Designing for Trust: A Case of Value-Sensitive Design

In this paper, we consider the meaning, roles, and uses of trust in the economic and public domain, focusing on the task of designing systems for trust in information technology. We analyze this task by means of a survey of what trust means in the economic and public domain, using the model proposed by Lewicki and Bunker, and using the emerging paradigm of value-sensitive design. We explore the difficulties developers face when designing information technology for trust and show how our analysis in conjunction with existing engineering design methods provides means to address these difficulties. Our main case concerns a concrete problem in the economic domain, namely the transfer of control from customs agencies to companies. Control of individual items is increasingly untenable and is replaced by control on the level of companies aimed at determining whether companies can be trusted to be in control of their business and to be in compliance with applicable regulations. This transfer sets the task for companies to establish this trust by means of information technology systems. We argue that this trust can be achieved by taking into account philosophical analyses of trust and by including both parties in the trust relationship as clients for whom the information technology systems are to be designed.     

The appeal of violent video games to lower educated aggressive adolescent boys from two countries.

The objective of this study was to test the effect of individual differences on appeal and use of video games. Participants were 299 adolescent boys from lower and higher secondary schools in the Netherlands and Belgium. In general, boys were most attracted to violent video games. Boys that scored higher in trait aggressiveness and lower in empathy were especially attracted to violent games and spent more time playing video games than did boys lower in trait aggressiveness. Lower educated boys showed more appreciation for both violent and nonviolent games and spent more time playing them than did higher educated boys. The present study showed that aggressive and less empathic boys were most attracted to violent games. The fact that heavy users of violent games show less empathy and higher aggressiveness suggests the possibility of desensitization. Other studies have shown that playing violent games increases aggressiveness and decreases empathy. These results combined suggest the possibility of a violence cycle. Aggressive individuals are attracted to violent games. Playing violent games increases aggressiveness and decreases empathy, which in turn leads to increased appreciation and use of violent games.     

Long-term priming of neighbours biases the word recognition process: evidence from a lexical decision task.

The role of orthographically similar words (i.e., neighbours) in the word recognition process has been studied extensively using short-term priming paradigms (e.g., Colombo, 1986). Here we demonstrate that long-term effects of neighbour priming can also be obtained. Experiment 1 showed that prior study of a neighbour (e.g., TANGO) increased later lexical decision performance for similar words (e.g., MANGO), but decreased performance for similar pseudowords (e.g., LANGO). Experiment 2 replicated this bias effect and showed that the increase in lexical decision performance due to neighbour priming is selectively due to words from a relatively sparse neighbourhood. Explanations of the bias effect in terms of lexical activation and episodic memory retrieval are discussed.     

De-Ontologizing the Debate on Social Explanations: A Pragmatic Approach Based on Epistemic Interests

In a recent paper on realism and pragmatism published in this journal, Osmo Kivinen and Tero Piiroinen have been pleading for more methodological work in the philosophy of the social sciences—refining the conceptual tools of social scientists—and less philosophically ontological theories. Following this de-ontologizing approach, we scrutinize the debates on social explanation and contribute to the development of a pragmatic social science methodology. Analyzing four classic debates concerning explanation in the social sciences, we propose to shift the debate away from (a) the ontologizing defenses of forms of social explanation, and (b) a winner-takes-all-approach. Instead, we advocate (c) a pragmatic approach towards social explanation, elaborating a rigorous framework for explanatory pluralism detached from the debates on social ontology.

A further look at the "language-as-fixed-effect fallacy".

The proper analysis of experiments using language materials has been a source of controversy and debate among researchers. We summarize the main issues and discuss the solutions that have been presented. Even though the major issues have been dealt with extensively in the literature, there still exists quite a bit of confusion about how to analyze the data from such experiments. We discuss a number of the most frequently voiced objections. In particular, we discuss the issue of what happens if in a counterbalanced design only some of the items show the treatment effect. Finally, a possible solution is discussed for the case where only partial matching of items between conditions is possible.     

