This research aims to identify to what extent the primary drivers of migration gain influence due to social contagion effects – in other words, to what extent the metaphor of an “epidemic” can be used to describe emigration. The scope of the research is limited to the migration of individuals from South Africa to countries abroad. A model is developed as a means with which to analyse the premise that social contagion influences migration due to its effect on the underlying driver's thereof. Results obtained through analysis of secondary data reveal the primary drivers of migration, their trends and their relative influence within the population. Results obtained through simulation revealed that the impact of general crises attributable to a particular determinant of migration is fleeting and that increased rates will subside in time. In contrast, as random isolated events related to the primary drivers of migration increase in frequency and intensity, so too does migration. In addition, drivers disseminated through social contagion discouraging migration from South Africa are found to be capable of negating the influence of the determinants of migration. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Service quality has been shown to be critical for the success of service organisations. However, the quality of service delivered by an organisation is dependent on the behaviours of organisational members. Therefore, understanding the various processes that foster desirable service behaviour is important. While there have been many studies which deal with antecedents of service delivery, research adopting a cultural perspective and focusing on elements such as shared values and norms have been somewhat sparse. This is quite surprising given the amount of reference to the importance of a service culture. Recently, there have been calls for research into the cultural determinants of service quality and in particular service culture. This study answers the call by testing a multi-layer model of service culture and performance. The key objectives of the study relate to understanding how service culture leads to both customer-based and financial performance, as well as investigating the process of culture transmission from managers to employees. On the basis of data collected from management and employees, the study assesses service culture at the management and the employee levels, focusing simultaneously on assumptions, value, norms and behaviours. Two routes for culture transmission: the social contagion and behavioural routes are hypothesised and tested. The key findings are that shared service norms are the key impact point of culture transmission from management to employees as well as the key determinant of employee service delivery behaviour. The findings also show that proximity among managers and employees is crucial in the diffusion of service culture and hence in the leadership influencing process. Based on the findings, managerial implications for managing service employees are discussed as well as limitations and suggestions for future research.

Social networks are everywhere, from face-to-face activities to online social networks such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. In social networks, ties (relationships) are connections between people. The change of social relationships over time consequently leads to the evolution of the social network structure. At the same time, ties serve as carriers to transfer pieces of information from one person to another. Studying social ties is critical to understanding the fundamental processes behind the network. Although many studies on social networks have been carried out over the last many decades, most of the work either used small in-lab datasets, or focused on directly connected static relations while ignoring indirect relations and the dynamic nature of real networks. Today, because of the emergence of online social networks, more and more large longitudinal social datasets are becoming available. The available real social datasets are fundamental to understanding evolution processes of networks in more depth. In this thesis, we study the role of social ties in dynamic networks using datasets from various domains of online social networks. Networks, especially social networks often exhibit dual dynamic nature: the structure of the graph changes (by node and edge insertion and removal), and information flows in the network. Our work focuses on both aspects of network dynamics. The purpose of this work is to better understand the role of social ties in network evolution and changes over time, and to determine what social factors help shape individuals’ choices in negative behavior. We first developed a metric that measures the strength of indirectly connected ties. We validated the accuracy of the measurement of indirect tie metric with real-world social datasets from four domains. Another important aspect of my research is the study of edge creation and forecast future graph structure in time evolving networks. We aim to develop algorithms that explain the edge formation properties and process which govern the network evolution. We also designed algorithms in the information propagation process to identify next spreaders several steps ahead, and use them to predict diffusion paths. Next, because different social ties or social ties in different contexts have different influence between people, we looked at the influence of social ties in behavior contagion, particularly in a negative behavior cheating. Our recent work included the study of social factors that motivate or limit the contagion of cheating in a large real-world online social network. We tested several factors drawn from sociology and psychology explaining cheating behavior but have remained untested outside of controlled laboratory experiments or only with small, survey based studies. In addition, this work analyzed online social networks with large datasets that certain inherent influences or patterns only emerge or become visible when dealing with massive data. We analyzed the world’s largest online gaming community, Steam Community, collected data with 3, 148, 289 users and 44, 725, 277 edges. We also made interesting observations of cheating influence that were not observed in previous in-lab experiments. Besides providing empirically based understanding of social ties and their influence in evolving networks at large scales, our work has high practical importance for using social influence to maintain a fair online community environment, and build systems to detect, prevent, and mitigate undesirable influence.

