The theory about missing links of economic growth often lags behind the empirical estimations of such links. A consensus has emerged that ethnic fractionalization has a negative impact on growth, also when controlled for income inequality. Often, although implicitly, the assumed channel is social cohesion. We analyse the effect of fractionalization on social cohesion with a different inequality...

In this chapter we examine variation in the contents of supernatural minds across cultures and the social correlates of this variation. We first provide a sketch of how humans are capable of representing supernatural minds and emphasize the significance of the types of knowledge attributed to supernatural agents. We then argue that the contents of supernatural minds as represented cross-cultura...

For several decades, development theorists, planners and policy makers have experimented extensively with poverty reduction strategies to arrive at some kind of a consensus on the essential elements of such strategies. The World Bank’s recent World Development Report 2000/2001, Attacking Poverty provides an example of a consensus view that identifies poverty as the consequence of lack of access...

pedestrian areas are a type of urban public space, nowadays because of the serious consequencesof car-dependency and ignoring pedestrian needs, a consensus on the importance of walking and the necessity forplanning for pedestrians movement has been formed among urban designers, planners and people. the concernsabout human health and movement in city create a new trend in contemporary urbanism, ...

there are a variety of definitions about social security and threats indicating a lack of consensus on this issue, and not considering the impact of social conditions of different countries. thus, although in a scientific study considering other viewpoints can be useful, in order to be practical, we should indigenously note indigenous conditions and domestic scholar’s comments. based on this id...

Disagreement among experts is a central topic in social epistemology. What should an expert do when confronted with the different opinion of an epistemic peer? Possible answers include the steadfast view (holding to one’s belief), the abstemious view (suspending one’s judgment), and moderate conciliatory views, which specify criteria for belief change when a peer’s different opinion is encounte...

A 5-day field study (N = 415) during and right after a shower ban demonstrated multifaceted social projection and the tendency to draw personality inferences from simple behavior in a time of drastic consensus change. Bathers thought showering was more prevalent than did non-bathers (false consensus) and respondents consistently underestimated the prevalence of the desirable and common behavior...

In many cases, recommendations are consumed by groups of users rather than individuals. In this paper, we present a system which recommends social events to groups. The system helps groups to organize a joint activity and collectively select which activity to perform among several possible options. We also facilitate the consensus making, following the principle of group consensus decision maki...

A novel way of characterizing the process of reaching consensus for a social system is given. The foundation of the characterization is based on the theorem which states that the sufficient and necessary condition for a system to reach the state of consensus is the occurrence of communicators, defined as the units of the system that can directly communicate with all the others simultaneously. A...