Geopolitical Forecasting Skill in Strategic Intelligence

Extending research by the authors on intelligence forecasting, the forecasting skill of 3622 geopolitical forecasts extracted from strategic intelligence reports was examined. The codable subset of forecasts (N = 2013) was expressed with verbal probabilities (e.g., likely) and translated to numeric probability equivalents. This subset showed very good calibration and discrimination, but also underconfidence. There was no support for the hypothesis that forecasting skill was good mainly because of the general ease of forecasting topics. First, forecasting skill was as good among authoritative key judgments as in the general set. Second, forecasts that were assigned high degrees of certainty, indicative of ease, (p ≤ 0.05 or p ≥ 0.95) did not discriminate as well as less certain forecasts (0.05 < p < 0.95), and these subsets did not differ in calibration. Sensitivity and benchmarking tests further revealed that if the 1609 uncodable forecasts were all assigned forecast probabilities of .5 (i.e., if all followed a “cautious ignorance” rule), skill characteristics would still show a large effect size improvement over a variety of guesswork strategies. The findings support a cautiously optimistic assessment of forecasting skill in strategic intelligence and indicate that such skill is not primarily attributable to the selection of easy forecasting topics. However, the large proportion of uncodable cases suggests that intelligence forecasts could be improved by avoiding imprecise language that affects not only the codability but also, in all likelihood, the interpretability and indicative value of forecasts for intelligence consumers. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temporal Synechism: A Peircean Philosophy of Time

Axiomathes - Charles Sanders Peirce is best known as the founder of pragmatism, but the name that he preferred for his overall system of thought was “synechism” because the principle of...     

The Impact of Integrated Behavioral Healthcare on Glycemic Control

Integrated behavioral healthcare (IBH) is the “standard of care” to address psychosocial factors impacting diabetes outcomes; it is not standard in practice. This longitudinal, retrospective, chart-review examines IBH impact on glycemic control in an adult diabetes clinic. Adults (n?=?374) with?≥?1 behavioral health encounter,?≥?2 hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) values, and HbA1c value?>?8% at initial IBH visit were included. Mixed effects linear piecewise models examined differences in slope trajectories for 365 days pre- and post-IBH intervention. Pre-intervention slope was not significant (z?=?? 1.09, p?=?0.28). The post-intervention slope was significant (z?=?? 6.44, p?<?0.001), indicating a significant linear decrease in HbA1c values. Results demonstrated that prior to engaging with behavioral health, there was no change in HbA1c. After initial IBH visit, there was a predicted reduction of?>?1% in HbA1c over the following year. These results suggest that IBH significantly improves patients’ metabolic status. Next steps for IBH research are offered.

     

The role of career adaptabilities for mid-career changers

Career adaptability is mediated by personality factors and socio-psychological processes, with learning playing an important role. Using a five-fold career adapt-abilities competency framework (defined here as control, curiosity, commitment, confidence and concern), which was developed from the international quantitative study that is the focus of this special edition, an explicitly qualitative study of the career biographies of mid-career changers from two European countries was undertaken. Data from 64 in-depth interviews with adults in contrasting labor markets from Norway and the UK were analysed deductively, using a career adapt-abilities framework. Results demonstrate the utility of the framework, as well as how adaptive adults used both formal and informal learning to develop career adapt-ability competencies, over time, across occupations and occupational sectors. A key conclusion relates to how this career adapt-abilities competency framework could be used to motivate adults in mid-career to adopt behaviors that help them effect positive career change.     