Social contagion—the spread and adoption of affects, behaviors, cognitions, and desires within a social group due to peer influence—is a widely studied phenomenon that continues to have a significant impact on commerce. When social contagion occurs within a culture of consumption, brands and branded products are not only adopted by the community, but they are also normalized and elevated from a strictly utilitarian function to identity-markers. Brands become important components of cultural meaning. Despite this impact, the specific details of the processes of social contagion are still relatively unknown. This dissertation studied social contagion within the hip hop culture of consumption, a multi-billion dollar marketplace. Using data from the Reddit social networking platform, the research provided empirical evidence that non-linear social contagion exists within the hop hip community for multiple brands. A netnography determined the processes by which brands and branded products spread within the hip hop community. Building on the established social processes of evaluation and legitimation that are known to drive the community coordination necessary for social contagion, the research uncovered four underlying mechanisms—responding, recontextualizing, reconciling, and reinforcing. These four mechanisms of evaluation and legitimation not only provide a richer understanding of social contagion but also enable the embedding of brands into culture and culture into brands. This theory-grounded empirical analysis of social contagion and meaning-making in the hip hop culture of consumption provides practical insights to marketers on how to better curate signals and communications to drive cultural meaning. / Business Administration/Marketing

Thèse (D. en psychologie)--Université du Québec à Montréal, 2005. / En tête du titre: Université du Québec à Montréal. Comprend des réf. bibliogr. Publié aussi en version électronique.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the cognitive processes of social learning from the bottom up. In the field of comparative psychology, an overemphasis on understanding complex cognitive processes in nonhuman animals (e.g. empathy, imitation), may be detrimental to the study of simpler mechanisms. In this thesis, I report five studies of simple cognitive processes related to social learning. A series of experiments with human children and capuchin monkeys (Sapajus sp.), examined action imitation and identified a possible role for associative learning in the development of this ability. An analysis of observational data from captive capuchins explored a number of lesser-studied social learning phenomena, including behavioural synchrony, the neighbour effect, and group-size effects. The results of this study emphasise the importance of exploring behaviour at a number of levels to appreciate the dynamic nature of social influence. Two final experiments examined social contagion in capuchin monkeys, and highlight the importance of describing the relationship between behaviour and emotion to properly understand more complex social cognition. Together, these studies demonstrate how approaching human and nonhuman behaviour from the bottom up, as well as from the top down, can contribute to a better comparative science of social learning.

Submitted by JOSIANE SANTOS DE OLIVEIRA (josianeso) on 2018-05-11T16:03:46Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Francisco Ricardo Cichero Kury_.pdf: 2512177 bytes, checksum: 185b66368313879189ff8f963e11c947 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-05-11T16:03:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Francisco Ricardo Cichero Kury_.pdf: 2512177 bytes, checksum: 185b66368313879189ff8f963e11c947 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-12-05 / Nenhuma / Sustentabilidade é conceito problemático que obscureceu o legítimo conceito de justiça intergeracional. O Direito Ambiental não tem obterá resultados apreciáveis enquanto sustentabilidade for considerada o primeiro fundamento de uma ciência que precisa aproximar-se da filosofia para gerar efetividade juntamento com a compreensão da justiça intergeracional. Adotando-se a justiça intergeracional como fundamento do Direito Ambiental, que esta apoiada pelos Direitos Humanos, altera-se a idéia de desenvolvimento sustentável para desenvolvimento equitativo para o uso e transformações das riquezas naturais entre os povos. Para esta tarefa o conceito de parresía inspira novo ponto de vista para a comunicação jurídica que deve ser robustecida para denunciar o que a sustentabilidade faz parte da contabescência social que atinge o direito para torná-lo ineficiente. A parresía significa postura legítima para advogar-se em favor da humanidade que é entendida como família humana dentro de uma Filosofia do Direito Ambiental que estará assentada no conceito de physis. Toda esta concepção ingressará no Direito Internacional para interpor no diálogo entre as nações o conceito de justiça intergeracional. / Sustainability is a problematic concept that has obscured the legitimate concept of intergenerational justice. Environmental Law will not obtain appreciable results so long as sustainability is considered the first foundation of a science that needs to approach philosophy to generate effective compliance with the understanding of intergenerational justice. Adopting intergenerational justice as the foundation of Environmental Law, which is supported by Human Rights, changes the idea of sustainable development for equitable development for the use and transformation of natural wealth among peoples. For this task the concept of parrhesia inspires a new point of view for legal communication that must be strengthened to denounce what sustainability is part of the social contagion that reaches the right to make it inefficient. Parresía means a legitimate posture to advocate for the humanity that is understood as a human family within an Environmental Law Philosophy that will be based on the concept of physis. All this conception will enter into international law to interpose in the dialogue between nations the concept of intergenerational justice.

