Open educational resources (OERs) provide opportunities as enablers of societal development, but they also create new challenges. From the perspective of content providers and educational institutions, particularly, cultural and context-related challenges emerge. Even though barriers regarding large-scale adoption of OERs are widely discussed, empirical evidence for determining challenges in re...

Psychological causes of social distance were examined from the perspective of Construal Level Theory (CLT; Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007), which predicts that temporal distance from and abstract construal of a social target would create perception of social distance. Our studies demonstrate that expectations for temporally remote (versus proximal) social interaction produce greater social di...

The referral incentive programs are one of the common incentive mechanisms to attract new customers in e-commerce websites, especially for start-ups, by leveraging existing customer’s social networks. Designing an appropriate referral reward program will allow online businesses to increase customer base and enhance sales. This paper leverages the ultimatum game (sense of fairness) and construal...

Drawing upon construal level theory, this research investigates the influence of social distance on individuals’ responses to persuasive messages. Experiment 1 (N = 133) demonstrates that the persuasive impact of a gain frame becomes stronger when people make judgments for socially distant (e.g., others) versus proximal entities (e.g., selves). On the other hand, the persuasive impact of a loss...

This study investigated EEG correlates of social interaction at distance between twenty-five pairs of participants who were not connected by any traditional channels of communication. Each session involved the application of 128 stimulations separated by intervals of random duration ranging from 4 to 6 seconds. One of the pair received a one-second stimulation from a light signal produced by an...

In this paper we relate linguistic, geographic and social distances to each other in order to get a better understanding of the impact the DutchGerman state border has had on the linguistic characteristics of a sub-area of the Kleverlandish dialect area. This area used to be a perfect dialect continuum. We test three models for explaining today’s pattern of linguistic variation in the area. In ...

The exponential advancement in information and communication technology has fostered the emergence of new channels for online discussion and has also reduced distances between people. Unfortunately, malicious people take advantage of this technological achievement in the sense that they use it for illegal purposes. In social media, the users produce several and various formats of suspicious pos...

As a measure of how prosocial behavior depends on social distance, social discounting is defined as the decrease in generosity between the decision maker and the recipient as the social distance increases. While risk is a ubiquitous part of modern life, there is limited research on the relationship between risk and prosocial behavior. In the present experiment, we empirically test whether risk ...