Peter Bearman
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3633155 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Peter Bearman |
| NOMBRES | Peter |
| APELLIDO | Bearman |
| FIRMA | BEARMAN P |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 0 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 31 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2011 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2011 |
| ÍNDICE H | 1 |
Homophily and the Focused Organization of Ties
This article examines homophily — the tendencies for people with similar characteristics to interact with one another — and how social structure gives rise to network autocorrelation more than expected, while at the same time providing a balance against dynamics inducing pure segregation. The article begins with a discussion of two distinct processes by which network autocorrelation can arise from people acting consistently with homophily, their …
Social Dynamics from the Bottom Up
This article focuses on agent-based computational (ABC) modeling of social interaction. It begins with an overview of ABC modeling as a computational implementation of ‘methodological individualism’, the search for the microfoundations of social life in the actions of intentional agents. It then considers how the ABC method differs from an earlier generation of modeling approaches, including game theory, equation-based models of computer simulati…
Social Influence
This article examines the role of social influence in the puzzling nature of success in cultural markets: successful cultural products, such as hit songs, best-selling books, and blockbuster movies, are considerably more successful than average; yet which particular songs, books, and movies will become the next ‘big thing’ appears impossible to predict. The article investigates this paradox empirically by constructing a website where more than 27…
Segregation Dynamics
This article explores the dynamics of segregation, with particular emphasis on the relationship between identity-based individual choices and the constraints on those choices due to others’ identity-based choices. It begins with an overview of segregation and the key elements of segregation processes: the actors, dimensions of clustering, and universe in which clustering occurs. It then reviews measures, data, and models for investigating the dyn…
Analytic Ethnography
This article examines the unique contribution that analytic ethnography has made and can make to accomplishing two of the key principles of analytical sociology: developing theoretical explanations by identifying mechanisms that connect actors, action, and outcomes; bridging the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis in those explanations. It first distinguishes ‘analytic ethnography’ from other varieties of ethnography before showing how anal…
Conditional Choice
This article examines the dynamics of conditional choice as a mechanism for explaining social action, with particular emphasis on identifying model frameworks for the analysis of the trajectory and outcome of conditional decision-making processes. It begins with an overview of conditional decision-making, including key words and concepts, followed by a discussion of conditional decision rules and initial states of activity and how they shape the …
Heuristics
This article examines the role of heuristics in driving social action, focusing on the simple heuristics that people use in their everyday lives: the Recognition Heuristic and the Take-the-best Heuristic. It first describes recognition-based inference and knowledge-based inference before discussing how fast-and-frugal heuristics are being employed as models of both individual and group decision-making. It then describes social heuristics, with pa…
Time and Scheduling
This article examines time and scheduling dynamics, with particular emphasis on the potential consequences of scheduling constraints for social life. It asks why scheduling conflicts exist and why they are often enormously difficult to resolve, first by providing an overview of traditional approaches to the study of time in the social sciences. These include an extensive literature across a number of disciplines on how societies conceptualize tim…
Status
This article examines status dynamics, with particular emphasis on four common patterns. First, actors use others’ status as a signal of their underlying quality. Second, an actor’s status influences the rewards that he/she receives. Third, an individual’s status position is not fixed, but arises from the exchange relations between individuals. Fourth, actors are especially likely to rely on status queues to make inferences about quality when the…
What is Analytical Sociology All About? An Introductory Essay
This book deals with analytical sociology, an approach for understanding the social world. Analytical sociology explains important social facts such as network structures, patterns of residential segregation, typical beliefs, cultural tastes, and common ways of acting. It does so by detailing in clear and precise ways the mechanisms through which social facts are brought about. This introductory chapter discusses some of the fundamentals of analy…
Trust
This article examines the role of trust as a determinant of cooperative behavior in social relations and social organizations. It begins with an overview of some issues of definition, scope, and measurement of trust, followed by discussion of the dimensions of trust and trustworthiness. It then reviews some evidence on the role of trust in social relations and social organizations before analyzing the main and moderating effects of trust in the c…
Network Dynamics
This article explores dynamic networks and diffusion, with particular emphasis on evolving traces of enacted social relations. It begins with a review of models for the evolution of networks over time — making a distinction between ‘node-based’ and ‘edge-based’ models — and more specifically how and why networks change. It then considers how network timing affects the flow of things across networks, focusing on how edge timing reshapes the set of…
Collective Action