Androgenetic alopecia: stress of discovery

The psychological problems of men in the initial stages of alopecia androgenetica (hereditary male hair loss) have seldom been studied. We evaluated two groups of 80 men with alopecia androgenetica in Stages II to IV, indicating the amount of hair loss (overall N=160; for Group I: M=48 yr., SD=18.2; for Group II: M=50 yr., SD=18.0) who visited a dermatology clinic for benign dermatological complaints but not for hair loss, by questionnaires and interview, retrospectively. As predicted, hair problems were reported to be significantly greater overall at the moment of discovery of hair loss than later. About half of the men reported feeling annoyed to very annoyed about the discovery of hair loss. For those patients, provision of information by internet might facilitate a visit to the dermatologist.     

A general framework for the analysis of concept identification tasks

A general framework is presented for concept identification based on hypothesis-testing theory. It is a modification of the duoprocess theory presented by Chumbley (1972). It is shown how Markov models for various complex concept identification tasks may be derived from this framework and how such models may be analyzed by making use of probability generating functions. Two experiments are described. In experiment 1 three tasks were used: two simple tasks, where the subject either only had to select the relevant dimension in order to solve the problem or only had to learn a short list of paired-associates, and a more complex task, where both processes were needed to reach the solution. The results were in general favorable to the theory. Experiment 2 was designed to test the application of the theory to the four-choice concept problem. The predictions of the theory are compared to those of the subproblem learning theory of trabasso and Bower (1964), modified to include a ‘learning-on-errors’ assumption. The fit of the duoprocess theory was reasonably good and superior to that of the subproblem learning theory.     

Sound improves diminished visual temporal sensitivity in schizophrenia

Visual temporal processing and multisensory integration (MSI) of sound and vision were examined in individuals with schizophrenia using a visual temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. Compared to a non-psychiatric control group, persons with schizophrenia were less sensitive judging the temporal order of two successively presented visual stimuli. However, their sensitivity to visual temporal order improved as in the control group when two accessory sounds were added (temporal ventriloquism). These findings indicate that individuals with schizophrenia have diminished sensitivity to visual temporal order, but no deficits in the integration of low-level auditory and visual information.     

A model for evidence accumulation in the lexical decision task

We present a new model for lexical decision, REM-LD, that is based on REM theory (e.g., ). REM-LD uses a principled (i.e., Bayes' rule) decision process that simultaneously considers the diagnosticity of the evidence for the 'WORD' response and the 'NONWORD' response. The model calculates the odds ratio that the presented stimulus is a word or a nonword by averaging likelihood ratios for lexical entries from a small neighborhood of similar words. We report two experiments that used a signal-to-respond paradigm to obtain information about the time course of lexical processing. Experiment 1 verified the prediction of the model that the frequency of the word stimuli affects performance for nonword stimuli. Experiment 2 was done to study the effects of nonword lexicality, word frequency, and repetition priming and to demonstrate how REM-LD can account for the observed results. We discuss how REM-LD could be extended to account for effects of phonology such as the pseudohomophone effect, and how REM-LD can predict response times in the traditional 'respond-when-ready' paradigm.     

Associative priming in a masked perceptual identification task: Evidence for automatic processes

Two experiments investigated the influence of automatic and strategic processes on associative priming effects in a perceptual identification task in which prime-target pairs are briefly presented and masked. In this paradigm, priming is defined as a higher percentage of correctly identified targets for related pairs than for unrelated pairs. In Experiment 1, priming was obtained for mediated word pairs. This mediated priming effect was affected neither by the presence of direct associations nor by the presentation time of the primes, indicating that automatic priming effects play a role in perceptual identification. Experiment 2 showed that the priming effect was not affected by the proportion (.90 vs. .10) of related pairs if primes were presented briefly to prevent their identification. However, a large proportion effect was found when primes were presented for 1000 ms so that they were clearly visible. These results indicate that priming in a masked perceptual identification task is the result of automatic processes and is not affected by strategies. The present paradigm provides a valuable alternative to more commonly used tasks such as lexical decision.