With the advent of popular Web destinations such as MySpace and Facebook, online social networking communities now occupy the center stage of e-commerce. Yet these online social networking communities must balance the trade-off between advertising revenue and user experience. Drawing on the sociology and advertising literature, this study investigates the impacts of social identity and group no...

Humans, as discriminately social creatures, make frequent judgments about others' suitability for interdependent social relations. Which characteristics of others guide these judgments and, thus, shape patterns of human affiliation? Extant research is only minimally useful for answering this question. On the basis of a sociofunctional analysis of human sociality, the authors hypothesized that p...

OBJECTIVE This article examines how epidemiological evidence is and should be used in the context of increasing concern for health equity and for social determinants of health. METHOD A research literature on use of scientific evidence of "environmental risks" is outlined, and key issues compared with those that arise with respect to social determinants of health. RESULTS The issue sets are...

The current study tested whether preschoolers' moral and social-conventional judgments change under social pressure using Asch's conformity paradigm. A sample of 132 preschoolers (Mage=3.83years, SD=0.85) rated the acceptability of moral and social-conventional events and also completed a visual judgment task (i.e., comparing line length) both independently and after having viewed two peers who...

This study examined the potential of pedagogical agents as learning companions (PALs) to build social relations with learners and, consequently, to motivate learning. The study investigated the impact of PAL affect (positive vs. negative vs. neutral), PAL gender (male vs. female), and learner gender (male vs. female) on learners’ social judgments, motivation, and learning in a controlled experi...

The present study is a first attempt to experimentally test the impact of two specific social factors, namely social conformity pressure and a sense of being watched, on participants' judgments of the artistic quality of aesthetic objects. We manipulated conformity pressure with a test form in which a photograph of each stimulus was presented together with unanimously low (downward pressure) or...

The negotiation of social order is intimately connected to the capacity to infer and track status relationships. Despite the foundational role of status in social cognition, we know little about how the brain constructs status from social interactions that display it. Although emerging cognitive neuroscience reveals that status judgments depend on the intraparietal sulcus, a brain region that s...

Interpersonal sensitivity (emotional and social) is the ability to accurately assess others' abilities, states, and traits from nonverbal cues. The authors predicted that individuals' interpersonal sensitivity would be related to accurate judgments of friends' interpersonal sensitivity. Fifty participants were recruited, each bringing a friend to participate in performance-based, self-report, a...

The human brain tracks dynamic changes within the social environment, forming and updating representations of individuals in our social milieu. This mechanism of social navigation builds an increasingly complex map of persons with whom we are familiar and form attachments to guide adaptive social behaviors. We examined the neural representation of known others along a continuum of attachment us...

Interpersonal sensitivity (emotional and social) is the ability to accurately assess others’ abilities, states, and traits from nonverbal cues. The authors predicted that individuals’ interpersonal sensitivity would be related to accurate judgments of friends’ interpersonal sensitivity. Fifty participants were recruited, each bringing a friend to participate in performance-based, self-report, a...