Autonomy,Respect, and the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Crisis

Article 12(2) of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities guarantees persons with disabilities ‘the right to legal capacity on an equal basis with others in all aspects of life.’ In its General Comment on Article 12, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities claims that this guarantee necessitates the abolition of the world's dominant approach to mental capacity law. According to this approach, when a person lacks the mental capacity to make a particular legal decision at the material time, the state authorises a third‐party to make it on her behalf. The Committee declares such substituted decision‐making a violation of the Convention's guarantee of legal capacity on an equal basis, and therefore demands it be replaced by an allegedly non‐discriminatory alternative called supported decision‐making. This article argues that we should reject the Committee's demand in its current form, because the most influential version of the new approach to supported decision‐making suffers from serious conceptual flaws that make it inferior to the mental capacity approach. However, I then argue that the Committee's demand stems from a legitimate ethical concern with respect and equality that ought to inform the CRPD's implementation process.     

The More the Better? Effects of Training,Experience and Information Amount in Legal Judgments

In an experimental study involving German lay judges, law students and controls, effects of legal training and experience as well as information amount on legal judgments was investigated. In a three (legal knowledge: legal training versus legal experience versus controls) x two (information amount: high versus low) between‐subjects design, 137 participants judged the premeditation of a perpetrator in eight real‐world cases decided by the German Federal Court of Justice. Judgment congruency with the Court's ruling increased with legal training, but official lay judges showed lower congruency compared with student controls. Additionally, legal training and experience corresponded with higher confidence. Emotional reactions to the legal cases were stronger when more information was given for individuals without legal training but decreased for individuals with training. An information‐processing perspective to explain the observed differences in legal judgments is advanced, and the issue of using untrained individuals in the legal decision making process is discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Retracted: Racist biases in legal decisions are reduced by a justice focus

Six studies investigate whether the effect of racist biases on judges' legal decisions on minority defendants is reduced by a “justice focus.” Given that people associate legal decision‐making with the need to do so in a colorblind manner, a justice focus blocks the effect of racist biases on legal decisions. Experiment 1 shows that explicit instructions to adopt a justice goal decrease biases. Experiment 2 shows that a primed justice focus also decreases biases. Experiments 3a and 3b show the role of pre‐existing legal expertise, which makes people more susceptible a justice goal. Experiments 4a and 4b apply these findings by studying the role of a justice focus among professional courtroom judges. Together, these results demonstrate the importance of a justice focus in preventing racist biases in legal decision‐making. Importantly, a justice focus is a necessary but no sufficient condition for the colorblind administration of justice. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Impact of Selected Ethical Information Resources on Counselor Educators' Decision‐Making Regarding Boundary Crossings

A random sample of 207 counselor educators used 4 ethical information resources in the context of 16 boundary‐crossing scenarios. Burian and Slimp's (2000) social dual‐role relationship model was the only resource to change counselor educators' boundary‐crossing decision‐making in a manner that could mitigate boundary‐crossing concerns with students. Curiously, almost 60% of counselor educators stated that they would not use Burian and Slimp's model in the future when this was the only ethical decision‐making resource that made a difference in boundary‐crossing decision‐making for counselor educators.     

Group Decision Makers' Preferences Modelling within the Goal Programming Model: An Overview and a Typology

The Goal Programming (GP) model is one of the first models that have been developed to deal with managerial decision‐making problems where several incommensurable and conflicting objectives are involved. The GP variants integrate the decision maker's preferences differently. This model has also been applied to group decision‐making situations. The aim of this paper is to propose a new typology based on preferences articulation of decision makers through the GP model. This typology is based on the articulation and the elucidation process of the group decision makers' preferences. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Justice for the Professional Guinea Pig

Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) remains a controversial technique, one that has elicited a variety of regulatory responses throughout the world. On March 29, 2005, Canada's Assisted Human Reproduction Act came into force. This law prohibits a number of research activities, including SCNT. Given the pluralistic nature of Canadian society, the creation of this law stands as an interesting case study of the policy-making process and how and why a liberal democracy ends up making the relatively rare decision to use a statutory prohibition, backed by severe penalties, to stop a particular scientific activity. In this article, we provide a comprehensive and systematic legal analysis of the legislative process and parliamentary debates associated with the passage of this law.     

Ethical social justice: Do the ends justify the means?

This article offers an ethical decision‐making model, informed by community psychology values, as a means for guiding psychologists when engaging in social justice‐oriented work. The applicability of this model is demonstrated through a case analysis elucidating how America's psychologists individually and collectively arrived at the decision to endorse torture—ostensibly as a means for preventing terrorism. Critics have wondered how the American Psychological Association succumbed to these involvements, and how to prevent such ethical lapses in the future. Unfortunately, the American Psychological Association's ethical codes fail to provide explicit guidance for psychologists' involvement in social justice work that impacts communities and systems. To address this gap, we present a values‐driven, ethical decision‐making framework that may be used to guide psychologists' future practices. This framework infuses fundamental community psychology values (i.e., caring and compassion; health; self‐determination and participation, human diversity, social justice; and critical reflexivity) into a 9‐step model.     

