Implementing the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Scientific Practice—A Case Study

Widespread enthusiasm for establishing scientific codes of conduct notwithstanding, the utility of such codes in influencing scientific practice is not self-evident. It largely depends on the implementation phase following their establishment—a phase which often receives little attention. The aim of this paper is to provide recommendations for guiding effective implementation through an assessment of one particular code of conduct in one particular institute. Based on a series of interviews held with researchers at the Department of Biotechnology of Delft University of Technology, this paper evaluates how the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Scientific Practice is received by those it is supposed to govern. While respondents agreed that discussion of the guiding principles of scientific conduct is called for, they did not consider the code as such to be a useful instrument. As a tool for the individual scientific practitioner, the code leaves a number of important questions unanswered in relation to visibility, enforcement, integration with daily practice and the distribution of responsibility. Recommendations are provided on the basis of these questions. There is more at stake than merely holding scientific practitioners to a proper exercise of their duties; implementation of scientific society codes of conduct also concerns the further motives and value commitments that gave rise to their establishment in the first place.

Prenatal diagnosis for "minor" genetic abnormalities is ethical

Is it justified to detect minor genetic aberrations before birth and terminate pregnancies based upon such information? We present the case of a woman who wanted Prenatal Diagnosis (PND) to detect whether her female fetus was a Haemophilia mutation carrier. Such carriers are usually healthy. She wished to eradicate the Haemophilia mutation from her family to avoid future generations being affected and to protect her children from having to go through PND themselves. We explore existing guidelines, public attitudes and possible objections to providing PND for minor abnormalities. We argue that in a society where couples have considerable autonomy relating to decisions about the fetus at least until viability, the routine restriction of PND for minor genetic abnormalities would be an unjust infringement of individual liberty.     

S-R correspondence effects of irrelevant visual affordance: Time course and specificity of response activation

It has been suggested that representations for action, elicited by an object's visual affordance, serve to potentiate motor components (such as a specific hand) to respond to the most afforded action. In three experiments, participants performed speeded left-right button press responses to an imperative target superimposed onto a prime image of an object suggesting a visual affordance oriented to left or right visual space. The time course of response activation was measured by varying the onset time between the prime and target. Long-lasting and gradually developing correspondence effects were found between the suggested affordance of the prime and the side of response, with little effect of response modality (hands uncrossed, hands crossed, or foot response). We conclude that visual affordances can evoke an abstract spatial response code, potentiating a wide variety of lateralized responses corresponding with the affordance.     

We favor formal models of heuristics rather than lists of loose dichotomies: a reply to Evans and Over

In their comment on Marewski et al. (good judgments do not require complex cognition, 2009) Evans and Over (heuristic thinking and human intelligence: a commentary on Marewski, Gaissmaier and Gigerenzer, 2009) conjectured that heuristics can often lead to biases and are not error free. This is a most surprising critique. The computational models of heuristics we have tested allow for quantitative predictions of how many errors a given heuristic will make, and we and others have measured the amount of error by analysis, computer simulation, and experiment. This is clear progress over simply giving heuristics labels, such as availability, that do not allow for quantitative comparisons of errors. Evans and Over argue that the reason people rely on heuristics is the accuracy-effort trade-off. However, the comparison between heuristics and more effortful strategies, such as multiple regression, has shown that there are many situations in which a heuristic is more accurate with less effort. Finally, we do not see how the fast and frugal heuristics program could benefit from a dual-process framework unless the dual-process framework is made more precise. Instead, the dual-process framework could benefit if its two “black boxes” (Type 1 and Type 2 processes) were substituted by computational models of both heuristics and other processes.