The JRF’s recent public consultation revealed a strong sense of unease about some of the changes shaping British society. This Viewpoint continues the discussion about modern ‘social evils’ on the theme of ‘distrusting and fearful society’. Anna Minton argues that the cause of growing fear and distrust is visible physical inequality and segregation in the environment, combined with a commercial...

Although prejudice is typically positively related to relative outgroup size, four studies found converging evidence that perceived atheist prevalence reduces anti-atheist prejudice. Study 1 demonstrated that anti-atheist prejudice among religious believers is reduced in countries in which atheists are especially prevalent. Study 2 demonstrated that perceived atheist prevalence is negatively as...

In the wake of public distrust regarding biotechnology, it has been suggested that the debate should be moved "upstream", whereby the public help to set research priorities. Although many scientists see this as an illogical reaction to a loss of faith in science, we argue that the boundaries between science and its technological applications have become blurred and this produces conflicts of in...

Although trust and distrust are both crucial in online truster-trustee relationships, researchers disagree as to whether trust and distrust are distinct from each other. Given this debate, it is important to consider how distrust could be distinguished from trust. Accordingly, this paper extends the nomological network of distrust and introduces two novel antecedents never introduced in e-comme...

s the purpose of this study was to identify indicators of social capital and pursue their correlation to communicational skill of mangers. this descriptive-correlation study has an applied objective. the population is composed of all employees (243 individuals) of nonprofit organizations in noor city. the total number of 85 individuals was selected in random sampling as the sample. in this stud...

Trust is not only essential in our daily lives, its importance in virtual networks should not be underestimated either. For example, we only use information found on the web when we trust the source, and we do not give our credit card details on sites we distrust. With the advent of the semantic web [2], intelligent web agents will be taking over more and more human tasks. Therefore, there is a...

the doctor-patient relationship (dpr) is one of the most important subjects in medical sociology and health policy. due to mutual understanding, undistorted dprs not only result in satisfaction of both doctors and patients, but also help to reduce financial burdens for patients and the health care system. the purpose of this research was to identify a dpr based on the qualitative paradigm model...

Mutual help groups (n=32) were compared to three other types of groups (psychotherapy, n=35; social-recreational, n=59; and task oriented, n=39) on 10 social climate dimensions derived from the 90-item Group Environment Scale. All 10 dimensions yielded significant (p..05) differences. Differences between the mutual help and psychotherapy groups were particularly intereting and large in size. Th...

Fairness and efficiency are important aspects that influence cooperation in social dilemmas. During a repeated interaction, they have the potential to serve as competing goals for the decision maker. The ability to balance between fairness and efficiency depends, among other things, on available information regarding mutual accountability for the outcomes in an interaction. In this paper, we ex...