This paper analyzes scapegoatism from the perspective of the individual members of a social network, their social utilities, and the decisions that result. Using basic psychological descriptions of the effects of a scapegoat event on the members of a social group, this paper formalizes an economic model to describe this dynamic social process. Furthermore, the model’s results lead to several general conclusions about the factors that increase the likelihood of scapegoat events.
By Jen Gong ’12, THURJ Staff Many of us believe we are more impartial than our historic predecessors, whether it be in matters of race, gender or ethnic equality. Landmark achievements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the end of apartheid or the rise of a black president to the highest office in America might seem like enough reason [...]
This study analyzes the issues of identity within a community to understand the issue of who retains the right to define a place socially and culturally.
This study examined whether mindfulness, or active awareness, could reduce priming effects, the subconscious effects of stimuli on one’s behavior. With a sample of 39 undergraduates, we replicated an earlier study demonstrating the effect of priming the elderly stereotype through a word task on participants’ walk speed, and extended it by introducing a mindfulness manipulation through the task instructions given.
The paper probes this under-researched question by constructing a household water demand model with household-level data gathered during a field survey in July and August 2009 of 265 households in the Emir Ali neighborhood of Ayn al-Basha, Jordan.
By Jen Gong ’12, THURJ Staff The hallways winding around the third floor of the Center for Government and International Studies’s Knafel building are something you won’t find anywhere else at Harvard. The walls, lined with white boards, can literally be written on. The residents of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences (IQSS) take full advantage of this, and equations [...]
