The social enforcement of debt at the individual, household, and group level

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Smith
2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 446-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom N. Walker ◽  
William O. H. Hughes

Social insects have evolved a suite of sophisticated defences against parasites. In addition to the individual physiological immune response, social insects also express ‘social immunity’ consisting of group-level defences and behaviours that include allogrooming. Here we investigate whether the social immune response of the leaf-cutting ant Acromyrmex echinatior reacts adaptively to the virulent fungal parasite, Metarhizium anisopliae . We ‘immunized’ mini-nests of the ants by exposing them twice to the parasite and then compared their social immune response with that of naive mini-nests that had not been experimentally exposed to the parasite. Ants allogroomed individuals exposed to the parasite, doing this both for those freshly treated with the parasite, which were infectious but not yet infected, and for those treated 2 days previously, which were already infected but no longer infectious. We found that ants exposed to the parasite received more allogrooming in immunized mini-nests than in naive mini-nests. This increased the survival of the freshly treated ants, but not those that were already infected. The results thus indicate that the social immune response of this leaf-cutting ant is adaptive, with the group exhibiting a greater and more effective response to a parasite that it has previously been exposed to.


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 345-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Fischer ◽  
Dimitris Xygalatas

We often think of pain as intrinsically bad, and the avoidance of pain is a fundamental evolutionary drive of all species. How can we then explain widespread cultural practices like certain rituals that involve the voluntary infliction of physical pain? In this paper, we argue that inflicting and experiencing pain in a ritual setting may serve important psychological and social functions. By providing psychological relief and leading to stronger identification with the group, such practices may result in a positive feedback loop, which serves both to increase the social cohesion of the community and the continuation of the ritual practices themselves. We argue that although the selective advantage of participation lies at the individual level, the benefits of those practices de facto extend to the group level, thereby allowing extreme rituals to function as effective social technologies.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 187 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Artiningsih ◽  
Suratman Worosuprojo ◽  
R. Rijanta ◽  
Su Rito Hardoyo

<p>In the last eight years (2008-2016), some areas in the northern part of Pekalongan have been experiencing coastal inundation. There have been social, economic and physical disruptions caused by coastal inundation particularly on built environments, paddy fields, and fishpond. The capacity of these areas to provide support for community livelihood has decreased significantly. This accumulative environmental change leads to the emerging of vulnerable regions which are characterized by limited social and ecological capability in responding to hazards. In order to enhance the social-ecological resilience, it is necessary to identify how these communities elevate their capacity and improve their livelihood. This paper presents empirical evidence of various pathways on how the community has transformed their capacity to respond to the changing environment due to coastal inundation. Using a case study approach, this paper explores on how the community has learned from their experiences, knowledge, and efforts withdrawn from the past, and then turns them into a better understanding to cope with, to adapt to, and to become resilient from coastal inundation. In-depth interviews with several key persons who are selected by purposive and snowballing sampling method are employed. These key persons represent the most capable person in each sub-district who poses some important data and information related to coastal inundation either as the individual, household members, or community organization members. The scope of area observation is limited to six sub-districts which adjacent to the coast in the North Pekalongan District. This research employs inductive approach and manual coding technique. The research demonstrates that social-ecological resilience will likely enhance in a community which is capable of nurturing flexible networking. Such networking has made it possible for important information, novel knowledge and practical tools and solutions spread over in the community. These are key elements that allow new transformative pathways occur. However, there is various community capacities with different achievement on transformative pathways which need to be engage on the future empowerment initiatives. Only few community of Kandang Panjang Sub-district come to short term resilience due to their awareness on establishing social networking and several actions on environmental quality improvement.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bagavandas m

