Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one’s location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost, social mindfulness typically entails small acts of attention or kindness. Even though fairly common, such low-cost cooperation has received little empirical attention. Measuring social mindfulness across 31 samples from industrialized countries and regions (n = 8,354), we found considerable variation. Among selected country-level variables, greater social mindfulness was most strongly associated with countries’ better general performance on environmental protection. Together, our findings contribute to the literature on prosociality by targeting the kind of everyday cooperation that is more focused on communicating benevolence than on providing material benefits.

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Third party liability insurance in the event of nuclear accidents emerged as a pressing issue in the 1950s, triggered to a great extent by the activities of international organizations and major nuclear accidents. By the mid-1960s a tight international network of negotiators comprising insurers, lawyers, scientists, engineers, businessmen, and government officials made its appearance along with nuclear insurance pools. Experts, functionaries, diplomats and politicians with often diverging views and expertise were involved in negotiations over the newly emerging legal and regulatory problems related to radiation protection and third party liability in the event of severe accidents. This paper argues that insurers transformed their identities from lobbyists to backstage nuclear diplomats, making their role explicitly political and profoundly diplomatic in an emerging international nuclear order. Within this novel multilayered context of negotiations the nuclear insurance pools developed a unique form of nuclear diplomacy, altering both terms of 'nuclear' and 'diplomacy'. KEYWORDSThird party nuclear liability; nuclear insurance pools; IAEA; nuclear diplomacy 'When CERA was born, you were one of the pillars of the assembly which finally fixed the wording of a resolution, which may become famous within the world of insurance, saying that the European insurers are studying the risk with a view to granting cover against nuclear perils'. 1 With these words, William Belser, the president of the Committee for the Study of Atomic Risks (Comité d' Études du Risque Atomique -CERA), acknowledged the contributions of Archibald George Mount Batten, the man who turned insurers into backstage nuclear diplomats in the early 1960s. Batten was an expert in third party liability insurance and the author of a standard reference book on this topic published almost a quarter of a century before this nuclear case even arose. In 1959, he served as assistant general manager of one of the most powerful British insurers -Alliance Company -and was also the chairman of the London Insurance Institute. That year, along with several of his esteemed colleagues, all chairmen of the European nuclear insurance pools and representatives of the Committee of European Insurers (CEA), Batten attended one of their most significant conferences in the glamorous premises of the London Savoy Hotel. With much fanfare, at the dinner party given at the end of the first day on 13 October, participants acknowledged Batten's services to the European insurers who were involved in the underwriting of nuclear risks. 2 CONTACT Alexandros-Andreas Kyrtsis

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The institutional problems facing sociology in Greece and the difficulties of the Greek sociological community to play a role comparable to the one seen in other European countries is traced back to the intellectual history of the period between the First and Second World Wars. The main point made here is that the interrelationship between the breakdown of ideologies of modernization and the orientation towards certain theoretical approaches during the second half of this period have led to an intellectual stance which was hostile to classical sociology. The result was a displacement of sociological thought by Stalinist Marxism and romantic elitism, which could be partly overcome only after the abolition of the dictatorship of the colonels (1967-74), and which has created enduring deficiencies in the deliberative components of the politics of modernization in Greece.