Search strategies in decision making: the success of “success”

Examination of search strategies has tended to focus on choices determined by decision makers' personal preferences among relevant cues, and not on learning cue‐criterion relationships. We present an empirical and rational analysis of cue search for environments with objective criteria. In such environments, cues can be evaluated on the basis of three properties: validity (the probability that a cue identifies the correct choice if cue values differ between alternatives); discrimination rate (the proportion of occasions on which a cue has differing values); and success (the expected proportion of correct choices when only that cue can be used). Our experiments show that though there is a high degree of individual variability, success is a key determinant of search. Furthermore, a rational analysis demonstrates why success‐directed search is the most adaptive strategy in many circumstances. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Discourse and Cognition. Edwards,D. (1997). Sage,London: pp. 368. £49.50 ISBN 0‐8039‐7696‐8 (hardback), £15.99 ISBN 0‐8039‐7697‐6 (paperback)

Wendy Drewery is a philosopher by training and teaches health development and counselling at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Community Psychology: Theory and Practice. Orford J. (1992). Wiley,Chichester: pp. vii+292. £18.99 ISBN 0‐471‐93810‐6 (paperback)

The Stirling Community Psychology Class of 1999 consisted of 57 third and fourth year undergraduates who each reviewed the book separately. The above review is the result of content analysis by Rebekah Pratt who trained as a community psychologist at the University of Waikato, New Zealand and is currently working as a research fellow at the Centre for Social Research on Dementia, University of Stirling. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘I'm not a war monger but…’: Discourse Analysis and Social Psychological Peace Research

The present paper argues for a discourse analytic approach to social psychological peace research and demonstrates the potential of such an approach through a re‐specification of the concept of attitudes to war. This is illustrated through an analysis of a series of televised debates broadcast in the UK in February–March 2003 in the build‐up to the formal outbreak of the Iraq War. Analysis draws attention to the importance of rhetorical context and function, the inseparability of attitude object and evaluation and the formulation of evaluations as specific or general. Findings are discussed in the context of recent calls for methodological pluralism in social psychological peace research with a suggestion that matters of epistemology stand prior to methodology. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Effect of Prosody on Distributional Learning in 12‐ to 13‐Month‐Old Infants

Distributional information is a potential cue for learning syntactic categories. Recent studies demonstrate a developmental trajectory in the level of abstraction of distributional learning in young infants. Here we investigate the effect of prosody on infants' learning of adjacent relations between words. Twelve‐ to thirteen‐month‐old infants were exposed to an artificial language comprised of 3‐word‐sentences of the form aXb and cYd, where X and Y words differed in the number of syllables. Training sentences contained a prosodic boundary between either the first and the second word or the second and the third word. Subsequently, infants were tested on novel test sentences that contained new X and Y words and also contained a flat prosody with no grouping cues. Infants successfully discriminated between novel grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, suggesting that the learned adjacent relations can be abstracted across words and prosodic conditions. Under the conditions tested, prosody may be only a weak constraint on syntactic categorization. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multidimensional Latent Classification of ‘Street Robbery’ Offences

In a recent study of personal robbery, commissioned by the Home Office in the UK, a qualitative typology of robbery offences was proposed based on the approach used by the offender to commit the crime, consisting of four approach types: Blitz, Confrontation, Con, and Snatch. Conceptual inspection of the typology reveals that these proposed types may be hypothetically demarcated as the product of two latent dimensions: interaction (between the offender and the victim) and violence (used to threaten/harm the victim). The current paper utilises crime scene information from 72 incarcerated male offenders convicted of ‘street’ robbery to test this hypothesis. Convergent statistical analysis was utilised to test the structure of Smith's typology first using multidimensional scaling (MDS) and then principal component analysis (PCA). MDS and PCA analyses provided convergent support for the existence of the four robbery styles and the latent dimensions of interaction and violence. Implications of Smith's typological structure and latent behavioural dimensions on the conceptualisation and classification of robbery offences are discussed within the existing literature on ‘street’ robbery. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effect of 45‐Day −6° Head‐Down Bed Rest on Cooperation and Aggression