Abstract BackgroundThe main objective of this study is to develop multilevel multi-factor index to assess the quality of life of Malayali tribal population of India at the individual and village levels based on nine domains, namely, Demography, Economy, Health, Human Development, Infrastructure Development, Work Participation, Recreation, Social Capital and Self Perception. Also, an attempt is made to classify the individuals as well as villages on the basis of the overall scores of multifactor index within a community which will help policy makers to develop concrete policy recommendations for the improvement of quality of life of this tribal group.MethodMultilevel factor analysis is utilized to determine uncorrelated meaningful factors and their respective weights using Mplus software from the nested dataset consists of values of nine domains of 1096 individuals collected from 19 villages. Multilevel multifactor index is constructed using the weights of these factors. The qualities of lives of different households and of different villages are assessed using the scores of this index.ResultsThree different factors are identified at household as well as village levels. The quality of life at Households and at villages levels are classified as poor, low, moderate, good and excellent based on five quintiles of the scores of the multifactor index and the contribution of each domain in this classification is ascertained.DiscussionThis study finds that at household as well as at village levels, the quality of life of the individuals of this tribal population increases with increase in education, income and occupation status which make them to lead a healthy life and also make them to find time and money to spend on recreation. Infrastructure does not play a significant role at the house hold level whereas it is a matter at village level. ConclusionThe main purpose of developing this kind of multifactor index at different levels is to provide a tool for tribal development based on realistic data which can be used to monitor the key factors that encompass the social, health, environmental and economic dimensions of quality of lives at the individual/household and community levels of this tribal people.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alecia Carter ◽  
Guy Cowlishaw

The formation of culture in animal societies, including humans, relies on the social transmission of information amongst individuals. This spread depends upon the transmission of social information, or social learning, between individuals. However, not all information spreads. To better understand how constraints at the individual-, dyad- and group-level might influence the formation of culture, we experimentally introduced four innovations (novel behaviours) across three troops of wild chacma baboons (Papio ursinus). At the individual-level, different phenotypic traits constrained individuals' use of social information about the innovations. At the dyad-level, we found evidence for social reinforcement and directed social learning affecting who learnt and from whom. Group-level characteristics also limited the diffusion of information, which spread more slowly through social networks that showed less mixing across age classes. Nevertheless, despite these multi-level limitations, the four innovations quickly spread through all the social groups in which they were tested, suggesting that the formation of animal cultures can be surprisingly resilient to constraints on information transmission.


1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 201-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claude Flament

This paper is concerned by a possible articulation between the diversity of individual opinions and the existence of consensus in social representations. It postulates the existence of consensual normative boundaries framing the individual opinions. A study by questionnaire about the social representations of the development of intelligence gives support to this notion.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-137
Author(s):  
Roxanne Christensen ◽  
LaSonia Barlow ◽  
Demetrius E. Ford

Three personal reflections provided by doctoral students of the Michigan School of Professional Psychology (Farmington Hills, Michigan) address identification of individual perspectives on the tragic events surrounding Trayvon Martin’s death. The historical ramifications of a culture-in-context and the way civil rights, racism, and community traumatization play a role in the social construction of criminals are explored. A justice orientation is applied to both the community and the individual via internal reflection about the unique individual and collective roles social justice plays in the outcome of these events. Finally, the personal and professional responses of a practitioner who is also a mother of minority young men brings to light the need to educate against stereotypes, assist a community to heal, and simultaneously manage the direct effects of such events on youth in society. In all three essays, common themes of community and growth are addressed from varying viewpoints. As worlds collided, a historical division has given rise to a present unity geared toward breaking the cycle of violence and trauma. The authors plead that if there is no other service in the name of this tragedy, let it at least contribute to the actualization of a society toward growth and healing.


This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 C.E.). Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, it illustrates how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introduces the social and textual histories of each collection. Nearly every chapter focuses on the letter collection of a different late ancient author—from the famous (or even infamous) to the obscure—and investigates its particular issues of content, arrangement, and publication context. On the whole, the volume reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with its own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas while offering new approaches to interpret both larger letter collections and the individual letters contained within them. Each chapter contributes to a broad argument that scholars should read letter collections as they do representatives of other late antique literary genres, as single texts made up of individual components, with larger thematic and literary characteristics that are as important as those of their component parts.


