This work introduces a formal framework for the social acquisition of ontologies which are constructed dynamically from overhearing the possibly conflicting symbolic interaction of autonomous information sources, and an approach to the pragmatics of communicated ontological axioms. Technically, the framework is based on distributed variants of description logic for the formal contextualization ...

On the human brain activities in social interaction, there may be associated with some kind of reinforcement mechanism like crowd psychology or mimicking drive, or sometimes, creating a social mechanism like punishments. Some of such reinforcement mechanisms can be interpreted with a nonlinear Polya urn process of which W. Brian Arthur(1994) is fond. He called structure as emergence of a new co...

This research is concerned with the processes by which individuals use social interaction to actively test hypotheses about other people. In four separate empirical investigations, female participants were provided with hypotheses about the personal attributes of other individuals ("targets"). Participants then prepared to test these hypotheses (i.e., that their targets were extraverts or that ...

In this paper we shall present a further development of a previously published theory concerning opinion influence processes in social groups (7). This further development has enabled us to extend the theory to deal with other areas, in addition to opinion formation, in which social comparison is important. Specifically, we shall develop below how the theory applies to the appraisal and evaluat...

This brainstorming experiment assessed the extent to which idea exposure produced cognitive stimulation and social comparison effects. One hundred and sixty participants were exposed to either a high or low number of common or unique ideas. The participants likelihood of engaging in social comparison processes (high or low) was also manipulated through instructional sets. The results indicated ...

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In this review, we focus on social psychological studies of influence-research in which the goal is to bring about change in another person or oneself. Although many constructs can be targeted for change (e.g., beliefs, behaviors), we focus on attitudes (people's general evaluations of people, objects, and issues) because attitudes often serve a key mediational role in behavior change (i.e., at...