This paper revisits and extends the experiment on the solidarity game by Selten and Ockenfels (1998). We replicate the basic design of the solidarity game and extend it in order to test the robustness of the ’fixed total sacrifice’ effect and the applied strategy method. Our results only partially confirm the validity of the fixed total sacrifice effect. In a treatment with constant group-endow...

We want to congratulate Steven Durlauf on a most interesting and provocative paper. He reminds us that modeling the social interaction among and the social interdependence of individuals is a challenging task that is at the core of social science theory. As James Coleman (1990) has argued, understanding the link between the micro and the macro is one of the keys to the development of social sci...

The second half of the nineteenth century in Spain was a period characterized by a strong presence of social science, which even came to permeate the masses. Evolutionary theories and some figures such as Charles Darwin himself were present in areas far from the scientific activity proper. The use of concepts and laws of biological origin for the diagnosis and political practice against certain...

Twitter is a major social media platform in which users send and read messages ("tweets") of up to 140 characters. In recent years this communication medium has been used by those affected by crises to organize demonstrations or find relief. Because traffic on this media platform is extremely heavy, with hundreds of millions of tweets sent every day, it is difficult to differentiate between tim...

Human-environment research in the 21st century will need to change in major ways. It will need to integrate the natural and the social sciences; it will need to engage stakeholders and citizens in the design of research and in the delivery of science for the benefit of society; it will need to address ethical and democratic goals; and it will need to address a myriad of important theoretical an...

The present article analyzes aspects of the intellectual trajectory of Maria Cecília Ferro Donnangelo and her principal works. The text emphasizes the innovating and pioneer role her work played in the first moments of social sciences in the field of health in the mid sixties, occurring just together with changes in medical education and medical practice in Brazil.

Facebook is rapidly gaining recognition as a powerful research tool for the social sciences. It constitutes a large and diverse pool of participants, who can be selectively recruited for both online and offline studies. Additionally, it facilitates data collection by storing detailed records of its users' demographic profiles, social interactions, and behaviors. With participants' consent, thes...

Psychologists' appropriation of language and ideas from Thomas Kuhn's (1962, 1970b) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions reveals deep and contradictory concerns about truth, science, and the progress of the field. The author argues that psychologists, uncomfortably straddling natural and social science traditions, reference Structure for 2 reasons largely overlooked: first, because it presen...

In the social sciences we are often interested in comparing models specified by parametric equality or inequality constraints. For instance, when examining three group means [Formula: see text] through an analysis of variance (ANOVA), a model may specify that [Formula: see text], while another one may state that [Formula: see text], and finally a third model may instead suggest that all means a...

This essay examines the societal dynamics surrounding modern science. It first discusses a number of challenges facing any effort to communicate science in social environments: lay publics with varying levels of preparedness for fully understanding new scientific breakthroughs; the deterioration of traditional media infrastructures; and an increasingly complex set of emerging technologies that ...