The Use of History for Research in Theoretical Sociology

Reaching agreement on contribution behavior in different cultures-a public goods game with representatives in Japan and Germany

Medical psychology: Human behavior in groups

Human flight behavior in groups

Inclusion is a theme that has been gaining importance in recent decades, especially when we refer to people with disabilities who have been stigmatized and suffered prejudice throughout history. This data serves to ratify that there is an ongoing inclusion process, demanding from schools an ability to organize themselves to receive these students. The present study has as general objective to investigate how the process of inclusion of students with disabilities occurs in schools of the municipal education network of Rio de Janeiro under the perspective of the Physical Education teacher. We used the qualitative approach, which studies subjective aspects of social phenomena and human behavior in specific groups, providing the creation of new approaches, review and elaboration of new concepts and categories during the investigation. For data collection, an observation script was used, a semi-structured guided interview, which was supported by an interview script. Participated in the research 12 Physical Education teachers who work in regular classes of 4 municipal schools in Rio de Janeiro, within the scope of the 2nd CRE (Coordination of Education). We use the Yin cycle in data analysis. We conclude that teachers aspire to training with a more inclusive approach, in addition to regular continuing education. We also highlight the importance of improving the school's infrastructure and the provision of specific material to better meet the specificities of students. Flexible planning and the offer of diverse activities that minimize competition and favor cooperation were also cited as strategies and gained strength in the teachers' discourse. Inclusion is everyone's responsibility, not limited to the teacher, mediator of the process. In the case of Physical Education we highlight the need for a special look at the specificity of the environment, which is based on emotions and movements.

Recent evidence indicates that biological evolution and cultural history are linked together. Study of the linkage has been active in the past several years and constitutes a new phase of investigation in sociobiology. The work is of particular interest to philosophical and interdisciplinary inquiry because it avoids the earlier biological determinism and animal comparisons, emphasizing instead the multiple roles played by cultural transmission, genetic inheritance, and individual mental development within specifically human social systems. Culture is proposed to be shaped in part by biological mechanisms that direct the assembly of the human mind during socialization. These mechanisms create the rules by which human nature governs itself, supporting individual choice and the social forms emergent in human group behavior. The frequencies of the gene variants prescribing these mechanisms are in turn influenced by evolutionary forces exerted in the context of particular cultures. The forces include but are not limited to natural selection. Mathematical theories have been developed that begin to trace the course of the gene-culture coevolutionary relationship and use it to further unify biology with the social sciences and humanities.

The article deals with the aplication of Schwartz theory of human values in a sociological research. The Schwartz theory of human values is a psychological theory of motivation in human behaviour and acting. The article is a critical introduction to a research of human values comparing research approaches of M. Rokeach, G. Hofstede, R. Inglehart and S.H. Schwartz. The “youngest” one — Schwartz’s has an aspiration to be universal. This theory has a common ground with a number of sociological theories. Basically, it is possible to apply this theory in empirical investigation of spectrum of nowadays sociological themes, topics and theories. The article is an attempt to step toward empirical investigations of values in sociology.

There have been many studies in the literature on social group recognition of crowds of pedestrians. However, most of these studies have approached the problem from a static point of view. A study on the dynamic property of social groups among people over time can provide significant insight into human behaviors and events. Inspired by sociological models of human collective behavior, in this work, we present a framework for characterizing hierarchical social groups based on evolving tracklet interaction network (ETIN) where the tracklets of pedestrians are represented as nodes and the their grouping behaviors are captured by the edges with associated weights. We use non-overlapping snapshots of the interaction network and develop the framework for a unified dynamic group identification and tracklet association. The approach is evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively on videos of pedestrian scenes where manually labeled ground-truth is given. The results of our approach are consistent to human-perceived dynamic social groups of the crowd. The performance analysis of our method shows that the approach is scalable and it provides situational awareness in a real-world scenarios.

