Generalized Generosity: How the Norm of Generalized Reciprocity Bridges Collective Forms of Social Exchange

This study examines the potential for small-scale acts of giving that are not directly reciprocated, or generalized generosities, to build social bonds and promote contributions to the group. Social exchange theorists define such acts as generalized exchange. The potential for generalized exchange to build strong social bonds relative to other forms of exchange is the subject of theoretical debate. In this article, I build on two prominent theories of social exchange—affect theory and the theory of reciprocity—to propose that a strong norm of generalized reciprocity may bridge the connective benefits of generalized exchange with the connective benefits of productive exchange, which is a collaborative form of social exchange that involves sharing pooled resources. I argue that a strong norm of generalized reciprocity will activate mechanisms theorized to build strong social bonds in generalized and productive exchange systems, and will promote additional behavioral investments into the group. I test my argument with a controlled laboratory experiment, finding strong support for the proposed causal model. The results of this study have implications for research on generosity, collective action, collaboration, sense of community, and social capital.

Conceptualizing and assessing norm strength in International Relations

What constitutes a strong or a weak norm? Scholars often refer to strong or weak, or strengthening or weakening norms, yet there are widespread inconsistencies in terminology and no agreed-upon measures. This has hindered the accumulation of knowledge and made it difficult to test competing hypotheses about norm development and contestation. To address these conceptual problems and their analytical implications, this article conceptualizes norm strength as the extent of collective expectations related to a principled idea and proposes two indicators to assess a norm’s strength: the level of international concordance with a principled idea, and the degree of international institutionalization of a principled idea. The article illustrates the applicability and utility of the proposed conceptualization by evaluating the strengths of two transitional justice norms: the norm of legal accountability and the norm of truth-seeking. In so doing, the article resolves empirical disputes over the origins and status of these norms. In particular, the analysis reveals that while legal accountability became a norm in the early 1990s and is today a strong norm, truth-seeking emerged later and remains a weak norm. More generally, the proposed framework should advance existing debates about norm contestation, localization, violation, and erosion.

The breakdown of antiracist norms: A natural experiment on hate speech after terrorist attacks

Terrorist attacks often fuel online hate and increase the expression of xenophobic and antiminority messages. Previous research has focused on the impact of terrorist attacks on prejudiced attitudes toward groups linked to the perpetrators as the cause of this increase. We argue that social norms can contain the expression of prejudice after the attacks. We report the results of a combination of a natural and a laboratory-in-the-field (lab-in-the-field) experiment in which we exploit data collected about the occurrence of two consecutive Islamist terrorist attacks in Germany, the Würzburg and Ansbach attacks, in July 2016. The experiment compares the effect of the terrorist attacks in hate speech toward refugees in contexts where a descriptive norm against the use of hate speech is evidently in place to contexts in which the norm is ambiguous because participants observe antiminority comments. Hate toward refugees, but not toward other minority groups, increased as a result of the attacks only in the absence of a strong norm. These results imply that attitudinal changes due to terrorist attacks are more likely to be voiced if norms erode.

Understanding and Improving Proximity Graph Based Maximum Inner Product Search

The inner-product navigable small world graph (ip-NSW) represents the state-of-the-art method for approximate maximum inner product search (MIPS) and it can achieve an order of magnitude speedup over the fastest baseline. However, to date it is still unclear where its exceptional performance comes from. In this paper, we show that there is a strong norm bias in the MIPS problem, which means that the large norm items are very likely to become the result of MIPS. Then we explain the good performance of ip-NSW as matching the norm bias of the MIPS problem — large norm items have big in-degrees in the ip-NSW proximity graph and a walk on the graph spends the majority of computation on these items, thus effectively avoids unnecessary computation on small norm items. Furthermore, we propose the ip-NSW+ algorithm, which improves ip-NSW by introducing an additional angular proximity graph. Search is first conducted on the angular graph to find the angular neighbors of a query and then the MIPS neighbors of these angular neighbors are used to initialize the candidate pool for search on the inner-product proximity graph. Experiment results show that ip-NSW+ consistently and significantly outperforms ip-NSW and provides more robust performance under different data distributions.

The emergence of deviance: Experiments testing the personal effects of violating a social norm

Social norms are such powerful drivers of human behavior that people conform to social norms even when they would prefer to violate them or when conforming is not in their personal material interest. Researchers have theorized that in these cases, people conform to avoid the social and psychological costs of deviance (e.g., guilt, self-deprecation, punishment). Notwithstanding the possible costs, people do decide to violate norms. We conducted two randomized experiments (N = 3,499) to explore the behavioral and psychological consequences of deviating from norms. Participants played behavioral games governed by norms of cooperation, without a mechanism for players to punish one another. Participants assigned to the treatment condition, unlike those in the control condition, were offered a monetary incentive to deviate from a strong norm of cooperation in one round of the game. Violating this norm significantly increased their propensity to violate other social norms in new settings involving new groups and new games (with no incentive to deviate). Post-treatment survey data suggest that violating norms causes people to depreciate their expectation of the costs associated with violation, but does not lead them to update their views of the self. Together, these results challenge and inform traditional views of deviance as personality or a stable individual motivation or trait, and suggest that deviance can emerge from an experience of deviance at any point in one's life.

