Many animals are known to learn socially, i.e. they are able to acquire new behaviours by using information from other individuals. Researchers distinguish between a number of different social-learning mechanisms such as imitation and social enhancement. Social enhancement is a simple form of social learning that is among the most widespread in animals. However, unlike imitation, it is debated ...

Social interactions and personal tastes shape our consumption behaviors of cultural products. In this study, we present a computational model of a cultural market and we aim to analyze the behavior of the consumer population as an emergent phenomena. Our results suggest that the final market shares of the cultural products dramatically depend on the consumer heterogeneity and social interaction...

Games are increasingly being adapted for use as educational tools. One relatively new use of games is to facilitate learning social or interpersonal skills such as conflict resolution by simulating human behavior with virtual characters. My work investigates students' social goals to understand how they help motivate students to acquire cultural understanding in BiLAT, one such system designed ...

Elevated arterial blood pressure varies substantially in relation to social and cultural variables. Early work on acculturation, socioeconomic status, and blood pressure documented this variation, which could not be explained entirely by conventional factors such as diet, physical activity, or access to medical care. These findings stimulated the development of a model of stress and disease. Th...

INTRODUCTION Social, cultural, and economic environments are associated with high rates of disease incidence and mortality in poor Appalachian regions of the United States. Although many historical studies suggest that aspects of Appalachian culture (e.g., fatalism, patriarchy) include values and beliefs that may put Appalachians at risk for poor health, other cultural aspects may be protective...

People have a folk theory of social change (FTSC). A typical Western FTSC stipulates that as a society becomes more industrialized, it undergoes a natural course of social change, in which a communal society marked by communal relationships becomes a qualitatively different, agentic society where market-based exchange relationships prevail. People use this folk theory to predict a society’s fut...

Social influence has been shown to create significant unpredictability in cultural markets, providing one potential explanation why experts routinely fail at predicting commercial success of cultural products. As a result, social influence is often presented in a negative light. Here, we show the benefits of social influence for cultural markets. We present a policy that uses product quality, a...

Social media sites are rapidly becoming one of the most important forums for public deliberation about advocacy issues. However, social scientists have not explained why some advocacy organizations produce social media messages that inspire far-ranging conversation among social media users, whereas the vast majority of them receive little or no attention. I argue that advocacy organizations are...

Political science can gain from incorporating richer conceptions of social relations into its analyses. In place of atomistic entities endowed with assets but few social relationships, social actors should be seen as relational entities embedded in social and cultural structures that connect them to others in multifaceted ways. Understanding those relationships requires a deeper understanding o...