The 21st century has brought an increasing demand for expertise in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Although strides have been made towards increasing gender diversity in several of these disciplines, engineering remains primarily male dominated. In response, the U.S. educational system has attempted to make engineering curriculum more engaging, informative, and welcoming to g...

Cultural evolutionary models have identified a range of conditions under which social learning (copying others) is predicted to be adaptive relative to asocial learning (learning on one's own), particularly in humans where socially learned information can accumulate over successive generations. However, cultural evolution and behavioural economics experiments have consistently shown apparently ...

BACKGROUND Social anxiety disorder (SAD) has been repeatedly shown to be very prevalent in the Western society with prevalence rates of 10% or above. However, very few studies have been performed in the Middle East and in Arab countries. METHODS A total of 300 Israeli students participated in our study and were administered the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS), the Cheek and Buss Shyness...

Evolutionary psychologists argue that because humans are biological creatures, cultural explanations must include biology. They thus offer to unify the natural and social sciences. Evolutionary psychologists rely on a specific history of cultural anthropology, particularly the work of Alfred Kroeber to make this point. A close examination of the history of cultural anthropology reveals that Kro...

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people’s private lives. In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the eme...

Purpose – Based on the cybernetic agency theory of part 1, the paper creates a parallel theory to Maruyama’s Mindscape theory called mindset theory, relying on the three-trait organisational value system of Sagiv and Schwartz that arises from extensive theoretical and empirical work on cultural values originally undertaken by Shalom Schwartz. The derived normative personality types are embedded...

Our species is characterized by a great degree of cultural variation, both within and between populations. Understanding how group-level patterns of culture emerge from individual-level behaviour is a long-standing question in the biological and social sciences. We develop a simulation model capturing demographic and cultural dynamics relevant to human cultural evolution, focusing on the interf...

The hybrid aspect of cultures has been on the agenda of cultural and social studies as well as the arts for several years. From the perspective of the semiotician, cultures will necessarily be in continuous contact with a minimum of neighbours in order to enhance cultural semiosis, i.e., to make innovation and change possible. Otherwise, isolation would be in effect and limit a culture to its o...

In this paper we question one of the paradigms in the behavioural sciences in the last century. We call it the "rationality" paradigm, according to which animal and human behaviour can be understood from the assumption that it is "rational" with respect to reaching a given goal. For instance, animals are assumed to take the best course of action for maximising their reproductive success, and ac...

In the authoritarian regimes dissident social activists are not recognized as agents who are capable of participating in decisionand law-making processes. In addition to the factual deprivation of political rights, representatives of the dissident social movements experience cultural deprivation of esteem from the entire society, since the majority of people in authoritarian regimes as a rule d...