Stigma devalues individuals and groups, producing social and economic disadvantages through two distinct but reinforcing processes: direct discrimination (e.g., a White person not hiring a Black person based on race) and stigma internalization (e.g., women believing men are more qualified for leadership positions). We review strategies that individuals can use to not only cope with but also cha...

Terrence Deacon’s (2012) notion developed in his book Incomplete Nature (IN) that living organisms are teleodynamic systems that are self-maintaining, self-correcting and self-reproducing is extended to human social systems. The hypothesis is developed that culture, language, organization, science, economics and technology (CLOSET) can be construed as living organisms that evolve, maintain and ...

Classic social psychology studies demonstrate that people can behave in ways that contradict their intentions--especially within the moral domain. We measured brain activity while subjects decided between financial self-benefit (earning money) and preventing physical harm (applying an electric shock) to a confederate under both real and hypothetical conditions. We found a shared neural network ...

Introduction: To improve mothers and children's health, the World Health Organization has emphasized on women's empowerment and enhancement of their well-being. It is of paramount importance for the individuals to have an assessment of social support and self-empowerment in the sensitive moments after childbirth. This study therefore aimed to investigate the relationship between perceived socia...

This paper studies the causal effect of status differences on moral disengagement and violence. To measure violent behavior, in the experiment, a subject can inflict a painful electric shock on another subject in return for money. We exogenously vary relative status in the realm of sexual attractiveness. In three between-subject conditions, the assigned other subject is either of higher, lower ...

This paper describes ongoing research into planning in an uncertain environment. In particular, it introduces U-Plan, a planning system that constructs quantitatively ranked plans given an incomplete description of the state of the world. U-Plan uses a Dempster­ Shafer interval to characterise uncertain and incomplete information about the state of the world. The planner takes as input what is ...

In this contribution we study how to adapt Backward Plan search to the Logics of Communication and Change (LCC). These are dynamic epistemic logics with common knowledge modeling the way in which announcements, sensing and world-changing actions modify the beliefs of agents or the world itself. The proposed LCC planning system greatly expands the social complexity of scenarios involving cogniti...

This paper examines the role of the shift in pension plans — from Defined Benefit to Defined Contribution — in explaining the recent increase in labor supply of older workers. A structural model of consumption, savings, Social Security, and pension plan heterogeneity is estimated using data from the Health and Retirement Study. Model simulations indicate that changes in pension plan composition...