In this article, I consider how fear in contexts of crisis shapes and is shaped by agents’ relationships. I survey a number of approaches to understanding fearing at the intersection of empirical psychology and philosophy, highlighting the extent to which interpersonal relationships are positioned as involved in processes of fearing, and establish what I take to insufficient attention paid by these approaches to the ways interpersonal relations shape the emotions we come to have. Contexts of acute crisis and uncertainty can (...) involve rapidly adjusting practices of fearing in response to other agents, both those we trust and those we do not. I call for the development of a model of ‘relational calibration’ for understanding the complex interpersonal dynamics of fearing during crises, including in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

The problem of induction is sometimes motivated via a comparison between rules of induction and rules of deduction. Valid deductive rules are necessarily truth preserving, while inductive rules are not.

The appeal to expert opinion is an argument form that uses the verdict of an expert to support a position or hypothesis. A previous scheme-based treatment of the argument form is formalized within a Bayesian network that is able to capture the critical aspects of the argument form, including the central considerations of the expert's expertise and trustworthiness. We propose this as an appropriate normative framework for the argument form, enabling the development and testing of quantitative predictions as to how (...) people evaluate this argument, suggesting that such an approach might be beneficial to argumentation research generally. We subsequently present two experiments as an example of the potential for future research in this vein, demonstrating that participants' quantitative ratings of the convincingness of a proposition that has been supported with an appeal to expert opinion were broadly consistent with the predictions of the Bayesian model. (shrink)

Roger White objects to interval-valued credence theories because they produce a counterintuitive “dilation” effect in a story he calls the Coin Game. We respond that results in the Coin Game were bound to be counterintuitive anyway, because the story involves an agent who learns a biconditional. Biconditional updates produce surprising results whether the credences involved are ranged or precise, so White's story is no counterexample to ranged credence theories.

Suppose you want to live a happy life. Who should you turn to for advice? We normally think that we know best about our own happiness. But recent work in psychology and neuroscience suggests that we are often mistaken about our own natures, and that sometimes scientists know us better than we know ourselves. Does this mean that to live a happy life we should ask scientists for advice rather than relying on our introspection? In what follows, we highlight ways (...) in which the science of happiness could help us live happy lives, but we also argue that, in other ways, our navel gazing will remain indispensable. (shrink)

Regardless of formalization used, one on-going challenge for AI systems that model legal proceedings is accounting for contextual issues, particularly where judicial decisions are made in criminal cases. The law assumes a rational approach to rule application in deciding a defendant’s guilt; however, judges and juries can behave irrationally. What should a model prize: efficiency, accuracy, or fairness? Exactly whether and how to incorporate the psychology of courtroom interactions into formal models or expert systems has only just begun to be (...) examined in a serious fashion. Here, I outline data from the United States which suggest that trying to incorporate psychological biases into formal models of legal decision-making will be challenging. I focus on the use of neuroscience data in criminal trials, homing in on so-called group-to-individual inferences. I argue that data which should be the most effective at swaying judicial decisions are in fact those most likely not to make a difference in the disposition of the case. I conclude that judges often assign culpability by ignoring what our best science regarding how human decision-making occurs. (shrink)

People made forecasts from graphically presented time series. Series were sinusoids overlaid by a zero or positive linear trend and a zero, low, moderate, or high level of noise. Forecasting performance was affected by both these variables. However, it did not correlate with ability to identify the trend and correlated significantly with ability to detect the sinusoidal pattern only when series were noise-free. A second experiment showed that the effect of data noise was not influenced by the number of forecasts (...) that people made from a series. These findings are consistent with the view that data noise does not affect the way that forecasts are made but that it impairs them for two reasons. First, it renders the anchor-and-adjust heuristics underlying them less effective. Second, it causes people to add more noise to their judgements in their attempts to make them representative of the data. (shrink)

The sunk cost fallacy is a well-established phenomenon where decision makers continue to commit resources, or escalate commitment, because of previously committed efforts, even when they have knowledge that their returns will not outweigh their investment. Most research on the sunk cost fallacy is done using hypothetical scenarios where participants make a single decision to continue with a project or to abandon it. This paradigm has several limitations and has resulted in a relatively limited understanding sunk cost behavior. To address (...) some of these limitations, we created a dynamic repeated choice paradigm where sunk costs are learned over time and opportunity costs are explicit. Over three experiments we show that the sunk cost fallacy depends on the relative a priori importance of the goal being invested in. We observed escalation of commitment only when the sunk cost domain is more important than alternatives, and participants showed de-escalation of commitment to the sunk costs domain otherwise. (shrink)

