FB1 Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaften
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Charlemagne’s Legacy
(2023)
We investigate between- and within-country consensus about affective meanings of social identities along the evaluation, potency, and activity dimensions from the affect control theory research tradition. Ratings for 387 (194 male and 193 female) identities were collected from two samples representative of the French (N = 700) and German (N = 700) populations for age, gender, and region. Guided by two preregistered hypotheses based on previous cross-cultural research, our analysis points to considerable cultural consensus between French and Germans who seem to share a common “Carolingian” affective culture; yet some culture-specific patterns concerning the evaluation dimension and evaluation-potency interactions were found to be statistically significant. We interpret these results in terms of known cross-cultural features such as power distance and conceptions of power.
Theoretical and Empirical Modeling of Identity and Sentiments in Collaborative Groups (THEMIS.COG) was an interdisciplinary research collaboration of computer scientists and social scientists from the University of Waterloo (Canada), Potsdam University of Applied Sciences (Germany), and Dartmouth College (USA). This white paper summarizes the results of our research at the end of the grant term. Funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform’s Digging Into Data initiative, the project aimed at theoretical and empirical modeling of identity and sentiments in collaborative groups. Understanding the social forces behind self-organized collaboration is important because technological and social innovations are increasingly generated through informal, distributed processes of collaboration, rather than in formal organizational hierarchies or through market forces. Our work used a data-driven approach to explore the social psychological mechanisms that motivate such collaborations and determine their success or failure. We focused on the example of GitHub, the world’s current largest digital platform for open, collaborative software development. In contrast to most, purely inductive contemporary approaches leveraging computational techniques for social science, THEMIS.COG followed a deductive, theory-driven approach. We capitalized on affect control theory, a mathematically formalized theory of symbolic interaction originated by sociologist David R. Heise and further advanced in previous work by some of the THEMIS.COG collaborators, among others. Affect control theory states that people control their social behaviours by intuitively attempting to verify culturally shared feelings about identities, social roles, and behaviour settings. From this principle, implemented in computational simulation models, precise predictions about group dynamics can be derived. It was the goal of THEMIS.COG to adapt and apply this approach to study the GitHub collaboration ecosystem through a symbolic interactionist lens. The project contributed substantially to the novel endeavor of theory development in social science based on large amounts of naturally occurring digital data.
Simulation tools aimed at enhancing cross-sectoral cooperation can support the transition from a traditional transport planning approach based on predictions towards more integrated and participatory urban mobility planning. This shift entails a broader appraisal of urban dynamics and transformations in the policy framework, capitalizing on new developments in urban modelling. In this paper, we argue that participatory social simulation can be used to solve these emerging challenges in mobility planning. We identify the functionalities that such a tool should have when supporting integrated mobility planning. Drawing on a transdisciplinary case study situated in Potsdam, Germany, we address through interviews and workshops stakeholders’ needs and expectations and present the requirements of an actionable tool for practitioners. As a result, we present three main challenges for participatory, simulation-based transport planning, including: (1) enhancement of the visioning process by testing stakeholders’ ideas under different scenarios and conditions to visualise complex urban relationships; (2) promotion of collective exchange as means to support stakeholder communication; and (3) credibility increase by early stakeholder engagement with model development. We discuss how our participatory modelling approach helps us to better understand the gaps in the knowledge of the planning process and present the coming steps of the project.