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This report provides initial evidence that "devoted actors" who are unconditionally committed to a sacred cause, as well as to their comrades, willingly make costly sacrifices, including fighting and dying. Although American military analysts since WWII tend to attribute fighting spirit to leadership and the bond of comradeship in combat as a manifestation of rational self-interest, evidence also suggests that sacrifice for a cause in ways independent, or all out of proportion, from the reasonable likelihood of success may be critical. Here, we show the first empirical evidence that sacred values (as when land or law becomes holy or hallowed) and identity fusion (when personal and group identities collapse into a unique identity to generate a collective sense of invincibility and special destiny) can interact to produce willingness to make costly sacrifices for a primary reference group: by looking at the relative strength of the sacred values of Sharia versus Democracy among potential foreign fighter volunteers from Morocco. Devotion to a sacred cause, in conjunction with unconditional commitment to comrades, may be what allows low-power groups to endure and often prevail against materially stronger foes.

A Learning Management System (LMS) can be analyzed by sorting the features into four groups; tools for distribution, tools for communication, tools for interaction and tools for course administration. This classification was used for the first time when the use of LMS at the School of Engineering, University of Borås, in the year 2004 and the academic year 2009-2010 was investigated. The results from this longitudinal investigation confirmed the suspicion that lecturers used the available LMS predominantly to distribute documents to students,and that the pattern of use did not change over time. In this article the authors asserts that this classification is necessary to convincingly demonstrate the pattern of use and to analyze the pedagogical application of an LMS. The classification system works regardless of what brand of LMS is used, and it allows the connection between educational procedures and features in the LMS to be analyzed. Today, platforms, similar to a LMS are used in industry and government to handle information, staff development and internal communication. The possibility to analyze the use of such platforms may have beneficial effects on society beyond and outside universities.

Abstract – This paper is a description of the design and implementation of a course within the project USo+I: Universidad, Sociedad e Innovación financed by the European Union, within the ALFA III program. The course was an introduction to the handling of Learning Management Systems (LMS) first conducted at Instituto Superior Politécnico José Antonio Echeverría, Facultad de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Havana, Cuba. The course was divided as two weeks of on-campus lectures and workshops followed by distance learning for three months, altogether corresponding to ten weeks of full time studies. Pedagogically and methodically the course was planned within the concept of Problem Based Learning (PBL). All course material was open educational resources freely available on the internet. The design of the course also had to consider the problems of limited access to computers and internet, both during the course and in the lecturers´ future practice. The solution was to have the LMS "Moodle" and other software executable from USB-memories and all course material available from the same USB-memory sticks. How this design can meet the given considerations is discussed. ; Sponsorship : This work has been produced with financial assistance from the European Community, contract DCIALA/ 19.09.01/08/19189/160-922/ALFA III-9

Willingness to lay down one's life for a group of non-kin, well documented in the historical and ethnographic records, represents an evolutionary puzzle. Here we present a novel explanation for the willingness to fight and die for a group, combining evolutionary theorizing with empirical evidence from real-world human groups. Building on research in social psychology, we develop a mathematical model showing how conditioning cooperation on previous shared experience can allow extreme (i.e., life-threatening) pro-social behavior to evolve. The model generates a series of predictions that we then test empirically in a range of special sample populations (including military veterans, college fraternity/sorority members, football fans, martial arts practitioners, and twins). Our results show that sharing painful experiences produces "identity fusion" – a visceral sense of oneness – more so even than bonds of kinship, in turn motivating extreme pro-group behavior, including willingness to fight and die for the group. These findings have theoretical and practical relevance. Theoretically, our results speak to the origins of human cooperation, as we offer an explanation of extremely costly actions left unexplained by existing models. Practically, our account of how shared dysphoric experiences produce identity fusion, which produces a willingness to fight and die for a non-kin group, helps us better understand such pressing social issues as suicide terrorism, holy wars, sectarian violence, gang-related violence, and other forms of intergroup conflict.

Societal inequality has been found to harm the mental and physical health of its members and undermine overall social cohesion. Here, we tested the hypothesis that economic inequality is associated with a wish for a strong leader in a study involving 28 countries from five continents (Study 1, N = 6,112), a study involving an Australian community sample (Study 2, N = 515), and two experiments (Study 3a, N = 96; Study 3b, N = 296). We found correlational (Studies 1 and 2) and experimental (Studies 3a and 3b) evidence for our prediction that higher inequality enhances the wish for a strong leader. We also found that this relationship is mediated by perceptions of anomie, except in the case of objective inequality in Study 1. This suggests that societal inequality enhances the perception that society is breaking down (anomie) and that a strong leader is needed to restore order (even when that leader is willing to challenge democratic values).

Men sometimes withdraw support for gender equality movements when their higher gender status is threatened. Here, we expand the focus of this phenomenon by examining it cross-culturally, to test if both individual- and country-level variables predict men's collective action intentions to support gender equality. We tested a model in which men's zero-sum beliefs about gender predict reduced collective action intentions via an increase in hostile sexism. Because country-level gender equality may threaten men's higher gender status, we also examined whether the path from zero-sum beliefs to collective action intentions was stronger in countries higher in gender equality. Multilevel modeling on 6,734 men from 42 countries supported the individual-level mediation model, but found no evidence of moderation by country-level gender equality. Both country-level gender equality and individual-level zero-sum thinking independently predicted reductions in men's willingness to act collectively for gender equality.

Men sometimes withdraw support for gender equality movements when their higher gender status is threatened. Here, we expand the focus of this phenomenon by examining it cross-culturally, to test if both individual- and country-level variables predict men's collective action intentions to support gender equality. We tested a model in which men's zero-sum beliefs about gender predict reduced collective action intentions via an increase in hostile sexism. Because country-level gender equality may threaten men's higher gender status, we also examined whether the path from zero-sum beliefs to collective action intentions was stronger in countries higher in gender equality. Multilevel modeling on 6,734 men from 42 countries supported the individual-level mediation model, but found no evidence of moderation by country-level gender equality. Both country-level gender equality and individual-level zero-sum thinking independently predicted reductions in men's willingness to act collectively for gender equality.