Social commitments are commitments made from an agent to another agent to bring about a certain property. In broad terms, a social commitment represents the commitment that an agent, called debtor, has towards another agent, called creditor, to bring about some property or state of affairs, which is the subject of the commitment. Commitments are a well-known concept in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS)...

Romantic relationship dissolution can be stressful, and social networking sites make it difficult to separate from a romantic partner online as well as offline. An online survey (N = 431) tested a model synthesizing attachment, investment model variables, and post-dissolution emotional distress as predictors of interpersonal surveillance (i.e., "Facebook stalking") of one's ex-partner on Facebo...

In this paper we aim to formally model individual, social and collective motivational attitudes in teams of agents involved in Cooperative Problem Solving. Particular attention is given to the strongest motivational attitude, collective commitment, which leads to team action. First, building on our previous work, a logical framework is sketched in which social commitments and collective intenti...

This paper examines Amartya Sen’s notion of ‘commitment’ in light of Geoffrey Brennan’s recent discussion thereof. Its aim is to elucidate one type of commitment which consists in following social norms. To this end, I discuss Sen’s ‘apples’ example from his ‘Rational fools’ essay (section 2). In section 3, I draw some implications of commitments in Sen’s work for the concept of ‘agent relativi...

Less than ten years ago, the science of humility seemed stuck with intractable measurement problems. However, due to theoretical innovations, measures have proliferated in recent years. In order to avoid fragmentation, humility science faces a critical stage of needing to reconcile and integrate definitions and measures. In Chapter 1, I review 22 measures of humility, including (a) survey measu...

This study applies qualitative methodology to the study of sociopolitical development (SPD) among community and labor organizers of color. Participant data (open-ended applications) were obtained from a long-standing training institution, span 18 years (n=200), and equally represent Black, Latino/a, and Asian individuals. This study sought to reveal important dimensions of SPD and to identify c...

This paper considers optimal social insurance in a dynamic moral hazard economy. The existing literature has focussed on environments in which a planner and a population of agents share the same discount factor. A key finding is that agents are then almost surely immiserated; their welfare is driven to its lowest bound. Such immiseration requires a social commitment to treat (almost) everyone a...

In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights-based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the “near death” exper...

As mandatory involvement requirements may not intrinsically motivate learners to achieve high quality learning, social factors under affective commitment are especially important determinants of TML success. This paper investigates an individual’s social and self identities as important determinants in developing affective commitment (identification) and intrinsic motivation (perceived enjoymen...