It is arguable that the instinct for survival in animal species has evolved due to the evolutionary elimination of those individuals who did not have enough inclination nor desire to cluster in a team. Thus, the roots of ethical conduct in its many facets in today’s world, may be sought in this very primeval concern for the society that enabled communities, rather than individuals, to survive i...

Despite ongoing concern about substance use during adolescence, very little is known about alcohol and drug use among teens living in affluent social settings. In this longitudinal study, cluster analysis was used to characterize patterns of substance use and change in other dimensions of psychosocial adjustment within a cohort of 292 high school students (54% girls) living in an affluent, subu...

Research on humor in organizations has rarely considered the social context in which humor occurs. One such social setting that most of us experience on a daily basis concerns the team context. Building on recent theorizing about the humor-performance link in teams, this study seeks to increase our understanding of the function and effects of humor in team interaction settings. We examined beha...

BACKGROUND Cognitive mapping is a participatory research methodology that documents, in visual form, a construct of the local environment in which people live and work. We adapted this method to provide detailed data about study locales to inform recruitment and retention strategies for HIV prevention community based clinical trials. METHODS Four cognitive mapping studies were undertaken betw...

We investigated how positive affectivity influences people's perception of the pat terns of social relationships around them. Positive affectivity was measured as trait positive affect. The outcome variable was accuracy in the perception of informal patterns of social interaction in a group (i.e., the group's network structure). Data on the perception of the relationships of friendship and work...

The words we use matter. The concept of a social norm exists in many social and behavioral science disciplines and research traditions (1). Because the general term “social norm” is a hypernym, an explicit definition is crucial to discussions of its place and usefulness in solving complex social–environmental issues (cf. ref. 2). In their discussion of incentives, Lubchenco et al. (3) suggest t...