Models of voter choice frequently assume voters behave as independent actors who make decisions in a social vacuum. Recent work has demonstrated that social connections play a formative role in the decision to turnout to vote, to take expressive political action, and in the formation of political identity. Yet, no work has examined how social connections influence voters’ choices in an election...

Actors in realistic social networks play not one but a number of diverse roles depending on whom they interact with, and a large number of such role-specific interactions collectively determine social communities and their organizations. Methods for analyzing social networks should capture these multi-faceted rolespecific interactions, and, more interestingly, discover the latent organization o...

Recent psychological research suggests that the individual human mind may be effectively modeled as involving a group of interacting social actors: both various subselves representing coherent aspects of personality; and virtual actors embodying “internalizations of others.” Recent neuroscience research suggests the further hypothesis that these internal actors may in many cases be neurological...

The purpose of rational choice theory is to explain social phenomena by assuming rational choice at the actor’s level. To realize this purpose, the theory assumes two mechanisms: choice by actors and the macro–micro–macro transition. After explaining these mechanisms, this article first shows how rational choice theory successfully explains the problem of social order embodied in various fields...

We aim to study the social dimension of business-to-customer electronic commerce (B2C eCommerce) and propose a critical social-theoretic approach that equates commercial transactions with social actions undertaken by buyers and sellers who are conceived of as social actors. The critical socialtheoretic approach enables analyzing and interpreting empirical evidence of automobile sellers and buye...

Common-pool resource (CPR) dilemmas distinguish themselves from general public good problems by encompassing both social and physical features. This paper examines how a physical mechanism, namely asymmetric payoff; and a social mechanism, reciprocity; simultaneously affect collective cooperation in theoretical water sharing interactions. We present an iterative N-person game theoretic model to...

Collective behavior refers to how individuals behave when they are exposed in a social network environment. In this article, we examine how we can predict online behaviors of users in a network, given the behavior information of some actors in the network. Many social media tasks can be connected to the problem of collective behavior prediction. Since connections in a social network represent v...

as narrative discourses and discursive thematic frame- works on social issues in media can provide us with an insight into how different understandings and perspectives serve to construct dif- ferent presentations of social actors, social events as well as social re- lations and conflicts, it seems necessary to take them into more seri- ous considerations. to this end, the present study was an ...

The aim of this paper is to understand emerging learning conditions, when a visual analytics is implemented and used in K 12 (education). To date, little attention has been paid to the role visual analytics (digital media and technology that highlight visual data communication in order to support analytical tasks) can play in education, and to the extent to which these tools can process actiona...