The present historiosophical and sociological searches for an adequate study of society and history ask for a reflection of today's historical reality and for a reflection of the method of its analysis. Today's necessity for a sociological search in Lithuania cannot limit itself with a search for fashionable sociological theory with the aim of inserting (squeezing) our social reality into it, but it must carefully study the concrete historical background of the present social situation and find an adequate interpretation of it. The historical investigation of society could gain by addressing the main problems of contemporary theoretical research in sociology. One of them is the problem of the agent of social reality, without reducing it to social structures or to social individuals as a set of social roles, which are imputed on him/her by society. The most realistic problem today that sociology reflects is the subordination of the two levels of social reality—"social physics" (the reality determined by the causality of material interests) and "social metaphysics" (the reality teleologically organized by definite value orientations and ideas). The present crisis of social transformation in Eastern European countries shows the pseudo-morphosis of Western social-organizational structures due to a hasty transplanting of them into the post-Communist social reality. This asks a question about the state of "social metaphysics" in these societies, as the crisis evidently shows a lack of correspondence between the system of values and social-organizational structures. The solving of the problem is not found in acquiring a "know-how" which will be obtained in the nearest future. The problem consists of a simultaneous adequate response to the challenge of postmodernity. The postmodernity itself breaks the correspondence of "social physics" (organizational structures) with "social metaphysics" (system of values) as it produces a pluralistic (not hierarchical) "metaphysics" while keeping a hierarchy in "physics," where the subordination of the individual to the social structures is even stronger than in the era of modernity. This challenge appears together with another one—the necessity of founding a democratic national state (consolidating the nation on the basis of common aims when the interest of community is destroyed by the negative experience of communist collectivity)—the present situation of European unification. This brings with it the danger of not obtaining a national identity and independence. The entire situation asks for a necessity of deep reflection and conscious choice, i.e., a search for a new subject (agent) of social reality, because the reduction of it to social structures or to a social individual as the set of imputed social roles in this situation of multi-sided challenge is already not adequate. This invites sociology to overcome a deterministic standpoint and to turn from a functional approach towards social phenomena to a substantial one. This means to turn to the person as an agent of social reality; this person being the only one who unites in himself/herself a social experience (personification of social structures) with a deliberate choice (personalized structure of values). He/she can be a real agent, not only by combining both levels of social reality ("social physics" and "social metaphysics") but also in overcoming another split of social reality between the social system and the "life world" sociological theory. This can help historiosophy overcome a split between culture as the history of ideas and the historiographical fixation of separate historical events and facts.

With conservation and ethical concerns facing cetaceans, minimally invasive research on reproduction is important for population management. Belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) are endangered in parts of their range, yet little is known about their breeding behavior and much of the existing research depends on post-mortem sampling. To date, there have been no directed studies of social interactions between belugas during the breeding season, and few studies have attempted to correlate reproductive physiology with behavior in any species of cetacean. Improved understanding of reproductive strategies in this species would facilitate management. This work describes the development of minimally invasive methods for determining sex, maturity, and reproductive cycle stage in belugas, and the utilization of these methods to assess relationships between reproductive physiology and behavior in a social group of belugas in an aquarium. The results of this work are interpreted in the context of the current understanding of beluga reproductive physiology and ecology. Chapter 1 describes the physiological validation of blow (exhale) sampling for measuring testosterone and progesterone in belugas. Concentrations of both progesterone and testosterone in blow are correlated with circulating concentrations and reflect variation in the reproductive status of individuals. Chapter 2 presents the development of DNA isolation from beluga blow samples and determines the relationship between various sample characteristics and DNA yield and performance in polymerase chain reactions (PCR). Although yield and quality varied greatly among samples, single exhale samples from wild and aquarium belugas enabled PCR amplification of genes used in sex determination or population genetics. Chapter 3 describes the seasonal variation in testicular volume and testosterone in male belugas studied longitudinally. This work revealed a seasonal increase in testes size in belugas of approximately 50%, filling a significant gap in knowledge for wild belugas. Chapter 4 utilizes methods developed and validated in Chapters 1 and 3 to evaluate social behavior in a group of aquarium belugas in the context of reproductive physiology. Reproductive seasonality and the occurrence of reproductive events were detected using non-invasive techniques and used to contextualize patterns of association and the frequency of social behaviors of interest, including courtship. Appendix 1 presents a general review of the literature regarding beluga mating strategies and reproductive biology; specific literature reviews are included with each chapter. Appendix 2 provides a synthesis of the dissertation and discusses the implications of these findings on the current understanding of beluga mating strategies, and by extension, the management and conservation of

Modeling group behavior is very critical in the context of simulations designed for training personals or evacuation decision making strategies. The behavior of agents in such simulations plays a very important role. Agent behavior in complex environments such as emergency evacuation scenario involves collaboration with other agents. A simple example can be a group of people in a building trying to reach an exit by minimizing their travel time. A further complex situation would be involving several group of people trying to reach multiple exits. This paper describes how complex simulation environments involving group behavior can be constructed by fusing human behavior into the simulation. The developed prototype system is able to demonstrate some emergent human social behaviors, such as competitive, queuing, and herding behaviors.

