Ederyn Williams (born 21 September 1946) [1] is a British academic, commentator and writer whose work focuses on social presence theory and technology transfer. [2] [3]
Williams is the son of the Welsh academic and television critic Raymond Williams. [4] Williams earned a DPhil in Psychology from the University of Oxford in 1971. [5] [ self-published source? ]
Williams, along with fellow social psychologists Bruce Christie and John Short, developed social presence theory in 1976. [6] Social presence theory is defined as "the degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships." [6] This theory argues that media differ in their ability to convey intimacy and immediacy. [6] Social presence theory is a key theory in understanding interpersonal communication and has found to be a strong indicator in satisfaction. [7] [6]
He worked at British Telecom on a 'viewdata' system called Prestel. This was similar to the much more successful French system Minitel. It never got more than 90,000 subscribers. Both systems were replaced by the Internet and World Wide Web.
He wrote an assessment in 1979: Strengths and weaknesses of Prestel. [8]
In the early 1980s, Williams was briefly the head of the short-lived gaming company, Telecomsoft. [9]
In 1991, Williams became the Managing Director of Leeds Innovations Ltd. at the University of Leeds. [10] In 2000, Williams joined the University of Warwick, where he founded an academic department that later became Warwick Ventures Ltd. [2] The company branded itself as a technology commercialisation company. [2] In April 2010, Williams was awarded the Queen's Award for Enterprise Promotion for his pivotal role in the development of "knowledge transfer from universities to businesses in the UK." [10] Williams retired from Warwick Ventures in September 2011 and now serves as the Director of Biosite Systems Ltd. [11] [5]
Social psychology is the scientific study of how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, and implied presence of others, 'imagined' and 'implied presences' referring to the internalized social norms that humans are influenced by even when they are alone.
The University of Warwick is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. The university was founded in 1965 as part of a government initiative to expand higher education. The Warwick Business School was established in 1967, the Warwick Law School in 1968, Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) in 1980, and Warwick Medical School in 2000. Warwick incorporated Coventry College of Education in 1979 and Horticulture Research International in 2004.
The concept of interpersonal relationship involves social associations, connections, or affiliations between two or more people. Interpersonal relationships vary in their degree of intimacy or self-disclosure, but also in their duration, in their reciprocity and in their power distribution, to name only a few dimensions. The context can vary from family or kinship relations, friendship, marriage, relations with associates, work, clubs, neighborhoods, and places of worship. Relationships may be regulated by law, custom, or mutual agreement, and form the basis of social groups and of society as a whole. Interpersonal relationships are created by people's interactions with one another in social situations.
Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.
Communication studies or communication science is an academic discipline that deals with processes of human communication and behavior, patterns of communication in interpersonal relationships, social interactions and communication in different cultures. Communication is commonly defined as giving, receiving or exchanging ideas, information, signals or messages through appropriate media, enabling individuals or groups to persuade, to seek information, to give information or to express emotions effectively. Communication studies is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge that encompasses a range of topics, from face-to-face conversation at a level of individual agency and interaction to social and cultural communication systems at a macro level.
Fritz Heider was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which expanded upon his creations of balance theory and attribution theory. This book presents a wide-range analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that influence human social perception. It had taken 15 years to complete; before it was completed it had already circulated through a small group of social psychologists.
Salience is the state or condition of being prominent. The Oxford English Dictionary defines salience as "most noticeable or important." The concept is discussed in communication, semiotics, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and political science. It has been studied with respect to interpersonal communication, persuasion, politics, and its influence on mass media.
Social rejection occurs when an individual is deliberately excluded from a social relationship or social interaction. The topic includes interpersonal rejection, romantic rejection and familial estrangement. A person can be rejected by individuals or an entire group of people. Furthermore, rejection can be either active, by bullying, teasing, or ridiculing, or passive, by ignoring a person, or giving the "silent treatment". The experience of being rejected is subjective for the recipient, and it can be perceived when it is not actually present. The word ostracism is often used for the process.
Bertram Herbert Raven was an American academic. He was a member of the faculty of the psychology department at UCLA from 1956 until his death. He is perhaps best known for his early work in collaboration with John R. P. French, with whom he developed an analysis of the five bases of social power.
The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Psychological Association that was established in 1965. It covers the fields of social and personality psychology. The editors-in-chief are Shinobu Kitayama, Colin Wayne Leach, and Richard E. Lucas.
Social identity is the portion of an individual's self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group.
Self-categorization theory is a theory in social psychology that describes the circumstances under which a person will perceive collections of people as a group, as well as the consequences of perceiving people in group terms. Although the theory is often introduced as an explanation of psychological group formation, it is more accurately thought of as general analysis of the functioning of categorization processes in social perception and interaction that speaks to issues of individual identity as much as group phenomena. It was developed by John Turner and colleagues, and along with social identity theory it is a constituent part of the social identity approach. It was in part developed to address questions that arose in response to social identity theory about the mechanistic underpinnings of social identification.
Warwick Ventures is a University technology commercialisation office of the University of Warwick, in Coventry, United Kingdom.
Social presence theory explores how the "sense of being with another" is influenced by digital interfaces in human-computer interactions. Developed from the foundations of interpersonal communication and symbolic interactionism, social presence theory was first formally introduced by John Short, Ederyn Williams, and Bruce Christie in The Social Psychology of Telecommunications. Research on social presence theory has recently developed to examine the efficacy of telecommunications media, including SNS communications. The theory notes that computer-based communication is lower in social presence than face-to-face communication, but different computer-based communications can affect the levels of social presence between communicators and receivers.
Mark Schaller is a psychological scientist who has made many contributions to the study of human psychology, particularly in areas of social cognition, stereotyping, evolutionary psychology, and cultural psychology. He is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia.
Delroy L. Paulhus is a personality psychology researcher and professor. He received his doctorate from Columbia University and has worked at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Davis. Currently, Paulhus is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses.
Interpersonal emotion regulation is the process of changing the emotional experience of one's self or another person through social interaction. It encompasses both intrinsic emotion regulation, in which one attempts to alter their own feelings by recruiting social resources, as well as extrinsic emotion regulation, in which one deliberately attempts to alter the trajectory of other people's feelings.
A non-biological entity with a cellular organizational structure is set up in such a way that it mimics how natural systems within biology work, with individual 'cells' or 'nodes' working somewhat independently to establish goals and tasks, administer those things, and troubleshoot difficulties."Cellular organization" is the defining property in living organisms.These cells exist in a broader network in which they frequently communicate with each other, exchanging information, in a more or less even organizational playing field. Numerous examples have existed both in economic terms as well as for groups working towards other pursuits. This structure, as applied in areas such as business management, exists in direct contrast to traditional hierarchical leadership that is seen in institutions such as United States federal government agencies, where one type of supervisor gives specific orders to another supervisor and so on down the line.
In the field of personality psychology, Machiavellianism is a personality trait centered on manipulativeness, callousness, and indifference to morality. Though unrelated to the historical figure or his works, the trait is named after the political philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli, as psychologists Richard Christie and Florence Geis used edited and truncated statements inspired by his works to study variations in human behaviors. Their Mach IV test, a 20-question, Likert-scale personality survey, became the standard self-assessment tool and scale of the Machiavellianism construct. Those who score high on the scale are more likely to have a high level of deceitfulness and an unempathetic temperament.