In response to failures of central planning, the Chinese government has experimented not only with free-market trade zones, but with allowing non-profit foundations to operate in a decentralized fashion. A network study shows how these foundations have connected together by sharing board members, in a structural parallel to what is seen in corporations in the United States. This board interlock...

Generous public investment in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides research foundations with a unique opportunity to more closely connect investments in basic research to a payoff in improved health. Foundations can support efforts to integrate what is known from the biological, behavioral, and social sciences to solve the nation's most pressing health problems. In doing so, they wi...

Where does morality come from? Why are moral judgments often so similar across cultures, yet sometimes so variable? Is morality one thing, or many? Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) was created to answer these questions. In this chapter we describe the origins, assumptions, and current conceptualization of the theory, and detail the empirical findings that MFT has made possible, both within social...

The debate on the existence of laws in individual and social behaviour dates back to the very beginnings of economics as a modern science. In adopting the concept of natural laws from classical mechanics, economics originally evolved as ‘social physics.’ But is it really appropriate to transfer the idea of precise and accurate laws to social life and social science? We attempt to answer this qu...

This paper provides technical details and user guidance on the Research Infrastructure of Chinese Foundations (RICF), a database of Chinese foundations, civil society, and social development in general. The structure of the RICF is deliberately designed and normalized according to the Three Normal Forms. The database schema consists of three major themes: foundations' basic organizational profi...

The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions f...

Synopsis: Many theorists have long emphasized the importance of civic society and voluntary associations as vital to the lifeblood of democracy. Interest in this perennial topic has been revived by Putnam’s theory of social capital claiming that rich and dense associational networks facilitate the underlying conditions of interpersonal trust, tolerance and cooperation, providing the social foun...

Neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) is the term used to describe the presence of withdrawal symptoms in neonates exposed prenatally to opiates. Much of what is known about NAS is based on the biomedical model of illness. There is less consideration of the social, historical, and political influences on knowledge development about the NAS phenomenon. Social construction presents an alternate fram...

‘Trust in government has been identified as one of the most important foundations upon which the legitimacy and sustainability of political systems are built. Trust is essential for social cohesion and well-being as it affects governments’ ability to govern and enables them to act without having to resort to coercion. Consequently, it is an efficient means of lowering transaction costs in any s...

There has been growing interest in moral-emotional phenomena in psychology, sociology and other social sciences. One of the main issues in this field of study centers on the relationship between public/political discussion and moral-emotional framework. The first major attempt was done by J. Haidt(2012), a leading advocate of ‘moral psychology’. He argues that there are five distinct moral foun...