Associations Between Violent Video Gaming,Empathic Concern,and Prosocial Behavior Toward Strangers,Friends, and Family Members

Exposure to media violence, including violent video gaming, can have a cognitive desensitization effect, lowering empathic concern for others in need. Since emerging adulthood offers increased opportunities to volunteer, strengthen relationships, and initiate new relationships, decreases in empathic concern and prosocial behavior may prove inhibitive to optimal development during this time. For these reasons, the current study investigated associations between violent video gaming, empathic responding, and prosocial behavior enacted toward strangers, friends, and family members. Participants consisted of 780 emerging adults (M age = 19.60, SD = 1.86, range = 18–29, 69% female, 69% Caucasian) from four universities in the United States. Results showed small to moderate effects between playing violent video gaming and lowered empathic concern for both males and females. In addition, lowered empathic concern partially mediated the pathways between violent video gaming and prosocial behavior toward all three targets (at the level of a trend for females), but was most strongly associated with lower prosocial behavior toward strangers. Discussion highlights how violent video gaming is associated with lower levels of prosocial behavior through the mechanism of decreased empathic concern, how this association can affect prosocial behavior differently across target, and finally what implications this might have for development during emerging adulthood.     

What do bloggers do: an average day on an average political blog

This study investigates whether average political bloggers engage in four distinct activities: informing readers, checking the media, engaging in political advocacy, and gathering money for charitable causes. Findings show that most bloggers inform their readers about articles in the media or to draw attention to key posts on other blogs. Somewhat less frequently, most bloggers write posts that detect errors or biases in the media. Bloggers use their blogs to pursue activist and philanthropist activities even less often. Ideology and traffic levels slightly affect the content and purpose of blog posts.     

Green appropriations through shifting contours of authority and property on a pastoralist commons

The dynamics of customary land rights and displacement among east African pastoralists have been the subject of extensive scholarly inquiry. Displacement to make way for other land uses, government-led privatization schemes, endogenous subdivision to defend land against outsiders, and progressive enclosure of private land in the context of the recent ‘land rush’ are some of the documented trajectories of land tenure change. Less explored is how exogenous authority systems gain traction within common property regimes to re-shape the contours of property. Laikipia, Kenya presents an ideal context for this research given the uniquely ambitious effort to conserve globally significant wildlife on private land. We focus on a group ranch owned collectively by Maa-speaking pastoralists for whom formal title was secured with the support of outside actors vested in conservation, and coupled with efforts to provide financial incentives for conservation. Findings suggest the new governance structure established in the context of land titling has become a pathway through which outside authority gains traction – with consequences for property, sovereignty and the traction of green agendas. Findings deepen understanding of how shifting authority shapes processes of alienation and legitimation, and contribute to ongoing debates about land grabs, tenure formalization and neoliberal approaches to conservation.     

Civil Society under the Law ‘On Foreign Agents’: NGO Strategies and Network Transformation

Abstract

This essay analyses how the ‘foreign agent’ law has been interpreted and implemented by the Russian authorities and examines diverse NGO survival strategies in response to the ‘foreign agent’ label. The foreign agent law has disrupted and transformed resource mobilisation strategies and transnational NGO networks. Based on qualitative research on environmental NGOs, we offer a typology of NGO responses to the foreign agent law, providing examples to show how the organisations attempt to ensure their survival.     

Fairtrade labour certification: the contested incorporation of plantations and workers

Fair trade seeks to promote the well-being and empowerment of farmers and workers in the Global South. This article traces the contested growth and configuration of Fairtrade International labour certification, providing a multifaceted and dynamic view of private regulation. I explain why Fairtrade International began certifying large enterprises and how its hired labour strategy has developed over time, illuminating fair trade’s move from peasant to plantation sectors, stakeholder involvement in shaping the growth of Fairtrade labour certification, the internal and external balancing of farmer and worker concerns, and major innovations in Fairtrade’s ‘New Workers Rights Strategy’. My findings challenge the claim that recent market mainstreaming explains the rise of labour certification within fair trade and the more general argument that private regulatory programmes founded to foster empowerment evolve over time to prioritise a logic of control. As I document, Fairtrade International has recently moved to bolster producer power within its organisation and labour rights within its certification programme. My analysis reveals the dynamic nature of private regulatory programmes and the potentially influential role of diverse stakeholders in shaping the priorities of Fairtrade and other labour-standards systems.     

Improving the Inside: Gender, Property and the 18th-Century Self

This article looks at questions of politeness, conduct and civility in the 18th century to explore how individuals imagined owning themselves as market actors and as members of an emerging civil society. It focuses on how they managed the contradictions of participating in the capitalist market without being branded as gamblers. It argues that a moral economy of rational improvement and a disciplined self was crucial to this process, to counter the fragility of self-ownership and the unpredictability and riskiness of property not based on land ownership. This disciplined and rational self-ownership was inextricable from the development of gender relations, which rested on the division between the public and private spheres, and from the disavowal of 'bad femininity' from the account of property.