This article examines collective action, focusing on the role of social interactions, conflict, and the dynamics of interpersonal influence in shaping collective identities and interests. The discussion is based on the co-occurrence of individuals’ interest and group identity through a consistent course of action and begins with an overview of analytical models used to investigate extraordinary forms of collective action. The article then describ…
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
This article examines self-fulfilling prophecies and the conditions under which they are most likely to arise. The term ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ (SFP) was coined in 1948 by Robert K. Merton to describe ‘a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true’. SFP is a particular type of dynamic process and is also known as ‘Oedipus effect’, ‘bootstrapped induction’ and ‘Barnesian perform…
Preferences
This article examines four basic issues regarding ‘preferences’ as an explanatory concept in analytical sociology. First, it explains how the ontology of preference should be understood; that is, the question of what preferences are. It challenges both the ideas that preferences are ‘mental events’ and that they are ‘behavioral tendencies.’ Second, given that real-world alternatives may be characterized by numerous different attributes, the artic…
Emotions
This article explores the role of emotions in the explanation of behavior. It first provides an overview of complexities associated with the term ‘emotion’ before discussing the link between emotions and rationality. In particular, it considers the rational choice theory of action and the notion of emotional choice, along with the impact of emotion on substantive preferences, formal preferences, beliefs and belief formation, and information-gathe…
Experiments
This article discusses game theoretic experiments conducted in the laboratory on topics of particular interest to analytical sociologists, including cooperation, collective action, and social order. It reviews experimental work in economics that seems to be of direct relevance to analytical sociology and what it has to offer, with particular emphasis on behavioral economics. It first provides an overview of some key methodological considerations,…
Conflict
This article examines the role of individual preferences and actions in producing conflict and how conflict shapes preferences, identity, and actions. Using an analytical approach, it looks at the causes and consequences of interpersonal and group conflict, with particular emphasis on the microfoundations of conflict and peace. It also considers how conflict causes action and the formation of collective identity, much as collective identity gives…
Opportunities
This article examines how the concept of opportunity is used in analyses of choices people make and in analyses of social inequality and civil rights. It first considers the distinction between choices made without attention to what other agents do versus choices made strategically taking into account the possible actions of others. It then explains how agents may act to shape the constraints and opportunities they face, as well as how available …
Beliefs
This article examines the multiple mechanisms by which beliefs are formed — from observation, social influence/socialization, induction, deduction from other beliefs, adaptation to desire (wishful thinking), and dissonance-reduction mechanisms — as well as the conditions under which each arises and the characteristic processes (and problems) associated with each. The discussion is generally set in a socio-cognitive framework, which is based on th…
Dominance Hierarchies
This article explores how dominance hierarchies develop their typical structures. It tackles a number of questions, for example: how is it that different groups develop the same kinds of hierarchy structures, even when the structures arise spontaneously, without being imposed by central authority; what mechanisms generate these hierarchy structures; or whether an understanding the development of hierarchies provides more general insight into the …
Game Theory
This article considers how game theory can be simultaneously deployed as a tool for framing questions and for formal analytical investigation of the relationship between micro-level decisions and macro-level outcomes. It first provides an overview of some basic concepts of game theory before turning to evolutionary game theory and its most salient features, including the concept of equilibrium. It then examines behavioral game theory and presents…
Historical Sociology
This article examines the different methods employed in historical sociology through which historical macro social outcomes are investigated — comparative, institutional, relational, and cultural — as well as the enduring tension revealed by the meso-level structures that often shape outcomes. It begins with a discussion of two major categories of historical sociology: comparative historical analysis, characterized by historical sociologists and …
Norms
This article explores the relationship between norms and action, making a distinction between social and moral norms, quasi-moral norms, legal norms, and conventions. It defines ‘social norm’ as a non-outcome-oriented injunction to act or to abstain from acting, sustained by the sanctions that others apply to norm violators. After explaining how social norms operate, the article considers some important or representative social norms, including w…
The Contagiousness of Divorce
This article examines the contagiousness of divorce. It begins with an overview of various mechanisms suggesting that the marital status of significant others influences an individual’s decision to divorce. It then presents evidence based on data from a unique Swedish longitudinal database including all employees at approximately 1,500 randomly selected workplaces. The database allows for detailed analyses of how the sex, age, and marital status …
Analytical Sociology and Theories of the Middle Range
This article locates analytic sociology in the Mertonian tradition of middle-range theory, which focuses on partial explanation of phenomena observed in different social domains through identification of core causal mechanisms. Robert K. Merton was one of the most important figures in twentieth-century sociology. He wrote on a wide range of topics, including bureaucracy, deviance, mass communications, professions, social stratification, and the s…