The social transmission of social behaviours in nonhuman primates has been understudied, experimentally, relative to instrumental, food-related behaviours. This is disproportional in relation to the comparatively high percentage of potential social traditions reported in wild primates. I report a systematic survey of the social learning literature and provide quantitative evidence of the discrepancy (Watson and Caldwell, 2009). Addressing the identified deficit in experimental work on social behaviours, I also report three empirical studies investigating the contagious nature of affective states in captive, socially housed marmosets. I carried out an observational study, to determine whether marmosets are influenced by spontaneously produced neighbour calls to perform a range of behaviours associated with similar affect. My results supported a neighbour effect for anxiety in marmosets. Consistent with previous findings for chimpanzees (Baker and Aureli, 1996; Videan et al., 2005), I also found evidence for neighbour effects for aggression and affiliation (Watson and Caldwell, 2010). Through experimental playback, I investigated contingent social contagion in the auditory and visual modalities. The playback of pre-recorded affiliative (chirp) calls was found to be associated with marmosets spending increased time in a range of affiliative behaviours. Playback of video showing conspecifics engaged in a positive affiliative behaviour (allogrooming) also appeared to cause marmosets to spend longer performing various affiliative behaviours. My results indicate that social contagion of affiliation is a multi-modal phenomenon in marmosets and also represent the first evidence that allogrooming is visually contagious in primates. Sapolsky (2006) conceptualised culture as the performance of species-typical behaviours to an unusual extent, termed ‘social culture’. Researchers have yet to directly investigate a transmission mechanism. I investigated whether a social culture of increased affiliation could be initiated in marmosets through the long-term playback, of positive calls, or of video of positive behaviour. The results were consistent with a relatively long-lasting influence of the playback of affiliative calls across several affiliative behaviours. The effect appeared to last substantially beyond the specific hours of playback, between playbacks, and after playback had ceased, potentially indicating a temporary shift in social culture. These results are preliminary but provide some support for the proposal that auditory social contagion may be a transmission mechanism for social culture. The long-term video playback of allogrooming appeared to result in a transitory shift in performance of the identical behaviour (increased allogrooming) after playbacks had ceased. In addition to theoretical implications for social cognition and social culture, my findings have potential practical application for the enhancement of welfare in captive marmosets through sensory, and non-contact social, enrichment.

This essay examines influencers’ framing of mental illness and how the framing could possibly affect the growing problem of mental illness among Swedish youth. Previous research concerning mental illness among youth, social media and social contagion is presented as a basic understanding of the problem at hand. Approximately 16 000 Instagram posts from Sweden’s most influential Instagram accounts were reviewed for content about mental illness. Posts containing descriptions of mental illness were extracted and analyzed using thematical analysis. The main finding from the thematical analysis was that influencers tended to use The Hero’s Journey dramaturgy in the framing of mental illness. The main conclusion made from the study was that influencer framing of mental health issues, consciously or unconsciously, tended to augment mental illness in a number of ways. The influencers seemed to have developed specializations in different forms of mental illness. The specialized influencer took upon him/herself the role of a mentor to followers experiencing symptoms of the same type of mental illness, leading them on for their own Hero’s Journey. Hence, the mechanisms of The Hero’s Journey were shown to, in themselves, have a tendency to increase the contagious effects of mental illness.

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