Competence and Trust in Choice Architecture

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge advances a theory of how designers can improve decision-making in various situations where people have to make choices. We claim that the moral acceptability of nudges hinges in part on whether they can provide an account of the competence required to offer nudges, an account that would serve to warrant our general trust in choice architects. What needs to be considered, on a methodological level, is whether they have clarified the competence required for choice architects to prompt subtly our behaviour toward making choices that are in our best interest from our own perspectives. We argue that, among other features, an account of the competence required to offer nudges would have to clarify why it is reasonable to expect that choice architects can understand the constraints imposed by semantic variance. Semantic variance refers to the diverse perceptions of meaning, tied to differences in identity and context, that influence how users interpret nudges. We conclude by suggesting that choice architects can grasp semantic variance if Thaler and Sunstein’s approach to design is compatible with insights about meaning expressed in science and technology studies and the philosophy of technology.     

Building esprit de corps: learning to better navigate between "my" patient and "our" patient

Excellence in the care of hospital patients, particularly those in an intensive care unit, reflects esprit de corps among the care team. Esprit de corps depends on a delicate balance; each clinician must preserve a sense of personal responsibility for "my" patient and yet participate in the collaborative work essential to the care of "our" patient. A harmful imbalance occurs when a physician demands total control of the decision-making process, especially concerning end-of-life treatment options. Although emotional factors may push a physician to claim decision-making exclusivity, compounded by a legal framework that overemphasizes individual responsibility, esprit de corps can be preserved through timely communication among clinicians and a recognition that optimal care for "my" patient requires effective team practice.     

Wearable computing: Will it make people prosocial?

We recently reported that people who wear an eye tracker modify their natural looking behaviour in a prosocial manner. This change in looking behaviour represents a potential concern for researchers who wish to use eye trackers to understand the functioning of human attention. On the other hand, it may offer a real boon to manufacturers and consumers of wearable computing (e.g., Google Glass), for if wearable computing causes people to behave in a prosocial manner, then the public's fear that people with wearable computing will invade their privacy is unfounded. Critically, both of these divergent implications are grounded on the assumption that the prosocial behavioural effect of wearing an eye tracker is sustained for a prolonged period of time. Our study reveals that on the very first wearing of an eye tracker, and in less than 10 min, the prosocial effect of an eye tracker is abolished, but by drawing attention back to the eye tracker, the implied presence effect is easily reactivated. This suggests that eye trackers induce a transient social presence effect, which is rendered dormant when attention is shifted away from the source of implied presence. This is good news for researchers who use eye trackers to measure attention and behaviour; and could be bad news for advocates of wearable computing in everyday life.     

Intergroup Cooperation in Common Pool Resource Dilemmas

Fundamental problems of environmental sustainability, including climate change and fisheries management, require collective action on a scale that transcends the political and cultural boundaries of the nation-state. Rational, self-interested neoclassical economic theories of human behavior predict tragedy in the absence of third party enforcement of agreements and practical difficulties that prevent privatization. Evolutionary biology offers a theory of cooperation, but more often than not in a context of discrimination against other groups. That is, in-group boundaries are necessarily defined by those excluded as members of out-groups. However, in some settings human’s exhibit behavior that is inconsistent with both rational economic and group driven cooperation of evolutionary biological theory. This paper reports the results of a non-cooperative game-theoretic exercise that models a tragedy of the commons problem in which groups of players may advance their own positions only at the expense of other groups. Students enrolled from multiple universities and assigned to different multi-university identity groups participated in experiments that repeatedly resulted in cooperative outcomes despite intergroup conflicts and expressions of group identity. We offer three possible explanations: (1) students were cooperative because they were in an academic setting; (2) students may have viewed their instructors as the out-group; or (3) the emergence of a small number of influential, ethical leaders is sufficient to ensure cooperation amongst the larger groups. From our data and analysis, we draw out lessons that may help to inform approaches for institutional design and policy negotiations, particularly in climate change management.     

A quantification of robustness

Robustness is an important construct in domains as diverse as evolutionary biology, structural engineering, and decision-making. Unfortunately, in many domains, most relevantly cognitive science, considerations of robustness end with vague semantic references. Little attention is paid to formal analysis. The aim of this paper is to initiate a discussion in the scientific community regarding methods for quantifying and analyzing robustness. To this end, we propose a means for assessing robustness that may supplant the current ambiguous use of the term. We demonstrate our quantitative approach using examples of heuristic-based decision processes, selected due to their explicit association with robustness in the psychological literature. These examples serve to illustrate basic properties of our general methodology for quantifying robustness.     

Properties of the diversity effect in category-based inductive reasoning

Four experiments investigated how people judge the plausibility of category-based arguments, focusing on the diversity effect, in which arguments with diverse premise categories are considered particularly strong. In Experiment 1 we show that priming people as to the nature of the blank property determines whether sensitivity to diversity is observed. In Experiment 2 we find that people's hypotheses about the nature of the blank property predict judgements of argument strength. In Experiment 3 we examine the effect of our priming methodology on people's tendency to bring knowledge about causality or similarity to bear when evaluating arguments, and in Experiment 4 we show that whether people's hypotheses about the nature of the blank property were causal predicted ratings of argument strength. Together these results suggest that diversity effects occur because diverse premises lead people to bring general features of the premise categories to mind. Although our findings are broadly consistent with Bayesian and Relevance-based approaches to category-based inductive reasoning, neither approach captures all of our findings.     

Recurrence quantification analysis of eye movements

Recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) has been successfully used for describing dynamic systems that are too complex to be characterized adequately by standard methods in time series analysis. More recently, RQA has been used for analyzing the coordination of gaze patterns between cooperating individuals. Here, we extend RQA to the characterization of fixation sequences, and we show that the global and local temporal characteristics of fixation sequences can be captured by a small number of RQA measures that have a clear interpretation in this context. We applied RQA to the analysis of a study in which observers looked at different scenes under natural or gaze-contingent viewing conditions, and we found large differences in the RQA measures between the viewing conditions, indicating that RQA is a powerful new tool for the analysis of the temporal patterns of eye movement behavior.