Instance‐based learning in dynamic decision making

This paper presents a learning theory pertinent to dynamic decision making (DDM) called instancebased learning theory (IBLT). IBLT proposes five learning mechanisms in the context of a decision‐making process: instance‐based knowledge, recognition‐based retrieval, adaptive strategies, necessity‐based choice, and feedback updates. IBLT suggests in DDM people learn with the accumulation and refinement of instances, containing the decision‐making situation, action, and utility of decisions. As decision makers interact with a dynamic task, they recognize a situation according to its similarity to past instances, adapt their judgment strategies from heuristic‐based to instance‐based, and refine the accumulated knowledge according to feedback on the result of their actions. The IBLT's learning mechanisms have been implemented in an ACT‐R cognitive model. Through a series of experiments, this paper shows how the IBLT's learning mechanisms closely approximate the relative trend magnitude and performance of human data. Although the cognitive model is bounded within the context of a dynamic task, the IBLT is a general theory of decision making applicable to other dynamic environments.     

AN ALGORITHMIC INFORMATION THEORY CHALLENGE TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN

William Dembski claims to have established a decision process to determine when highly unlikely events observed in the natural world are due to Intelligent Design. This article argues that, as no implementable randomness test is superior to a universal Martin‐Löf test, this test should be used to replace Dembski's decision process. Furthermore, Dembski's decision process is flawed, as natural explanations are eliminated before chance. Dembski also introduces a fourth law of thermodynamics, his “law of conservation of information,” to argue that information cannot increase by natural processes. However, this article, using algorithmic information theory, shows that this law is no more than the second law of thermodynamics. The article concludes that any discussions on the possibilities of design interventions in nature should be articulated in terms of the algorithmic information theory approach to randomness and its robust decision process.     

Are children competent to make decisions about their own deaths?

Attorneys, philosophers, bioethicists and health care professionals have vigorously debated how much state control there should be over an individual's or family's decision to discontinue life-sustaining treatment. Where treatment of a minor is involved, the debate becomes even more complex. The purposes of this study were to identify cases involving the withdrawal of Life-sustaining treatment in children, to describe the legal response to, and the management of, these cases, to examine variables that influence decision making, and to determine what legal-ethical standards are used and how they are applied. In addition, the author reviewed the literature on children's understanding of death and competence to participate in treatment decision making and applied those findings to argue for greater involvement of children in decision making related to the use of life-sustaining treatment.     

Generating consensus priority interval vectors for group decision‐making in the AHP

Many practical and important decision‐making problems are complicated by at least two factors: (1) the qualitative/subjective nature of some criteria often results in uncertainty in the individual ratings; and (2) group decision‐making is involved and some means of aggregating individual ratings is required. Traditionally, both individual and group priorities have been represented as point estimates, but this approach presents severe limitations for accommodating imprecision in the decision‐making process. This paper examines the group decision‐making problem in the context where priorities are represented as numeric intervals. A set of techniques that could be used at some of the phases of an analytic hierarchy process (AHP)‐based group decision‐making process, which has the objective of generating a ‘consensus’ priority that represents the group's opinion with regards to the relative importance of a set of N objects (e.g. criteria, alternatives), is presented. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Decision‐making competence: External validation through an individual‐differences approach

This study asks to what extent (a) individuals show consistent performance differences across typical behavioral decision‐making tasks, and (b) how those differences correlate with plausible real‐world correlates of good decision making. Seven tasks, chosen to span the domain of decision‐making skills, were administered to participants in an ongoing longitudinal study providing extensive social, psychological, and behavioral measures. Performance scores on individual tasks generally showed small, positive inter‐task correlations. An aggregate measure of decision‐making competence (DMC) was appropriately correlated with plausible sources, concomitants, and outcomes of good decision making, suggesting the underlying construct's external validity. Higher DMC scores were associated with more intact social environments, more constructive cognitive styles, and fewer ‘maladaptive’ risk behaviors. In each case, DMC adds to the predictive validity of general measures of cognitive ability. These results suggest that poor decision making on common laboratory tasks is related to real‐world antecedents and consequences of poor decision making. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

GLOBAL ETHICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS: A REFLECTION

This paper examines the contributions that the international human rights community can make to the definition and framing of a practically effective global ethic, especially in light of ongoing concerns about social and economic justice, environmental issues, and systematic abuses of vulnerable populations. The principal argument is that the human rights movement in all of its dimensions (moral, legal, political) provides the pivotal foundation for a practicable global ethic now and for the foreseeable future. Evidence for the truth of this claim is discerned in the movement's contemporary efforts to intersect explicitly with other areas of international law and politics. Examples adduced include developments with respect to the rights of indigenous peoples, decision making about the environment, and transitional justice.     

Theoretical application of holland's theory to individual decision‐making styles: implications for career counselors

Career decision making is an important aspect of career choice and career development. This theoretical article explores the relationship between J. L. Holland's (1997) 6 dimensions of personality and individual decision‐making styles. Implications for career counselors are also provided.     

