Punishment offers a powerful mechanism for the maintenance of cooperation in human and animal societies, but the maintenance of costly punishment itself remains problematic. Game theory has shown that corruption, where punishers can defect without being punished themselves, may sustain cooperation. However, in many human societies and some insect ones, high levels of cooperation coexist with lo...

Research repeatedly identifies an association between health and socio-economic status-richer people are healthier than poorer people. Richard Wilkinson has posited that socio-psychological mechanisms may be part of the explanation for the fact that socio-economic inequalities run right across the social spectrum in wealthy societies. He argues that polarised income distributions within countri...

Article history: Received 11 August 2014 Received in revised form 13 May 2015 Accepted 15 May 2015 Available online 10 June 2015 The transition to a low carbon and sustainable economy represents a major transformation that can only be compared to one other comprehensive transition in modern human history: the industrial revolution. Like the low-carbon transformation, the process of industrialis...

Technology has had many influences on the Iranian society in different eras. Today, information and telecommunication technologies have revolutionized the basic structures of society and a new network society has been propagated inside the traditional and semi-modern context. In countries like Iran, which are in the process of modernization, a chaos deriving from the transition period is obs...

New Social Structures Are Generating New Leadership Styles Different epochs produce different kinds of leadership – with different patterns of hierarchical authority, different skill sets and attitudes, and different institutional incentives. Societies today are experiencing significant changes potentially as far reaching as the transition from agricultural to industrial societies. Today’s epoc...

Background: The study aimed to evaluate the interval between first drug use and regular injection and factors associated with transition from first injection into premature regular injection among people who inject drugs (PWIDs).Methods: In a multicenter cross-sectional study, we recruited 400 PWIDs using snowball sampling. Age of first drug use, age of initiation of regular injection, and demo...

A promising area of application for agent based social simulation is social policy analysis. This promise stems from the ability of ABSS models to describe key processes and relationships in actual societies. However, existing descriptive studies with ABSS have been too abstract convincingly to inform policy analysis. This paper describes the transition from one such study towards a usefully de...

We analyze how positive institutions—democracy, strong families, free inquiry, free press, schools, businesses, communities, societies, work, and culture—can help foster human flourishing. We provide four examples of positive law and policy to illustrate the important role legal and social institutions can play in facilitating positive psychology. First, we explore positive psychology’s potenti...