Behavioural Sciences
A new frontier for hate
James Hawdon, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention at Virginia Tech, USA, has spent many years studying online hate, including hate speech and other forms of cyberviolence. His work has examined how hate speech gets produced, how the hate groups and individuals that produce it become radicalised, how it spreads across the […]
Couples bickering: Disaffiliation and discord in Chinese conversation
In “Couples Bickering”, Guodong Yu, Yaxin Wu and Paul Drew use conversation analysis on candid, everyday conversations in Mandarin from China in order to understand communication and social action. Using the relationships in interaction of arguments and conflicts found in conversations between couples, they show how there are many linguistic and grammatical ways that conflict can be limited to bickering, […]
Home advantage in the NHL
Since his retirement in 2003, Dr Marshall Jones, a professor at Penn State’s College of Medicine, has focused his research efforts on trying to explain how the home advantage in team sports works. The home advantage is the tendency for the home team to win more often than it loses. In the National Hockey League (NHL) the home advantage had […]
Creative or destructive: The perspective may be a matter of convenience
Creativity is largely understood as the production of novel and useful ideas or things. In this article, we look at the research of Chetan Walia, who argues for a new dynamic definition of creativity in order to better understand the difference between creativity, creator, and creation. This new dynamic definition will allow us to more effectively consider how negative creativity […]
Timely intervention helps protect the sexual health of adolescents
Teenagers often take risks and make poor choices around their sexual health. In young people, particularly those living in deprived areas, HIV, sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancy remain major challenges. Dr Dianne Morrison-Beedy of The Ohio State University College of Nursing, Columbus, Ohio, USA, has developed an evidence-based sexual risk reduction intervention for adolescents called The Health Improvement Project […]
White identity in the Caribbean
What does it mean to be white in a black majority population? That’s the question addressed in ongoing research into racial identity and ethnicity by Michiru Ito from Japan’s Otsuma Women’s University. Focusing on ‘whiteness’ in the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Trinidad, Ms Ito’s work reveals substantial differences between the two islands in how people who identify as white […]
Agent-based modelling of immigration impact
Policy makers depend on immigration policies and quotas, derived from models of the impacts of immigration to design policies that meet the needs of an entire society. Marcello Marini, Dr Ndaona Chokani and Professor Reza S. Abhari from the Laboratory for Energy Conversion (LEC) Group, at ETH Zürich, have developed an artificial intelligence model that significantly reduces simulation times allowing […]
De-mythologizing and re-branding the traditional drink kava
What do you call journalism, or more importantly research, that is supported by repetitive misinformation, resulting in an accepted but incorrect, narrative? This is the case with the kava plant, named Piper methysticum or ‘intoxicating pepper’ by a naturalist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his voyage to the Pacific some 250 years ago. That name, which inferred that kava […]
The effect of diversity beliefs on friendship formation
For most of us, friendships are an essential part of our lives, and forming them usually comes naturally; we don’t even think about it. In fact, research shows that complex social constructs are at play and influence the choices we make about who we form friendships with. Diverse friendships, for example where people differ in race or religious background, have […]
The Bristol School of Multiculturalism
It’s an exciting moment when like-minds come together and produce insights that create a new paradigm in their subject discipline. A leading academic in Australia believes that moment of synergy has come for a group of political theorists and sociologists associated with the University of Bristol in the UK. So significant is their non-liberal approach to multiculturalism, Geoffrey Brahm Levey, […]