{"title":"What Is Grounded Simulation?","authors":"Michael Lee Wood, Dustin S. Stoltz","doi":"10.1111/jtsb.70002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.70002","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The capacity to mentally simulate objects and events is an important yet underexplored component in sociological theorising. Recent sociological research drawing on simulation research from the cognitive sciences suggests opportunities for new insights via a richer interdisciplinary engagement. To this end, we provide a thorough review of the literature on grounded simulation theory, building on the nascent work in sociology engaging with grounded simulation theory, and discuss its potential for sociological analysis. We highlight its utility as a cognitively plausible framework for addressing important issues in the analysis of culture and action and culture and thinking, including questions of salience, novelty, implicit cognition, deliberation and the relation between Type 1 and Type 2 processing. We conclude with some considerations for future research.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47646,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour","volume":"55 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143818522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Feeling the Conspiracy—Theorising the Transformation and Collectivisation of Emotions Through Conspiracy Theories","authors":"Philipp Wunderlich","doi":"10.1111/jtsb.70001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.70001","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Conspiracy theories have become a prominent topic for sociological research. But although emotions such as paranoia and panic are—sometimes dismissively—referred to in classical accounts of conspiracy theories and different emotions have been empirically linked to conspiracy beliefs, a comprehensive theoretical account of the emotional underpinnings of conspiracy theories is still lacking. In this contribution, I aim to fill this gap by proposing a theoretical model that focuses on the transformation and collectivisation of emotions, facilitated by conspiracy theories. Drawing on existing research, I first identify three groups of emotions relevant to conspiracy theories: (1) anxiety and fear, (2) excitement, fascination and awe and (3) anger, ressentiment and hate. Many of these emotions are both considered to drive individuals towards conspiratorial beliefs and are found to be evoked by conspiracy theories, which raises questions regarding their causal relationship to conspiracy theories. To clarify this conceptual ambiguity, I propose a processual account, according to which conspiracy theories enable the transformation of individual emotions which are marked by powerlessness and thus are frequently suppressed into emotions that are less harmful to the self and can be expressed and acted upon. Crucially, the resulting emotions are experienced collectively and consequently can drive the formation of emotional collectives. Thus, the emotional mechanism does not only motivate individuals to subscribe to conspiracy beliefs but also allows them to reassert their collective political agency and sense of control. In this process, however, the original emotional concern may be lost, resulting in potentially misdirected political actions.</p>","PeriodicalId":47646,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour","volume":"55 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jtsb.70001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143749427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theory-Refuting Findings in Psychology: How Much Should They Matter?","authors":"David Trafimow","doi":"10.1111/jtsb.70000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>To a naïve falsificationist, one theory-refuting finding falsifies a theory. In contrast, sophisticated science philosophers have emphasised larger research systems that include theories and auxiliary assumptions. Theory-refuting findings can be accommodated by blaming poor auxiliary assumptions, refining theories, improving auxiliary assumptions, or pronouncing that the benefits of the research system render theory-refuting findings unimportant. Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Laudan have proposed research systems, with many disagreements between them. The present thesis is that each proposal is subject to two caveats. None of these philosophers sufficiently considered the opportunity costs associated with ignoring theory-refuting findings. Secondly, it is not clear that previous pronouncements about how research systems work in the hard sciences necessarily apply well to modern psychological science. The interaction of these issues suggests that theory-refuting findings may have more potential for mattering in modern psychology than would seem apparent from sophisticated research system perspectives.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47646,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143120508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Theory of Social Representation: Its Various Models and Their Imbrication","authors":"Grégory Lo Monaco, Patrick Rateau","doi":"10.1111/jtsb.12441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12441","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article begins with a summary of the four major theoretical and methodological models of social representations—the sociogenetic, structural, sociodynamic and dialogical models—and then explores new and original approaches to integrating these frameworks. The aim is to move beyond the mere accumulation or juxtaposition usually used in presenting these models and to propose methods for imbricating and interweaving them from three perspectives: conceptual innovation, methodological innovation and the temporal logic of research. We demonstrate how these imbrications—though still requiring extensive empirical research—facilitate a better understanding of how individuals and groups represent the objects in their environment.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47646,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143113962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Identity, Collective Action and Inaction: The Role of Self-Esteem and Psychological Benefits","authors":"Doron Shultziner","doi":"10.1111/jtsb.12440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12440","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This paper proposes a theoretical framework of collective action that integrates three aspects of identity—social identity, moral convictions, and self-esteem. The paper explains how these identity aspects relate to each other and how they affect collective action or inaction. The paper presents a framework that returns to and focuses on the underlying cognitive motivations to engage in collective action while paying special attention to the mechanism of maintaining positive self-esteem and the benefits that people may gain from participation in collective action. These benefits explain both the personal incentives for action or inaction and the positive feedback loops of action on self-esteem which reinforce additional mobilization and explain why some individuals participate more than their peers. The framework draws from existing theories and empirical studies to formulate testable hypotheses and stresses the importance of studying both participants and non-participants of the same affected social group.