In this paper, we assume that the social reality and the communal meaning about this reality are reflected in each other. In object-related activity two kinds of congruent elements are constructed – objectivated elements oriented internally towards the human mind and objectified elements oriented externally towards the social reality. We propose that the mutual construction of mind and social r...

There has been a curious gap between theoretical debate and quantitative research on social inequality throughout the history of sociology. The theoretical debates on inequality have above all revolved around the concept of class, and in particular around the adequacy of the Marxist theory of class. From Weber, to Parsons, to Dahrendorf and Giddens, the point of departure of theorizing the natu...

This essay is about a special kind of social networks called ego networks. Like other networks, they are made up of social units persons, groups or organizations and social relations like marriage or friendship that Iink pairs of units into some sort of overall patterned structure. Ego networks, however, are special in that they are built around a particular social unit designated a!, ego. To u...

Stereotypes are important simplifying assumptions we use for navigating the social world, associating traits with social categories. These beliefs can be used to infer an individual’s likely social category from observed traits (a diagnostic inference) or to make inferences about an individual’s unknown traits based on their putative social category (a predictive inference). We argue that these...

Nowadays, modern mobile devices are becoming true personal computer that allow us to exploit new typologies of applications by combining several technologies such as camera, GPS, 3D graphics and permanent Internet connection. The resulting integration of such technologies allows to run complex applications, such as augmented reality and Social Networks. The goal of our present research is to su...

Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed `women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and a fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imag...

Social groups highlight structure in the social world and support induction about individuals. In the present work, we examined children’s and adults’ intuitions about shared preferences within social groups. In Experiment 1, we find that 3to 5-year-old children treat preferences as a consistent property of social groups: that is, they expect members of a group to like the same toys as their te...

We present findings from a qualitative study of activity on Pinterest.com, in which we investigated professional and personal uses of the site using interview data and observations of online activity. We find that Pinterest serves as an infrastructure for repository building that supports a wide range of activities including: discovery, collecting, collaborating, and publishing. We discuss thes...

In order to take the developing field of Social Robotics a stage further, this work investigates mixed reality in embodied social agents. The Virtual Robotic Workbench is employed which provides a versatile framework for experimentation in interoperability and cooperation between heterogeneous robots (real, simulated and virtual) and humans in multi-reality domains. Explicit social interaction,...