Understanding Social Action, Promoting Human Rights

Over the last 20 years, the social scientific understanding of human behavior has taken a significant leap forward. Important advances in several fields have increased the complexity and accuracy of prevailing models of individual actors, group dynamics, and communication. Yet too few of the key insights of that scholarship have been incorporated into the theory or practice of human rights promotion. With this book, legal scholars Ryan Goodman, Derek Jinks, and Andrew K. Woods begin the process of incorporation, by collecting research from a broad set of disciplines and underscoring its implications for human rights scholarship and practice. By focusing on nonlegal, empirical scholarship that touches on norm creation, diffusion, and institutionalization, the book presents a broad range of interdisciplinary insights relevant to human rights scholars and practitioners. The volume introduces work from multiple disciplines including economics (Herb Gintis), communications (Robert C. Hornik), social psychology (Jonathan Baron; Deborah Prentice; Paul Slovic and David Zionts), moral biology (John Mikhail), political science (Margaret Levi, Tom R. Tyler, and Audrey Sacks), social network analysis (David Lazer), and negotiation theory (Lee Ross, Byron Bland, and Brenna Powell).