To test the effect of ability grouping on grades and the attainment of higher education, this study examines a naturally occurring experimentan admission reform that dramatically increased ability sorting between schools in the municipality of Stockholm. Following six cohorts of students (N= 79,020) from the age of 16 to 26, I find a mean effect close to zero and small positive and negative differentiating effects on grades. With regard to the attainment of higher education, I find a mean effect close to zero, the achievement group gap was unaffected, the immigrant-native gap increased, and the class background gap decreased. These results are consistent with much previous research that has found small mean effects of ability grouping. They are inconsistent with previous research, however, in that I find ability groupings effects on gaps are rather small and point in different directions.

Despite the burgeoning literature on immigrant entrepreneurship, there is a dearth of research on the social and economic factors shaping the performance of immigrant-run firms. Drawing upon human and social capital theory and assimilation theory, we investigate differences in performance measured as revenue growth in a comparative study of native and immigrant CEOs. Following 50,002 small firms in Sweden over four years, we find distinct patterns in both firm size and revenue growth between firms managed by immigrants and by natives. While firms run by second-generation immigrants from OECD countries exhibit higher growth rates than natives, the reverse is true for second generation immigrants from non-OECD countries, suggesting that economic integration in terms of immigrants’ small business growth in Sweden is characterized by segmented rather than universal assimilation.

This paper studies the long-term impact of entrepreneurship education and training in high school on entrepreneurial entry, performance, and survival. Using propensity score matching, we compare three Swedish cohorts from junior Achievement Company Program (JACP) alumni with a matched sample of similar individuals and follow these for up to 16 years after graduation. We find that while JACP participation increases the long-term probability of starting a firm as well as entrepreneurial incomes, there is no effect on firm survival.

Recent studies have found disapproval of peer punishment of norm violations. This seems puzzling, given the potential benefits peer punishers contribute to the group. We suggest part of the answer is that peer punishers tend to come across as aggressive and as such may be viewed as more problematic than beneficial to have around. We used simple computer animations of geometric shapes to enact 15 precise variations of social sanctions against a norm violator. More than 1,800 subjects were recruited to watch an animation and judge the behavior and character of the animated agents. They also completed a trait aggression measure. Across the variations peer punishment was typically disapproved of, especially when severe or openly aggressive, and especially by subjects low on trait aggression. We conclude that there seems to be a social norm against peer punishment and that dislike of aggressiveness seems to be part of the reason why.

A strategy activated in one task may be transferred to subsequent tasks and prevent activation of other strategies that would otherwise come to mind, a mechanism referred to as procedural priming. In a novel application of procedural priming we show that it can make or break cognitive illusions. Our test case is the 1/k illusion, which is based on the same unwarranted mathematical shortcut as the MPG illusion and the time-saving bias. The task is to estimate distances between values of fractions on the form 1/k. Most people given this task intuitively base their estimates on the distances between the denominators (i.e., the reciprocals of the fractions), which may yield very poor estimations of the true distances between the fractions. As expected, the tendency to fall for this illusion is related to cognitive style (Study 1). In order to apply procedural priming we constructed versions of the task in which the illusion is weak, in the sense that most people do not fall for it anymore. We then gave participants both "strong illusion" and "weak illusion" versions of the task (Studies 2 and 3). Participants who first did the task in the weak illusion version would often persist with the correct strategy even in the strong illusion version, thus breaking the otherwise strong illusion in the latter task. Conversely, participants who took the strong illusion version first would then often fall for the illusion even in the weak illusion version, thus strengthening the otherwise weak illusion in the latter task.

Here we propose the idea that the success of an argument in favor of an issue position should depend on whether the argument resonates with the audiences values. Now consider two groups, one of which has a broader set of values than the other. We develop a mathematical model to investigate how this difference in broadness of values may drive a change on the population level towards positions in line with the more narrow set of values. The model is motivated by the empirical finding that conservative morality rests equally on moral foundations that are individualizing (harm and fairness) and binding (purity, authority, and ingroup), whereas liberal morality relies mainly on the individualizing moral foundations. The model then predicts that, under certain conditions, the whole population will tend to move towards positions on moral issues (e.g., same-sex marriage) that are supported by individualizing moral foundations. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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It is known that presentation of a meaningful label (e. g., "The Teamwork Game") can influence decisions in economic games. A common view is that such labels cue associations to preexisting mental models of situations, a process here called frame selection. In the absence of such cues, participants may still spontaneously associate a game with a preexisting frame. We used the public goods game to compare the effect of such spontaneous frame selection with the effect of label framing. Participants in a condition where the public goods game was labeled "The Teamwork Game" tended to contribute at the same level as participants who spontaneously associated the unlabeled game with teamwork, whereas those who did not associate the the unlabeled game with teamwork tended to make lower contributions. We conclude that neutrally described games may be subject to spontaneous frame selection effects comparable in size to the effects of label framing.

