Giving real-life money to your Second Life friends

Recent research by SONIC undergraduate Nick Merrill and graduate student Brooke Foucault demonstrates that social status within a Second Life group is positively correlated with the donation of in-game resources to one’s group. In Second Life, in-game resources can be traded for real-world money, so this finding indicates that an avatar’s social standing among virtual friends may be strong enough to spur sacrifices in the player’s real-life bank account. Overall, this research shows that traditional models of social giving and altruism may hold in a virtual-world context.

The paper will be presented at the NCA Conference in November.

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SONIC Lab member meets a Supreme Court justice

SONIC undergraduate researcher Curie Chang recently visited the land’s highest court as a part of her Supreme Court class (SocPol 351). The class is application-based, where 9 students are chosen every year to study the behind-scenes process of the court, culminating up to the visit to observe the court in person. At Washington D.C., the class was given a special tour around the supreme court, sat in on the oral argument for McNeill v. U.S., and were fortunate enough to have a Q & A session with Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The nine students sat across from Justice Sotomayor and were able to ask questions they had prepared in advance.

Feature story on Northwestern University website: http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2011/05/students-visit-supreme-court.html

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Noshir Contractor Presents Keynote at Rutgers University Conference

Professor Noshir Contractor will present a keynote lecture entitled “Social and Knowledge Network-Building to Advance Global Health Decision-Making”  at Rutgers University’s “Advancing Global Health Decision-Making” conference. The conference will be held May 20-21, 2011 and marks the launch of a new initiative on health decision- making by EABIS, Rutgers Universiy, and Johnson & Johnson.

The conference website can be found at: http://www.eabis.org/projects/project-detail-view.html?uid=20.

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Weak ties may just be weak

In this month’s edition of WIRED magazine (May 2011), writer Clive Thompson made a startling assertion.  Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties” has been at the foundation of many different network theories since its publication in 1973.  But Thompson says that this may not be true.  Based on in-press research done by Sinan Aral and Marshall Van Alstyne, they find that even though a person who is dissimilar to you may have interesting things to say, the fact that you don’t interact with them very often (the weak tie) greatly reduces the probability of them actually telling you something interesting and instead the people you interact with very often (the strong ties) have a much higher likelihood of tell you something new.  This article is set to be published this summer.

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The perils of corporate social networks

Noshir Contractor was quoted in a recent article published in Bloomberg Businessweek, discussing some of the issues in companies’ internal social networks:

Some sociologists warn that with so many people making gaffes on Twitter and Facebook, companies should prepare for similar behavior on internal social networks. “Because this started out in the social sphere before the corporate sphere, people will bring the same cavalier attitude,” says Noshir Contractor, a professor of behavioral sciences at Northwestern University. “When people locate something in their mind as being informal, they get in trouble.” That could create problems for employees who are too open on services like Yammer and Chatter, a rival product sold by Salesforce.com. “When you’re considered for a promotion … anything you said on Yammer will be used in some cases to determine if you’re qualified,” Contractor says.

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