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Role-taking, perspective taking, and empathy have developed through parallel literatures in sociology and psychology. All three concepts address the ways that people attune the self to others’ thoughts and feelings. Despite conceptual and operational overlap, researchers have yet to synthesize existing research across the three concepts. We undertake the task of theoretical synthesis, constructing a model in which role-taking emerges as a multidimensional process that includes perspective taking and empathy as component parts.

We review the literatures on role-taking, perspective taking, and empathy across disciplines. Focusing on definitions, measures, and interventions, we discern how the concepts overlap, how they are distinct, and how they work together in theoretically meaningful ways.

The review identifies two key axes on which each concept varies: the relative roles of affect and cognition, and the relative emphasis on self and structure. The review highlights the cognitive nature of perspective taking, the affective nature of empathy, and the structural nature of role-taking. In a move toward theoretical synthesis, we propose a definition that centers role-taking as a sociological construct, with perspective taking and empathy representing cognition and affect, respectively.

Role-taking is an important part of selfhood and community social life. It is a skill that varies in patterned ways, including along lines of status and power. Theoretical synthesis clarifies the process of role-taking and fosters the construction of effective interventions aimed at equalizing role-taking in interpersonal interaction.

During the 1990s many states used budget surpluses to refinance public education and provide property tax relief. This paper uses a case study of Kansas to assess the sustainability of state-initiated property tax cuts. It finds that the cuts are not fully sustainable over time because of court and federal mandates that require additional spending on education, economic fluctuations that reduce the ability of state budgets to maintain a given share of education spending, and demands for local control to allow school districts to spend more or less than state-mandated levels. The paper also argues that the property tax is essential to economic efficiency and local control.

Role-taking is a basic social process underpinning much of the structural social psychology paradigm – a paradigm built on empirical studies of human interaction. Yet today, our social worlds are occupied by bots, voice assistants, decision aids, and other machinic entities collectively referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). The integration of AI into daily life presents both challenges and opportunities for social psychologists. Through a vignette study, the authors investigate role-taking and gender in human-AI relations.

Participants read a first-person narrative attributed to either a human or AI, with varied gender presentation based on a feminine or masculine first name. Participants then infer the narrator's thoughts and feelings and report on their own emotions, producing indicators of cognitive and affective role-taking. The authors supplement results with qualitative analysis from two open-ended survey questions.

Participants score higher on role-taking measures when the narrator is human versus AI. However, gender dynamics differ between human and AI conditions. When the text is attributed to a human, masculinized narrators elicit stronger role-taking responses than their feminized counterparts, and women participants score higher on role-taking measures than men. This aligns with prior research on gender, status, and role-taking variation. When the text is attributed to an AI, results deviate from established findings and in some cases, reverse.

This first study of human-AI role-taking tests the scope of key theoretical tenets and sets a foundation for addressing group processes in a newly emergent form.

Usage patterns of mobile phones in Israel position them as instruments of great importance and as everyday, multipurpose, and interpersonal devices. This study utilizes a critical perspective of the “uses and gratifications” approach to explore the usage of and gratification sought from smartphone usage of millennials. Sixty personal in-depth interviews were conducted during 2013 with millennials (undergraduate students) with the primary goal of exploring millennials’ perceptions of smartphone usages, as well as their personal experiences with smartphones and the role of smartphones in their lives. A grounded theory approach was used to analyze students’ reflections on the roles of smartphones in their lives. Participants have expressed a great bonding with their smartphone and relationships that can be described in term of "love and hate.” The thematic analysis highlighted the addictive elements of using their smartphone, that is, using it more frequently and under undesired circumstances than one would like to, and even becoming anxious about losing the device or even getting too far away from it. Other leading themes included the influence of external pressures to use smartphones, the varied usefulness that smartphones serve in participants’ lives, and a strong sense of "Fear of missing out" as an explanation for their extensive use of their smartphones. The findings of this chapter indicate that smartphones have become an indispensable medium among young adults, used due to practical, as well as to emotional reasons; inner, as well as external impulses.