This paper presents methods and challenges attendant on the use of protocol analysis to develop a model of heuristic processing applied to research ethics. Participants are exposed to ethically complex scenarios and asked to verbalize their thoughts as they formulate a requested decision. The model identifies functional parts of the decision-making task: interpretation, retrieval, judgment and editing and seeks to reliably code participant verbalizations to those tasks as well as to a set of cognitive tools generally useful in such work. (...) Important difficulties in the reliability and external validity of measurement are evaluated and a small set of illustrative data is used in support of that discussion. Results indicate that both intuitive emotional but also more deliberative cognition is present which is consistent with work in related literatures in expertise and in neuropsychology. Finally, the theoretical and practical potential of the approach is elaborated, particularly through links to a framing in Aristotelian ethics. (shrink)

This article analyzes the business ethics of digital games, using Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. It identifies different types of monetization options as virtuous or nonvirtuous, based on Rand’s views on rational self-interest. It divides the options into ethical Mover and unethical Looter designs, presents those logics in relation to an illustrative case example, Zynga, and then discusses a view on the role of players in relation to game monetization designs. Through our analysis of monetization options in the context of (...) Objectivist ethics, the article contributes to discussions on game revenue ethics. It also expands the still understudied area of applying Rand’s ethics to business, in the context of a new sector, game development, and business. This research enables ethicists to apply a wider-than-before perspective on virtue ethics to online business, and helps game developers act in a virtuous manner, which provides them with a long-term business advantage. (shrink)

Deliberation is a standard procedure to make decisions in not too large groups. It has the advantage that the group members can learn from each other and that, at the end, often a consensus emerges that everybody endorses. But a deliberation procedure also has a number of disadvantages. E.g., what consensus is reached usually depends on the order in which the different group members speak. More specifically, the group member who speaks first often has an unproportionally high impact on the (...) final decision: She anchors the deliberation process. While the anchoring effect undoubtably appears in real deliberating groups, we ask whether it also appears in groups whose members are truth-seeking and rational in the sense that they take the information provided by their fellow group members properly into account by updating their beliefs according to plausible rules. To answer this question and to make some progress towards explaining the anchoring effect, a formal model is constructed and analyzed. Using this model, we study the anchoring effect in homogenous groups, for which we provide analytical results, and in inhomogeneous groups, for which we provide simulation results. (shrink)

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS It is my lot, if not my duty, in presenting these opening remarks at our conference, to take the title of our meeting seriously. ...

Risk is always present in people’s lives: diseases, new technologies, socio-scientific issues such as climate change, and advances in medicine—to name just a few examples—all carry risks. To be able to navigate risks in everyday life, as well as to participate in social debate on risk-related issues, students need to develop risk competence. Science education can be a powerful tool in supporting students’ risk competence, which is an important component of scientific literacy. As there are different definitions of risk within (...) the scientific community, the aims of this article are to review the literature on two major theoretical frameworks for conceptualising risk, the realist, and the constructivist paradigms of risk and to connect both in order to suggest a working definition of what can be understood as risk competence in science instruction. (shrink)

I report on the fate of three methodological and metatheoretical ideas introduced by Brunswik roughly half a century ago. All were greeted with more than the usual hostility because they challenged the conventional beliefs of the time. All have survived in unexpected ways. I also address certain sins of commission and omission made during the neo-Brunswikian phase of the development of Social Judgement Theory. My hopes and fears for the future are mentioned.

