The generalisability of confidence-accuracy studies in eyewitnessing

Abstract

This paper discusses the evidence on the confidence-accuracy relationship in eyewitness research. It is pointed out that the conclusion often drawn on the basis of such research, that there is little or no relationship between eyewitness confidence and accuracy, is an unwarranted generalisation based on the use of experimental paradigms that are limited in terms of their generalisability to courtroom situations. In particular, almost all studies involve between-subject rather than within-subject designs, thereby limiting the generalisability of findings. A within-subjects analysis examines whether, within an individual, more confident responses are associated with greater accuracy than are less confident responses. A between-subjects analysis examines whether a more confident individual is likely to be more accurate than a less confident individual. A further limitation on the generalisability to real life situations of studies conducted to date is that experiments must involve making errors in identification in order to allow correlational analysis to take place. This means that findings cannot be generalised to those real life situations where all subjects are likely to be completely accurate and confident.     

Nuclear Power is Neither Right Nor Wrong: The Case for a Tertium Datur in the Ethics of Technology

The debate over the civilian use of nuclear power is highly polarised. We argue that a reasonable response to this deep disagreement is to maintain that advocates of both camps should modify their positions. According to the analysis we propose, nuclear power is neither entirely right nor entirely wrong, but rather right and wrong to some degree. We are aware that this non-binary analysis of nuclear power is controversial from a theoretical point of view. Utilitarians, Kantians, and other moral theorists make sharp, binary distinctions between right and wrong acts. However, an important argument speaking in favour of our non-binary analysis is that it better reflects our considered intuitions about the ethical trade-offs we face in discussions of nuclear power. The aim of this article is to make this argument sharp by explaining how it can be rendered compatible with, and supported by, the Capability Approach, which is quickly becoming one of the most influential frameworks for thinking about human development.     

The privileged role of location in visual working memory

Reports have conflicted about the possible special role of location in visual working memory (WM). One important question is: Do we maintain the locations of objects in WM even when they are irrelevant to the task at hand? Here we used a continuous response scale to study the types of reporting errors that participants make when objects are presented at the same or at different locations in space. When several objects successively shared the same location, participants exhibited a higher tendency to report features of the wrong object in memory; that is, they responded with features that belonged to objects retained in memory but not probed at retrieval. On the other hand, a similar effect was not observed when objects shared a nonspatial feature, such as color. Furthermore, the effect of location on reporting errors was present even when its manipulation was orthogonal to the task at hand. These findings are consistent with the view that binding together different nonspatial features of an object in memory might be mediated through an object’s location. Hence, spatial location may have a privileged role in WM. The relevance of these findings to conceptual models, as well as to neural accounts of visual WM, is discussed.     

Mad and glad: Musically induced emotions have divergent impact on morals

Moral judgments can be positive or negative: we can judge action as good or wrong. Here we show that good judgments and wrong judgments are influenced by incidental emotions. Using instrumental music as an induction method, we show that anger, but not happiness, increases the tendency to judge actions as wrong (Experiment 1). We also show that happiness increases the tendency to praise actions as both good and obligatory, while anger reduces these judgments (Experiment 2). These findings extend the literature on emotions and moral judgment by demonstrating impact of anger and happiness, and by contrasting goodness and wrongness in their emotional valence. The findings also show that music can have a significant impact on moral judgment. This is important because music is a highly prevalent situational variable. The use of instrumental music may have advantages over other induction techniques because it does not carry specific semantic cues that might encourage people to think about morality.     

Ethics and Fictive Imagining

Sometimes it is wrong to imagine or take pleasure in imagining certain things, and likewise it is sometimes wrong to prompt these things. Some argue that certain fictive imaginings—imaginings of fictional states of affairs—are intrinsically wrong or that taking pleasure in certain fictive imaginings is wrong and so prompting either would also be wrong. These claims sometimes also serve as premises in arguments linking the ethical properties of a fiction to its artistic value. However, even if we grant that it might sometimes be wrong to imagine x or to take pleasure in imagining x, nothing follows about the ethical status of fictively imagining x, with or without pleasure. Prompting some fictive imagining is intrinsically wrong only when the fiction is a means to encourage for export from the fiction to the actual world some belief or attitude that it would be blameworthy to hold. The failure of arguments for the wrongness of certain fictive imaginings and their prompting lies in part in a failure to recognize that imagining x and fictively imagining x are distinct mental acts. This distinction blocks many arguments attempting to forge a link between a work's ethical properties and its artistic properties.     