This study traces the boundaries of online-based social networks and its possible extensions and intersections with offline social networks. It focuses on the massive multiplayer online (MMO) gaming community. Most online gaming research has only addressed one side of the equation, that is, the online aspect of social interaction, omitting the offline context. The primary objective is to look at both offline and online social contexts of gamers. The data analyzed here are part of a bigger research project. Using a sample of 242 respondents and a total of 1,452 social ties (three online and three offline) this work addresses the differences and similarities between online gamer’s offline and online networks. Around 72% of the participants were between the ages of 18 and 37. This group provides insight into the management of social interactions and ties in the digital age among millennials and the coming-of-age of Generation Z. The analysis suggests that overall offline ties are slightly more important than online. Still, this does not imply that online ties are not meaningful at all. The length of their online relationships plays a significant role in how participants qualify their ties. Most participants that had not met face-to-face were willing to meet their online ties. They also reported sharing personal and everyday life matters with their online social network at a lower rate of their offline network. Time spent with online relationships stemming from online gaming and a cooperative environment is more likely to be considered higher quality time. This suggests that in MMOs the gap between online and offline relationships is becoming narrower.

Dubbed as the “first digital generation,” the millennials (or Generation Y) have been ensconced in digital technologies throughout their lives. As a demographic cohort, the eldest members of Generation Y were the first to reach adulthood by 2001, which heralded the third millennium, and were, therefore, called the millennials.

This research study theorizes that the millennials are ushering an emerging post-digital era that is redefining how we live, work, and play. By situating media consumption within a cross-disciplinary context of mediated engagement, this study analyzed how millennials consume media based on a 2019 meta-analytical research analysis of 22 cross-disciplinary studies, published between 2015 and 2019.

This research study analyzes how millennials curate and engage with digital media and information content in the midst of incessant evolutions of their identity, media use, and digital life. This study explicates six theoretical insights into how millennials consume information and engage with media. In their pursuit of easy access to media, the millennials get most of their information and media content from social media.

In theorizing how millennials engage with digital media, this study explicates important conceptual trends such as incidental news exposure (INE), which refers to people stumbling upon news stories they otherwise would not have purposefully seen or sought. INE spawns “bumpers” who involuntarily bump into news items, as opposed to “seekers” who actively search or seek news content. This leads to the news-finds-me mindset among some passive news consumers who rely and expect other active news consumers to share important news and information.

The goal of this chapter was to provide an insight into rules and norms behind generation Y social media presence and inform future research through an exploration of the norms underpinning digitally mediated interaction and behavior among college-age students in Ireland.

The authors administered a questionnaire containing both closed- and open-ended questions among 131 first-year college students in Ireland, asking them to identify online behaviors and actions with a purpose of recognizing rules and norms that guided how they handled sharing, interaction, and mediated aspects of relationships in their use of mobile devices and social media platforms.

This study reveals that the driving force is the desire for and implementation of what can be called the norm of “Do No Harm Lest Others Do Harm to You.” This norm, rather than being driven by the Hippocratic Code of principled awareness is an expression of an acute consciousness of audience segregation and the need for self-protection in online interaction. The respondents were asked about the rules and norms that guided how they handled sharing, interaction, and mediated aspects of relationships in their use of mobile devices and social media platforms. Their responses demonstrated that millennials, in their everyday and intensive use of digitally mediated technologies, have begun to observe a new social contract of “Do No Harm Lest Others Do Harm to You” where internet becomes a space of entertainment and private messaging devoid of conflict and exchanges of opinion with others. Millennials seem to be closing down the scope of online interaction which in the long run can limit the function of internet as a social sphere where various issues, including political views, are exchanged and discussed.

The research is exploratory in nature and relied up on a relatively small sample size. For this reason, while the study produces new analytic frameworks, the findings could not be generalized. Additionally, there are certain features that appear to be specifically Irish such as a blurred line between perception of bullying and harmless having the “craic.”

This research makes explicit the harm mitigation and conflict avoidance strategies underpinning the use of social and digital media as it has been deployed and shaped by Irish millennials and discusses the consequences of their reluctance to engage in the public realm of the internet.

With the ubiquitous spread of the Selfie as a central feature of millennial digital practices, this article examines the impact of digital media on the traditional uses of the snapshot as a record of private life, particularly in terms of the family and circles of friends. It argues that the affordances of digital photography and social media lead to a transformation of the snapshot into the Selfie. The Selfie as a kind of performance impacts the social practices of family photography in a variety of ways. Some positive, in that the affordances of digital photography put the opportunity for the public circulation of self-selected Kodak “moments” which show the individual in the best possible light; and some negative since the new emphasis on the body as a vehicle of self-expression sustains a tournament based on appearances. The resultant shift from notions of the gift economy implicit in practices of family photography leads to the personal snapshot becoming a proto-commodity form in which the competitive logic of Celebrity culture pervades the social exchange of the photograph. The chapter closes with consideration of the importance of the Selfie across the life course and the logic of self-impression management as a digital performance.