1970 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-226
Author(s):  
Олена Горова

Професійне   становлення   особистості   супроводжує   всі   етапи  соціально-вікового   розвитку  особистості.  Трудова  діяльність  є  основним  видом  суспільної  активності,  який  дозволяє  працівнику  задовольняти  основні  потреби,  особливо  у  процесі  постійних  соціальних,  освітніх  реформ.  Важливим  завданням психологічного супроводу працівника у процесі виконання професійної діяльності є забезпечення  сприятливих  умов  формування  професійно  важливих  якостей.  Соціальна  успішність  є  результатом  ефективного  розв’язання  виробничих  завдань, які  мають  суспільно корисну  важливість  та  пов’язані  з  потребами інших людей. Якісний прогресивний розвиток працівника можливий лише за умови збереження  стійкого  позитивного  ставлення  до  професії.  Позитивна  професійна  самоідентифікація  пов’язана  з  ототожненням  та  персоналізацією  працівником  особистісних  рис  працівників,  які  досягли  успіху  у  професії,  мають  суспільно  визнані  результати  діяльності.  Таким  чином,  професійна  успішність  як  суб’єктне  новоутворення  у  якості  відчуття  гордості  за  власні  результати  діяльності  забезпечує  реалізацію традиції наставництва і  передачі позитивного професійного досвіду.    Професійно  успішний  працівник  усвідомлює  необхідність  та  важливість  результатів  своєї  діяльності  для  інших,  що  вимагає,  відповідно,  від  соціального  середовища  усвідомлення  необхідності  визнання  результатів  діяльності  фахівців.  Знехтуваний  суспільством  працівник,  або  той,  результати  діяльності  якого  позиціонуються  як  меншовартісні,  дистанціюється  від  професії  та  має  негативний  потенціал розвитку. Professional formation of the person accompanies all phases of social and age of the individual. Gainful  employment is the main form of social activity that allows the employee to realize the basic needs. An important task  of psychological support worker in the course of professional activity is to provide favorable conditions for the  formation  of  professionally  important  qualities.  Professional  success  is  the  result  of  an  effective  solution  of  industrial jobs that are socially useful and important related to the needs of others. High-quality progressive  development of an employee is only possible while maintaining a stable positive attitude towards the profession.  Positive  professional  identity  associated  with  the  identification  and  personalization  of  employee  personality traits of employees who have been successful in the profession, who have publicly acknowledged  performance. Thus professional success as the subjective feeling of a lump in the pride of their own results of  operations  ensures  the  implementation  of  the  tradition  of  mentoring  and  of  positive  transfer  of  professional  experience.  Professionally successful employees aware of the need and the importance of the results of its operations  for the other, which requires, respectively, from the social environment - awareness of the need to recognize the  performance of specialists. Unclaimed society worker, or the results of operations, which are positioned as less  important, is moving away from the profession and has a negative potential. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Valeriy HEYETS ◽  

Self-realization of the individual in the conditions of using the policy of “social quality” as a modern tool of public administration in a transitional society is largely related to overcoming the existing limitations of the individual in acting in such a society and economy transitioning to a market character. Given that, in particular, in Ukraine the market is hybrid (and this is especially important), the existing limitations in self-realization of the individual must be overcome, including, and perhaps primarily, through transformations in the processes of socialization, which differ from European practices and institutions that ensure its implementation. Thus, it is a matter of overcoming not only and not so much the natural selfish interests of the individual, but the existing gap in skills, which are an invisible asset to ensure the endogenous nature of economic growth. It is shown that there is an inverse relationship between the formation of socialization and the policy of “social quality”, which is characterized by the dialectic of interaction between the individual and the group and which is a process of increasing the degree of socialization. The latter, due to interdependence, will serve to increase the effectiveness of interaction between the individual and the group, which expands the possibilities of self-realization of the individual in terms of European policy of “social quality” as a tool of public administration, whose successful application causes new challenges and content of the so-called secondary sociology. The logic of Ukraine's current development shows that new approaches are needed to achieve the social development goals set out in the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the European Union and to minimize the potential risks and threats that accompany current reforms in Ukrainian society. They should introduce new forms of public administration to create policy interrelationships of all dimensions, as proposed, in particular, by the social quality approach to socialization, the nature of which has been revealed in the author's previous publications. As a result, the socio-cultural (social) dimension will fundamentally change, the structure of which must include the transformational processes of socialization of a person, thanks to which they will learn the basics of life in the new social reality and intensify their social and economic interaction on the basis of self-realization, thereby contributing to the success of state policy of social quality and achieving stable socio-economic development.


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