How Do People Come to Judge What Is "Reasonable"? Effects of Legal and Sociological Systems on Human Psychology

How do people decide what is reasonable? People often have to make those judgments, judgments that can influence tremendously consequential decisions-such as whether to indict someone in a legal proceeding. In this article, we take a situated cognition lens to review and integrate findings from social psychology, judgment and decision-making, communication, law, and sociology to generate a new framework for conceptualizing judgments of reasonableness and their implications for how people make decisions, particularly in the context of the legal system. We theorize that differences in structural and social contexts create information asymmetries that shape people's priors about what is and is not reasonable and how they update their priors in the face of new information. We use the legal system as a context for exploring the implications of the framework for both individual and collective decision-making and for considering the practical implications of the framework for inequities in law and social policy.

Life course transitions and changes in network ties among younger and older adults

Several theories of the life course highlight the importance of social connections and ties for coping with transitions that occur at different ages. Individuals rely on family, friends, and colleagues to adapt to these transitions which may in turn change the composition of their networks. Yet, little is known about the association between life cycle transitions and changes in network characteristics. We used fixed effects regression models with three waves of egocentric network data from the UC Berkeley Social Network Study (UCNets) to examine how career- and family-related life cycle transitions during two key life stages-young adulthood and the transition from middle to old age-are associated with network turnover, the proportion of the network comprised of kin, and confidence in receiving support from personal networks. Younger adults experienced churn following a birth and marriage or partnership, while no life transition was associated with changes in proportion kin, and only with the birth of a child did confidence decline. Among older adults, no transition was associated with any measured event, suggesting that older adults maintain more stable relationships compared to young adults and can weather life events without significant disruptions to their networks.

Anorexia and Young Womens' Personal Networks: Size, Structure, and Kinship

Anorexia is a serious threat to young women's wellbeing worldwide. The effectiveness of mental health intervention and treatment is often evaluated on the basis of changes in the personal networks; however, the development of such measures for young women with anorexia is constrained due to the lack of quantitative descriptions of their social networks. We aim to fill this substantial gap. In this paper, we identify the basic properties of these women's personal networks such as size, structure, and proportion of kin connections. The empirical analysis, using a concentric circles methodology, is based on 50 ego networks constructed on data drawn from interviews with Russian-speaking bloggers who have been diagnosed with anorexia and write about this condition. We conclude that young women with anorexia tend to support a limited number of social ties; they are prone to select women as alters, but do not have a preference to connect to their relatives. Further research is needed to elucidate whether these personal network characteristics are similar among women with anorexia who belong to different age, ethnic, cultural, and income groups.

Cross-Lagged Modeling of Cognition and Social Network Size in the Sydney Memory and Ageing Study

Objectives

This study assessed whether reciprocal relationships exist between cognitive function and the social network size of older adults, controlling for age, sex, education, medical conditions, and depressive symptoms.

Methods

Data were collected at biennial follow-ups over 6 years in the Sydney Memory and Ageing Study, a longitudinal cohort study including 1,037 community-based Sydney residents aged 70–90 years without dementia at baseline. We used random intercept cross-lagged panel models to investigate reciprocal associations between social network size and scores in each of 7 cognitive domains including a global score.

Results

Standardized models indicated that within-person deviation in expected language score predicted deviation in expected network size. Within-person deviation in prior expected social network size predicted deviation in expected executive function at year 6. Cross-lagged effects in models of both global cognition and memory, respectively, could not be attributed solely to within-person change.

Discussion

Findings support a co-constitutive view of cognitive function and social relationships in older age. Although both cognition and network size declined over time, slower than expected decline in language ability predicted less than expected contraction in social networks. A similar influence of network size on executive functioning indicated that relationships with friends and family outside of the home contributed significantly to the maintenance of higher order cognitive abilities in older late life. Diverse patterns of influence between cognitive domains and social network size over 6 years underscore the importance of assessing the complex and nuanced interplay between brain health and social relationships in older age.

Social Resources as Cognitive Structures: Thinking about a Dense Support Network Increases Perceived Support

Two experiments examined how the ways in which people mentally represent their personal networks affect perceptions of social support. Social support research often uses “name generators” in which individuals are asked to choose how many people they receive support from, resulting in cognitive networks that confound size and density. Taking a fixed size approach, Study 1 showed that the density of chronically activated networks predicted perceived support in both emotional and informational domains. Study 2 assigned participants to think of a dense or sparse personal network of equal size to test whether experimentally manipulated density can influence perceived support. Results indicated that thinking of a dense (vs. sparse) network led to higher perceived support, which in turn promoted more confidence in coping with life stressors. Collectively, these studies highlight how moment-to-moment changes in cognitive networks can influence social resources and explicate key psychological mechanisms tied to cognitive social structures.