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47646,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143110906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Context, Emergence and Critical Realism: A Response to Navarrete and Fryer","authors":"Dave Elder-Vass","doi":"10.1111/jtsb.12439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12439","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This is a response to Cristián Navarrete and Tom Fryer's recent paper on contextual emergence and critical realism. Their paper raises some stimulating challenges to critical realist accounts of emergence, but I argue that it does not establish that critical realist accounts of emergence are flawed, nor that the contextual emergence tradition has significant improvements to offer.</p>","PeriodicalId":47646,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jtsb.12439","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143110719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Peirce's Universal Categories and Critical Realist Ontology","authors":"Tobin Nellhaus","doi":"10.1111/jtsb.12435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12435","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Much of Charles S. Peirce's philosophy hinges on his “universal categories” of Firstness (qualities, potentialities), Secondness (action, otherness) and Thirdness (relationship, rule-boundedness). Despite their abstractness, the categories have concrete applications and shed light on several critical realist theories, such as its ontological domains, its social ontology and its more nascent semiotics. Using Peirce's categories this way requires building on his effectively non-deterministic materialist arguments and extricating his ontology from his better-known phenomenology. Peirce's universal categories, which are stratified and emergent, unearth a systematic pattern unifying critical realist ontologies and address certain problems elsewhere in critical realist philosophy. Most significantly, Peirce's semiotics provides critical realism with the mechanism connecting epistemology to ontology and grounds a case for reconceptualizing critical realism's empirical domain as the semiosic domain.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47646,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143117844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Bourdieusian Unconscious: The Scientific and Political Significance of the Sociological Treatment of a Psychoanalytic Concept","authors":"Gergely Csányi","doi":"10.1111/jtsb.12437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12437","url":null,"abstract":"<p>From the very beginning of Pierre Bourdieu's oeuvre, but with increasing intensity, one can find expressions that are either explicitly taken from psychoanalysis, or at least have a psychoanalytic meaning. This paper aims to contribute to the existing discourse on Bourdieu's relation to psychoanalysis by examining the meaning of Bourdieu's most frequently used term, unconscious, which is also a key one in psychoanalysis, in Bourdieu's writings. In a brief introduction, I outline Bourdieu's relationship to psychoanalysis based on the literature and Bourdieu's texts, and argue that although Bourdieu's relationship with psychoanalysis remained controversial over the years, there is a growing integrative tendency, with psychoanalysis playing an increasingly important—even if sometimes hidden—role in his texts. In the main body of the paper, I argue that this tendency does not fully cover Bourdieu's approach to the unconscious, and that although his approach to the unconscious is not independent of the tendency discussed in the previous section, a dichotomy can be observed from the beginning to the end of the oeuvre, namely the parallel use of the unconscious in the sociological and psychoanalytic sense, and the lack of clarity regarding the relationship between the two. Finally, in the last section, I point out that socioanalysis, as an emancipatory project, should have clarified its position on the unconscious, because it marks the limits of the actors' potential for self-reflexivity, which can also shape political strategies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47646,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jtsb.12437","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143114654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Myth of Agreement","authors":"Michal Roch Kaczmarczyk","doi":"10.1111/jtsb.12438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12438","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Contemporary ontological constructivism often rests on the belief that social reality emerges from tacit agreements, underpinning mutual expectations and trust. In social theory, the concept of agreement has evolved from explicit social contracts to normative consensus and the idea of tacit knowledge that subtly binds social actors. This article challenges this prevailing approach by dissecting various constructivist positions and exposing the implications of agreement-based ontological constructivism on our understanding of culture, norms, and society. The author revisits an alternative perspective, claiming that human society is equally a structure of disagreement. Emphasizing disagreement advocates for a realistic social theory and highlights the vital role of fiction in shaping social life.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47646,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143114216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Paradox of Situated Knowledge: Toward an Existential Embedment Theory of Perceptual Truth","authors":"Shanyang Zhao","doi":"10.1111/jtsb.12436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12436","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Truth is a thorny issue for the sociology of knowledge. In emphasizing social influence on knowledge production, sociologists tend to disavow the objectivity of truth and slide down the slope of the consensus theory and the nihilism of post-truth. In fighting science denial, on the other hand, sociologists often find themselves aligning with the correspondence theory and the naïve notion of naked truth. The aim of this article is to advance a position that recognizes social influence on knowledge attainment without obviating the objectivity in truth. The key to this argument lies in the concept of existential embedment that unifies objectivity and subjectivity in human struggles for survival and prosperity, from which truth originates and to which truth contributes. Existential embedment also anchors knowledge by providing the foundation for truth validation. Depending on the modalities of knowledge attainment, truth is divided into four types with varying degrees of veridical certitude, each having its own criterion for validity assessment. Knowledge that passes the validation test is accepted as truth within the horizon of the given realm of existential embedment, which may change as the existential activity of the knower changes.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47646,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour","volume":"54 4","pages":"632-644"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143111435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}