Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour最新文献

Sometimes I am with a group of people but feel socially distant because their activities make me think, ‘I don't belong here!’ However, the distance between me and them is not created by intentional acts of exclusion. It stems from my non-participation in their chosen activities—the things other members of the in-group do for fun—for personal reasons. Although we share a lot in common, such as being supporters of the same football club, staff at the same institution, students at the same university or having shared religious beliefs, we differ in the things we do for fun; not all of us are smokers, not all of us drink beer/alcohol, and not all of us speak the same languages. The feeling of social distance that one experiences when excluded from activities enjoyed by members of one's in-group is a form of discrimination. In this perspective paper, I expose this type of discrimination as acceptable within in-groups for two reasons: (1) the general lack of discriminatory intentions towards victims and (2) the spatial situatedness of the discriminatory activities. I call this acceptable type of discrimination ‘Groupcism’. I argue that groupcism is regarded as an acceptable form of discrimination not primarily because of the two reasons stated above, but because of another two: (1) other activities that the victims of groupcism share with the members of their in-group; and (2) the agency to opt in and out of the sub-group activities that engender groupcism.

Cognitive science needs phenomenology, not despite, but because of the epistemic challenges posed by consciousness. This article argues that the pervasive presence of intuitive dualism, the empirical cognitive tendency to distinguish the mental from physical, is a widespread and entrenched feature of human experience. Drawing on work in developmental psychology and cognitive anthropology, we suggest that first-person experience, often bracketed or marginalised in scientific accounts, must instead be treated as a legitimate source of epistemic access. The goal is in no way to return to metaphysical dualism but to recognise that the intuitively dualist subjective experience forms the data any science of consciousness must take seriously. Reframing the study of consciousness through phenomenological epistemology not only acknowledges the ontological stakes of mental phenomena but also realigns scientific inquiry with the lived realities it seeks to explain. This interdisciplinary rethinking offers a path forward for reconciling cognitive science, philosophy and the enduring puzzle of consciousness.

The progression of dementia often leads to significant life changes, with particular emphasis placed on memory decline and increased forgetfulness. People living with dementia (PlwD) are frequently subjected to stereotyping as profound forgetful individuals, a phenomenon termed dementism. This paper develops a comprehensive conceptual framework of dementism grounded in the social psychological theory of ageing. The proposed framework identifies four key psychosocial factors: emotional reactions and beliefs, social attribution, exclusion and avoidance, and denial of humanness. This framework does not aim to replace existing social research paradigm in dementia studies but rather offer novel theoretical insights through a critical lens to advance the field. We argue that psychosocial and cultural principles are fundamental to dementia care, emphasising the importance of valuing personhood and the subjective experiences of PlwD. This approach promotes enhanced sensitivity, social equality and justice in dementia care practices. Building on this framework, we conclude with targeted recommendations for future research, particularly focusing on strategies to prevent discriminatory behaviours towards PlwD. We propose that implementing antioppressive practices can help remediate dementism and foster more inclusive respectful care environments. This framework provides a foundation for understanding and addressing the complex psychosocial challenges faced by PlwD, ultimately contributing to more dignified and person-centred approaches to dementia care.

This article examines whether AI-generated texts—such as stories produced by large language models (LLMs)—can be considered social representations as defined by social representation theory. This paper argues that AI-generated outputs simulate communicative behaviour without participating in social processes of meaning-making. Although these texts contain familiar symbols, metaphors or narrative structures, they lack dialogical co-construction, intentionality and embeddedness in cultural practices. This paper introduces the concept of quasi-agents to capture the distinctive role that AI systems occupy in social interactions: entities perceived as social interlocutors, despite lacking genuine intentionality or social consciousness. This conceptual innovation extends social representation theory's analytical vocabulary, facilitating clearer distinctions between socially constructed meanings and algorithmically generated simulations. Misidentifying machine-generated texts as genuine social knowledge risks eroding the dialogical foundations of public discourse, particularly in education, media and policy contexts. Ultimately, meaning-making remains fundamentally a human and collective endeavour—one that AI may mirror but not originate.

The paper argues that humour can be very effective in disseminating extremist ideologies, in part because of humour's inherent capacity to hinder critical reflection and in part because humour requires bringing together two conflicting frames of interpretation. With extremist humour, the other frame needed to make sense of what is funny is the extremist ideology itself. Thus, merely grasping what is funny in an extremist joke entails the ability to see and interpret other things through the lenses of that extremist ideology. Although this ability does not amount to accepting the ideology, the ability is the crucial first step in the process of converting audiences to the ideology. I argue that ideology should be understood as an interpretational framework, following the political theorist Michael Freeden, so that it is something that can be parsed from the joke by the audience making sense of the joke. This view of ideology opens a way for understanding how indoctrination to an ideology with humour occurs, explaining how ideology is transmitted, how it bypasses critical reflection and how it might cause dogmatism. The paper argues that this power stems not only from the cognitive mechanisms of humour processing but also from the deeper human needs that humour serves, the desire for communality and belonging and the creation of in-group/out-group distinctions (schismogenesis). The neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer, which is notorious for using humour to garner new adherents for the white supremacist ideology and antisemitism, is used as a case study.

This article introduces immanent idealism as an alternative path in social ontology and theory. It argues for a distinction between three basic ontological dimensions, the ideational, the institutional and the structural. This approach highlights the cognitional priority of worldviews as the core element of the ideational dimension, and it also argues for the immanence, the transhistorical existential priority (over the institutional and the structural dimensions) and the transituational pervasiveness of the ideational dimension. It is argued that this approach is both antirealist and antinaturalist in socio-theoretical terms, and that it has decisive implications for the emerging subfield of cognitive sociology. These steps lead us to the invocation of a new idealism standing in opposition to new materialist approaches in social theory.