As the divorce rate increased through the 1970s, the policy climate for divorce also changed dramatically, raising the question of whether the secular trends in divorce were influenced by these policy changes or vice versa. One such policy change, passed in late 1977 in recognition of falling marriage durations, entitled divorced persons to claim auxiliary Social Security benefits on their ex-s...

Social networking is gaining enormous popularity in the past few years. However, the popularity may also bring unexpected consequences for users regarding safety and privacy concerns. To prevent privacy being breached and modeling a social network as a weighted graph, many effective anonymization techniques have been proposed. In this work, we consider the edge weight anonymity problem. In part...

Rigid social categorization can lead to negative social consequences such as stereotyping and prejudice. The authors hypothesized that bodily experiences of fluidity would promote fluidity in social-categorical thinking. Across a series of experiments, fluid movements compared with nonfluid movements led to more fluid lay theories of social categories, more fluidity in social categorization, an...

Inappropriate social behaviour is an early symptom of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) in both behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and semantic dementia (SD) subtypes. Knowledge of social behaviour is essential for appropriate social conduct. The superior anterior temporal lobe (ATL) has been identified as one key neural component for the conceptual knowledge of social b...

Economic actors confront various forms of uncertainty in their decision making, and the ways in which they deal with these obstacles may affect their success in accomplishing their goals. In this paper, we examine the means by which relationship managers in a major commercial bank attempt to close transactions with their corporate customers. We hypothesize that under conditions of high uncertai...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...