High levels of cooperation and low aggression seem obviously vital to the successful implementation of space missions. To elucidate the effect of microgravity on these behaviors, we investigated whether cooperative and aggressive behaviors would be affected in 16 male volunteers during 45‐day ?6° head‐down bed rest, which is a reliable simulation model for most physiological effects of spaceflight. We used an ultimatum game task to evaluate the cooperative behavior and a revised competitive reaction time test to evaluate the aggressive behavior simultaneously. We found that (1) the participants became less cooperative in the post‐bed rest phase in comparison with the pre‐bed rest phase and (2) the participants became more aggressive in the in‐bed rest phase in comparison with the pre‐bed rest phase. These findings provide evidence that head‐down bed rest may affect both cooperative and aggressive behaviors in males, suggesting an important perspective for future studies in space psychology.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tracing the Path from Personality — via Cooperativeness — to Conservation

Ecological behaviour is often conceptualized as an instance of cooperating in a social dilemma situation. Thus, it has been argued to relate to dispositional tendencies of moral virtue and pro‐social orientation. To embed such notions in models of basic personality, we herein predicted that the recently proposed sixth basic personality factor, Honesty–Humility — which specifically pertains to individual differences in cooperativeness — is linked to environmental attitudes and ecological behaviour. Results from two studies (N = 137 and N = 531, respectively) supported these hypotheses and showed that Honesty–Humility explains incremental variance beyond the remaining, more classical five factors of personality. In addition, mediation analyses revealed that Honesty–Humility exerts part of its influence via individual differences in pro‐social value orientations. Individual tendencies to cooperate in social dilemma situations could thus be shown to form a bridge between basic personality dimensions and ecological behaviour. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“We have no quarrel with you”: Effects of group status on characterizations of “conflict” with an outgroup

In three studies, we examined the effect of intergroup status on group members' tendencies to characterize the ingroup's relationship with an outgroup as conflictual following outgroup action. Findings from all three studies supported the prediction that the intergroup relationship would be characterized as less conflictual when the ingroup had relatively high rather than low status. Consistent with the hypothesis that the effect of status reflects strategic concerns, it was moderated by the perceived relevance of the outgroup's action to intergroup status relations (study 1), it was sensitive to audience (study 2), and it was partially mediated by status management concerns (study 3). The role of strategic, status‐related factors in intergroup relations is discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fuzzy MCDM based on the concept of α‐cut

In a fuzzy multiple criteria decision‐making (MCDM) problem, with a hierarchical structure of more than two levels and involving multiple decision‐makers (DMs), to find the exact membership functions of the final aggregation ratings of all feasible alternatives is almost impossible. Thus, ranking methods based on exact membership functions cannot be utilized to rank the feasible alternatives and complete the optimal selection. To resolve the above‐mentioned complexity and to incorporate assessments of all DMs' viewpoints, in this paper a fuzzy MCDM method with multiple DMs, based on the concepts of fuzzy set theory and α‐cut, is developed. This method incorporates a number of perspectives on how to approach the fuzzy MCDM problem with multiple DMs, as follows: (1) combining quantitative and qualitative criteria as well as negative and positive ones; (2) using the generalized means to develop the aggregation method of multiple DMs' opinions; (3) incorporating the risk attitude index β to convey the total risk attitude of all DMs by using the estimation data obtained at the data input stage; (4) employing the algebraic operations of fuzzy numbers based on the concept of α‐cut to calculate the final aggregation ratings and develop a matching ranking method for proposed fuzzy MCDM method with multiple DMs. Furthermore, we use this method to survey the site selection for free port zone (FPZ) in Taiwan as an empirical study to demonstrate the proposed fuzzy MCDM algorithm. The result of this empirical investigation shows that the port of Kaohsiung, the largest international port of Taiwan as well as the sixth container port in the world in 2004, is optimal for the Taiwan government in enacting the plan of FPZ. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Toward a ‘Catholic’ Reading of Kierkegaard

Historically, some Catholic readers have been suspicious of Kierkegaard's writings; viewing him as an irrational Protestant irreconcilably at odds with Catholic thought. Nevertheless, the unexpected yet favorable mention of Kierkegaard in John Paul II's Fides et Ratio is an indication that Kierkegaard's writings are not so easily dismissed. One may be justified in asking: what account can be given to explain such a shift in how the Catholic reception of Kierkegaard changes from a polemical rejection to a papal endorsement during the 20th century? In this review essay, I will explore some recent Kierkegaard research that provides – or at least, provides some of the groundwork for – a positive ‘Catholic’ reading of Kierkegaard. Space does not permit an exhaustive exposition of each book, so I will highlight the salient features of each to underscore a new trend that is emerging in Kierkegaard studies.     