The effects of social exclusion on confirmatory information processing

After making a preliminary decision, a balanced search for information that is consistent and inconsistent with one's decision is associated with effective decision making. However, whereas searching for information that is inconsistent with one's preliminary preference arouses the aversive motivational state of cognitive dissonance, evokes negative emotions, and threatens the self, preference‐consistent information reduces dissonance, evokes positive emotions, and has positive implications for the self. Thus, searching for information in a balanced way requires the willingness to face the negative implications of searching for preference‐inconsistent (relative to preference‐consistent) information. Social exclusion has been shown to be associated with impulsive, undercontrolled behavior. Therefore, we expected socially excluded (relative to included or control) participants to be less willing to confront oneself with the unappealing qualities of preference‐inconsistent information and more willing to seek for the appealing qualities of preference‐consistent information. This hypothesis was supported in two studies, with the use of different manipulations of social exclusion. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cognitive Reflection Predicts Real‐Life Decision Outcomes,but Not Over and Above Personality and Decision‐Making Styles

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), designed to assess the ability to inhibit intuition to process a problem analytically, predicts people's performance in many normative judgement and decision‐making tasks (e.g., Bayesian reasoning, conjunction fallacy and ratio bias). However, how the CRT predicts normative decision‐making performance is unclear, and little is known about the extent to which the CRT predicts real‐life decision outcomes. We investigate the role of the CRT in predicting real‐life decision outcomes and examine whether the CRT predicts real‐life decision outcomes after controlling for two related individual differences: the Big Five personality traits and decision‐making styles. Our results show that greater CRT scores predict positive real‐life decision outcomes measured by the Decision Outcome Inventory. However, the effect size was small, and the relationship became non‐significant after statistically controlling for personality and decision‐making styles. We discuss the limited predictive role of cognitive reflection in real‐life decision‐making outcomes, along with the roles of personality and decision‐making styles. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's utilization of emotion expectancies in moral decision‐making

This study investigated the relevance of emotion expectancies for children's moral decision‐making. The sample included 131 participants from three different grade levels (M = 8.39 years, SD = 2.45, range 4.58–12.42). Participants were presented a set of scenarios that described various emotional outcomes of (im)moral actions and asked to decide what they would do if they were in the protagonists' shoes. Overall, it was found that the anticipation of moral emotions predicted an increased likelihood of moral choices in antisocial and prosocial contexts. In younger children, anticipated moral emotions predicted moral choice for prosocial actions, but not for antisocial actions. Older children showed evidence for the utilization of anticipated emotions in both prosocial and antisocial behaviours. Moreover, for older children, the decision to act prosocially was less likely in the presence of non‐moral emotions. Findings suggest that the impact of emotion expectancies on children's moral decision‐making increases with age. Contrary to happy victimizer research, the study does not support the notion that young children use moral emotion expectancies for moral decision‐making in the context of antisocial actions.     

The effect of self‐regulated decision making on career path and major‐related career choice satisfaction

The present research examined the influence of self‐regulated decision making on satisfaction in career path (college major for Study 1, job for Study 2) and major‐related career choice. Results indicate a full mediating effect of fit in the relationship between self‐regulated decision making and satisfaction in career path. Self‐regulated decision making also influenced major–job congruence via satisfaction with a participant's college major. Findings suggest that individuals who possess self‐regulatory ability in decision‐making contexts were more likely to choose majors and jobs of good fit, experience satisfaction from their career decisions, and choose careers relevant to their college majors.     

Probabilistic Inferences Under Emotional Stress: How Arousal Affects Decision Processes

Many models of decision making neglect emotional states that could affect individuals' cognitive processes. The present work explores the effect of emotional stress on people's cognitive processes when making probabilistic inferences. Two contrasting hypotheses are tested against one another: the uncertainty‐reduction and attention‐narrowing hypotheses of how emotional stress affects decision making. In the experimental study, emotional stress was induced through the use of highly aversive pictures immediately before each decision. Emotional state was assessed by both subjective (state anxiety, arousal, and pleasantness ratings) and objective (skin conductance) measures. The results show that emotional stress impacts decision making; in particular, emotionally aroused participants seem to have focused on the most important information and selected simpler decision strategies relative to participants in a control condition. The results are in line with the attention‐narrowing hypothesis and suggest that emotional stress can impact decision making through limited predecisional information search and the selection of simpler decision strategies. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Future‐focussed thinking: combining scenario planning with decision analysis

This paper first describes current practice in decision analysis and argues that nothing in the technique's application is likely to challenge the strategic decision maker's current worldview of the course of future events that are modelled in the decision tree. By contrast, a scenario planning intervention in an organization has the potential to increase perceived threat and thus lead to a step change in strategic decision making. Strategic decisions are made against a backcloth of the operation of psychological processes that act, it is argued, to reduce the perceived level of environmental threat and result in strategic inertia. For this reason, it is recommended that scenario planning should be adopted as a standard procedure because of its ability to challenge individual and organizational worldviews. The use of scenario planning prior to conventional decision analysis is termed as ‘future‐focussed thinking’, and parallels are drawn between the current advocated approach and that of Keeney's value‐focussed thinking. Both serve to prompt the creation of enhanced options for subsequent evaluation by conventional decision analytic techniques. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.