论愚蠢的德才欠缺理论

并非所有的愚蠢都是由弱智、知识有欠缺、社会阅历不足或低情商造成的,也不可将愚蠢简单地视作聪明的反义词。愚蠢是指个体因自身在品行或才智上有欠缺,导致无法以睿智、豁达的态度看待人生、展现人生,无法洞察生活中形形色色的人与事,从而易做出不理智的举动,或当其面临一个复杂问题情境时,因自身在品行或才智上有欠缺,导致做出错误的判断、决定或行动,由此而损害了他人或自己与他人的正当权益,最终可能既害人害己,甚至还给单位、国家或人类的健康与可持续性发展造成巨大损失。因此,愚蠢的实质是个体因自身在品行或才智上有欠缺而犯的错误。从类型上看,根据愚蠢的成因不同,可将愚蠢分为少智式和缺德式两大类型,二者在内涵、成因、子类型多寡、危害程度等方面都存在明显差异。     

Racial Profiling And Cumulative Injustice

This paper tries to explain why racial profiling involves a serious injustice and to do so in a way that avoids the problems of existing philosophical accounts. An initially plausible view maintains that racial profiling is pro tanto wrong in and of itself by violating a constraint on fair treatment that is generally violated by acts of statistical discrimination based on ascribed characteristics. However, consideration of other cases involving statistical discrimination suggests that violating a constraint of this kind may not be an especially serious wrong in and of itself. To fully capture the significant wrong that occurs when racial profiling is targeted at black Americans or other similarly situated groups, it is argued that we should appeal to the idea that this basic injustice is exacerbated when it forms part of a larger pattern of similar actions that collectively realize a state of cumulative injustice.     

Compatibility due to the coding of the relative position of the effectors

Response latencies emitted with the hands crossed are slower than those emitted with the hands uncrossed. Two explanations are available for the so-called crossed-hand effect. One attributes it to the non-natural posture of the arms in the crossed position, whereas the other is in terms of a conflict between the code describing the hand and the code describing its position. Experiment 1 disproved the postural hypothesis by showing that crossing the hands has no effect on response latencies in a simple reaction time task. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the crossed-hand effect in a choice reaction time task and showed that it depends on the relative position of the two hands. In other words, responses are slower when the hand is located in the “wrong” position with respect to the other (e.g., the right hand is located to the left of the left hand), whereas the absolute position, that is the side of the body where the responding hand is located, does not seem to effect the speed of response.     

Hand preference and its flexibility according to the position of the object: a study in cercopithecines examining spontaneous behaviour and an experimental task (the Bishop QHP task)

The extant literature on manual laterality in non-human primates is inconclusive, plagued by inconsistent or contradictory findings and by disturbing methodological issues (e.g. uncontrolled influential factors, comparability issues). The present study examined hand preference and its flexibility in 15 red-capped mangabeys (C. t. torquatus) and 13 Campbell's monkeys (C. c. campbelli), two species that differ in their degree of arboreality. We investigated the influence of the spatial position of the object on hand preference for reaching. We considered spontaneous behaviour (reaching for food during daily feeding) and an experimental task: the QHP task. The QHP is a task that is used in humans. This is a simple reaching task that involves high spatial constraints on hand use. In our study, the subject had to reach for items that were placed on a semi-circle in front of it on five positions, including in the centre position, in the ipsilateral space and in the contralateral space. We assessed hand preference for reaching in front (baseline condition), and we examined how this preference changed when reaching in lateral positions. For reaching in front, about half of the subjects were lateralized and no group-level bias occurred, for both spontaneous and experimental conditions. When considering reaching in the lateral positions, we observed that the position of the object influenced hand use: individuals used the hand that was closest to the object. The results are discussed in relation to previous findings in humans and in non-human primates and regarding theories on handedness and flexibility of hand preference.     

Rules of Meaning and Practical Reasoning

Can there be rules of language which serve both to determine meaning and to guide speakers in ordinary linguistic usage, i.e., in the production of speech acts? We argue that the answer is no. We take the guiding function of rules to be the function of serving as reasons for actions, and the question of guidance is then considered within the framework of practical reasoning. It turns out that those rules that can serve as reasons for linguistic utterances cannot be considered as normative or meaning determining. Acceptance of such a rule is simply equivalent to a belief about meaning, and does not even presuppose that meaning is determined by rules. Rules that can determine meaning, on the other hand, i.e., rules that can be regarded as constitutive of meaning, are not capable of guiding speakers in the ordinary performance of speech acts.     

Why the spontaneous images created by the hands during talk can help make TV advertisements more effective

The design of effective communications depends upon an adequate model of the communication process. The traditional model is that speech conveys semantic information and bodily movement conveys information about emotion and interpersonal attitudes. But McNeill (2000) argues that this model is fundamentally wrong and that some bodily movements, namely spontaneous hand movements generated during talk (iconic gestures), are integral to semantic communication. But can we increase the effectiveness of communication using this new theory? Focusing on advertising we found that advertisements in which the message was split between speech and iconic gesture (possible on TV) were significantly more effective than advertisements in which meaning resided purely in speech or language (radio/ newspaper). We also found that the significant differences in communicative effectiveness were maintained across five consecutive trials. We compared the communicative power of professionally made TV advertisements in which a spoken message was accompanied either by iconic gestures or by pictorial images, and found the iconic gestures to be more effective. We hypothesized that iconic gestures are so effective because they illustrate and isolate just the core semantic properties of a product. This research suggests that TV advertisements can be made more effective by incorporating iconic gestures with exactly the right temporal and semantic properties.     