Signaling
This article examines signaling theory as an element of analytical sociology, and particularly as an analytic framework for accounting for irrational behaviors. It first provides an overview of the basic principles of signaling theory, focusing on the distinction between signs and signals as well as the concepts of differential costs and differential benefits. It then considers various sources of signal costs, including receiver’s independent cos…
Homophily and the Focused Organization of Ties
This article examines homophily — the tendencies for people with similar characteristics to interact with one another — and how social structure gives rise to network autocorrelation more than expected, while at the same time providing a balance against dynamics inducing pure segregation. The article begins with a discussion of two distinct processes by which network autocorrelation can arise from people acting consistently with homophily, their …
Social Dynamics from the Bottom Up
This article focuses on agent-based computational (ABC) modeling of social interaction. It begins with an overview of ABC modeling as a computational implementation of ‘methodological individualism’, the search for the microfoundations of social life in the actions of intentional agents. It then considers how the ABC method differs from an earlier generation of modeling approaches, including game theory, equation-based models of computer simulati…
Social Influence
This article examines the role of social influence in the puzzling nature of success in cultural markets: successful cultural products, such as hit songs, best-selling books, and blockbuster movies, are considerably more successful than average; yet which particular songs, books, and movies will become the next ‘big thing’ appears impossible to predict. The article investigates this paradox empirically by constructing a website where more than 27…
Segregation Dynamics
This article explores the dynamics of segregation, with particular emphasis on the relationship between identity-based individual choices and the constraints on those choices due to others’ identity-based choices. It begins with an overview of segregation and the key elements of segregation processes: the actors, dimensions of clustering, and universe in which clustering occurs. It then reviews measures, data, and models for investigating the dyn…
Analytic Ethnography
This article examines the unique contribution that analytic ethnography has made and can make to accomplishing two of the key principles of analytical sociology: developing theoretical explanations by identifying mechanisms that connect actors, action, and outcomes; bridging the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis in those explanations. It first distinguishes ‘analytic ethnography’ from other varieties of ethnography before showing how anal…
Conditional Choice
This article examines the dynamics of conditional choice as a mechanism for explaining social action, with particular emphasis on identifying model frameworks for the analysis of the trajectory and outcome of conditional decision-making processes. It begins with an overview of conditional decision-making, including key words and concepts, followed by a discussion of conditional decision rules and initial states of activity and how they shape the …
Heuristics
This article examines the role of heuristics in driving social action, focusing on the simple heuristics that people use in their everyday lives: the Recognition Heuristic and the Take-the-best Heuristic. It first describes recognition-based inference and knowledge-based inference before discussing how fast-and-frugal heuristics are being employed as models of both individual and group decision-making. It then describes social heuristics, with pa…
Time and Scheduling
This article examines time and scheduling dynamics, with particular emphasis on the potential consequences of scheduling constraints for social life. It asks why scheduling conflicts exist and why they are often enormously difficult to resolve, first by providing an overview of traditional approaches to the study of time in the social sciences. These include an extensive literature across a number of disciplines on how societies conceptualize tim…
Status
This article examines status dynamics, with particular emphasis on four common patterns. First, actors use others’ status as a signal of their underlying quality. Second, an actor’s status influences the rewards that he/she receives. Third, an individual’s status position is not fixed, but arises from the exchange relations between individuals. Fourth, actors are especially likely to rely on status queues to make inferences about quality when the…
What is Analytical Sociology All About? An Introductory Essay
This book deals with analytical sociology, an approach for understanding the social world. Analytical sociology explains important social facts such as network structures, patterns of residential segregation, typical beliefs, cultural tastes, and common ways of acting. It does so by detailing in clear and precise ways the mechanisms through which social facts are brought about. This introductory chapter discusses some of the fundamentals of analy…
Trust
This article examines the role of trust as a determinant of cooperative behavior in social relations and social organizations. It begins with an overview of some issues of definition, scope, and measurement of trust, followed by discussion of the dimensions of trust and trustworthiness. It then reviews some evidence on the role of trust in social relations and social organizations before analyzing the main and moderating effects of trust in the c…
Network Dynamics
This article explores dynamic networks and diffusion, with particular emphasis on evolving traces of enacted social relations. It begins with a review of models for the evolution of networks over time — making a distinction between ‘node-based’ and ‘edge-based’ models — and more specifically how and why networks change. It then considers how network timing affects the flow of things across networks, focusing on how edge timing reshapes the set of…
Collective Action