This book explores the behavioral perspectives of management in day to day life of an individual as well as decision makers. This book tries to relate behavioral factors in the purview of human resource, consumer behavior, investment and finance as well as organizational behavior as a whole. The chapter on behavioral study of human resource is the framework for supporting personnel to increase their non-public and organizational competencies, expertise and abilities specialty of converting or enhancing the understanding, capabilities, and attitudes of people. While the chapter on consumer behavior is complicated and dynamic approaches of determining what product to shop for, when to shop for, how to shop for, from wherein to shop for, a way to secure, a way to use, or a way to dispose to meet individuals, groups, or organization’s desires. The chapter on behavioral finance is to study and define the relationship of identified determinants with investment pattern and to explore the relationship of psychological factors influencing the investment decision makings with the returns through investments. The chapter on organizational behavior is the study of human behavior in the place of work, the relations between people and the organization with the aim to know and forecast human behavior. The accepting of person, group, and organizational behavior is important to accomplishment as a leader or an admirer, and it necessitate a methodical lesson to even begin to grasp all of the variables that impact behavior.

This short communication presents the findings of the work conducted by the human behaviour in fire permanent working group of the International Association for Fire Safety Science. Its aim is to identify determinants of research gaps in the field of human behaviour in fire. Two workshops were conducted in 2023 in which research gaps were identified and discussed by twenty experts. The workshops led experts through a series of questions to determine the reasons (or determinants) for these gaps in human behaviour in building fires and wildfires. Through the questions, the primary identified determinants were (1) researchers’ literacy in the variety of methods adopted in the field, (2) difficulties associated with recruitment of study participants, (3) multi-disciplinary barriers across different research sub-domains, and (4) issues in obtaining funding for addressing fundamental human behaviour in fire research questions. Two key issues emerged from an open discussion during the workshops, namely the difficulties in attracting and training new people in the field (given the limited educational offers around the world on the topic) and the need for more regular opportunities for the community to meet.

Human social behavior is structured by relationships. We form teams, groups, tribes, and alliances at all scales of human life. These structures guide multi-agent cooperation and competition, but when we observe others these underlying relationships are typically unobservable and hence must be inferred. Humans make these inferences intuitively and flexibly, often making rapid generalizations about the latent relationships that underlie behavior from just sparse and noisy observations. Rapid and accurate inferences are important for determining who to cooperate with, who to compete with, and how to cooperate in order to compete. Towards the goal of building machine-learning algorithms with human-like social intelligence, we develop a generative model of multiagent action understanding based on a novel representation for these latent relationships called Composable Team Hierarchies (CTH). This representation is grounded in the formalism of stochastic games and multi-agent reinforcement learning. We use CTH as a target for Bayesian inference yielding a new algorithm for understanding behavior in groups that can both infer hidden relationships as well as predict future actions for multiple agents interacting together. Our algorithm rapidly recovers an underlying causal model of how agents relate in spatial stochastic games from just a few observations. The patterns of inference made by this algorithm closely correspond with human judgments and the algorithm makes the same rapid generalizations that people do.

So far in this series, we have explored the relevance of the work of Talcott Parsons and Karl Marx to pharmacy practice research.1, 2 Both these writers placed an emphasis on the ways in which human actions and, moreover, human consciousness are shaped by the requirements of the social system. Such perspectives came under fire, often from sociologists within the US, during the 1950s and 1960s. These sociologists were concerned to place the activities, experiences and understandings of human beings at the centre of the sociological endeavour. In doing so, they have provided some highly insightful examples of sociological research, especially as applied to health, illness and health care. It is this reaction against the “dehumanising” aspects of Marxist, functionalist and other sociological theories that we now turn to in our consideration of the emergence of symbolic interactionist sociology. Symbolic interactionist sociology has been partially responsible for the rise of a set of research techniques and theoretical concepts that will be familiar to many readers — the use of “naturalistic” methods of social research (observational or ethnographic work) and grounded theory,3 both of which figure increasingly within health services and pharmacy practice research. In this paper, we will look at the origins of interactionist sociology and comment on its relevance and application to the research agenda of pharmacy practice.

3D numerical analyses of geosynthetic encased stone columns