“If a girl doesn't say ‘no’…”: young men,rape and claims of ‘insufficient knowledge’

Most psychological theories of rape tend to stress factors internal to both rapists and their victims in accounting for the phenomenon. Unlike such theories, social psychological and feminist accounts have drawn attention to social and cultural factors as productive of rape, and have criticized psychological accounts on the grounds that they often serve, paradoxically, to cement pre‐existing ‘common‐sense’. In this paper we examine the ways in which young Australian men draw upon widely culturally shared accounts, or interpretative repertoires, of rape to exculpate rapists. In particular, we discuss the reliance placed on a ‘lay’ version of Tannen's 1992 ‘miscommunication model’ of (acquaintance) rape and detail the use of this account—the claim that rape is a consequence of men's ‘not knowing’—as a device to accomplish exculpation. Implications of our methods for capturing young people's understanding of sexual coercion, rape and consent, and for the design of ‘rape prevention’ programmes, are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Career counseling: beyond “test and tell”

Behavior-oriented inventories need not be used in a static manner. This article presents a way of using John Holland's Self-Directed Search (SDS) as an illustration of how such an inventory can be employed dynamically within a developmental career counseling framework. Use of the SDS is discussed in terms of environmental exploration, self-exploration, and integration of information. The breadth of individual behavior styles and the flexibility of work environments are the key concepts in the approach to career counseling described here.     

Beyond Homo Strategus: a comment on Kelley's ‘Analysis of social orientations’

This comment addresses Kelley's target article that provides a model aimed at providing a broad theoretical model for all of our ongoing interpersonal life. We underline Kelley's assertion to use abstract minimal representations for assessment purposes, but observe that similar principles should hold for theoretical models. Kelley's theoretical model defies falsification because there are many possible problems for confounding. In addition the model is heavily influenced by the dominant game theoretical protocol in that it focuses on strategic behaviour to be found in control-type relationships, thereby ignoring the affiliative type of interpersonal behaviour. Finally it is observed that although sequential–temporal aspects of behaviour are integrated in the model, the model neglects the embeddedness of the dyad in other groups and organizations, thereby ignoring the long-term effect of the externalities on the collective level. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Decisionarium ‐ aiding decisions,negotiating and collecting opinions on the web

Decisionarium ( www.decisionarium.hut.fi ) is the first public site for interactive multicriteria decision support with tools for individual decision‐making as well as for group collaboration and negotiation. Web‐HIPRE ( www.hipre.hut.fi ) supports value tree and AHP analysis including group models. The RICH methodology ( www.rich.hut.fi ) allows the decision maker to provide incomplete ordinal preference statements when considering the relative importance of attributes in a value tree. Opinions‐Online ( www.opinion.huf.fi ) is a platform for surveys voting and group collaboration. There are different ways for voting, multiattribute scoring, surveys as well as interactive viewing of the results. Joint Gains ( www.jointgains.hut.fi ) applies the method of improving directions to support multiparty negotiations in a multicriteria setting. Smart Swaps offers an implementation of the even swaps procedure ( www.smart‐swaps.hut.fi ). All of the tools above are web‐based, so global interaction is natural and links can be utilized for multimedia information support. Decisionarium also offers access to complete e‐learning modules ( www.dm.hut.fi ) based on the use of the software. There are also illustrative powerpoint presentations and additional Windows software WINPRE and PRIME‐Decisions for value tree analysis under incomplete information. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The closed mind: ‘Experience’ and ‘cognition’ aspects of openness to experience and need for closure as psychological bases for right‐wing attitudes