This paper addresses theoretical problems arising from the vagueness of language terms, and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. It is argued that the central intuitions of prototype theory are sufficient to account for both typicality phenomena and psychological intuitions about degrees of membership in vaguely defined classes. The first section explains the importance of the relation between degrees of membership and typicality (or goodness of example) in conceptual categorization. The second and third section address (...) arguments advanced by Osherson and Smith (1997), and Kamp and Partee (1995), that the two notions of degree of membership and typicality must relate to fundamentally different aspects of conceptual representations. A version of prototype theory—the Threshold Model—is proposed to counter these arguments and three possible solutions to the problems of logical selfcontradiction and tautology for vague categorizations are outlined. In the final section graded membership is related to the social construction of conceptual boundaries maintained through language use. (shrink)

The connotations attached to the concept of 'risk' have changed over the last several decades. In particular, the image of risk, at least in the word's most economically advanced countries, has turned from predominantly positive to highly critical. A sociological look at this historic change reveals the emergence of a plurality of risk definitions that can be attributed to different risk cultures. We can distinguish risk cultures by their proximity to the dominant social practice of risk taking ; namely risk (...) cultures belong either to the centre or the periphery of society. Social movements that resist risky technologies are examples of a peripheral risk culture. Due to a certain concept of social community their perception of risk differs fundamentally from that of the centre. In addition, cultural variation across countries leads to different representations of risk-avoidance in social movements. This contribution illustrates these differences by comparing the American and German anti-nuclear movements. (shrink)

In this article, we argue for the general importance of normative theories of argument strength. We also provide some evidence based on our recent work on the fallacies as to why Bayesian probability might, in fact, be able to supply such an account. In the remainder of the article we discuss the general characteristics that make a specifically Bayesian approach desirable, and critically evaluate putative flaws of Bayesian probability that have been raised in the argumentation literature.

Industry involvement in the machine learning (ML) community seems to be increasing. However, the quantitative scale and ethical implications of this influence are rather unknown. For this purpose, we have not only carried out an informed ethical analysis of the field, but have inspected all papers of the main ML conferences NeurIPS, CVPR, and ICML of the last 5 years—almost 11,000 papers in total. Our statistical approach focuses on conflicts of interest, innovation, and gender equality. We have obtained four main (...) findings. (1) Academic–corporate collaborations are growing in numbers. At the same time, we found that conflicts of interest are rarely disclosed. (2) Industry papers amply mention terms that relate to particular trending machine learning topics earlier than academia does. (3) Industry papers are not lagging behind academic papers with regard to how often they mention keywords that are proxies for social impact considerations. (4) Finally, we demonstrate that industry papers fall short of their academic counterparts with respect to the ratio of gender diversity. We believe that this work is a starting point for an informed debate within and outside of the ML community. (shrink)

Many ethics initiatives have stipulated sets of principles and standards for good technology development in the AI sector. However, several AI ethics researchers have pointed out a lack of practical realization of these principles. Following that, AI ethics underwent a practical turn, but without deviating from the principled approach. This paper proposes a complementary to the principled approach that is based on virtue ethics. It defines four “basic AI virtues”, namely justice, honesty, responsibility and care, all of which represent specific (...) motivational settings that constitute the very precondition for ethical decision making in the AI field. Moreover, it defines two “second-order AI virtues”, prudence and fortitude, that bolster achieving the basic virtues by helping with overcoming bounded ethicality or hidden psychological forces that can impair ethical decision making and that are hitherto disregarded in AI ethics. Lastly, the paper describes measures for successfully cultivating the mentioned virtues in organizations dealing with AI research and development. (shrink)

Algorithmic systems are increasingly used by state agencies to inform decisions about humans. They produce scores on risks of recidivism in criminal justice, indicate the probability for a job seeker to find a job in the labor market, or calculate whether an applicant should get access to a certain university program. In this contribution, we take an interdisciplinary perspective, provide a bird’s eye view of the different key decisions that are to be taken when state actors decide to use an (...) algorithmic system, and illustrate these decisions with empirical examples from case studies. Building on these insights, we discuss the main pitfalls and promises of the use of algorithmic system by the state and focus on four levels: The most basic question whether an algorithmic system should be used at all, the regulation and governance of the system, issues of algorithm design, and, finally, questions related to the implementation of the system on the ground and the human–machine-interaction that comes with it. Based on our assessment of the advantages and challenges that arise at each of these levels, we propose a set of crucial questions to be asked when such intricate matters are addressed. (shrink)

