibility of its multiple accounts. I argue that from the ecology of knowledges, the idea that intentions, body, and physical and social environments are constitutive elements of our experience and knowledge, we can understand both the veridical, as embodied and extended, and pluralistic, as essentially limited, nature of religious experiences and knowledges. I characterize the mystical religious experience as a state of consciousness that (allegedly) allows direct epistemic contact with the supreme reality, articulating its essentially non-ordinary nature on the basis of the radical otherness of the sacred realm, namely, its character of being eternal, infinite, and with supreme ontological, ethical, and aesthetic value. According to this proposal, the different religious perspectives are understood as different epistemic approaches dealing with these numinous features in a gradual continuum from their most impersonal to their most personal specifications. I conclude that the cognitive relevance of any religious knowledge implies explanations and interventions that, although compatible with, go beyond those of both other religious knowledges and the knowledges of the non-sacred domains.

The effects of social environment and the metapleural gland on disease resistance in acorn ants

Eusocial species differ in living conditions when compared to solitary species primarily due to the dense living conditions of genetically related individuals. Consequently, these crowded conditions can induce a high rate of pathogen transmission and pathogen susceptibility. To resist an epidemic, individuals rely on sets of behaviors, known as social immunity, to decrease pathogen transmission among nestmates. Alongside social immunity, ants have a pair of secretory metapleural glands (MG), thought to secrete antimicrobial compounds important for antisepsis, that are believed to be transferred among nestmates by social immune behaviors such as grooming. To investigate the effects of social immunity on pathogen resistance, we performed a series of experiments by inoculating acorn ants Temnothorax curvispinosus with a lethal spore concentration of the entomopathogenic fungus Metarhizium brunneum . After inoculation ant survival was monitored in two environments: solitary and in groups. Additionally, the MG role in pathogen resistance was evaluated for both solitary and grouped living ants, by sealing the MG prior to inoculations. Individuals within a group environment had a higher survival compared to those in a solitary environment, and individuals with sealed glands had significantly decreased survival than ants with non-sealed-MG in both solitary and social environments. We observed the lowest survival for solitary-sealed-MG individuals. Although sealing the MG reduced survival probability, sealing the MG did not remove the benefits of grouped living. We show here that social living plays a crucial role in pathogen resistance and that the MG has an important role in pathogen resistance of individual T. curvispinosus ants. Although important for an individual's pathogen resistance, our data show that the MG does not play a strong role in social immunity as previously believed. Overall, this study provides insights into mechanisms of social immunity and the role of MG in disease resistance.