It is widely held, by social scientists as well as by lay people, that the members of human groups have an "innate" propensity to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, to delineate social boundaries and to develop stereotypes about "the other" in order to sustain and justify these boundaries. If this is indeed the case, ethnicity can be conceived of as being nearly as universal a characte...

In recent decades, an ever-increasing cluster of phenomena has attracted the attention of social scientists and historians of medicine: processes of medicalization. As in other regions, Latin America has been affected by these phenomena. This article surveys recent literature involving sociological studies of these processes in the region, in order to provide an overview of the issue. It explor...

Cultural selection theory has been rejected by many social scientists. The objections against this theory are listed and commented. Some of the objections can be dismissed as expressions of preference for one perspective over another. Different perspectives lead scientists to make different kinds of discoveries, but all perspectives are valid, and no theory or perspective can cover all aspects ...

The universe of prion and prion-like phenomena has expanded significantly in the past several years. Here, we overview the challenges in classifying this data informatically, given that terms such as "prion-like", "prion-related" or "prion-forming" do not have a stable meaning in the scientific literature. We examine the spectrum of proteins that have been described in the literature as forming...

OBJECTIVES According to recent findings trauma and stress are important etiological factors in pathogenesis of depression. As characteristic features of depressive cognition have been reported intrusive thoughts and memory disturbances similar to posttraumatic symptoms known in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder or dissociative disorders. Hypothetically is also suggested a close relati...

People make social inferences without intentions, awareness, or effort, i.e., spontaneously. We review recent findings on spontaneous social inferences (especially traits, goals, and causes) and closely related phenomena. We then describe current thinking on some of the most relevant processes, implicit knowledge, and theories. These include automatic and controlled processes and their interpla...

In this paper we discuss the purpose, design and direction of systems for the computational simulation of social phenomena. We do this by arguing and speculating about what an ideal system of this type might look like. We illustrate this with the tentative steps that have been made in this direction with respect to SDML. We hope that this will inform and stimulate the further development of soc...

This brief paper responds to a featured article By Ernst von Glasersfeld, titled “Who conceives of society,” Constructivist Foundations 3,2: 59-64, 2008, in which he elaborates his radical constructivist conception of human cognition about social phenomena. The response agrees that individuals construct their own meanings but questions whether discrepancies in understanding are recognizable and...