Modern research on social norms makes an important distinction between descriptive norms (how people commonly behave) and injunctive norms (what one is morally obligated to do). Here we propose that this distinction is far from clear in the cognition of social norms. In a first study, using the implicit association test, the concepts of "common" and "moral" were found to be strongly associated. Some implications of this automatic common-moral association were investigated in a subsequent series of experiments: Our participants tended to make explicit inferences from descriptive norms to injunctive norms and vice versa; they tended to mix up descriptive and injunctive concepts in recall tasks; and frequency information influenced participants own moral judgments. We conclude by discussing how the common-moral association could play a role in the dynamics of social norms. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We study the effects of actors audience-specific reputations on their levels of success with different audiences in the same field. Extending recent work that has emphasized the presence of multiple audiences with different concerns, we demonstrate that considering audience specificity leads to an improved understanding of reputation effects. Using data on emerging artists in the field of contemporary art from 2001 to 2010, we investigate the manner in which artists audience-specific reputations affect their subsequent success with two distinct audiences: museums and galleries. Our findings suggest that audience-specific reputations have systematically different effects with respect to success with museums and galleries. Our findings also illuminate the extent to which audience-specific reputations are relevant for emerging research on the contingent effects of reputation. In particular, our findings support our predictions that audiences differ from one another in terms of the extent to which other signals (specifically, status and interaction with other audiences) enhance or reduce the value of audience-specific reputations. Our study thus advances theory by providing empirical evidence for the value of incorporating audience-specific reputations into the general study of reputation.

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Previous studies indicate the importance of similarities between street gang members in terms of ethnicity for mapping the patterns of co-offending relationships within gangs. Individual members are more likely to co-offend with other members who are from the same ethnicity. Past studies, however, do not appropriately account for the fact that correlation between attributes of co-offending gang members may be driven by alternative mechanisms. Most importantly, the presence of clustering in networks can dramatically affect the assessment and make us believe that homophilythe deliberate choice to co-offend with others from the same ethnic groupis important while in fact it is not. In this article, we recreate the internal structure of a London-based street gang with exponential random graph (ERG) models. Our results refine the role of ethnicity for co-offending within gangs. While homophily is still prevalent, the effect diminishes when triad closurethe tendency for two individuals to offend with each other when they also offend with a common third personis considered. Furthermore, we extend existing ERG specifications and investigate the interaction between ethnic homophily and triad closure. Findings indicate that ethnic homophily is even stronger when it is embedded in co-offending triads.

under senare tid har den analytiska sociologin vuxit sig allt starkare. Artiklar och böcker om analytisk sociologi publiceras av de främsta förlagen och tidskrifterna i världen, ledande yngre forskare attraheras till området och årliga internationella konferenser anordnas. Mina egna bidrag till detta område var en viktig anledning till att jag valdes in i Akademien och i detta kapitel ska jag ge en kortfattad beskrivning av vad som karaktäriserar den analytiska sociologin. Eftersom den analytiska sociologin ägnar mycket uppmärksamhet åt hur de sociala nätverk som individer är inbäddade i påverkar olika samhällsprocesser, kommer jag även att kortfattat uppmärksamma detta.

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This paper presents a novel method for deducting propensities for social exchange between individuals based on the choices they make, and based on factors such as country of origin, sex, school grades and socioeconomic background. The objective here is to disentangle the effect of social ties from the other factors, in order to find patterns of social exchange. This is done through a control-treatment design on analysing available data, where the treatment is similarity of choices between socially connected individuals, and the control is similarity of choices between non-connected individuals. Structural dependencies are controlled for and effects from different classes are pooled through a mix of methods from network and meta-analysis. The method is demonstrated and tested on Swedish register data on students at upper secondary school. The results show that having similar grades is a predictor of social exchange. Also, previous results from Norwegian data are replicated, showing that students cluster based on country of origin.

Determinants of cooperation include ingroup vs. outgroup membership, and individual traits, such as prosociality and trust. We investigated whether these factors can be overridden by beliefs about people’s trust. We manipulated the information players received about each other’s level of general trust, “high” or “low”. These levels were either measured (Experiment 1) or just arbitrarily assigned labels (Experiment 2). Players’ choices whether to cooperate or defect in a stag hunt (or an assurance game)—where it is mutually beneficial to cooperate, but costly if the partner should fail to do so—were strongly predicted by what they were told about the other player’s trust label, as well as by what they were told that the other player was told about their own label. Our findings demonstrate the importance for cooperation in a risky coordination game of both first- and second-order beliefs about how much people trust each other. This supports the idea that institutions can influence cooperation simply by influencing beliefs.

