Human experience reflects the interplay of multiple influences operating on various time scales to promote constantly evolving patterns of thought, emotion, and action. Although the complexity and dynamism of personal and social phenomena have long been recognized, they are difficult to investigate using traditional research methods. This article provides an overview of dynamical social psychol...

One of the most contested questions in the social sciences is whether people behave rationally. A large body of work assumes that individuals do in fact make rational economic, political, and social decisions. Yet hundreds of experiments suggest that this is not the case. Framing effects constitute one of the most stunning and influential demonstrations of irrationality. The effects not only ch...

The recognition that information systems comprise both technical and social elements has not been matched by the emergence of a coherent theoretical understanding of the nature of, and relationship between, these elements. A number of approaches have been advocated that seek to transcend traditional assumptions of either technological or social determinism, but these may be seen to have their o...

This paper evaluates four competing psychological explanations for why the jury in the O.J. Simpson murder trial reached the verdict they did: explanatory coherence, Bayesian probability theory, wishful thinking, and emotional coherence. It describes computational models that provide detailed simulations of juror reasoning for explanatory coherence, Bayesian networks, and emotional coherence , ...

Prediction of popularity has profound impact for social media, since it offers opportunities to reveal individual preference and public attention from evolutionary social systems. Previous research, although achieves promising results, neglects one distinctive characteristic of social data, i.e., sequentiality. For example, the popularity of online content is generated over time with sequential...

The concept of character believability is often used in interactive narrative research hypothesis. In this paper we define believability metrics using perceived believability dimensions and discuss how they can be accessed. The proposed dimensions are: behavior coherence, change with experience, awareness, behavior understandability, personality, visual impact, predictability, social and emotio...

The constructivist psychologies theorize about and investigate how human beings create systems for meaningfully understanding their worlds and experiences. I refer to these “constructivisms” using the plural because there are many varieties of constructivism (Neimeyer & Raskin, 2001) and they have been described in various constellations (Botella, 1995; Chiari & Nuzzo, 1996a, 1996b; Lyddon, 199...

In this work, we study the use of Twitter by House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates during the midterm (2010) elections in the U.S. Our data includes almost 700 candidates and over 690k documents that they produced and cited in the 3.5 years leading to the elections. We utilize graph and text mining techniques to analyze differences between Democrats, Republicans and Tea Party candidates, a...

This paper presents an analysis of a World Bank document representing a version of the new ‘Social Capital’ approach of International Financial Institutions (IFIs). This stance involves a rhetorical reorientation away from a much criticized unilateral approach to the poor indebted countries and to a more bi-lateral and participatory attitude. Analysis suggests that this ‘post-ideological’ postu...

Sustainable use of natural resources seems necessary to maintain functions and services of ecoand social systems in the long run. Efforts in policy and science for sustainable development have shown the splintering of local, national and global strategies. Sustainability becomes contingent and insecure with the actors ́ conflicting knowledge, interests and aims, and seems even impossible through...