This article examines collective action, focusing on the role of social interactions, conflict, and the dynamics of interpersonal influence in shaping collective identities and interests. The discussion is based on the co-occurrence of individuals’ interest and group identity through a consistent course of action and begins with an overview of analytical models used to investigate extraordinary forms of collective action. The article then describ…
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
This article examines self-fulfilling prophecies and the conditions under which they are most likely to arise. The term ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ (SFP) was coined in 1948 by Robert K. Merton to describe ‘a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true’. SFP is a particular type of dynamic process and is also known as ‘Oedipus effect’, ‘bootstrapped induction’ and ‘Barnesian perform…
Preferences
This article examines four basic issues regarding ‘preferences’ as an explanatory concept in analytical sociology. First, it explains how the ontology of preference should be understood; that is, the question of what preferences are. It challenges both the ideas that preferences are ‘mental events’ and that they are ‘behavioral tendencies.’ Second, given that real-world alternatives may be characterized by numerous different attributes, the artic…
Emotions
This article explores the role of emotions in the explanation of behavior. It first provides an overview of complexities associated with the term ‘emotion’ before discussing the link between emotions and rationality. In particular, it considers the rational choice theory of action and the notion of emotional choice, along with the impact of emotion on substantive preferences, formal preferences, beliefs and belief formation, and information-gathe…
Experiments
This article discusses game theoretic experiments conducted in the laboratory on topics of particular interest to analytical sociologists, including cooperation, collective action, and social order. It reviews experimental work in economics that seems to be of direct relevance to analytical sociology and what it has to offer, with particular emphasis on behavioral economics. It first provides an overview of some key methodological considerations,…
Conflict
This article examines the role of individual preferences and actions in producing conflict and how conflict shapes preferences, identity, and actions. Using an analytical approach, it looks at the causes and consequences of interpersonal and group conflict, with particular emphasis on the microfoundations of conflict and peace. It also considers how conflict causes action and the formation of collective identity, much as collective identity gives…
Opportunities
This article examines how the concept of opportunity is used in analyses of choices people make and in analyses of social inequality and civil rights. It first considers the distinction between choices made without attention to what other agents do versus choices made strategically taking into account the possible actions of others. It then explains how agents may act to shape the constraints and opportunities they face, as well as how available …
Beliefs
This article examines the multiple mechanisms by which beliefs are formed — from observation, social influence/socialization, induction, deduction from other beliefs, adaptation to desire (wishful thinking), and dissonance-reduction mechanisms — as well as the conditions under which each arises and the characteristic processes (and problems) associated with each. The discussion is generally set in a socio-cognitive framework, which is based on th…
Dominance Hierarchies
This article explores how dominance hierarchies develop their typical structures. It tackles a number of questions, for example: how is it that different groups develop the same kinds of hierarchy structures, even when the structures arise spontaneously, without being imposed by central authority; what mechanisms generate these hierarchy structures; or whether an understanding the development of hierarchies provides more general insight into the …
Game Theory
This article considers how game theory can be simultaneously deployed as a tool for framing questions and for formal analytical investigation of the relationship between micro-level decisions and macro-level outcomes. It first provides an overview of some basic concepts of game theory before turning to evolutionary game theory and its most salient features, including the concept of equilibrium. It then examines behavioral game theory and presents…
Historical Sociology
This article examines the different methods employed in historical sociology through which historical macro social outcomes are investigated — comparative, institutional, relational, and cultural — as well as the enduring tension revealed by the meso-level structures that often shape outcomes. It begins with a discussion of two major categories of historical sociology: comparative historical analysis, characterized by historical sociologists and …
Norms
This article explores the relationship between norms and action, making a distinction between social and moral norms, quasi-moral norms, legal norms, and conventions. It defines ‘social norm’ as a non-outcome-oriented injunction to act or to abstain from acting, sustained by the sanctions that others apply to norm violators. After explaining how social norms operate, the article considers some important or representative social norms, including w…
The Contagiousness of Divorce
This article examines the contagiousness of divorce. It begins with an overview of various mechanisms suggesting that the marital status of significant others influences an individual’s decision to divorce. It then presents evidence based on data from a unique Swedish longitudinal database including all employees at approximately 1,500 randomly selected workplaces. The database allows for detailed analyses of how the sex, age, and marital status …
Sociology (25 obras) · Computer Science (21 obras) · Epistemology (18 obras) · Psychology (15 obras) · Social Psychology (14 obras) · Political science (12 obras) · Economics (10 obras) · Action (physics) (9 obras) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (9 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (8 obras)