Religious socialization occurs within the immediate family as well as in the broader social context. Previous research has shown that parents religiosity matters less for the transmission of religious beliefs in devout than in secular nations, implying smaller costs of religious socialization. In this article we test which other societal factors affect the transmission of religious beliefs: anti-religious policies in formerly socialist countries, economic development, and income inequality. Our results indicate that societies with high levels of income inequality seem to provide the most favorable context for religious socialization. Individuals develop strong religious beliefs even if they only received little religious socialization within the family. Formerly socialist nations increased socialization costs through the overall suppression of religious practice. Economic development has no impact on socialization effects, suggesting that inequality is a more important driver of religious change than previously thought.

New right-wing extremist parties all over Europe have been described as adopting a master framethat combines xenophobia and anti-political establishment populism (Rydgren 2004). In Sweden the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD) have emerged as the dominating newright-wing extremist party that was able to more than double their share of votes from the 2010 tothe 2014 parliamentary elections (2010: 5.7%, 2014: 12.9%). We conducted a vignette study in arepresentative sample of the Swedish population shortly before and after the 2014 nationalelections, which helps us to analyse the social distance between the majority population and theMuslim minority. We are explicitly taking into account the prevalence of right-wing populistattitudes in the population and their support for SD in the 2010 and 2014 elections. Our resultsshow that; (1) anti-minority attitudes (held by 36% of the population) but not anti-establishmentattitudes (held by 37% of the population) predict increased social distance to Muslims and eventowards persons that are only presented as having a foreign name, (2) SD voters hold drasticallymore negative views about Muslims than does any other voter group, (3) the vote for SD is purelydriven by anti-minority sentiments, not anti-establishmentarism. In conclusion, while SD mightpresent its cause in the language of anti-establishment populism and their voters mightlegitimise their voting choice by this principle, SD voters’ intentions are fundamentallyrooted in xenophobia.

It is widely recognized that segregation processes are often the result of complex nonlinear dynamics. Empirical analyses of complex dynamics are however rare, because there is a lack of appropriate empirical modeling techniques that are capable of capturing complex patterns and nonlinearities. At the same time, we know that many social phenomena display nonlinearities. In this article, we introduce a new modeling tool in order to partly fill this void in the literature. Using data of all secondary schools in Stockholm county during the years 1990 to 2002, we demonstrate how the methodology can be applied to identify complex dynamic patterns like tipping points and multiple phase transitions with respect to segregation. We establish critical thresholds in schools’ ethnic compositions, in general, and in relation to various factors such as school quality and parents’ income, at which the schools are likely to tip and become increasingly segregated.

Rules about punishment dictate how one must behave to ensure that one’s punishment behavior is not met with social disapproval. These rules can be both prescriptive, telling us when we have to punish and how much we must punish at a minimum, and restrictive, telling us when we cannot punish or what the maximum punishment can be. In this chapter we investigate the general features of these rules, focusing on punishment of norm violations in social dilemmas.

Researchers have often viewed the provision of punishment as a costly public good that must itself be enforced, creating a second order social dilemma that requires prescriptive norms for people to "cooperate", i.e., to punish. We argue that this is a misunderstanding of the nature of punishment and go through theoretical reasons for why prescriptive rules about punishment might not be important. Instead, we discuss the reasons that restrictive norms could benefit the group and review experiments where this is shown to be the case.

Finally we report the results of four surveys that use real world situations to assess people’s views about punishment in several countries. We find that punishment behavior is regulated by generally agreed upon views (i.e., norms), which are largely restrictive rather than prescriptive. Results show a strong consistency across scenarios and countries, indicating that these norms follow general principles.

Detta kapitel jämför vikten av flyktingars individuella resurser, såsom utbildning, med vikten av förutsättningarna på den lokala arbetsmarknaden, för tiden det tar att få en första betald anställning i Sverige. Över 100 000 flyktingar som kommit till Sverige efter år 2000 följs i vår studie i upp till 17 år. Våra resultat påvisar att individers utbildning och familjesituation spelar stor roll för tiden till första jobbet, men att även de lokala faktorerna spelar stor roll: den lokala sysselsättningsnivån såväl generellt som bland individens härkomstgrupp påverkar möjligheterna att få jobb, och i viss mån även den politiska situationen i bostadskommunen. Slutsatser för lokala och nationella integrationsåtgärder diskuteras.

