This paper presents a novel experiment on group conflict. Subjects are divided into groups according to preferences on paintings, and subjects are divided into groups according to self-declared political affiliations and leanings. Using a unique within subject design, we find twenty percent of subjects destroy social welfare – at personal cost – when facing a subject outside their group. This e...

Recent research has shown dramatic benefits to incorporating social media in public facing websites. Using a perspective based on the duality of goals, we argue that social media, with emphasis on facilitating visitors’ unconstrained exchanges, may undermine the communicative purpose of an organization’s website and may not be desirable in some cases. We tested these ideas by examining the soci...

Morality rates for various social groups within the population of Finland were compared, using 179 919 death certificates for the period 1969-72. Morality was generally lowest in the highest social groups and highest among unskilled workers. Male mortality from coronary heart disease was also high among lower salaried employees. In the less developed area of northern Finland, female mortality f...

As Internet freedoms are increasingly threatened both at home and abroad, marginalized groups, such as journalists, activists, and government watchdogs require new tools to retain free and open discourse on-line. In this paper, we introduce SecurePost a tool for verified group anonymity on social media. SecurePost gives social media posters anonymity while safeguarding group credibility through...

Co-operative group recommenders aim to help a group of users arrive at a consensus when they need to make a decision in relation to a common goal. The success of any such recommender critically relies on its ability to; (1) gather and accurately model group preferences, (2) enhance group awareness of member preferences, and (3) focus user attention on areas of the recommendation space which are...

Despite the many works on contagion phenomena in both well-mixed systems and heterogeneous networks, there is still a lack of understanding of the intermediate regime where social group structures evolve on a similar time scale to individual-level transmission. We address this question by considering the process of transmission through a model population comprising social groups which follow si...

Individual rights can generally be respected if and, except in rare special cases, only if they apply to independent components of a Cartesian product space of social states, and also each individual is indifferent to how others exercise their rights. This is true whether or not the Pareto criterion is satisfied. Group rights can also be respected if they apply to the independent components for...

We consider the Stag Hunt in terms of Maynard Smith’s famous Haystack model. In the Stag Hunt, contrary to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, there is a cooperative equilibrium besides the equilibrium where every player defects. This implies that in the Haystack model, where a population is partitioned into groups, groups playing the cooperative equilibrium tend to grow faster than those at the noncoopera...

Group formation is a fundamental step in the evolution of cooperation, yet there are few models of this process in social animals, and even fewer empirical tests. The prolonged nest initiation phase in temperate paper wasps provides a valuable opportunity to study group formation. Data were obtained for 180 groups of females collected from a large population of Polistes dominulus in two sites i...