School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Ten years of Ana: Lessons from a transdisciplinary body of literature on online pro-eating disorder websites

Abstract: ResumeThis paper offers a methodical review of the scientific literature of the last decade that concerns itself with online services offering supportive advocacy for anorexia nervosa and bulimia n

Punishment is not a group adaptation : Humans punish to restore fairness rather than to support group cooperation ()

Abstract: Punitive behaviours are often assumed to be the result of an instinct for punishment. This instinct would have evolved to punish wrongdoers and it would be the evidence that cooperation has evolved by group selection. Here, I propose an alternative theory according to which punishment is a not an adaptation and that there was no specific selective pressure to inflict costs on wrongdoers in the ancestral environment. In this theory, cooperation evolved through partner choice for mutual advantage. In the ancestral environment, individuals were in competition to be recruited in cooperative ventures and it was vital to share the benefits of cooperation in a mutually advantageous manner. If individuals took a bigger share of the benefits, their partners would leave them for more interesting partners. If they took a smaller share, they would be exploited by their partners who would receive more than what they had contributed to produce. This competition led to the selection of a sense of fairness, a cognitive adaptation aiming to share equally the benefits of cooperation in order to attract partners. In this theory, punishment is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. Punitive behaviours are only a way to restore fairness by compensating the victim or penalizing the culprit. Drawing on behavioural economics, legal anthropology, and cognitive psychology, I show that empirical data fit better with this framework than with the theory of group selection. When people punish, they do so to restore fairness rather than to help the group.

Reachability and the sense of embodiment in amputees using prostheses

Abstract: Amputated patients are hardly satisfied with upper limb prostheses, and tend to favour the use of their contralateral arm to partially compensate their disability. This may seem surprising in light of recent evidences that external objects (rubber hand or tool) can easily be embodied, namely incorporated in the body representation. We investigated both implicit body representations (by evaluating the peripersonal space using a reachability judgement task) and the quality of bodily integration of the patient's prosthesis (assessed via questionnaires). As expected, the patients estimated that they could reach further while wearing their prosthesis, showing an embodiment of their prosthesis in their judgement. Yet, the real reaching space was found to be smaller with their prosthesis than with their healthy limb, showing a large error between reachability judgement and actual capacity. An overestimation was also found on the healthy side (comparatively to healthy subjects) suggesting a bilateral modification of body representation in amputated patients. Finally, a correlation was found between the quality of integration of the prosthesis and the way the body representation changed. This study therefore illustrates the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon of prosthesis integration, which involves its incorporation as a tool, but also various specific subjective aspects.