Bullying among Javanese Ethnic Senior High School Students

This study is to find out the type of bullying that often occurs in high school of Javanese ethnic. The Javanese has a strong norm of courtesy, respect for the elder and they cannot speak frankly. In addition, the characteristics of the Javanese are also obedient (setya tuhu), not rejective and not rebellious. Javanese has also apolite language and it always humble. All of these Javanese characters are contrary to bullying which is an aggressive behavior that involves intention to harm others. In this research, the data were collected by using survey through open questionnaire. The data were collected from 7 (seven) cities in Central Java which were selected randomly. The subjects of the research were 287 high school students which were selected by purposive sampling technique. The data was analyzed by using indigenous psychology approach. The result of the study showed that there were 3 types of bullying in high school. They were verbal bullying (mocked, lied and slandered) as much as 72.13%, physical bullying (hit, groped and spit) as much as 14.63% and psychological bullying (belittled and exiled) as much as 13.24%.

Promising

This chapter argues that promise-making is governed by a norm of competence, alongside a norm of sincerity. Thus a promise can be criticizable even if it expresses a sincere commitment to act in some admirable way: even if it is neither a false promise nor a wicked promise. The chapter shows how a competence norm is distinct from the norm of keeping one’s promises. Competence norms come in various strengths, from a very weak ‘keepability’ norm of avoiding unkeepable promises to a very strong norm of not making promises unless one knows one will be able to keep the promise. These correspond to the variety of possible epistemic norms on assertion which are more familiar from philosophical debate. Finally, the chapter briefly reviews the relationship between different accounts of why we should keep our promises, and different accounts of what competence norm applies to promise-making.

From Noah’s Ark to ‘Nature+’

The chapter reconstructs two major changes in the ways in which the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has legitimated itself. In the 1980s and 1990s, IUCN’s focus first shifted from conserving nature for nature’s sake to conserving nature for the sake of the people. This rise of human well-being norms was subsequently reinforced by the increasing emphasis of stakeholder participation, local knowledge, and, with some time lag, indigenous peoples’ rights. Since the early 2000s, we then observe the rise of a complementary legitimation strategy that centres around the economic benefits of conservation. Analytically, the chapter shows that changes in membership structures as well as in the ideational environment of international organizations provide windows for change, that these are used by strong norm entrepreneurs in the organization’s secretariat, and that normative changes have a tendency to be self-reinforcing, a phenomenon we term normative path dependence.

Emotional Reactions to Intergroup Norm Violations

The present study investigates emotional reactions that follow norm violations involving Hindus and Muslims in India. It also studies how in-group’s emotional reaction is predicted by the emotion that the group experiences in tandem with certain contextual factors, such as, fraternal relative deprivation (FRD), social identity, power to harm and resource power. Data were collected on 221 Hindus and 167 Muslims. Three different types of norm-violating situations were presented and subjects were asked to rate the extent to which they and their group will experience anger, fear or anxiety in such situations. Respondents were asked to choose between conciliation, retaliation and retribution as one of their preferred emotional reactions. Although, conciliation was the most preferred reaction for resolving conflicts for both, Hindus and Muslims, this preference changed from one situation to another. Across three situations, anger was the most intensely experienced emotion followed by the emotions of anxiety and fear. Anger evoked retaliatory reactions among Hindus while Muslims preferred a retributory reaction in situations involving strong norm violations. Multinomial logistic analysis showed that no emotion was consistently related with the preferred emotional reaction to norm violations across situations. For Hindus, fear in Situation 1 (personal humiliation of a group member) was associated with preference for retribution but with conciliation in Situation 3 (mocking of Gods and Goddesses). Similarly, anger enhanced the odds of Hindus for engaging in retaliation in Situation 2 (obstruction of in-group’s religious procession). As for Muslims, contextual factors, such as, resource power, power to harm in association with different negative emotions increased the odds for their preferred choices of emotional reaction.

THE STRONG-NORM CONVERGENCE OF A PROJECTION-DIFFERENCE METHOD OF SOLUTION OF A PARABOLIC EQUATION WITH THE PERIODIC CONDITION ON THE SOLUTION

A smooth soluble abstract linear parabolic equation with the periodic condition on the solution is treated in a separable Hilbert space. This problem is solved approximately by a projection-difference method using the Galerkin method in space and the implicit Euler scheme in time. Effective both in time and in space strong-norm error estimates for approximate solutions, which imply convergence of approximate solutions to the exact solution and order of convergence rate depending of the smoothness of the exact solution, are obtained.