In order to accommodate for the present shortage of oocyte donors, oocyte-donation programs place ads in college newspapers and provide large monetary compensation to encourage participation. Large compensation acts as a strong incentive for young women to undergo the potentially risky procedure of donation. In this enticing situation, it is particularly important for programs to fully inform prospective donors of the risks of the procedure so that they can accurately weigh the costs and benefits of donating. However, because oocyte-donor programs (...) must alleviate the shortage of donors if they wish to maintain a financially viable business, there is reason to fear that they may minimize or misrepresent risks when recruiting egg donors. In this pilot study, the risk information provided by programs (n=19) to prospective oocyte donors in a preliminary phone call inquiry was investigated. The majority of the programs provided incomplete and/or inaccurate risk information. Policy changes are recommended to reduce the potential for undue influence and to standardize and regulate the risk information provided to prospective egg donors. (shrink)

This paper demonstrated the influences of initiation, development, turn-down, and reinitiation of the dynamic capability of an entrepreneurial firm in the solar energy industry. The focus is on the impact of entrepreneurial hubris, which may affect the decision of ambidexterity that can vitalize dynamic capability. The findings indicate that, when the major decision maker has the trait of hubris, the decision-making process may be overly arbitrary, and a decision of being exploratory or exploitative alone is likely to be made. On (...) the contrary, when the founder entrepreneur is aware of the hubris and shares decisive power, the decision of being ambidextrous as a dynamic capability is more freely achieved. This paper contributes by discovery of the cognitive-based microfoundation of entrepreneurial ventures and linkage of such microfoundation to organizational ambidexterity. (shrink)

The scope of a heuristic decision making rule is a product of its fit to the context, the extension to which a heuristic can be applied successfully. To achieve effective outcomes, decision makers may use a few heuristics with large scopes or many with narrow scopes. Through a directed review of the literature combined with ethnographic research, this paper contributes to the debate on the problem of scope in three types of heuristics, namely, multipliers, thresholds, and calends. The scope of (...) heuristic rules can be explored from different aspects, including the field in which a heuristic rule is applied and specific parameters that are used in a heuristic decision making process. The three types of heuristic rules we analyze were encountered in our ethnographic research, that was based on phenomenological interviews and observations. For these heuristics we discuss their scopes in through to the following organizing structures: the exploration of the adaptive tool-box, the role of ethnographic methodologies, and the categorization of heuristics. (shrink)

We set out to find ways to help decision makers overcome the “winner’s curse,” a phenomenon commonly observed in asymmetric information bargaining situations, and instead found strong support for its robustness. In a series of manipulations of the “Acquiring a Company Task,” we tried to enhance decision makers’ cognitive understanding of the task. We did so by presenting them with different parameters of the task, having them compare and contrast these different parameters, giving them full feedback on their history of (...) choices and resulting outcomes, and allowing them to interact with a human opponent instead of a computer program. Much to our surprise, none of these manipulations led to a better understanding of the task. Our results demonstrate and emphasize the robustness of the winner’s curse phenomenon. (shrink)

Though scholars have long acknowledged the vital role of affect in politics, recent research has sought to more thoroughly integrate emotions into models of political behavior. Emotions may prove to be the missing piece in a variety of puzzles with which political scientists have struggled for decades. At its core, democracy poses a collective action problem. For each individual citizen, the cost of productive political engagement often outweighs the additional policy benefits to be gained from such behavior. However, for a (...) variety of reasons, emotions appear to motivate citizens to at times break out of “cold” individual utility calculation and engage in politics. Still, emotions may also bias information processing, so scholars should keep this in mind as we continue to build on our understanding of emotion’s role in politics. (shrink)

:In this paper, we analyse the difference between two types of behavioural policies – nudges and boosts. We distinguish them on the basis of the mechanisms through which they are expected to operate and identify the contextual conditions that are necessary for each policy to be successful. Our framework helps judging which type of policy is more likely to bring about the intended behavioural outcome in a given situation.

This book critically examines Freud's own detailed arguments for his major explanatory and therapeutic principles, the current neorevisionist versions of psychoanalysis, and the hermeneuticists' reconstruction of Freud's theory and therapy as an alternative to what they claim was a “scientistic” misconstrual of the psychoanalytic enterprise. The clinical case for Freud's cornerstone theory of repression – the claim that psychic conflict plays a causal role in producing neuroses, dreams, and bungled actions – turns out to be ill-founded for two main reasons: (...) Even if clinical data were valid, the method of free association has failed to support the psychoanalytic theory of unconscious motivation; Clinical data tend in any case to be artifacts of the analyst's self-fulfilling expectations, thus losing much of their evidential value. The hypothesis that psychoanalytic treatment is in reality a placebo poses a serious challenge to the assumption that insight is a key causal factor when therapy is successful. This challenge has yet to be met by psychoanalysts. Similar conclusions undermine the neorevisionist versions of psychoanalysis. The most influential hermeneuticists, on the other hand, are shown to have imposed an alien philosophy on psychoanalysis, partly through their reliance on gross misconceptions of the natural sciences. Karl Popper's criticism of the Freudian corpus as empirically untestable has misjudged its evidential weaknesses, which are more subtle. If there exists empirical evidence for the principal psychoanalytic doctrines, it cannot be obtained without well-designed extraclinical studies of a kind that have for the most part yet to be attempted. (shrink)

