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• The challenges of supervised machine learning in sociological applications

  27-42.

  Nemeth Renata

  Views:

  24

  The sociological applications of supervised machine learning, already well proven in industrial/
  business applications, raise specific questions. The reason for this specificity is that in these applications, the algorithm is tasked with learning complex concepts (e.g. whether a tweet contains hate speech). Supervised learning consists of learning to classify previously annotated (hate
  speech/non-hate speech) texts by the algorithm, looking for characteristic text patterns. The
  questions that arise are: how to prepare annotation? How can a hermeneutic challenge such as
  hate speech recognition be performed by annotators? Are routinely applied, detailed annotation
  guidelines helpful? The article also discusses how large companies perform coding on crowdsourcing platforms, and describes AI bias, which in this case means that annotators themselves
  introduce bias into the data. I illustrate these issues with our own research experiences.

• “Can’t you see that we are in trouble?” – The environmental protection-related ignorance, its appearance in visual attentional patterns, and some possible explanation/interpretation

  49-69

  Péter Pajkossy

  Andrea Dúll

  Views:

  36

  The environmental crisis is an outstanding topic nowadays. Given that it is basically caused
  by human activity, this issue is worth examining at all levels of society. The present study
  investigated the individuals’ visual attentional patterns and the possible attentional biases related to pictures displaying environmental problems, in comparison to undisturbed nature
  and social scenes as control stimuli, within the framework of a reaction-time task. Changes
  in participants’ mood and their self-reported environmental awareness were also measured.
  However, only the negative social scenes resulted attentional bias, the environmental topics
  were not able to do that. Albeit the mood of the participants deteriorated during the experiment,
  it did not have any correlation with any other variables, and either did the environmental
  awareness. We displayed the stimuli during the task only for a short period of time, thereby we
  targeted to reach automatic attentional responses. Our results reflect to the fact, that the topic
  of the environmental crisis is not suitable to do this. This phenomenon propounds the demand of
  explanations behind this phenomenon (like the possible evolutionary background).

• Debunking Myths about the American Presidential Elections of 2016 and Failures in the Social Sciences

  51-61

  Eric Beckett Weaver

  Views:

  26

  Throughout the campaign and following the elections of 2016, the two major political parties
  cherished stories about what happened, and why it happened. Some of these stories have some
  basis in fact, while others are completely mythical, and nevertheless believed. These stories, or
  myths, arise from the political desires and belief systems of those who tell them. In what follows
  we will examine these stories in the lights of the facts

• Effectively influence on people: or are helping professionals free to utilize manipulative impacts?

  78-108

  Balázs Krémer

  Views:

  43

  The economic and political crises of the last two decades have been greatly influenced by the fact
  that, impacted by manipulative effects, instead to follow their rational judgements people have
  made their decisions under the influence of emotional and instinctive temtation, deception and
  manipulation. So far, these manipulative influences dominate contemporary commercial or populist political communication. The paper below shares the author’s hesitation that, while
  non-rational factors bias from rational arguing and reasoning, both in decision-making and in
  communicative impacts on the other person inevitably present, is it acceptable to manipulate
  the users/clients by assisting professionals/social workers while exercising influence on decision-making of their clients? And if so, under what conditions, what specific constraints could be
  exercised such impacts and „professional power”? Likewise, when and what can and should be
  done to immunize clients against manipulation, to mitigate manipulative effects, to „gain back”
  rational mind and „empower” clients to follow rational consideration and make wiser decisions?
  The article does not undertake to provide „only” true and correct answers, rather gives insights
  and tries to provoke its reader to contribute to clarifying this important issue.