Openness to Experience and Need for Closure (NFC) are dispositional variables related to social‐cultural right‐wing attitudes. The present study investigated their joint effects. Factor analysis revealed an ‘experiential’ dimension with high loading openness items, and a ‘cognition’ dimension with high loadings for most NFC items and about a quarter of the openness item set. The experiential openness items were weakly related to right‐wing attitudes, demonstrating little predictive value. Conversely, the cognitive openness and NFC items were powerful predictors of right‐wing attitudes, and also played an important role in integrative models, both as a predictor of authoritarianism‐based racism and as a mediator of age related increments in right‐wing attitudes. It is concluded that right‐wing attitudes should be primarily understood in terms of (motivated) cognition, and to a smaller extent in terms of experiential openness. The distinction between ‘experiential’ and ‘cognitive’ openness is critically assessed, and it is asserted that because cognition is a multifaceted construct openness contains more than one cognitive dimension. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On Variant Selection Mechanisms in Interactive MCDA – Engineering versus Reverse Engineering

In the paper, we focus on the engineering and the reverse engineering paradigms in the context of multiple criteria decision analysis. We argue and demonstrate that if variant selection mechanisms are reverse engineered, they are simple and intuitive to understand, making multiple criteria decision analysis marketable to operational research practitioners. We present a reverse engineering scheme for variant selection mechanisms, and we illustrate its working with instructive examples. We also present some experience with that scheme gathered when teaching a multiple criteria decision analysis course to students. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘An Association for All’—Notions of the Meaning of Autistic Self‐Advocacy Politics within a Parent‐Dominated Autistic Movement

In this paper, we seek to explore the tensions between advocacy and self advocacy autistic movements in a Swedish context with a special focus on the meanings that enable the production of particular understandings of autism and the autistic subject. Drawing on articles written for the Swedish advocacy magazine Empowerment written for and by people with autism, the discourse analysis explores two competing discourses: a reformist and a radical. The reformist discourse underlines a goal of (political) representation expressed in Empowerment. It may be understood as an important part of producing a legitimate autistic political subject–positioned as a full member, with a full membership–within a parent‐dominated autistic advocacy movement. The reformist discourse can be viewed as a result of a negotiation, where full membership is conditioned on the parents' terms and granted on specific terms. These include working together (neuro‐inclusively), advocacy based on interest rather than identity/position as a specific target/member group, agreement upon a definition of autism as a disability (a deficit) a person has rather than an identity. In relation to this, an alternative legitimate autistic subject is produced through invoking the counter‐hegemonic radical discourse. Such a narrative produces the ‘Asperger’ or ‘Aspie’. Here, the ‘full membership’ refers to a sense of identification with sense of belonging to and being at home with other people with autism. It contains a certain amount of autistic solidarity within the group of adults with autism. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Understanding consumers' brand‐induced food taste perception: A comparison of ‘brand familiarity’ – and ‘consumer value – brand symbolism (in)congruity’ – accounts

Past research has shown that familiar brands can boost consumers' food taste experiences. On the other hand, more recent evidence suggests that the (in)congruity between consumer values and brand symbolism can affect the food taste perception. This study is the first one to integrate these two accounts into one single conceptual framework and to empirically evaluate their relative roles in explaining consumers' brand‐induced taste perception. Two experiments involving taste trials (blind vs brand‐cued sensory evaluation) were conducted. The first experiment analysed the brand familiarity effect, whereas the second experiment addressed also the taste perception of yogurts with differing brand symbolism amongst food consumers with distinct value orientations to find support for the (in)congruity effects. This research implies that congruity is not responsible for enhancing consumers' taste perception beyond the level that is produced by the brand familiarity. In contrast, the incongruity effect appears capable of neutralising the brand familiarity effect. Therefore, these two explanations may operate independently. More generally, this study speaks for the importance of incorporating consumer value – brand symbolism incongruity mechanism into food consumption studies; even owners' of strong food brands cannot trust the ability of their brands to boost a consumer's taste experience if there is no correspondence between his or her central values and brand symbolism. Thus, an objectively better taste is not necessarily decisive; satisfactory sensory quality can suffice if it is coupled with imaginative and daring brand marketing that delivers unique emotional and functional benefits for well‐defined food consumer target segments. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.