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This comment discusses Kaidesoja (2013) and raises the issue whether his analysis justifies stronger conclusions than he presents in the book. My com- ments focus on four issues. First, I argue that his naturalistic reconstruction of critical realist transcendental arguments shows that transcendental arguments should be treated as a rare curiosity rather than a general argumentative strategy. Second, I suggest that Kaidesoja’s analysis does not really justify his optimism about the usefulness of causal powers ontology in the social sciences. Third, I raise some doubts about the heuristic value of Mario Bunge’s social ontology that Kaidesoja presents as a replacement for critical realist ontology. Finally, I propose an alternative way to analyze failures of aggregativity that might better serve Kaidesoja’s purposes than the Wimsattian scheme he employs in the book. 

Kokeellisen tutkimuksen suosio on nopeasti kasvamassa eri yhteiskuntatieteissä. Merkittävä osa tästä tutkimuksesta on sosiologisesti kiinnostavaa, ja siksi kaikkien sosiologien on hyvä tutustua sekä kokeellisen tutkimuksen vahvuuksiin että sen heikkouksiin. Tämä kirjoitus aloittaa erittelemällä kokeellisen tutkimuksen nousun taustatekijöitä ja jatkaa sitten esittelemällä kokeellisen tutkimuksen moninaisuutta: erilaiset kokeelliset asetelmat eroavat toisistaan suuresti ja samaakin koeasetelmaa on mahdollista käyttää useaan erilaiseen tutkimukselliseen tarkoitukseen. Tästä moninaisuudesta seuraa, että vaikka kokeellisen tutkimusasetelman erityinen ansio on sen suosiollisuus kausaalisille päätelmille, tulee kokeellinen tutkimus ymmärtää laajemmin kuin pelkkänä kausaalisten vaikutus- väitteiden testaamisena. Yleisesti ottaen kokeellisen tutkimuksen lisääntyminen on ehdottoman hyvä asia yhteiskuntatieteiden kannalta. Siihen ei kuitenkaan tule yhdistää kahta ongelmallista ajatusta. Ensimmäinen näistä on ajatus ehdottomasta ja tiukasta näyttöhierarkiasta, joka koskee eri tutkimus- tapojen soveltuvuutta luotettavien kausaalipäätelmien tekemiseen. Tämä ajatus on osoittautunut toimimattomaksi jo lääketieteellisten toimenpiteiden arvioinnin kohdalla, ja hankaluudet vain kas- vavat, jos sitä sovelletaan politiikkatoimenpiteiden arviointiin, puhumattakaan sen yleisemmästä soveltamisesta yhteiskuntatieteissä. Toinen ongelmallinen ajatus on toive, että kokeellisten mene- telmien myötä yhteiskuntatieteet voisivat viimein siirtyä nopeasti etenevän ja vakaasti kasautuvan tiedon tuottamiseen. Kokeellisesta menetelmästä ei ole tällaisen haavekuvan toteuttajaksi. Luonte- vinta onkin ajatella kokeellista tutkimusta yksinkertaisesti tervetulleena täydennyksenä sosiologian ja muiden yhteiskuntatieteiden menetelmävalikoimaan.

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Rationality and self-interest are routinely attributed an explanatory priority as an inherently understandable basis - as an ideal of natural order - for all social scientific explanation. We argue that this is not consistent with a causal-mechanistic understanding of science and that using self-interest and rationality heuristically as a default baseline biases social scientific research. From a naturalist perspective, both rationality and self-interest are empirical objects of explanation. We discuss one such explanatory hypothesis, according to which consistent self-interested behavior is sustained by a social norm.

The psychiatric category of addiction has recently been broadened to include new behaviors. This has prompted critical discussion about the value of a concept that covers so many different substances and activities. Many of the debates surrounding the notion of addiction stem from different views concerning what kind of a thing addiction fundamentally is. In this essay, we put forward an account that conceptualizes different addictions as sharing a cluster of relevant properties (the syndrome) that is supported by a matrix of causal mechanisms. According to this “addiction-as-a-kind” hypothesis, several different kinds of substance and behavioral addictions can be thought of as instantiations of the same thing—addiction. We show how a clearly articulated account of addiction can facilitate empirical research and the theoretical integration of different perspectives on addiction. The causal matrix approach provides a promising alternative to existing accounts of the nature of psychiatric disorders, the traditional disease model, and its competitors. It is a positive addition to discussions about diagnostic criteria, and sheds light on how psychiatric classification may be integrated with research done in other scientific fields. We argue that it also provides a plausible approach to understanding comorbidity.