Intelligence: new findings and theoretical developments

We review new findings and new theoretical developments in the field of intelligence. New findings include the following: (a) Heritability of IQ varies significantly by social class. (b) Almost no genetic polymorphisms have been discovered that are consistently associated with variation in IQ in the normal range. (c) Much has been learned about the biological underpinnings of intelligence. (d) "Crystallized" and "fluid" IQ are quite different aspects of intelligence at both the behavioral and biological levels. (e) The importance of the environment for IQ is established by the 12-point to 18-point increase in IQ when children are adopted from working-class to middle-class homes. (f) Even when improvements in IQ produced by the most effective early childhood interventions fail to persist, there can be very marked effects on academic achievement and life outcomes. (g) In most developed countries studied, gains on IQ tests have continued, and they are beginning in the developing world. (h) Sex differences in aspects of intelligence are due partly to identifiable biological factors and partly to socialization factors. (i) The IQ gap between Blacks and Whites has been reduced by 0.33 SD in recent years. We report theorizing concerning (a) the relationship between working memory and intelligence, (b) the apparent contradiction between strong heritability effects on IQ and strong secular effects on IQ, (c) whether a general intelligence factor could arise from initially largely independent cognitive skills, (d) the relation between self-regulation and cognitive skills, and (e) the effects of stress on intelligence.     

Individual development and evolution: experiential canalization of self-regulation

In this article, we contrast evolutionary and psychobiological models of individual development to address the idea that individual development occurring in prototypically risky and unsupportive environments can be understood as adaptation. We question traditional evolutionary explanations of individual development, calling on the principle of probabilistic epigenesis to suggest that individual development resulting from the combined activity of genes and environments is best understood to precede rather than follow from evolutionary change. Specifically, we focus on the ways in which experience shapes the development of stress response physiology, with implications for individual development and intergenerational transmission of reactive, as opposed to reflective, phenotypes. In doing so, we describe results from several analyses conducted with a longitudinal data set of 1,292 children and their primary caregivers followed from birth. Our results indicate that the effects of poverty on stress response physiology and on the development of the self-regulation of behavior represent instances of the experiential canalization of development with implications for understanding the genesis and "adaptiveness" of risk behavior.     

Traditional and proposed tests of slope homogeneity for non-normal and heteroscedastic data

The purpose of this study was to develop and compare tests of independent groups' slopes for non-normal distributions and heteroscedastic variances, including slope tests based on least squares, Theil-Sen, and trimmed estimation approaches. A slope test based on jackknife standard error estimates is proposed that can utilize each of the traditional estimation methods while also addressing problematic aspects of methods' standard error estimates. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed jackknife-based slope tests can improve standard error estimation, Type I error, and power relative to the traditional slope tests.     

Implicit race bias revisited: On the utility of task context in assessing implicit attitude strength

Decades of research have shown that many people harbor implicit attitudes that are positive toward Whites relative to Blacks. With some notable exceptions, these findings are almost always obtained using implicit attitude tasks that assess attitudes toward Whites and Black simultaneously. This makes it difficult to determine whether implicit race bias effects are the result of strong liking for Whites, dislike for Blacks, or both. The present article reports results from a study in which participants' automatic bias towards Blacks and Whites is assessed across multiple evaluative contexts. Results show consistent negative automatic attitudes towards Blacks, but there was considerable variability in participants' attitudes toward Whites. Consistent with the idea that strong attitudes are less contextually sensitive than weaker attitudes (e.g. Krosnick, 1988), it is concluded that participants harbor strong automatic bias against Blacks, but not strong favoritism for Whites. Implications for a context-centered approach to implicit attitude measurement are discussed.     

Brief daily exposures to Asian females reverses perceptual narrowing for Asian faces in Caucasian infants

Perceptual narrowing in the visual, auditory, and multisensory domains has its developmental origins during infancy. The current study shows that experimentally induced experience can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing on infants' visual recognition memory of other-race faces. Caucasian 8- to 10-month-olds who could not discriminate between novel and familiarized Asian faces at the beginning of testing were given brief daily experience with Asian female faces in the experimental condition and Caucasian female faces in the control condition. At the end of 3 weeks, only infants who received daily experience with Asian females showed above-chance recognition of novel Asian female and male faces. Furthermore, infants in the experimental condition showed greater efficiency in learning novel Asian females compared with infants in the control condition. Thus, visual experience with a novel stimulus category can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing during infancy via improved stimulus recognition and encoding.