If citizens’ behavior threatens to harm others or seems not to be in their own interest, it is not uncommon for governments to attempt to change that behavior. Governmental policy makers can apply established tools from the governmental toolbox to this end. Alternatively, they can employ new tools that capitalize on the wealth of knowledge about human behavior and behavior change that has been accumulated in the behavioral sciences. Two contrasting approaches to behavior change are nudge policies and boost policies. (...) These policies rest on fundamentally different research programs on bounded rationality, namely, the heuristics and biases program and the simple heuristics program, respectively. This article examines the policy–theory coherence of each approach. To this end, it identifies the necessary assumptions underlying each policy and analyzes to what extent these assumptions are implied by the theoretical commitments of the respective research program. Two key results of this analysis are that the two policy approaches rest on diverging assumptions and that both suffer from disconnects with the respective theoretical program, but to different degrees: Nudging appears to be more adversely affected than boosting does. The article concludes with a discussion of the limits of the chosen evaluative dimension, policy–theory coherence, and reviews some other benchmarks on which policy programs can be assessed. (shrink)

Marr's levels of analysis—computational, algorithmic, and implementation—have served cognitive science well over the last 30 years. But the recent increase in the popularity of the computational level raises a new challenge: How do we begin to relate models at different levels of analysis? We propose that it is possible to define levels of analysis that lie between the computational and the algorithmic, providing a way to build a bridge between computational- and algorithmic-level models. The key idea is to push the (...) notion of rationality, often used in defining computational-level models, deeper toward the algorithmic level. We offer a simple recipe for reverse-engineering the mind's cognitive strategies by deriving optimal algorithms for a series of increasingly more realistic abstract computational architectures, which we call “resource-rational analysis.”. (shrink)

Epistemologists and philosophers of mind both ask questions about belief. Epistemologists ask normative questions about belief—which beliefs ought we to have? Philosophers of mind ask metaphysical questions about belief—what are beliefs, and what does it take to have them? While these issues might seem independent of one another, there is potential for an interesting sort of conflict: the epistemologist might think we ought to have beliefs that, according to the philosopher of mind, it is impossible to have. This essay argues (...) that this conflict does arise and that it creates problems for traditional skeptical views in epistemology. In particular, it argues that on certain popular views about the nature of belief, it is impossible to adopt the near-global agnosticism recommended by the skeptical epistemologist. On other plausible views, it is possible only in special circumstances, and this limitation undermines skeptical epistemological claims. The only views about the nature of belief on which there are no metaphysical hurdles to adopting the agnosticism recommended by the skeptic are views that face powerful objections—objections that are completely independent of antiskeptical epistemological considerations. (shrink)

We examine how opinion on a controversial real-world issue shifts as a function of reading relevant arguments and engaging in a specific mental simulation about a future, fictional state of affairs involving the target issue. Individuals thought either counterfactually about a future event (“if only X had not happened …”) or semifactually about it (“even if X had not happened …”). In Experiment 1, as expected, individuals became more in favour of a course of action (the electronic tagging of children) (...) after reading relevant supporting arguments. They also became more in favour after they thought counterfactually how a negative future event could have been avoided if only electronic tagging had not been banned some years earlier. The effects of argument relevance and type of mental simulation were additive. Using a similar procedure but a different target issue (whether the UK should join the Economic Monetary Union), Experiment 2 confirmed that the type of mental simulation exerts a substantial effect on the impact of relevant arguments. Much weaker effects arose when the mental simulation was not relevant to the target issue. We set and discuss our results in terms of dual-processing theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNew trends in behavioral decision research see researchers attempting to integrate multiple-self models of behavioral economics with dual-process and dual-system theories of cognitive psych...