Most current attempts to explain the evolution—through individual selection—of pro-social behavior (i.e. behavior that favors the group) that allows for cohesive societies among non related individuals, focus on altruistic punishment as its evolutionary driving force. The main theoretical problem facing this line of research is that in the exercise of altruistic punishment the benefits of punis...

A touch of impatience can be discerned amongst realistically oriented colleagues in this series of essays: formal philosophers and economists have injected a certain a priori and deductive element into the discussion of trust. The description of the manner in which trust and hence economic vitality were deliberately destroyed by Neapolitan political authority is a welcome corrective (Pagden, th...

The purpose of the current study was to initiate the development of a psychometrically sound measure of cohesion for youth sport groups. A series of projects were undertaken in a four-phase research program. The initial phase was designed to garner an understanding of how youth sport group members perceived the concept of cohesion through focus groups (n = 56), open-ended questionnaires (n = 28...

OBJECTIVES We examined the association between social cohesion and mortality in a sample of older adults in Japan. METHODS Data were derived from a cohort study of elderly individuals (65-84 years) in Shizuoka Prefecture; 14 001 participants were enrolled at baseline (1999) and followed up in 2002, 2006, and 2009. Among the 11 092 participants for whom we had complete data, 1427 had died duri...

The authors argue that Wilkinson's model omits important variables (social class) that make it vulnerable to biases due to model mis-specification. Furthermore, the culture of inequality hypothesis unnecessarily "psychopathologizes" the relatively deprived while omitting social determinants of disease related to production (environmental and occupational hazards) and the capacity of the relativ...

In this paper, I will provide a broad overview of outreach and student engagement strategies used in Australian universities and raise key issues in regard to improving access to higher education for disadvantaged and under-represented students.

Studying the relationship between social capital and social security is special importance particularly for women in urban space to approach a sustainable urban society. The main aim of this paper is to survey the impact of social capital components on women in a neighborhood scale. The methodology of the research is based on descriptive-analytical methods by conducting a field study to complet...

Structural studies are, in the social sciences, the indirect outcome of modern developments in mathematics which have given increasing importance to the qualitative point of view in contradistinction to the quantitative point of view of traditional mathematics. It has become possible, therefore, in fields such as mathematical logic, set theory, group theory, and topology, to develop a rigorous ...