IS GOVERNMENT SUPEREROGATION POSSIBLE?

Governments are subject to the requirements of justice, yet often seem to go above and beyond what justice requires in order to act in ways many people think are good. These kinds of acts – examples of which include putting on celebrations, providing grants to poets, and preserving historic architecture – appear to be acts of government supererogation. In this paper, I argue that a common view about the relationship between government, coercion, and justice implies that most such acts are not supererogatory, but wrong. Many will find that conclusion unattractive, but rejecting the common view that implies it raises problems, too.     

Mind Perception Is the Essence of Morality

Mind perception entails ascribing mental capacities to other entities, whereas moral judgment entails labeling entities as good or bad or actions as right or wrong. We suggest that mind perception is the essence of moral judgment. In particular, we suggest that moral judgment is rooted in a cognitive template of two perceived minds-a moral dyad of an intentional agent and a suffering moral patient. Diverse lines of research support dyadic morality. First, perceptions of mind are linked to moral judgments: dimensions of mind perception (agency and experience) map onto moral types (agents and patients), and deficits of mind perception correspond to difficulties with moral judgment. Second, not only are moral judgments sensitive to perceived agency and experience, but all moral transgressions are fundamentally understood as agency plus experienced suffering-that is, interpersonal harm-even ostensibly harmless acts such as purity violations. Third, dyadic morality uniquely accounts for the phenomena of dyadic completion (seeing agents in response to patients, and vice versa), and moral typecasting (characterizing others as either moral agents or moral patients). Discussion also explores how mind perception can unify morality across explanatory levels, how a dyadic template of morality may be developmentally acquired, and future directions.     

Choice and Culpability

Abstract

In this paper, I take exception with a widely held philosophical doctrine, according to which agents are morally responsible only for actions they have intentionally done, or chosen to bring about. I argue that that there are positive duties of consideration and proper regard that make sense of holding persons responsible in the absence of any choice to commit wrong acts.     

VIII—Two Act-Omission Paradoxes

There are two ways in which the act-omission doctrine, which implies that it may be permissible to let people die or be killed when it is wrong to kill them, gives rise to a paradox. First, it may be that when you let a victim be killed, you let yourself kill this victim. On the assumption that, if it would be wrong of you to act in a certain fashion, it would be wrong of you let yourself act in this fashion, this yields the paradox that it is both permissible and impermissible to let yourself act in this fashion. Second, you may let yourself kill somebody by letting an action you have already initiated cause death, e.g., by not lending a helping hand to somebody you have pushed. This, too, yields the paradox that it is both permissible and impermissible to let yourself kill if you are in a situation in which killing is impermissible but letting be killed permissible.     

Mind Perception Is the Essence of Morality

Mind perception entails ascribing mental capacities to other entities, whereas moral judgment entails labeling entities as good or bad or actions as right or wrong. We suggest that mind perception is the essence of moral judgment. In particular, we suggest that moral judgment is rooted in a cognitive template of two perceived minds—a moral dyad of an intentional agent and a suffering moral patient. Diverse lines of research support dyadic morality. First, perceptions of mind are linked to moral judgments: dimensions of mind perception (agency and experience) map onto moral types (agents and patients), and deficits of mind perception correspond to difficulties with moral judgment. Second, not only are moral judgments sensitive to perceived agency and experience, but all moral transgressions are fundamentally understood as agency plus experienced suffering—that is, interpersonal harm—even ostensibly harmless acts such as purity violations. Third, dyadic morality uniquely accounts for the phenomena of dyadic completion (seeing agents in response to patients, and vice versa), and moral typecasting (characterizing others as either moral agents or moral patients). Discussion also explores how mind perception can unify morality across explanatory levels, how a dyadic template of morality may be developmentally acquired, and future directions.     

Predicting Students’ Intention to Plagiarize: an Ethical Theoretical Framework

This article investigates whether acts of plagiarism are predictable. Through a deductive, quantitative method, this study examines 517 students and their motivation and intention to plagiarize. More specifically, this study uses an ethical theoretical framework called the Theory of Reasoned Action (TORA) and Planned Behavior (TPB) to proffer five hypotheses about cognitive, relational, and social processing relevant to ethical decision making. Data results indicate that although most respondents reported that plagiarism was wrong, students with strong intentions to plagiarize had a more positive attitude toward plagiarizing, believed that it was important that family and friends think plagiarizing is acceptable, and perceived that plagiarizing would be an easy task. However, participants in the current study with less intention to plagiarize hold negative views about plagiarism, do not believe that plagiarism is acceptable to family, friends or peers, and perceive that the act of plagiarizing would prove difficult. Based on these findings, this study considers implications important for faculty, librarians, and student support staff in preventing plagiarism through collaborations and outreach programming.